August, again...

Snippets of thoughts, the ranting-and-raving that includes inside-jokes that I know old friends will 'get,' along with snapshots of minutiae from wherever we are--the fact that this blog has not been updated in a year shows me that my 'need' to communicate such things has made the move over to Instagram & Twitter.

Not that I was every truly 'personal' on this blog... My wife and I always figured that the phone and e-mail and texts would serve for important, immediate contact, so this format ended up serving as a visual bridge for those who know us, but one that wouldn't offer up too much to those who don't need to know more... a more guarded, anti-facebook of our choosing...

That's still what this is, then, I guess, just evolving into...an annual post?

And being stuck here, sick-at-home, away from work--I'm back at this desk typing with all ten fingers instead of thumbing away on my phone. Yep, the usual back-to-the-new-school-year cold caught up with me last Friday night; I've been back in the classroom with students since August 4th, and since Saturday it's been nothing but soup and vitamins. And some pizza. OK, and a glass of wine, too, last night. The restaurant down the road has this special going on right now, (pizza, salad, and drinks for 2 for $20), and I felt good enough to get out of the house for a bit with my wife...

Therapeutic.

The new year is off to a good enough start, student-wise. Yeah, there's the perennial lack of materials. What, you want textbooks? And projector bulbs? desks? silly, silly teachers... The school where I work is routinely listed as one of the best in the country--but it feels as if it's almost more in spite of instead of because of how certain things are (not)done... Imagine if...

Enough.

Time for the summer in review. 
Much less hectic than last summer with its moving of two households and driving of my mother's car across the country and then setting her up with new doctors and getting ready for a bit of neurosurgery right after settling into her new Arizona life. (She's doing well, by the way, adapting her gardening to the desert and learning that moles are amazing Mexican sauces, too.)

This summer was framed by Maui and Monument Valley...

Maui!

After sixteen years of marriage, S. and I finally got around to taking a truly relaxing vacation--no language classes, no scouting of locations for a possible year-abroad, no relatives to visit, no gathering of materials for future use in my classroom--all great trips, but those are trips with mission statements; we just wanted to relax. 

And we did. It was worth every penny. (Wow, lots of pennies for Hawaii. Lots.)



"Timeless" may be a cliché--just like faux-'tintyping' of iphone-photos may, by now, be a cliché--but with roots in truth and feeling, so, yes, staying on the eastern tip of Maui, at the end of the legendary 'Road to Hana' felt timeless. Deep breaths and everlasting trade winds... Restorative.

Guys, if your wife wants the two of you to do a spa-day, do it. You'll love her for it, too. Outdoor showers with ferns and orchids growing out of lava-rock. Crashing surf just beyond. Your mind will have a new happy place.

On the other end of the island, we spent a few days in Napili Bay. Sea turtles and humuhumunukunukuapua'a swimming right up to you! Sunsets framed by the islands of Lana'i and Moloka'i. And a black dog playing in the surf, epitomizing happiness:



(and this photo won us a couple of hotel nights in a little instagram contest! Thanks, pup!)

The very first day we got there, S. and I turned to each other and said, "what took us so long to finally get here?" Already plotting to go back...

The photos could go on, ad nauseum. I'm guessing that if you're reading this, you've already seen a few, so...

...on to Monument Valley.

After nine years of living here, I finally made it up there.

Going on a weekday, there were few American visitors--I heard more German and French than anything. These Wild West Vibes, popular with European road-trippers... And I mean, yeah, the landscape is epic:



In mid-July, I had to spend a week at a teachers' workshop up in Phoenix--from there it's a few hours closer to Navajo country than it is from Tucson, so I decided to tack on a little road-trip to round out the summer. From Monument Valley I drove down to Chinle, where some friends live, the gateway to Canyon de Chelly National Monument, with its scores of ancient ruins:

...and petroglyphs:

...and those whose families have lived here for centuries:

Driving through Petrified Forest National Park on my way back to Tucson:

======================

This summer, I learned that a couple of photos placed in this year's IPPAwards.

