Are they sending the Wolf?

When I arrived at Toyota-Volvo of Keene^[1], New Hampshire, this morning, there was already a palpable buzz amongst the service staff about the man I have been scheduled to meet there. The wheels of warranty-repair justice turn slowly, but the tech that Toyota have^[2] dispatched for me is the man they call when no one knows what to do, he is a fixer, he is the Wolf; I am half expecting Harvey Keitel to walk in the door.

I don’t know how you spent your teenage years, but mine involved lining car door panels with Dynamat to muffle the resonance of too much subwoofer. I never exactly grew out of that phase. When I drive near you, you’re probably going to hear it.

So when I found out last summer that my GR Corolla would have what Toyota optimistically terms the premium audio package^[3], I was pleased, because at the very least that would give me six speaker mounts in front. And, when I got laid off two weeks after I paid cash for the speedy little bastard, I figured the sound quality was competent, if not inspired — enough to carry me until I found suitable employ to justify building it out.

When the tech arrives, he’s not Harvey Keitel, but he is full-on Bah-ston; he has run up from Worcester, Mass., in the rain. I shake hands, and then ask: “Did you bring one?” and on his nod run out the door without further social grace because this is my first chance to see another GR Corolla. And there it is, a few spaces down, from mine.

Not-Keitel’s GR Corolla is black. Somehow it looks forlorn. I feel unmoved. Then I feel sad.

“I think it looks better in white,” he says, catching up with me, and I, long-time hater of white cars, realize that I agree. The styling beef that Toyota has glommed onto the GR to differentiate it from, well, the Corolla that it actually is, seems to disappear into the black. There is a crack in the windshield longer than my arm, two of the four wheels are missing valve-stem caps, and it’s raining.

The only other GR Corolla I have ever seen.

Why we are here

One day last November or so I went to drive my car and everything sounded terrible. I re-downloaded all my music in highest quality, munged settings, tried different inputs, all the boring crap you do when you’re trying to be scientific about something, hell I’m bored just writing this sentence. Nothing alleviated the portable-tape-deck sound that I was suffering out of the rear speakers.

I took it to the dealer in January. Several techs rotated into and out of my car, listening, shaking their heads, exchanging yeah, this is messed up looks. No one can put their finger on what exactly is wrong with my sound system but everyone who listens to it emerges feeling depressed. It is generally agreed that it is broken.

After this it takes months to arrange today’s rendezvous.

This is exactly how it is supposed to be

I have this recurring stress dream in which I am unable to figure out how to use my phone. It is an emergency, someone insistently needs medical attention, but I can’t find the app to make a phone call, I can’t seem to align my fat fingers to dial 9-1-1. This anxiety now plays out in real life in Keene, New Hampshire.

We need to reproduce my problem in a car that is not my own, ergo the tech bringing his own GR. I am unwilling to pair my phone to the not-my-GR because it took me hours of menu-diving, app downloads, network switching and restarts to get paired to my own. The tech’s phone doesn’t have signal, so he can’t stream the song I played in my own car moments before (the only music he has locally is Pearl Jam. I’m not going to touch that). We find that it may be literally impossible to tune the radio manually to get a local station — I found a buried sub-menu, but you have to maybe type in the frequency? Only the digits 3, 4 and 0 are available, the others are greyed out. This is really happening. Is this real life? — and we consider connecting my phone using a cable, but his phone is lightning and mine is USB-C, so we can’t. Easily twenty minutes go by in this fever nightmare. Finally we realize that the car has Sirius XM service and I dial in an appropriately stupid electronic-dancey station, sufficiently thumpy.

We start fading the sound to the back…and…

it sounds exactly like my car did.

The tech and do a long, slow burning stare at each other, his mouth open and eyes droopy at the bottom, a little like Huckleberry Hound. We don’t say anything for several seconds and I can hear the just-barely sounds of the rain over the near-nothing that is happening from the rear speakers. “Wow,” he says eventually, almost reverentially. “That sounds really terrible.”

Software is terrible.

