A Quiet, Peaceful Place

Yesterday we took a hike around Lily’s Pond. In the summer it is a popular swimming spot, but yesterday, with the season over, not a soul was around. It was totally silent, and there wasn’t even a breath of wind — leaving the water unruffled and as reflective as a looking glass.

They say everyone needs to have a peaceful, happy place to think of when they need to escape the hurly-burly rush of modern life. When I need to mentally visit that quiet place, I’ll be thinking of Lily’s Pond, just as it was yesterday.

Passing The September Test

There used to be a saying in college football:  September is for pretenders, and November is for contenders.  The underlying concept was that the good teams played a bunch of patsies in September and the tough games really didn’t roll around until November.  Thus, November was when you’d finally separate the wheat from the chaff.

That saying is true no longer, at least for the Ohio State Buckeyes.

Last night — on September 29 — the Buckeyes had to play the Penn State Nittany Lions at Happy Valley.  Penn State is one of the toughest teams in the Big Ten and a perennial contender for the conference championship, both teams were ranked in the top ten, and 110,000 screaming, white-clad fans packed Beaver Stadium to cheer on the Lions.  The sound in that Stadium last night was deafening.  It’s hard to imagine a better atmosphere for a big-time college football game, or a more daunting challenge for the visiting team.  It was a November contest being played in September.

Somehow, the Buckeyes came from 12 points down in the fourth quarter and beat the Nittany Lions, giving Ohio State a leg up over Penn State in the always tough Big Ten East.  The offense sputtered and coughed and the defense gave up some huge plays to let Penn State take the lead, but Ohio State never gave up and kept fighting until the final play.  Kudos should go to everyone on the Buckeye team, with a special nod to the punter Drue Chrisman, who repeatedly pinned the Nittany Lions deep after each unsuccessful Ohio State possession.

These days, college football in September is not for the faint of heart.  The Buckeyes have passed their first huge Big Ten test.  But if this is September, what in the world is November going to be like?

Late September Sunrise

It’s officially autumn. The leaves are just starting to turn on Deer Isle, we’re getting a heavy dose of morning dew, and there’s a definite chill in the air. But because we haven’t yet had the “fall back” time change, our sunrises are coming later and later, making it easier to sleep in a bit.

It’s always a treat when the sun first peeks over the rim of the world and lights up the harbor, but it’s even more enjoyable when the show starts at 6:45 rather than 5 a.m.

At The Heart Of Town

I worked for a while today at the Stonington Public Library. It’s a nifty little facility with free wireless, a good reading table, and a really excellent book selection for its size. And, like most small town libraries, it’s at the center of it all. While I was there, numerous people stopped by to pick up a book, chat up the friendly librarian, and talk about what’s going on.

Libraries are one of those civic institutions that hold towns together. Stonington has a really good one.

Birdbaths And Breadboxes

The other day I was out for a walk and saw a birdbath.  As I walked by, I thought:  boy, you don’t many birdbaths these days — even though they were a common feature that you saw in people’s yards when I was growing up.

It made me think about other once-common things that have pretty much vanished from the everyday scene.  Like breadboxes, for example.  When I was a kid, we had a wooden breadbox in our kitchen.  Every house seemed to have one.  In our case, it was part of a decorated matched set with the flour and sugar and coffee containers, and when you wanted to get the Wonder Bread to make your peanut butter-and-jelly sandwich you went to the breadbox, flipped down the front lid, took out the bread in its plastic wrapping with the red, yellow and blue balloons, and made the sandwich on the back part of the flipped-down lid.  I’m not sure whether breadboxes were supposed to really serve any meaningful function in terms of keeping bread from going stale, or whether people just wanted to have a central place to store their bread.  In any case, nobody puts a breadbox on their kitchen counter anymore, I doubt if anyone sells breadboxes anymore, and I imagine if you gave a breadbox to somebody under 35 they would have no idea what it was.  At some point, Americans collectively made the decision that it was better to put bread in the refrigerator, and breadboxes went into the dustbin of history.

Breadboxes.  Rotary telephones.  Rabbit ear interior TV antennas and elaborate TV antennae on rooftops.  Fancy silver tea sets, always slightly tarnished, on dining room tables.  Elaborate ashtrays on coffee tables and end tables and standing cigarette lighters. They’ve all been left behind as America has moved on and tastes have changed.

And birdbaths have been left behind, too.  Which makes me wonder:  where do birds go to freshen up these days?

 

“Rough Air” Versus Turbulence

When you travel a lot, you tend to notice the little things — like the fact that the routine pre-takeoff speech has been subtly changed.

Flight attendants used to tell you to keep your seatbelt fastened in case the plane experienced turbulence. Now, you’re instructed to do it “in case the plane encounters unexpected rough air.”

Why the change in the standard speech? I imagine the airlines did some focus group testing and determined that people reacted more favorably to the notion of “unexpected rough air” than “turbulence.” I’m of the opposite view, however. Turbulent air just sounds like air that is upset for some reason; it will calm down eventually. But rough air suggests some meanness and malice, like the air is eager to cuff us around a little bit. The fact that it’s allegedly unexpected just makes it worse, like a thug springing from a dark alley to knock you over the head.

