Zydeco Fiddler

Last weekend, I returned from Seattle, where I’d been working at the Northwest Folklife Festival. For the last eight years, I’ve worked as the festival’s Signage Coordinator (see posts from previous festivals here). The weather this year was pretty crappy — unseasonably cold and rainy, even for Seattle. But, I still managed to have a great time. Many of my coworkers have been at the festival for many years as well, so I was happy to get to hang out with many of them again. As always, most of my work takes place before and after the festival, and while the event is happening I have plenty of time to listen to music and take pictures. I’ve posted my best shots here; click on the photo above to see the whole gallery.

Tule Plants

We didn’t celebrate on Christmas Day itself, as Veronica wasn’t flying into Reno until that evening. Instead, my mom and I drove out to the Stillwater Wildlife Refuge east of Fallon, hoping to see some migrating Tundra Swans. We only saw one other person at the refuge, and that was only briefly. Most of the time, the only evidence of civilization we could see was the very road on which we were driving. Unfortunately, there weren’t any swans to see, either. The refuge comprises a network of lakes and wetlands, but on the day we were there they were all frozen over. So, no open water to attract migrating birds. We did see a few hawks, some Prairie Falcons, a couple of Great Blue Herons, and one Bald Eagle, but all from a distance. That evening, Veronica arrived following a relatively smooth trip.

Soaring Hawk at Washoe Lake

We had our Christmas on Boxing Day, emptying our overstuffed stockings, unwrapping presents, and eating my mom’s delicious crème brûlée French toast. Then, we headed up to Reno (stopping at Washoe Lake along the way) for some shopping and a visit to the Nevada Museum of Art. The Museum isn’t huge, but it always seems to have very interesting exhibits. The featured exhibition this time was a collection of more than 100 of Rembrandt’s prints. Although he’s known primarily for his paintings, the Dutchman was also a prolific printmaker. Since many of the works are small and have very fine details, the museum provided magnifying glasses to carry around the gallery with you. Not knowing much about printmaking, I appreciated that the curators provided good explanations of the processes, often showing multiple versions of the same print to show how changes in technique can alter the final product.

Us on the Marin Headlands

The next day, we headed over the mountains to the Bay Area to stay with our friends David and Francesca. We had a pretty relaxing visit — one day hanging out in Berkeley, and one in San Francisco. Among other things, we made a pilgrimage to the original Peet’s, drove across the Golden Gate Bridge, shopped at the City Lights Bookstore (where many of the beat poets hung out, and one of the best bookstores I’ve ever been to), and visited the Legion of Honor Art Museum (more on that in another post). Our one scheduled event while we were in California was a great one — my mom took us to see Wicked. Veronica had seen it before, but the other two of us hadn’t. The pseudo-clockwork set was very cool, the show was funny, and the singers were amazing. The lead roles were being played by the standbys, but they were great; except for the program, I wouldn’t have known they weren’t the regulars.

I didn’t take all that many photos on the trip, but click the thumbnails above to see my smallish gallery. I’ll leave you with a picture of Veronica behind bars at Battery Spencer, overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge:

Entering the Cave

Over labor day weekend, my dad drove up to Wisconsin for a visit. Among other things, we hit the farmers’ market, went for a bike ride, and attempted to tour the Capital Brewery (but, they were closed for a private event). But, one of the coolest things we did was a visit to the Cave of the Mounds in Blue Mounds, Wisconsin. The cave, which has no natural openings of significant size, was discovered in 1939 during a limestone quarrying operation. Quarrying was halted, the cave was quickly developed, and public tours began the following year. Though not a huge cave, the tour took about an hour. Highlights included a six-foot long cephalopod fossil in the cave’s ceiling and some interesting multicolored cave formations.

Purple Asters with Bugs

Cave of the Mounds also offers a couple of short above-ground trails, which we walked after emerging from the cavern. The trails offered myriad beautiful plant life, lots of insects and spiders, and not a few birds. I wasn’t able to get any decent bird pictures, but I did get a few good flower and bug photos. Veronica gets the buf-spotting prize for the day; she found a katydid blending in with leaves, a couple of sizable grasshoppers, and a bunch of daddy-long legs, all of which seemed quite content to stay put long enough to be photographed. Click here to see all of my above and below-ground photos from Cave of the Mounds.

Also, here are some of my previous wild caving pictures taken in Tennessee caves: Camp’s Gulf Cave, Indian Grave Point Cave, Cave of the Skulls, and Christmas Cave.