“Maybe they’ll send you a stick you can just plug in and everything will be better,” offers the deep-voiced, white-mustached, appropriately begrimed man who seems to be in charge of the service bay; the distant look in his eyes suggest that has seen things. He’s come in to shoot the shit with the tech because, like I said, the guy carries a lot of weight and everyone seems happy to see him. St. Patrick’s Day plans are discussed.

We’d been standing there, the three of us, in the service department, for several minutes, and the general consensus is software. Has Toyota pushed an update that neutered their own sound system? Did it somehow always sound this bad and I didn’t notice for months? Theres’s a gloominess, maybe it’s the weather. I have no reason to still be there but can’t seem to leave.

“Well,” offers the tech, “at least Toyota doesn’t hijack your speakers. I had a guy with a loaded Tundra last week who was pissed off at how bad his JBL system sounded. It was because his music was being drowned out by piped-through synthetic V-8 engine noises.”

Eventually I drove home because what else is there to do, never once touching the speed limit, behind dump truck, garbage truck, garbage truck, tractor trailer, erratic but ponderous Sentra, garbage truck again. Road mist and rain, the sky looks filthy, everything seems very glued to the ground and a little dream-like.

At least my engine noise is real.

The entire point of this series was that it would allow me to get here and then talk at you about how a year ago I rebuilt my entire old site in Next.js blah blah [time passed] um dev ergonomics, strict typing then subsequent personal crisis about what static-website really means and everyone hates Next.js and React now and start over and finding closure in technical compromise with Eleventy TADA and you see my new website before you herk blah boring words.

Forget it. I can write a separate post or, hell, fifty of them explaining all that. You probably don’t care, and that’s just fine.

I realized that, no, actually, the thing is: I could say anything to everyone if I wanted to. It’s my web site, and my regrettable content.

Hello, World.

Again.

What comes next?

Part I: Mud Season Choreography

I am unable to adequately tell you about mud in Vermont. I want to try, but it’s useless and it frustrates me. Like the northern lights or fireflies, mud season is a you-had-to-be-there phenomenon. What one experiences, in life, as oh hot hell I’m going to high-center right this moment or imminently slide into the river just renders as a few placid, shruggable undulations in photographs.

See? It’s infuriating.

Both cars mud-ice impacted in their wheels and brakes and pissed off about it; they need to be soothed. The road was still frozen this morning, sparred with ice crystals, driveable. I think: If I can beat the road, I can get the VW to the village car wash and back again and maybe it will stop driving like it’s on spin cycle with an unbalanced load.

As I mince-flail-mire toward the highway, I (hallelujah!) confront a Town grader, and it hups up into a snowbank to give me room to pass. I wave, hoot, thumbs-up, wild with gratitude. This buys me time — it should be able to do a pass before I’m back with the VW and maybe, just hells-yes maybe, I’ll be able to attend to the GR, too.

With the Golf, I opt for the automatic side of the carwash. This turns out to be a mistake. It lures me in, smears the car with a fleece of blinding foam and then lights up the green “OK, we’re done here” light and stops doing anything at all. I stick my head out the window to see and mince around to the manual side, pay again, wash it all off by hand. It is one degree below freezing.

Then, later, not much, I’ve made it home, swapped cars, yes!, and, then, once again in the village, feeling punchy, I hard-turn into the Dollar General parking lot^[1] like an asshole. Fortunately the Tacoma I’ve hooked around rudely belongs to my friend CP and his squiggling happy puppydawg. I tell him that England last week was just great but that I have returned to a hellscape of mud. He tells me it’s never been this bad, the mud. He grew up directly above my house, like literally straight up — you should see the view up there — and his parents still live there and he tells me that no one has ever seen anything like this.

Vermont is the most Wish You Were Here state in the country, it’s legitimately like the postcards, but mud season undoes it. It’s like phenological puberty.

