I'm Reading O'Brian Again

I do this every few years; I start reading Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin series again. I ran out of library books to read during the pass-by of Hurricane Irene in late August so I went to my personal collection and grabbed Master and Commander. Again.

It may be the start of another run through the whole 20-book series. Maybe. Last time, it was May to October of 2006. That has been the only time I have read through the series start-to-finish. I've read most of the novels in the series at least twice, but usually in a disconnected, non-sequential way.

I enjoy sea-stories and stories from the Napoleonic wars. But what I love most about these books is the language. Writing like this:

...it would have been difficult to imagine a pleasanter way of spending the late summer than sailing than sailing across the whole width of the Mediterranean as fast as the sloop could fly. She flew a good deal faster now that Jack had hit upon her happiest trim, restowing her hold to bring her by the stern and restoring her masts to the rake her Spanish builders had intended. What is more, the brothers Sponge, with a dozen of the Sophie's swimmers under their instruction, had spent every moment of the long calms in Greek waters (their native element) scraping her bottom; and Stephen could remember an evening when he had sat there in the warm, deepening twilight, watching the sea; it had barely a ruffle on its surface, and yet the Sophie picked up enough moving air with her topgallants to draw a long, straight whispering furrow across the water, a line brilliant with unearthly phosphorescence, visible for a quart of a mile behind her. Days and nights of unbelievable purity. Nights when the steady Ionian breeze rounded the square mainsail -- not a brace to be touched, watch relieving watch -- and he and Jack on deck, sawing away, sawing away, lost in their music , until the falling dew untuned their strings. And days when the perfection of dawn was so great , the emptiness so entire, that men were almost afraid to speak.

I marked this passage as I read by it the other day and thought it might make a good blog post. In searching back through this blog for previous O'Brian posts I realized I've done this kind of post a few times before.

I finished Master and Commander yesterday. The library is closed, so I moved on to Post Captain, the second in the series. I don't know if this is the start of another run through all 20 novels. That would probably carry me into January.

A Near Miss?

the neighbor's garage, a photo by mmahaffie on Flickr.

Our next door neighbor's garage door took a mighty wrench at some point during the storm. another neighbor, across the street from this one, lost the top of a large tree as well.

The working theory around our cul-de-sac is that both were caused by the storm cell that spawned the tornado that hit Nassau station, northwest of us -- or maybe by the tornado itself.

We Survived Hurricane Irene

It's a wet, blustery Sunday morning here in Lewes and we're approaching the endgame of Hurricane Irene. Bottom line: we're just fine.

The storm has moved inland in New York state at this point and is down to Tropical Storm strength. It was a Category 1 Hurricane when it passed east of Delaware overnight. I think the worst of the wind and rain for us was later afternoon and early evening of Saturday.

We had a scare when a storm cell that appears to have spawned a tornado passed just overhead of our neighborhood. we'd had warning from local television and spent a few minutes down in the basement.

The twister apparently touched-down about three miles to our west and damaged a number of houses, at least one of them seriously. as of now, I have heard no reports of injuries or deaths in Delaware from this storm.

We spent the rest of the night on the main floor, closer to the basement, camped-out in the living room.

I took a quick look around the house this morning and so far just a small tree is down in the side yard. It may be savable.

Somewhere in this picture....

...may be my grandfather, my great grandfather or my great grandmother.

This is a photo of Anadarko Township, Oklahoma, in its early days in August of 1901. It is from the Today's Document blog from the National Archives.  Anadarko is in Kiowa County, southwest of Oklahoma city. It lies about 50 miles from Hobart, where my great grandfather George Mahaffie was homesteading with his wife Mollie and their four children. They had moved to Oklahoma from Kansas sometime between 1889 and 1900.

George and Mollie would have been 40 years old in August of 1901. My grandfather, Charles, would have been 16. His elder sister, Rose, would have been 18. Younger brother Bart would have been 11 and the baby, Beatty, 1 year old.

It is possible that George may have taken Mollie or one or more of his children east for the lumber auction pictured here. If nothing else, it provides a clear picture of the landscape and environment that helped form my grandfather.

At The Delaware State Fair

My new office is sharing a booth at the 2011 Delaware State Fair with the Public Service Commission (PSC). We're both part of the Department of State for Delaware. As the new Deputy Director at the GIC, I thought I should lead by example and take a healthy number of shifts at the booth. I've been taking pictures when I can.

Down at the Harbor on a Summer's Evening

"The best looking couple in Lewes (this weekend)"

The best looking couple...
Originally uploaded by mmahaffie

I have no idea who these two people are. I ran across them while I was wading in the shallows of Delaware Bay along Lewes Beach today.