Golden Gate Bridge

The week before last, I headed out west to visit my mom in Nevada. We spent one day at Lake Tahoe, swimming, sunning, and Shakespeareing. We saw Much Ado About Nothing, which was far better than last year’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The next day, we drove to Napa (by way of Fry’s Electronics) to visit friends Mark and Dawn. We weren’t there long enough to actually tour any wineries, but we did take a scenic drive through the vineyards.

Most of our time, though, was spent in the Bay Area. We again stayed with friends David and Francesca (and their daughter Maria) in Oakland. Our intent was to have a relaxing visit, so we spent quite a bit of our time there just hanging out and doing some shopping in Berkeley. I made a pilgrimage to the original Peet’s on Vine, and picked up a good supply of Molinari salame — one of my favorite foods in the world — at Genova Delicatessen. I also made a trip to Forrest’s for a bassoon pickup (more on that soon).

Sphinx Outside the de Young

My mom and I only went across the bay to San Francisco on one day, but we squeezed in quite a bit. We started off at the de Young Museum to see the traveling King Tut exhibit. We got there early, and managed to see much of it before the crowds arrived. The exhibit included many artifacts associated with Tutankhamun’s probable ancestors (his precise lineage is uncertain), as well as those from the tomb of the boy king himself. Unfortunately the most famous Tut artifact, his gold funeral mask, no longer travels outside Egypt. But there was certainly no shortage of other breathtakingly beautiful objects to see.

Golden Gate Park Band

We spent about an hour and a half working our way through the exhibit, then spent some time elsewhere in Golden Gate Park. We took a stroll through the Japanese tea garden, although since we’d just stopped at the de Young’s cafe, we didn’t actually have tea. Then, we walked over to the Temple of Music, where the Golden Gate Park Band was setting up for an afternoon concert. That afternoon’s concert consisted of all Broadway tunes, and we stuck around and listened for a little while.

Kiteboarder Under the Bridge

We’d brought a picnic lunch with us, and we drove out to the beach to eat it. It was overcast and hazy, but still nice to sit on the sand and enjoy the sea breeze during our meal. After lunch, we headed over to the Golden Gate Bridge. We parked at bridge level and walked down a steep path to the waterfront near Fort Point. The clouds were low enough to obscure the tops of the bridge’s towers, which made for some dramatic photo opportunities. Many sailing craft of all sorts were out on the bay that day, taking advantage of the brisk wind. We spotted a group of kite boarders zooming across the water. A couple of the more daring ones were playing under the bridge and even beyond it in the open ocean.

As usual, click the photos above for larger versions, or check out the whole gallery here. The gallery contains a panorama of the city across the bay I stitched together from five or six separate pictures. The version in the gallery isn’t very big, though. Here’s a much larger version.

This past weekend, Veronica and I took a quick overnight trip to Milwaukee. We went for a variety of reasons: to visit her family, to see some of her friends, and to go to the big annual book sale at All Saints’ Cathedral downtown. Those plans left us some free time on Saturday, so we decided to take a tour of the Sprecher Brewing Company in Glendale, a Milwaukee suburb. Sprecher is best known for their root beer and seven other varieties of soda. And with good reason — the New York Times rated Sprecher root beer the best out of 25 brands from around the country. Indeed, soda was the only product I associated with them until last week. But Randall Sprecher started the company as a beer brewery, and they brew a wide variety of beers.

The tour was short (due to the small size of the brewery, but pretty good. Since it was the weekend, no one was there actually brewing or bottling, but our guide gave detailed descriptions of both processes, along with some of the company’s history. At the end of the tour of course comes the requisite tasting session — four samples of your choice from a selection of ten beers on tap. But we, along with about ten other people, bypassed the normal tasting in favor of a special Reserve Tasting. This tasting included samples of ten different Sprecher beers (including some premium varieties not available in the regular tasting), each paired with a different cheese.

We tried, in order, their Hefe Weiss, Extra Pale Ale, Mai Bock, Pub Brown Ale, IPA², Abbey Triple, Pipers Scotch Ale, Black Bavarian, Barley Wine, and Bourbon Scotch Ale. The various cheeses came mostly from Wisconsin cheese makers, including Sartori, Maple Leaf, Carr Valley, and others. The only cheese from outside the state was the delicious Kerrygold Dubliner, which was paired with Sprecher’s oak bourbon barrel-aged Bourbon Scotch Ale. Matt, the guy running the tasting, did a great job telling us about each cheese and each beer as we went along, and we were provided with tasting sheets with more detailed information (IBUs, degrees Plato, types of hops, etc.) and space for taking notes as we went.