Part II: Love and Driving

I’d just finished shammy-ing off the GR after a full manual wash (the car dry, me drenched) and was back on my way into-through the village when my car read out a text from an immediate family member informing me of a concerning, immediate medical situation with another immediate family member. I pulled into the village green next to the pie shop, stared out across the highway at the public tomb and the whole timbre of the morning pivoted so instantly it’s like I’ve just woken up. It’s too windy and I am unmoored by the sudden frantic love I feel for everyone in my life. I am so small and huge. To hell with this (please let it never stop).

Then I know for the next while I’ll be useless for anything but driving. I’ve already got the GR under me, unstabled, clean, on snow tires but still pliant. I suffer an irrepressible need to take the Grafton Road because it’s perfect. To Grafton village, seven miles, then back, and then I do the trip again. The first pairing to set the lay of the road conditions in my mind, the second to fly. Window just cracked to hear the sound of the car, keeping just tight enough on curves not to throw myself into the forest. There’s nothing but shoulderless road, trees, patchy snow, inclines, declines, the occasional back-set old house, pond. I encounter only one other car.

Pausing for a "Shrubbly" soda at the Grafton Village Store. All of Grafton looks this precious. It’s ridiculous.

It’s still not enough. South, to I-91 and then south again, south of Bellows Falls, stopping at Allen Bro’s in the tawny winter marshes next to the Connecticut River, to stand for a minute inside the shop with the people milling around buying coffee and sandwiches and knowing each other, being awake, alive. The wind steals all of my hair with it when I step outside again but gives me in recompense the scent of cider doughnuts.

North again on the Vermont-empty freeway, I tap up into three digits briefly to see if the GR will come unseated in the unsettling wind gusts. It doesn’t. Cautious, but I’d cleared the stretch for state troopers on my southbound pass.

Southern Vermont keeps unfurling for me willingly but I’ll need to set myself down somewhere. And so into Springfield, to BRIC at the haunting old Park Street School, here, where I can write it down, say it in public and regret it. Or not.

I had shoes once, sneakers, which I had thought were red when I bought them online, but they were pink. No, not pink. Those shoes were piiiiiiiink. So pink they seemed to make a noise when you looked at them. Not (pink) demurely spoken just between the two of us, but a honking hot marching-band donnybrook of color. A hue that came out swinging, that looked like it wanted to rub off and stain things.

It was my friend Autumn who nailed it: “Those are pank.”

This is pank.

And pank it has been, my web site, since 2015. For Lyza.com, I think it’s still the right color. For now, at least. I may change my mind within the fortnight. It’s the perfect color because it makes me uncomfortable; it fits because it doesn’t fit me well. It’s simultaneously unserious and vengeful-feeling, visceral, a little bit rageful, and more than mildly feminine (for which quality I have, at best, ambivalent feelings). It nods to the printer’s-red-and-monochrome of where I was coming from. It is neither welcoming nor off-putting, and can play, again, like printer’s red alongside the no-curves-thanks hard grid of my web site, circa 2015 and today. The color itself is a curve.

I built a new site, finally, in the summer of 2015, motivated not by a desire to make content once again, but instead a hot-breathing urge to hack, to create the personal-ultimate static-site generator and personal publishing workflow that kept my source content, whatever that might be, who cares, really, pristine, portable, human-readable, sacrosanct. I got that part, the content-separation thing, right. And the site was battened down tight and outrageously, as we said then, performant, with new-at-the-time Service Worker-based optimization and obsessive tuning.

Lyza.com during the peak-pank years.

But some other choices I made were less admirable: dependency-heavy, invent-my-own wheel JavaScript written at the height of the odd industry obsession with JS streams (e.g. GulpJS metaphors); I had no real plan for what was going to go on the site, just an eye toward how impeccable its bona fides would be to other web nerds.

It was a fun, feverish hobby of implementation for a couple of months, and I launched it and then I — neglected it entirely. What little content I did produce was...kind of boring? I listlessly popped out a few non-technical posts just to fill the blog page with something.

I’d built a ravenous pank content machine and given it nothing to devour.

Then I got distracted, the kind of distracted — writing another book, this time entirely solo; moving suddenly across the country to the woods of Vermont; facing down re-surgings of poor health and new chronic ailments — that didn’t lift for years.