Just a wall I drive by on my morning commute; glad I stopped to take a picture of it--an honorable mention in the ABSTRACT category:

...and an honorable mention in the landscape category as well, seen on one of my morning runs in Sabino Canyon:

The best camera's the one that's with you.

One last thing about photos--it turns out that I have a few dozen photos listed for sale on Getty Images--mostly nature, some architecture... Yes, this is a bit of shameless self-advertising. But hey, if you need some stock images, you'll know the source personally...

======================

This year, for the first time, I have a few students who speak Cantonese. Also, Lao (also known as Laotian). Allons, enfants de ces patries, le jour d'apprendre est arrivé...

"...the dominance of the eye..."

A few years ago, I came across A Book of Migrations by Rebecca Solnit.

This passage from that remarkable book has stuck with me:

     "Perhaps people travel for pleasure because the visual is much more memorable than the tangible, the seen than the felt.  At the time, traveling may be nothing more than a series of discomforts in magnificent settings:  running for the train to paradise in a heat wave, carrying an ever heavier pack in alpine splendor, seeing sublime ruins with stomach trouble. Yet it is the field of images and not the body of sensations that lingers.  My mother once remarked that if women remembered what childbirth felt like, no one would have more than one child.  And so I, third child of a third child, owe my existence to forgetting and my taste for travels to the dominance of the eye..."

...the field of images...

   ...the dominance of the eye...

Maybe that's why I haven't felt as much of a need in recent months to come back to this blog. In high school and as an undergrad, I entertained the notion that I was a wordsmith...In grad school, writing about writing grew tiresome, and then when I spent a year abroad living in Paris, I occasionally dreamed about getting a 'real camera' and documenting more of the images that were informing my sense-of-myself-within-geography instead of translating the images into words. (I did spend large amounts of time writing to the woman who would later marry me, though, conflating sense-of-place and sense-of-me in both par-avion letters and scrolluminous e-mails...)

This blog began as an outgrowth of group e-mails sent to friends during the year that my wife and I lived in Nicaragua. Within a year of moving back to Seattle, we realized that we wanted to leave behind the leaden sky winters of the Pacific Northwest, and so we moved down here to Tucson. (Eight years now?!) To share our impressions of the Sonoran Desert with our friends and family 'back home' and 'back East', I kept posting a few times a month for a few years...

...and then smart-phones happened.

   ...and then Instagram.

Yes, the tyranny of the square-format and the ubiquity of over-sharing are inescapable facets of the tool/beast which has become our portal, via our thumbs, to ever expanding grids of curated lives. So be it. Or rather, to be more modernly tautological: it is what it is.

Within the constraints of captions and hashtags, then, my need to write and share images has been finding a more immediate outlet here:

Images from past trips, snapshots from trail-runs, minutiae conveying a sense-of-place...

Hmm...this blog then--becoming more of a forum for occasional musings and ranting/raving/reflecting...
a self-published monthly? semi-monthly...?
desination running-guides? 
road-trip travelogues? 
"listicles?"

Looks like it.

Thanks, readers, for keeping up... 

Here are a couple of those 'listicles' I've recently had published, by the way,

for Arizona Tourism and the Matador Network: 

       - 20 Things You Didn't Know About Arizona 

       - 8 Incredible Natural Areas in Arizona You've Probably Never Heard of

'making faces'...with Hipstamatic's new TinType app...(mostly) Wordless Wednesday...

When Hipstamatic came out with its new TinType app a couple of weeks ago, I knew I'd have to start bugging friends to let me 'play with their faces' a bit. Ever since I got my first iPhone, I've been avid about landscape and travel mobile photography...but portraits weren't a priority. TinType has made me want to explore a bit more the variety of faces...

mére et filles...

 

...and it can be a fun tool for landscapes too:

The Cottonwood at San Pedro House

For this week's FriFotos: ORANGE

If you're interested in travel, photography, and travel-photography, Twitter's #FriFotos chat/forum/photo-share is probably already a weekly ritual... 

(For more info: check out this.) 

Anyone is welcome to participate...