The gentleman said, "wanna take a picture of the best looking couple in Lewes this weekend?" Putting aside for a moment the fact that the best-looking couple would have to, by definition, include the Lovely Karen, I said, "sure," and snapped this picture.

They thought I must be a newspaper photographer, because they asked about where the picture would appear. I promised them that I would post it with this title so they could google it and find themselves.

And so, I did.

...So Far

Just for fun, I ran the RSS from the blog through Wordle to see what the word cloud of recent posts looks like. Recent travel and Census stuff seem to predominate.

We're Missing a Tourism Opportunity: Water Baseball

Water baseball [Men playing baseball in
surf.] 27 July 1914 (LOC)
Originally uploaded by
The Library of Congress

The Library of Commerce photo stream in the Flickr commons includes a few intriguing, if faded, images of men playing baseball in the surf sometime in 1914. We should investigate this as a tourist activity/draw for Delaware beaches. The Division of State Parks could organize leagues. But I imagine the outfielders would have to be fairly tall.

Stuck in the Middle With (897,933 of) You

Census Bureau Director Robert Groves was out in the tiny village of Plato, Missouri, yesterday to unveil a National Geodetic Survey disc commemorating Plato as the new national center of population.

The Census Bureau calculates the center of population after each census as "the place where an imaginary, flat, weightless and rigid map of the United States would balance perfectly if all residents were of identical weight." The center of population has moved slowly west and south from Kent County, Maryland, in 1790 to Missouri.

The Census Bureau also calculates the center of population for each state. In 2010, the center of population for the 897,934 of us counted in Delaware was northeast of Smyrna, along Route 9.

Walking Up A Pair of Waterfall-Filled Gorges

I had a day to kill in Ithaca, New York, this weekend. Daughter #1 had a day of training scheduled the day after pick-up from Villanova. We drove straight from Radnor in PA to Ithaca on Friday and I spent Saturday wandering around two of New York's Waterfall-themed state parks.

First up was Taughannock Falls State Park, north of Ithaca and above Cayuga Lake.


Just south of Ithaca, and distressingly close to a Home Depot and other big-box retail, is Buttermilk Falls State Park.

We Bid a Fond Farewell to Sanibel Island

We're sitting in the airport at Fort Myers, Florida, waiting for a flight back to Philadelphia and home. We've just spent a pleasant four days on Sanibel Island, just west of here.

We stayed at an older beachfront resort called The Island Inn. It's a small and very laid back sort of place. The main activity here was none at all. We sat on the beach, we collected seashells, and did some very minor shopping. I threw in one exploratory bike ride out to the east end of the island to Lighthouse Point.

A word about seashells and beach-combing. Sanibel Island, and its neighbor Captiva, are awash in shells. I imagine they formed from shoals of shells deposited by currents unique to the area.

Sanibel is a quiet spot. The beach was not crowded and many of the homes, rentals and resorts seemed slightly populated. The Island Inn folks told us they were full, however, and said that the weeks around Easter are often the last big push of their tourist season.

Soon it will get too warm here and most of the folks who winter in Sanibel will head north. Probably some of them will be in Lewes this summer.

Fun With Culinary History

The New York Public Library has a neat crowd-sourcing project up in which volunteers are helping to transcribe the dishes offered on their collection of historic menus.

It's called What's on the Menu?

We're transcribing our historical restaurant menus, dish by dish, so that they can be searched by what people were actually eating. It's a big job so we need your help!

I spent some time with the menu at right this evening. It's from Friday, April 26, 1901. I found dishes like:

• Broiled squab on toast, with lettuce, for 50 cents
• Lobster a la Newburg, for 40 cents
• Barbecued oysters or soft clams in shell, for 35 cents

I think its fascinating to think that my great-grandfather John Redmond Farrar, a lawyer and justice of the municipal court in New York City, might have eaten here. Or maybe another great-grandfather, Augustus Charles Becker, described later by his son-in-law, my grandfather Redmond Farrar, as "a very imposing and good-looking man, over six feet tall, and very aristocratic in his bearing," might have eaten here.

They might have ordered a boiled young turkey, with oyster sauce.

Rocking the Mothership

It was a last-minute sort of thing, but I traveled down to Hampton, Virginia, yesterday to see the band Furthur in concert. They were playing in the distinctive-looking Hampton Coliseum, known variously as the Mothership or the Cosmic Cupcake.

I bought a ticket earlier in the week on a whim; partly to celebrate the new job and partly because I've been following the band's setlists and photos this tour and getting more and more interested.



