Five Things This Week: week 18

Atlas Obscura
Okay, mea culpa: I’ve lived in Sonoma County area now for more than 14 years (14 years and three days, in fact!) and I have yet to visit either Luther Burbank’s home and gardens nor his experimental Farm in Sebastopol. It’s on my list. After reading this article It might happen sooner than later. 
Atlas Obscura
Staying in the metaphorical garden here. I love the idea of roadtripping just to find these obscure, unmarked Champion trees – the best of their species. I’ve already looked up some of the trees in California to figure out where they might be and how I could find them… This is fun stuff and a good excuse for an adventure!
Inverse
I came across this after a really bad spell this week (see forthcoming Selfie post for week 18). It’s an interesting way to look at money and how we get trapped into a negative cycle of spending. Do be mindful of the potentially seizure-inducing background at that page – it’s painful.
Medium
I didn’t realize until I wiped the tears from my eyes that this had been written in 2013, so there’s a chance you might have already read this, like, forever ago. Or, if like me this is the first you’ve encountered it, enjoy. Oh, and warning for extreme profanity.
YouTube
One of my all-time favorite songs that just slays me every time. Eddie Vedder’s wonderful voice just brings something more to it. I needed this this week.

Selfie Week 18: Happy Birthday, Mom!

Since my mom passed four years ago, we have a family tradition of getting ice cream on this day, her birthday. We all take selfies and text them to each other. It’s a wonderful tradition and my mom would love it.

I’ve been treating my word processor like a rattlesnake tonight, cautiously approaching to write, then hurriedly stepping back. I’ve sought distractions from all directions. I watched the end of the Boston/76ers game. I watched the new woodworking video from April Wilkerson. I watched an episode of Ghost Adventures (in hindsight, in my little house in the woods, that might not have been the best idea…). I watched an inning of the Giant’s game.

I know I’m going to cry writing this.

…Okay, let’s do this.

Happy birthday, mom! I miss you so much.

There’s a number of reasons I have trouble writing about my mom. First and foremost of which is I have a lot of regrets. I regret that I didn’t visit her more. I regret that I didn’t take her up on visiting for what would be her last Thanksgiving. I regret not calling more. None of us know how much time we have left, but I guess I never thought mom would be… gone.

Even when we didn’t talk I knew she was there. My mom was such an important figure in my life. She got me. If you’re reading this you have probably known me for a while, and so you know that I’m not normal – in the best sense, I would maintain! But my mom got that. Case in point: in high school, a friend’s dad gave me his old moped. I loved it because it was quirky and weird. It had a front rack I could bungee my Little Mermaid lunchbox to. I affixed a milk crate to the back and would ride the thing to school in my Birkenstocks. Where does my mom come in here? She sewed me a tiger-striped seat cover.

Another story: for my birthday one year my aunt Jean bought me this awesome 6-foot tall blow-up Godzilla. I love that thing, but it developed a leak and I relegated it to my closet. Fast forward a few years and my buddies and I went to see Jurassic Park on opening night. Naturally I got home late, and the lights by the side door were off. No big deal. I opened the door and Godzilla, all six feet of him lurched at me from the open door. I’m not ashamed to say I screamed like a little girl. My mom hit the lights as she laughed hysterically. “I’m so glad you finally came home,” she said. “Do you know how many times I had to pump that thing up?!” This was a trend: a few years later I returned from seeing Blair Witch Project to find stick figures like in the movie menacingly decorating my room.

Mom came to visit Anna and I when we were living in Utah. She did her research and decided we had to hit up the enormous local corn maze. The three of us ventured in and got hopelessly lost almost immediately. We never found the exit – we ended up going out the way we came in. “You can’t go out this way!” one of the employees said. “We just did!” Mom replied as we hurried to the car. That same trip she and I drove out to Bear Lake (on the way we might have – at her urging – ventured up a few 4×4 trails…) and had their incredible raspberry milkshakes.

My ice cream picture above came from here in town. They encourage you to sample the different unique flavors, and as soon as I tried the blueberry limoncello, the tart blueberry reminded me just a little of that raspberry milkshake for just a moment…

…These moments…

She was always supportive of my writing. Always. She read all my clips from my high school paper and insisted I bring her home City on a Hill Press from UCSC when I started writing there. And then after college… I pretty much stopped writing for a long time. No one likes to think that they might not have lived up to their parents’ expectations, but I’m genuinely saddened to think of everything she’ll never read. I thought of that when I started this blog and, in a lot of ways, it’s dedicated to her. She might not get the opportunity to read it, but that’s not the point. What’s important is that I am writing again, and that’s enough.

The fall before she passed, she and her sister, my aunt Jean, went on my mom’s dream Greek cruise. She compiled the pictures of the trip into a huge album. Here’s another regret: I only got a few minutes to flip through it with her that February day when I came up to be with my family as my mom went in for exploratory surgery. Before we took her to the hospital I asked if we could look at it later. She agreed, but then a few hours later we got the terrible news, and nineteen days later, she was gone…

I promised myself I wouldn’t write about that time today. But I have a reason for this one – a few months before that she sent me the journal she kept throughout the trip about the excursions and the locations they visited and some of the colorful characters they me along the way. I re-read the journal recently, and heard her voice in my head again, so clear. I was surprised I didn’t cry – but then why would I? It was clear she was having the time of her life!