It was nice to sample so many beers at once; the process gave not only an overview of Sprecher’s beers, but a good side-by-side comparison of different beer styles. I think Veronica and I agreed that the Abbey Triple was our favorite, followed closely by the Hefe Weiss. From there our individual rankings diverged somewhat. The cheeses were all quite delicious. Whoever selected the pairings knew what they were doing; some cheeses complemented their respective beers, other provided delightful contrasts. This sort of thing seems to be catching on — the New Glarus Brewing Company (which I’ve now toured three times) near Madison just announced their own Hard Hat Tours, which are behind-the-scenes guided tours culminating in a beer and cheese tasting session. Perhaps it’s time for a fourth trip to New Glarus…

Chris and Veronica

Friday evening was Veronica’s performance at the guitar festival. She and Chris, the guitarist from UW, played first on the festival’s opening concert. I glanced through the program booklet, and I’m pretty sure that Veronica was the only non-guitarist performing all weekend. The two of them did an excellent job — they played two movements of Mauro Giuliani’s Grand Duo Concertant. I’m looking forward to hearing the whole piece on Chris’s recital in a couple of weeks.

Sue the T-Rex

On Saturday, we got up relatively early and checked out of the hotel. We were able to leave our bags there while we headed off to the Field Museum. Our main objective at the Field was to see their temporary Real Pirates exhibit. We arrived fairly early, so we were able to breeze right in to both the museum and the pirate exhibit. The exhibit follows the history of the Whydah, a slave ship turned pirate ship. So, it starts out detailing the ship’s participation in the Atlantic slave trade of the early 18th century, then picks up with the story of Sam Bellamy, the pirate captain who captured her in the Caribbean. The exhibit does a good job of explaining the various sorts of lives at sea — those of a slave, a pirate, and a sailor in the King’s navy. The exhibit is peppered with artifacts from the Whydah — cannon, pistols, pieces of eight, etc. The ship sank off Cape Cod in a storm in 1717 and was found by a team led by Barry Clifford in 1984. Partway through the exhibit, I was a little disappointed at the artifact to diorama ratio, but a whole section about the recovery of the ship and conservation of its artifacts set that straight.

We visited the Field a couple of years ago, so many of the exhibits were fresh in our minds. We did go through the dinosaur hall again, though (I’ve always been a dinophile). We also spent some time in a couple of small temporary exhibits, one featuring ancient jewelry from around the Middle East, and another of photographs of the massive Hindu Kumbha Mela pilgrimage. Sadly, we didn’t have the time or energy to see the other big temporary exhibit, The Aztec World.

A Colorful Wall Across the Street From Our Hotel

We made some great food choices throughout our visit, thanks in no small part to the Yelp.com iPhone application. Yelp lets you search for businesses near your current location and provides user-supplied ratings and reviews for them. Aside from the deep-dish pizza we had the first night, we had a delicious breakfast at the Bongo Room, great very fresh sushi at Oysy, and delectable Cuban sandwiches at Cafecito. We even found an impressively stocked independent liquor store where we were able to buy a bottle of Goats Do Roam red and a bar of Ghirardelli dark chocolate, thus bypassing the allure of our hotel room mini-bar.

The only snag in our trip came at the end. When we attempted to purchase our return trip Metra tickets at Union Station, the agent informed us that on the weekend, trains don’t go as far as the station where we’d parked the car. Whoops. We got on the train anyway, figuring we’d find a cab to take us the rest of the way. But, we remembered that our friends Lesley (of Le Triangle d’Or) and Keith were in Elgin that weekend visiting Keith’s family. They agreed to pick us up and ferry us to the other station. Even better than that, they invited us to stay for a delicious dinner with Keith’s parents and sister. So, what appeared to be a snag turned out to be serendipitous!

As usual, click any of the photos above to see the whole gallery.

Museum of Science and Industry

Last week was our much-needed spring break. Veronica was slated to play at the Mid-America Guitar Ensemble Festival (at Roosevelt University) with a guitarist from UW, so we used that as an excuse to spend a few days in Chicago. We landed a great hotel deal via Hotwire.com and stayed at the Chicago Hilton, which overlooks Grant Park and is walking distance from the Art Institute of Chicago‎, the Field Museum, the Shedd Aquarium, and lots of other cool stuff. The only downside of our ritzy downtown digs was that parking was $43 bucks a night. So, we parked in Elgin (at a rate of $1.50/night) and took the Metra commuter rail into town.