When I’m on a plane I’ll take upset air over angry air, every time.

Atop Table Rock

Boise is surrounded by mountains. Some are seen in the far distance; others are right next door. One of the nearby outcroppings is a huge, flat-topped butte called Table Rock that is a popular destination for hikers and tourists.

Table Rock is well worth a visit. It gives you a grand view of the Boise valley — that’s the city in the photo above, far below — and it reminds you that Boise gets its name from “bois,” the French word for tree. There are trees along the river, and trees have been planted all over town, but otherwise Boise is surrounded by desert conditions. Look in one direction from Table Rock and you see green; look in another and it’s dusty brown as far as the eye can see.

One other thing about Table Rock — there are no fences or guard rails. If you’re up there on a blustery day, as we were, you don’t want to get too close to the edge or you might just get blown off . . . and it’s a long way down. We maintained a prudent and respectful distance from the edge.

Pattern-Challenged

Some people are good at seeing patterns. I’m not. In fact, I stink at it. I never could find the hidden pictures in the Highlights for Children magazines in the dentist’s waiting room, and I don’t really see either the young woman or the old crone, or the vace and two faces, either.

So when I passed this sign on a walk through downtown Boise it took me a while to figure out that it was supposed to reflect a ram. An apparently very sad, gloomy ram, but a ram nevertheless.

Why would anyone want a gloomy ram as their business logo? Beats me! But it you did, why not just have a picture of the ram that even pattern-challenged people like me can recognize?

Waiter’s Choice

Sometimes, after a long day of work on the road, I’ll get to a restaurant, review its lengthy menu, and just not feel like making tough decisions about what to order. In such circumstances, it’s nice to have a waiter who will make knowledgeable recommendations about the options, without mouthing platitudes about whatever happens to be the daily special.

So it was last night at Fork Restaurant in Boise, Idaho, an excellent bistro that advertises itself as being “loyal to local.” Our waiter was experienced and glad to offer candid suggestions after asking a few basic questions like whether I wanted red or white wine or meat, fish, or vegetable. I accepted his recommendations across the board and ended up with a very fine Syrah from the northwest and succulent, melt in your mouth beef short ribs — which you can’t really see in the photo above because they are covered in crunchy Idaho “potato hay.”

His recommendations were so good that when we were considering dessert we decided to blindly rely on his choice. He came through like a champ, bringing us a ridiculously moist butter cake topped with local ice cream and a coulis made from an assortment of berries. It was a sensational end to a very fine meal.

Being a waiter is not easy, especially if you want to do it right. Our experience at the Fork Restaurant last night showed how a really good waiter can complement a really fine meal.

No Ice Ain’t Nice

On this business jaunt I’m staying in one of those hotels where every room has a kitchenette complete with refrigerator, two burner stovetop, sink, and dishwasher.

I don’t plan on doing any cooking while I’m here. Frankly, the thought of cooking in my hotel room and smelling lingering kitchen odors, like the smell of microwaved popcorn, while I’m trying to sleep kind of disgusts me, now that I think of it. There’s a reason there’s significant physical separation between kitchen and bedrooms in most American homes, and the smell factor is one of them.

Even though I don’t plan on cooking, a refrigerator seems like a nice option. In fact, a bracing glass of ultra-cold water with lots of ice sounds pretty good this morning. But my refrigerator has no ice tray or ice maker, even though it’s got a freezer. Why not? If you’re going to put a fridge in a hotel room, it should be fully functional — and that means complete ice-making capabilities. How much can a plastic ice tray cost?

Is there some nefarious reason why the kitchenette hotels want every guest to have to walk down to the ice maker?

Great Advances In Hotel Design

There have been some great developments in hotel design during my years of business travel. Business centers, for example. Coffee makers in your room. Easily accessible boarding pass printers.

But it’s hard to argue that any development is more welcome for a weary traveler than a rooftop bar on a hot, sunny day.

Who’s To Blame For NYC Subway Delays?

If you’ve ever been on the subway in New York City, you know it can be a frustrating, overwhelming experience.  It’s crowded, and hot, and the trains never seem to run on time.  In fact, a recent study determined that, in July, 72,000 subway trains ran late.  That’s a hefty 32 percent of all subway trains on the system.

Who’s to blame?

The New York Metropolitan Transit Authority says the subway riders themselves are one of the causes for the many delays.  The apparent problem is that riders aren’t letting the trains leave on time. If passengers are rushing to the train and the doors are closing, they don’t wait politely for the next train.  Instead, they shove their backpack or arm or leg into the gap, prevent the train doors from closing, and then when the doors open as a result they elbow their way into the already crowded cars.