I used to say anything to everyone.

For a decade and half of another I dropped any thought I had at the feet of the whole world. I didn’t pause, fret over audience. I plowed my fingers into keyboards and published at brave speed. A vignette about walking to work or photos of things upside down in reflections. Minutiae about my chronic illnesses. Complaints. Oho!, the complaints! The peeves! The snark! I did not care that no one cared what books I read or what I thought about them. I told everyone my thoughts about books with total lack of self reflection, or spent a week only posting about the planet Jupiter. I both hate and admire myself for all that content.

I wrote the last content that I would write for four years in the spring of 2011, a book review of Undaunted Courage by Stephen Ambrose.

Lyza.com on ice: spring 2011 through 2013 This is still what you will see on the landing page if you visit archive.lyza.com.

Then: silence. Lyza.com, unbreathing, for two-and-a-half years remaining exactly like this. Like the childhood bedroom, preserved, of someone who has disappeared. That’s too morose. But it’s not entirely off the mark: the sometimes-cringeworthy, often of-limited-general-interest, self-indulgent, unfiltered and completely brave content stream ceased that spring and has never resumed.^[1]

This is not at all indicative that the Web^[2] and I parted ways. In fact, we were more best buds than ever. It was during this time that I co-wrote my first book about the web, that I started speaking and writing about the web for various publications and traveling, in relation to the web, and that Cloud Four was starting to grow some proverbial legs.

Yet with my own web site, my online persona: a stagnant fug of self-doubt and creeping shame metastazised. I became, in real life, I think, very slowly, a kinder, humbler, but far more boring person, with adult-ish regrets and insights. I think I believe now that I can aim to be only one or the other: creative, careless, self-obsessed or compassionate, thoughtful, wise, a little dull. And that latter path requires a tincture of silence and reservation.

Then again, I took that to an extreme. In early 2014, when the burden of keeping my hand-cranked WordPress plugins and PHP versions maintained became too much hassle for me, and after my WordPress installation was the target of multiple hacking events, I folded like origami and took my site down to only the most minimal bit of printer’s red and monochrome.

Yeah, that is the whole of Lyza.com, 2014. The only marks of humanity here are a nod to the traditional printer’s red and my inability to quit Caslon.

From here, just a glimmer of a hint of a nucleus of a nascent verve — that red is a blue red, a slightly hot red. It is not that many hues away from the pinkest of the pink. So hot of a pink, in fact, that we like to call it pank.

I have a habit of holding my breath when I look at Lyza.com as it was in 2010. As if these pages would go to dust if I exhaled on them. I'd done the content genesis for years; now I gave it a lavish coat of finery.

The salad days, Lyza.com, early 2010

In retrospect, I think I got it right. I certainly tried hard enough:

...building and editing the photo illustrations throughout the site took me an estimated 100 hours... Nearly all of the items you’ll see in the images as you bop around the site are photos of objects in my home that I have some attachment to: books, anachronistic tools, papers, brass weights, engravings from old books, knick knacks and rocks.

I built exactly the site I wanted, for exactly that time. I went full deep, developing my own plugins for data retrieval and caching from remote APIs; photo galleries, photo posts, photos photos photos. The presentational reinvention of my site coincided with my acquisition of the new-at-the-time Canon EOS 5D digital SLR, which was a phenomenal, revolutionary camera (and I dislike the word revolutionary). This was when I finally finished my long, griefed transition away from 35mm film (Fuji Velvia 50ISO reversal film was my go-to beforehand). I was photo-drunk. It shows.

I indulged my then-current letterpress obsession by getting very persnickety about an all-Caslon font stack — system fonts only, though — achingly crafting tabular layouts and bulleting with fleurons. I was emulating Robert Bringhurst’s Elements of Typographic Style.

A detail of a post about books shows the depth of absurd typography I went to. I still get prickles from Caslon’s italics.