We rolled into town on Thursday afternoon, hoofed it from Union Station to our hotel, and settled in. For dinner, we hit Lou Malnati’s — a local pizza chain. I have to say that I’ve never been a fan of Chicago-style deep-dish, but this place changed my mind. Our main event for the evening was going to a taping of the NPR news quiz show “Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me!” We listen to the show religiously, and had been talking for awhile about seeing it live. We showed up about twenty minutes before the doors opened, and it was already packed. Luckily we’d already bought tickets, so we just joined the throng waiting to enter the auditorium.

The show itself was a blast! The panelists (for this show: Tom Bodett, Kyrie O’Connor, and Paul Provenza), host Peter Sagal, and scorekeeper Carl Kassel came onstage to a darkened room, flashing lights, and the Chicago Bulls’ entrance music. Carl even ran out, waving his arms and high-fiving the panel. The show itself took somewhere between an hour and a half and two hours to record. Quite a bit gets cut before the show airs, but it was all funny. Perhaps the funniest moment was something not written for laughs at all. The bulk of the show’s material was about the current economic crisis, with lots of talk about failing banks and shady deals made by said banks. At the end of one of the show’s segments, Peter started doing his little spiel about the show’s sponsors — one of which is LendingTree.com. When he got to the line “When banks compete, you win,” everyone erupted in laughter. He had to re-do that bit twice to get a laugh-free version.

U-505

We spent most of Friday at the Museum of Science and Industry, which occupies one of the only remaining buildings from the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. The museum has lots of cool stuff, and strikes a pretty good balance between activities and exhibits for kids and things for adults. I spent a lot of time marveling at how they got various things into the building: the entire Pioneer Zephyr streamlined train, a Boeing 727, and a German submarine U-505. I especially enjoyed the Transportation Gallery, the U-505, and the exhibit of Ships Through the Ages. The museum was packed with school groups, so we didn’t get to see everything we would have liked to. But, that means we should have plenty of things to see the next time we visit.

A Goose in a Tree!

After exiting the museum, we walked all the way around it to see the rest of the building and to look at it across the remnants of the lagoon from the World’s Fair. The building itself is quite cool, with lots of columns, statues, pre-distressed friezes, and domes. See the gallery for more exterior shots and close-ups of some of the architectural detail. As I was taking pictures across the lagoon, Veronica pointed up at a tree — there was a large goose sitting in it! I don’t think I’ve ever seen a goose in a tree before, and one of its companions walking around on the ground seemed confused by it as well.

I’ll continue the story soon. Meanwhile, click any of the photos above to view the rest of the photos from our weekend.

Rocks at Sunset

A couple of weekends ago, my mom and I headed over the mountains to Berkeley (I’d been visiting her in Carson City, NV for Christmas). There had been quite a bit of snow in the preceding days, and although the much of it cleared by the time we set out, the roads weren’t in the greatest shape. We had to periodically merge into a single lane of traffic to make room for heavy-duty snow-clearing machines that were working on pushing back the walls of snow (which were 6–7 feet high in places). Snow and other traffic problems made for a longer-than-normal drive. We arrived in Berkeley Friday evening, and didn’t do much except have dinner and hang out with our hosts — friends David and Francesca and their daughter Maria.

On Saturday, we spent the day mainly shopping in Berkeley. We made a trip to the original Peet’s Coffee and Tea, since I’d never been. We had lunch at Spenger’s, a seafood restaurant and Berkeley fixture that was family-owned until recently. Spenger’s is where I first tasted calamari, and I commemorated this fact by eating a big juicy calamari steak for lunch. We hit a variety of interesting shops around town, including Black Oak Books, The Bone Room, Genova Delicatessen, and Forrest’s Music, a double reed supply company.

California Academy of Sciences

The whole gang (Francesca, David, Maria, Mom, and me) headed to Golden Gate Park in San Francisco with the intent of visiting the new California Academy of Sciences (at left). By the time we arrived, however, the line to merely get in the door was about 2 hours long. So, we decided to visit the adjacent De Young Museum of Art instead. The museum had three special exhibits: Maya Lin’s Systematic Landscapes, a collection of 20th century Asian-American art, and the designs of Yves Saint Laurent. I particularly enjoyed the Maya Lin exhibit — it consisted of a variety of sculptures based on maps and topography. The De Young’s permanent collections were quite interesting, as well. They have quite a range of galleries, split pretty equally between traditional (American, African, and South Pacific) and modern art forms.