...and since this week's theme (announced on Tuesday) is going to be "ORANGE," these scenes from the past few years come to mind:

From this past winter,

a foggy sunrise over the Grand Canyon:

sunset behind Point Loma,

from Coronado Island, California

...to something man-made,

spotted near the Canal St.-Martin in Paris last summer:

windows outlined in orange

in the Château de Chambord, France:

the glorious stained-glass ceiling

of the Palau de la Musica Catalana, 

Barcelona:

...back to nature, the orange glow of a summer evening 

on the Canal de Midi in the South of France:

...and the Volcán de Agua throwing its shadow

into the sky to the west of Guatemala City:

From this summer, on Korea's Ulleung-do island,

(the most beautiful island you've never heard of)

the distinctive local "hobakmakgeolli" ale,

brewed from rice and pumpkin:

For more info on this unique island beverage, click here...

...a brightly jacketed senior citizen swinging 

through some morning calisthenics

near a riverside market in Jeonju, S. Korea:

...a 'guardian dragon' on the ceiling of the gateway 

of the old South Gate leading into downtown Seoul:

...looking up through some of the lanterns

at Jogye-sa temple in central Seoul:

...and back home to Tucson,

one of the adobe Sonoran-style row-houses in the Barrio Viejo:

the desert in bloom: poppies in spring after the winter rains,

Catalina State Park:

summer--Mexican-red-bird-of-paradise in bloom:

 ...fishhook barrel cactus in bloom,

adding some color in late summer:

autumn in the foothills of the Santa Catalina Mountains, northern edge of Tucson:

...and the fall color lingering into December along desert creeks,

cottonwoods along Sabino Creek:

Sunset from Gates Pass,

beetle on a jojoba leaf:

Once again...ten more tries for a 'dream'

Perhaps you've heard of the "Dream Trip" contest sponsored by Condé Nast Traveler magazine...it's a big one--the grand prize is $25,000 for whatever travel-itinerary you can dream up!

Well...in this month's magazine, on page 18--here's the announcement:

They're doing it again!

Last year, I was honored, and my wife and I thrilled, to have been one of the twenty-five finalists...honored, thrilled, and then, it must be honestly said, disappointed that we didn't win...(S. was pleased, though, that all finalists received a Clairsonic skin care system...and I also got a SeaLife underwater digital camera...snorkeling in Tucson, anyone?)

So...for what it's worth--below are my ten submissions.

(any guesses on which one(s) were taken on my iPhone?)

I am hereby shamelessly requesting your votes...

OR--go to www.cntraveler.com/dreamtrip 

and submit your own photos...

===================================

faces of Barcelona, from the Ist to the XXIst centuries;

looking out from the Museu d'Historia,

Roman marble framing a guy on his smartphone

in the medieval Plaça del Rei

Urban angst, from the hills of Park Güell, Barcelona

"Nighthawks for Dumplings"

--this streetscape in Seoul's Bukchon district reminded

me of a Hopper painting; 

on my last night in Korea, this scene

pulled me in for a memorable dinner

 Buddha vs. steel-and-glass...

the ancient Bong-eun-sa temple faces 

Seoul's now (in)famous Gangnam district

a streetscape from León, Nicaragua...

stark and vibrant side-by-side

 Hiking out of the forest...into color...

Goat Lake in WA's central Cascades;

after the seemingly endless grey of winter and spring,

summer beckons; a friend and I hiked out of the woods

into this ethereally-lit glacial-lake-scape, 

meeting forest service workers there to clear the trails

 The 'new' adobe mission church in Taos Pueblo, NM

 ...not easy staying white;

a summer morning's maintenance 

in the gardens of Versailles

 Benches require napping on a summer afternoon in Paris

On one last walk through the Jardin des Tuileries this summer,

this guy caught my eye:

sunbathing in front of a carnival-ride

while on his cell phone during his lunch hour--

the highs and lows of office-work-life in Paris

If anyone is so inclined, clicking on the link under the photo will take you to the photo on the Conde Nast site...where you can vote! Once a day is all it takes...Merci!