It’s odd to think of Proenneke now, more than a year into the Coronavirus pandemic. Many of us have remained inside our homes, not able to go outside or be around people. And contrasting that with being wholly in the wilds of Alaska, more or less outside all the time – able to go absolutely anywhere at all, but there being no one else around.
The Fenland Black Oak Project aims to transform the “Jubilee Oak,” a 42-foot long subfossilised Black Oak tree discovered in 2012, into a single, impossibly long table.
While the video is a bit much (and a little too on the nose for me), I did find myself thinking back to the passing of my Grandma Phoebe. And in particular, the very long night my sister and I stayed at her bedside overnight.
And now, the project is changing hands, complete with a new editor in Kwame Dawes, and a whole new look and website design. It will be interesting to see this new chapter of the project, after a decade and a half in Kooser’s hands.
Sadly, this experiment isn’t working anymore. I mean, it technically is but there’s just no good way to view/run it anymore.
I’ve got a handful of old Flash projects that I failed to maintain over the years, and a backlog of things to try to revisit and fix. Or at this point, recreate.
There are some ingenoius portions of the machine. But the barbell segment 3/4 of the way through really caught me by complete surprise! So incredibly well done…
“Everyone who studies the jewel wasp knows it stings the roach twice – once in the first thoracic ganglion to paralyze the front legs and once in the brain to zombify the roach.”
“[Ms. Mitoh] added that she expected the slug ‘would die quickly without a heart and other important organs.’ But it not only continued to live, it also regenerated the entirety of its lost body within three weeks.”
With the weather growing warmer, and the chance of us getting our vaccination shot increasing with each passing day… Liz and I have talked about going outside more. Moving around a bit more.
Hard to believe it’s been a year. This is a birthday thought, and also a pandemic thought. A lot has changed since then, but we remain lucky to remain employed, to be able to continue our jobs remotely, and to be comfortable in a time when so many others are struggling.
We may not be in a fancy restaurant (yet). But this is our private table, the ambience is good, the food fantastic, and the company stellar. Everything, all of it, is a gift.
Liz had to relocate her office up to the bedroom, back when we were getting work done on the first floor. We’ve held off moving her back down there over the winter (it’s warmer upstairs), but that may change soon.
“Hedda Sharapan, one of the staff members at Fred Rogers’s production company, Family Communications, Inc., recalls Rogers once halted taping of a show when a cast member told the puppet Henrietta Pussycat not to cry; he interrupted shooting to make it clear that his show would never suggest to children that they not cry.”
We were in Lake View this morning, running a bunch of errands. As we were driving down Clark, Liz looked out the window and yelled “It’s a bunny store!”
Who, I wondered, could she possibly be texting at this hour? Even if it was work-related, it seemed incredibly inappropriate to be messaging this late at night. And as I was thinking about all this, I found myself getting extremely jealous. Who is my wife talking to, at this late hour? At midnight, on a Tuesday?
I fell down a rabbit hole today, watching a ton of videos by The Hood Internet. Their project, ’79 – ’99, is just phenomenal and a ton of nostalgia and fun and good feelings, all rolled up.