Dusk

After leaving the museum and the park, we headed to the coast to watch the sunset over Cliff House and the Sutro Baths. I took some time to play with long exposures of the sun setting behind some rocks offshore (above) and the traffic below us (at right). Click any of the thumbnails to view the gallery that includes these photos as well as pics of some of the cooler things at the De Young.

When we were visiting my mom in Nevada last month, one of the activities she arranged for us to do was to take a guided tour of Grimes Point Archaeological Area. Grimes Point lies about an hour an a half east of Carson City, near the town of Fallon. For much of the last 10,000 years, a lake existed in the area — making it an attractive place for native peoples to settle. Fluctuating water levels resulted in multiple distinct areas and layers of occupation. Today, the site sits sort of out in the middle of nowhere, with no sizable body of water in the immediate vicinity.

Petroglyphs

Grimes Point has two main draws: Hidden Cave and the Petroglyph Trail. Hidden Cave is only open a couple of times a month, so we’ll have to do that on another trip. The Petroglyph Trail is always open, but we had a special guided tour. I’ve seen petroglyphs in a number of places in Arizona and New Mexico, but never in as high a concentration as there is at Grimes Point. Just about every sizable rock had some sort of rock art on it, and many were practically covered. Some of the oldest petroglyphs (roughly 8,000 years old, I think) have been almost entirely reclaimed by the desert, and are only visible from certain vantage points or in certain light. (Most petroglyphs in the American Southwest are created by scraping the dark patina — known as ‘desert varnish’ — off of rocks. The ‘varnish’ is redeposited over time, meaning that the oldest glyphs are now almost the some color as the surrounding rock.)

Cupules

We saw quite a range of iconography and techniques. Some of the earliest carvings are deep snake-like grooves and little round depressions known as ‘cupules.’ Later work ranges from seemingly abstract geometric symbol and designs to things that are more obviously representational: animals, people, and the like. Some motifs are similar to glyphs at Petroglyph National Monument and others I’ve seen, but the style is completely different (as one would expect from different cultures living in similar but distant areas). One particular example is the spiral — a motif the seems to be pretty common across the southwest. Spirals I’d seen before have very thin lines, lots of rotations, and are quite compact. The one spiral we saw at Grimes Point was constructed from a very wide line that only makes two-and-a-half or three rotations.

I took lots of photos on our walk, many of them attempts to capture the same glyphs from different angles. I cut the collection down quite a bit, and posted 22 pictures in a gallery. Click any of the photos above to view the whole set.

When we were in Nevada a few weeks ago, we spent an afternoon and evening at Sand Harbor on Lake Tahoe. It was hot outside, and refreshingly (if initially shockingly) cold in the lake. The water is very clear, although there wasn’t a whole lot to see — near the beach, at least. It was pleasant to go for a swim in a large body of water, dry out on the sandy beach, and realize that I wasn’t covered in either salt or lake sludge.

Stage by the Lake

After we’d had our fill of the beach, we cleaned up and walked over to the Lake Tahoe Shakespeare Festival’s outdoor stage, which has the lake for a backdrop. My mom had gotten us tickets to that evening’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. After finding our seats, we sat down to a delicious picnic assembled by the various members of our group. The food was tasty, the venue was gorgeous, and the play was… weird. Most of the Athenians were rich yacht club types (a good fit for many of Tahoe’s summer residents), while the rebellious Hermia and Lysander were goths. The faeries were mostly pseudo native American, except for the token black guy wearing a loincloth and carrying a spear. The mechanicals were a variety of blue-collar workers, with Nick Bottom as a guitar-wielding hot dog vendor.

To these disparate (and never satisfactorily explained) groups was added a bizarre mishmash of music. Nick Bottom came out to The Boss’s “Born in the USA.” The various songs within the play were sung in rock-ish settings with instruments played by members of the company. Throughout the play, a new-age Navajo — who was often on stage — played so-called “Native American flute.” Perhaps the weirdest thing came at the end. During Puck’s soliloquy (“If we shadows have offended…”) the flutist played and another Indian conducting a smudging ceremony on stage. The whole thing was a hodgepodge of different and largely unconnected directorial directions. But, at least we had plenty to talk about on the ride back down to Carson City.