In short, one of the problems is that . . . well, the vast majority of the NYC subway riders are pushy New Yorkers.  They’ve been conditioned through years of experience to behave in precisely that way in public places, whether it’s in the subway or ignoring “Don’t Walk” signs and dodging traffic on gridlocked Manhattan streets or cutting in line and getting into arguments about it.  And their pushy New Yorker conduct inevitably delays the trains, contributing to the crappy statistics for trains running on time.

The MTA is trying to deal with the problem by having train operators be less tolerant of the arm in the door practice and by having people in the stations as observers, in hopes that riders under the watchful eye of the MTA will behave more appropriately.  A platform controller quoted in the article linked above says, however, that even with the watchers, more courteous rider behavior “is not really catching on.”

Who’d have predicted that New Yorkers would continue to act like New Yorkers?  If the MTA really wants to have the trains run on time, it had better come up with a better solution than hoping that New Yorkers act politely in anonymous public places.

Testing The Outer Bounds Of Improbability

The Cleveland Browns won a football game on Thursday night.  Seriously!  An actual, regular season NFL football game.  And they even came from behind to do it.  The result was so wildly unexpected it’s taken me more than a day to fully process it.

And I’ve also been considering the profound implications of a Browns victory.  It makes me wonder:  if the Browns can somehow be victorious on the gridiron, it basically means that nothing is impossible.  And we all need to brace ourselves, because who knows what might happen next!  In the interests of enhancing public preparedness, I came up with a list of some of the other events that would rank right up there with the Browns winning a football game on the improbability scale:

•  President Trump is awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature for his Twitter feed
•  The French Minister of Culture admits that Americanized words like le supermarket are perfectly OK
•  A scientific study shows that Facebook political postings actually cause people of opposing political views to change their minds
•  Yankees fans concede the singing Sweet Caroline during the 8th inning of baseball games really is a pretty cool tradition
•  Kim Jong Un decides to grow his hair out and go with a ponytail
•  The Grand High Council of Vegans announces that eating an occasional cheeseburger is acceptable and tastes awfully darned good, too
• The Ohio State Marching Band misspells Ohio during the performance of Script Ohio

I’m sure there are more, but you get the idea.  Be wary, folks!  If the Browns can win a football game, all bets are off!

Changing One Corner

When I first started working at the law firm, more than 30 years ago, the lot at the western corner of Gay and High Streets in downtown Columbus was occupied by some kind of five and dime store.  It may have been a Woolworth’s, it may have been a Kresge’s, but there was a building and business there where I bought some small item, once.

I only went there once, because very soon after I made my purchase the building was torn down and the lot was paved over for parking.  It was one of the last gasps of the Columbus urban craze for demolishing old buildings that left the core area of downtown a veritable wasteland of ugly surface parking lots.  The preponderance of parking lots gave the center of downtown a kind of sad, scarred feel that made you wonder whether the area would ever be revived.

But slowly, over the past decade, many the surface lots are being replaced with buildings.  Some of the buildings are pure residential developments, many are mixed-use concepts with retail on the ground floor, office space above, and residential at the top, and a few purely commercial buildings have been constructed, too.  And some of the commercial buildings with parking lots have been converted into something that is much more interesting — like the former tire and lube business a few blocks from the firm that was turned into a cool bar, with its former parking lots becoming fenced-in outdoor seating areas complete with fire pits and games and food truck space.

And now the big, long-empty lot at the corner of Gay and High has finally joined this welcome trend.  Work has been ongoing for a while now, and as the picture with this post indicates, it’s getting close to being done.  It’s a huge project that is one of those mixed-use developments, and the buildings look pretty cool — and are much preferable to the grim asphalt expanse that we’d been looking at for years.  We’re now wondering what business might move into the ground floor options, and are hoping they will add to the buzz on Gay Street — for some years now the coolest street in downtown Columbus largely because the original buildings on the block between High Street and Third Street somehow survived the wrecking ball.

After more than three decades, our little part of the world is being reconfigured.  Scratch another surface parking lot and substitute something more attractive and vibrant and hopefully a harbinger of more to come.  Our downtown is on the move, one parking lot at a time, and we couldn’t be happier about it.

Cookie Culprits

The kitchen at our firm is legendary for its cookies.  Some of our lawyers intentionally schedule their meetings in the afternoon so they can get a plate of cookies to munch on while the discussion is proceeding.

But when the scheduled meeting is ended, and before the conference room table is cleared by the staff, the office cookie culprits go on the prowl.  They might just be innocently passing by when the sight of an available plate of cookies in an empty conference room tempts them into action, or they might intentionally take a foraging swing past all of the conference rooms to see whether there are any cookie remains that could provide them with a sugar boost during the mid-afternoon lull.  Whatever the reason, the abandoned cookie plates don’t hold on to their cookies for long.

When I left the meeting in this particular conference room yesterday, the cookie plate was virtually full, but when I passed by a short time later, the cookie culprits had been at it in force, leaving only orphaned oatmeal raisin and sugar cookies — and another sugar cookie from which somebody had taken two huge bites.  Hey, and what’s with putting a half-eaten cookie back on the cookie plate?  I thought the cookie culprits were more genteel than that.