Trapped in Space

I’ve already told you about my scariest flying experience on a turboprop at a small airport in Ohio, but if you haven’t read that and somehow ended up on this anecdote, read that first and come back to this story. We’ll wait.

In 2016 my spouse and I were invited to the wedding of dear friends who live in England. We had just been in England the year before for work, but we couldn’t pass up the chance to attend our friends’ wedding on the Dartmoor, which was being officiated by another close friend.

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AeroNOTics

Flying is not even close to the top of a list of Thing I Like To Do. Flying wasn’t something I or my family did when I was growing up. We drove everywhere. We drove to western Pennsylvania to see my mother’s family. We drove to The Shore — Wildwood, New Jersey to be more precise — to visit my father’s brother’s family. We even drove to Florida a few times to see my paternal grandparents. It was the 70s, and like many American families we drove. There is only one time that I can recall my father flying, and it wasn’t commercially. An old navy buddy of his flew his Cessna from New Jersey to a small airport near our house in Maryland, and took us both on a little excursion. As I remember this story, I honestly can’t recall any other times my father flew.

On the occasions I did get to fly I recall being excited. On rare occasions my mother and I would fly from Washington, DC to Pittsburgh, PA when my father couldn’t go with us; and one of her brothers would pick us up and drive us the rest of the way. There was at least one flight I took alone to visit my paternal grandparents in Florida. I recall enjoying the flights to and from Germany when I was 13 when a school friend named Dirk and I traveled alone to visit his oma in Cologne. I even flew first class one time when my cousin gave me a voucher and I was able to upgrade on a flight from Pittsburgh to Los Angeles.

It wasn’t often, but it also certainly wasn’t something to which I gave much thought. It was novel when I was a kid. Then it stopped being novel, and I can pinpoint when that changed. Not the year, just The Flight that scarred me.

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Traditions in the Time of a Pandemic

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For the record, our small family observes the a la carte menu version of the winter holidays. We draw upon our own cultural backgrounds with a nod to a few others. When it comes to our observations nothing is written in stone, and while I admittedly get a bit frustrated when certain aspects don’t go as planned, that will not happen this year.

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Lessons from Vermont on Community

Thursday, Sarah and I went to our first Feast & Field market. She had recently interviewed one the people behind the group for our YouTube channel, and as we had taken off Friday to clean the barn in anticipation of shearing Camissa — among other chores — everything lined up.

It was a beautiful evening, and we had local tacos, beer & wine for our supper, and then shopped for local pasture-raised beef, and vegetables.  There was live music and people dancing and laughing. We knew a few faces, and caught up with folks we hadn’t seen recently. We met some new people, and I met some people I only knew over phone and email from my day job at the local cooperative fiber optic Internet. Sarah exchanged emails with a nice guy working at the beer and wine counter about potentially modeling some of her knitting creations. And on our way home we stopped by Kiss the Cow dairy and picked up a pint of sea salt & caramel — on the honor system as they were still at the event down the road.

We were there for only an hour and a half, and most of the time I sat listening to the live music and just watching it all unfold in front of me. But staring at the blue sky with wisps of white clouds, and listening to the combination of live music and the hum of the people, I had a revelation.  More of a duh moment, but an idea nonetheless. (more…)

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Dealing with Existential Angst whilst Deep Cleaning

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Shortly after returning from a long weekend get-away to Montreal with Sarah, I started thinking about the time off I had earned from work, and how to spend it. We had just returned from one trip, and didn’t have any immediate plans — or any funds in our travel budget. We’re discussing what to do for our sixteenth anniversary in October; and we usually end the year with chill around the various holidays, but that still left me with at least a week of time available.

The solution was to do something we had been discussing for a few years, but knew it would take hard work. What we didn’t budget for was the emotional exhaustion. (more…)

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