The band Furthur, named for the Merry Pranksters' psychedelic school bus of that name, is made up of two of the original members of the Grateful Dead -- Bob Weir and Phil Lesh -- along with a talented crew of younger musicians. As a group, they are tight and inventive and having great fun.

There was some fear that this would just be a very good Dead cover band, but they are more than that. In fact, they are a cover band in the same way that the Grateful Dead were; taking classic songs and making them feel new. The setlist for the Hampton Coliseum show includes covers of Bob Dylan, the Beatles, and Led Zeppelin. Their version of Zeppelin's Fool in the Rain was particularly good.

I went alone to this show. It's fun to do that sometimes. It makes you completely free to be anonymous. And it lets me talk to all those around me. At this show, there were fans in a wide range of ages from substantially older than I am to much, much younger. 

A large group of college students (from Old Dominion University, I think) were in the row behind me. Though they would have been toddlers when the Grateful Dead last played, in 1995, some of them were  were Deadheads in the true sense. One young man had been in New York City for the run of shows at Madison Square Garden during which Furthur covered The Clash (a first, and exciting) and there were guest appearances by Elvis Costello and his wife the jazz singer and pianist Diana Krall (among others).

I was jealous.

Here's News: I Am Taking A New Job

I've been putting word out via twitter, e-mail and the telephone (yup, still do that sometimes) about a new job I've taken. Starting on April 11, I will be a part of the Delaware Government Information Center, a state agency with a mission of connecting Delaware citizens to government. In practice, that means managing Delaware's web site and helping state agencies use the web and social media to do a better job of communicating with and interacting with the people of the state.

As you may know, this sort of thing is what I really enjoy.

At the same time, a new job means leaving behind the work I've been doing for more than 12 years as GIS Coordinator and Census State Data Center lead for the Delaware Office of State Planning Coordination. This is a time of transition and reflection.

I’ve been around to see the State Planning Office grow into a small, focused, effective service bureau that helps state agencies, local governments, businesses and citizens come together (when that’s possible) on land use planning issues.

I'm very proud of the work done by the Delaware Geographic Data Committee in the time I've been associated with that group. I've made great friends among Delaware's GIS Community and I plan to stay involved, if at a lesser intensity.

I have been honored to be a part of the National States Geographic Information Council, an astonishing group of people from all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and the territories who lead GIS efforts in their part of the nation and come together to improve government at all levels.

And I have had the satisfaction of working with the people of the US Census Bureau to help plan for and carry out the decennial census and to distribute data and information from the Census Bureau to people, businesses, and units of government.

Working within state government can be very rewarding. We take our lumps of course -- sometimes rightfully so -- but at its most basic level, public service means helping people. I do that with data and information and sometimes with some modest expertise. I'll keep doing that sort of work in my new job, I enjoy it.

In Which Two Streams of My Musical Life Meet and Mix

Furthur, the best of the post-Garcia incarnations of the Grateful Dead, played a cover of Train in Vain, originally by The Clash, last night at Radio City Music Hall, in New York City. They didn't do too bad.



The song was originally sung by Mick Jones, the lead guitarist for The Clash.



I'm a Deadhead and I was a huge Clash fan back when they were active. I've written about this before. I think it's really cool that these two streams of music have come together.

STEM Education Should Be STEAM Education

Mickey Hart has written a nice little Huffington Post column on the importance of the arts in education. He argues that the science, technology, engineering and math approach, known as "STEM," won't work as well without the arts.

Neuroscientists also have shown that the brain is hardwired for music, innovation and creativity, all other human activities follow. No human culture known to historians or anthropologists has ever existed without music and dance. The arts are a necessity for insight: the arts make us human.The energy that you acquire from art and music turns inspiration into invention. This allows an inventor to dream up something never envisioned before and creates new industries and good-paying jobs.

I think he's right.

The Last Hours of Winter

I took a short walk this morning on the Junction and Breakwater trail that runs through parts of Cape Henlopen State Park between Lewes and Rehoboth Beach. Spring begins this evening at 7:21 p.m., but this morning was cold and clear and the trees remain spare and stark in the weak and watery light.

I Thought She Looked Familiar

This is a couple of years old, but it's new to me. Ann Marie Calhoun and her brother Joe Simpson play the old Grateful Dead tune Ripple. Her performance is remarkable.

I shouldn't be surprised. I'm pretty sure I've seen her work elsewhere. There's been lots of it and it looks like she'll be an interesting artist to watch.

Not least for how musically abandoned she is in her interpretation of what is one of my favorite tunes.

All It Needs is a Splash of Paint

A space scene? A lightning bolt? Either way.

Skull Chair