These moments.

I know she’s still around. There are moments I feel her distinctly. I know she’s with me when I’m on the motorcycle. I feel her when I’m off adventuring. She was in a dream recently – we were having a big family party and she was making a feast of our favorites, but was concerned there wasn’t enough food. I offered to make my oven fajitas and she agreed. That’s a dish I made only after she passed. At the risk of reading too much into a dream, I think it suggested that not only is she still around, but she’s aware of the things I make – be they oven fajitas or, well, this blog.

Happy birthday, mom! You are loved, you are remembered, and you are missed. Thank you for everything! See you in my dreams!

Five Things This Week: week 17

Movies With Mikey
This is the most recent episode from the YouTube channel Movies With Mikey and I chose it because I kept nodding at every point he made (spoiler: I loved The Last Jedi effusively). But I absolutely adore Movies With Mikey in general and I cannot recommend it highly enough. Some of my favorite episodes are his episode about John Wick, the one covering the still-criminally-unappreciated film Adaptation, and the wonderful episode he did about The Force Awakens which literally had me tearing up. A little backstory – because Mikey gives thoughtful, detailed takes on these films, it seems callous to just say “Watch these because they’re awesome” and leave it at that. Context!! – Mikey Neumann had a dream job at Gearbox Studios and was the creative force behind the Borderlands and Brothers In Arms video game franchises. He was absolutely A Big Deal. And then life intervened. He was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and literally had to learn how to live again. Realizing the high-powered, high-stress job in the video game industry wasn’t going to work anymore, he swapped his hobby (“Movies With Mikey”) in for his full time job, and, voila! Okay, not “voila!” (more like Patreon and dedicated fans). There’s a great recap and interview with Mikey that came out in January in Paste Magazine (maybe you’ve already read it because, like me, you always read Paste. You do, right? Right?) and you should totally check it out because Mikey is awesome. Seriously.
Atlas Obscura
Donald Olson looks at an Ansel Adams and believes he can determine exactly when and where Adams tripped the shutter on his camera. The way he and his team does this by unpacking clues in the sky and shadows absolutely fascinates me. I certainly don’t have the aptitude or tenacity for the task, but that’s the point: someone is passionate about this. And, sure, in the greater scheme of things is it important to know exactly when and where Ansel Adams stood in Denali National Park to take “Denali and Wonder Lake”? No, but this same sort of obsessive attention to detail can give us a richer context of the moment of creation. Along the same lines, I adored Errol Morris’ exhaustive examination of shadows of cannon balls on a road in the Crimea to determine whether the famous Roger Fenton 1855 war photograph “The Valley of the Shadow of Death” was staged or not (I’m not spoiling this one!). The link is to the original printing of Morris’ essay in the New York Times in 2007, but it was also collected in his book Believing Is Seeing: Observations on the Mysteries of Photography, helpfully hyperlinked with an Amazon affiliate link 😉 
Popular Mechanics
This news broke earlier this week and I wondered the same thing that Ezra Dyer does in this article (full disclosure: Ezra Dyer has been my auto journalistic crush for a long time) — is this strategy to stop selling most of its cars in the US a shortsighted move that will backfire once gas prices inevitably rise? But Dyer makes some good points. As if to underscore this, the Detroit News report FCA Chrysler reported record first quarter earnings — Fiat/Chrysler cut their low-end cars a few years ago in favor of Ram trucks, and, most importantly, Jeep. Meanwhile, Reuters reported Hyundai’s car-heavy US portfolio has dragged them down to a six-year low. I’m not wholly convinced this is a great move, but this takes me part of the way there. Seriously, the Focus RT and Fiesta ST have been such forbidden fruit on these shores for… well, ever. And now… it’s going to be that way again. *sigh*
I’ve been looking for an alternative to cable television since I moved. I’ve been trying the different live TV services since they first came out — Sling TV was the one that seemed most promising, but it was pricey. My biggest priority was the ability to watch the Giants and Warriors. You could with Sling, but you had to add this package, and that package… YouTube started their own live TV service, but it lacked the different stations for sports. I honestly didn’t even consider Apple’s live tv option because it’s… really wanting. Hulu Live, though, has all the different channels and I was already subscribed to their premium service. It’s not perfect — there’s still some stuttering occasionally, and the guide is just a mess. But it’s the best so far in this nascent field.
Avengers: Infinity War
This might be a bit premature — Fern and I are seeing this in about an hour. But I think it’s pretty safe to say it’ll be epic.
Editor: This post went up late because we had to go to the theater before I had a chance to finish this. I will say I enjoyed Avengers: Infinity War quite a bit, but it’s a lot. That’s all I’m gonna say.