Would I do it differently now? Barely. I wouldn’t use that weird “magic book” image on the right side of the header^[1], nor the creepy and self-worshipful analemma-halo thingy, and I’d take more care with the size and contrast of the navigation items. I wouldn’t use the BluePrint CSS framework or jQuery or CSS sprites, not because there was anything wrong with those tools at the time, but because the web is more better now and we don’t need them anymore. I wouldn’t use WordPress now, or really anything that shatters my content around a relational database, but that’s not a knock on WordPress, it’s just personal choice.

In my lookback this week, I assumed all of this visual faffery would cost, that my site then would have been a blue whale of a performance turd, but it looks like I did this:

The site, while visually intensive, scores an A on Yahoo!’s YSlow scale. To achieve this I’ve focused on GZIPping content, concatenating and compressing JavaScript, using CSS sprites and other tactics to improve performance.

Lest this entry in this series feel excessively self-contratulatory, the Beautiful Years didn’t last. Within 18 months a permafrost had set in that would mark the end of my life as a fretlessly public person. Forever.

I dragged my feet on writing this post in the series about Lyza.com’s history because I thought I’d be describing the site’s embarrassing Dark Ages, two years when my content wasn’t hosted on my own site, followed by a couple more years of something that looked even less considered than an afterthought.

I'd had it backwards. Everything until April, 2005, was the Dark Ages.

As, this week, I reconstructed these years (2005-2009) forensically, I was startled by the riot of content I was creating — typically several blog posts per week. The method of hosting, the visual blandness, the lack of hacker élan — these aren’t material to the manfiest outcome, which was: content.

Everything I ever put on my site leading up to and during the “Celeste” years, no matter how lovingly-crafted and genuine and naïve and enthusiastic, those things are gone, dead. Dumped to a CD-ROM from which they have never re-emerged. In 2005, Lyza.com died^[1]. But then it never died again.

In the spring of 2005, I published a brief blog post, presumably explaining why visitors were being shunted to a blogspot subdomain:

…I need a place to stash my thoughts while I develop my new software. Don’t be upset, it will all end well.

And it did end well. Or, it didn’t end, more precisely, because nothing on the web ever ends, if done right.

Yes, my site redirected to blogspot for two years. And, indeed, the two years following that, while back on Lyza.com soil, were bare-bones and structurally influenced by my adopted CMS of choice (WordPress, that juggernaut).

But that post of April 21, 2005^[2] and every single one that I ever excreted afterwards is still alive, still served on Lyza.com at its original URL^[3]. For better or cringe-ingly worse.

Lyza.com redirected to a Blogger blog for a couple of years. This capture is from February, 2006

In summer, 2006, I conceded that I wasn’t entirely content with the state of things (cobbler's children, shoes, that kind of thing):

...I’ve been spinning my Web wheels for nigh on two years now...

Even if it’s this stupid blogger blog for now, it has to be something. My vision for the perfect Web site for myself–someone who would likely demand that it serve as a personal killer app–is an ever-creeping morass. Even if all I get out there for now are murmors, those are louder than my useless silence.

In the fall of 2007, content is being served once again from Lyza.com.

Fundamentally, I’d had my priorities straight: content first, fripperies later. And, my, what fripperies they’d be.

This — late 2002 through 2005 — is an era of Lyza.com that I look back on with a condescending but genuine sense of affection for my enthusiasm, youth, dumbshittery. Basically I wrote a bunch of blog software. Again. But I still wasn’t calling it that because I was intent on reinventing a galaxy full of wheels. Tada! It’s Celeste. Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

The summer of 2003, WITH CELESTE

I recall my friend P.H. asking “What is Celeste, after all?” and — this is glorious — it’s treated as a defined term throughout the three years it blazed forth from the header. You're supposed to just know. It’s like an inside joke, but without any humorous intent on my part. I made some blogging-software-avec-yet-more-photo-database-hoohah and I wanted to call it something. The sibilant, refined-sugar sounds of Celeste appealed, and were a nod to the heavenly elements of the site’s design — it looked different depending on time of day and weather (in Portland, Ore., my hometown). See?

Hubris, maybe, bike-shedding and twiddling, definitely, but there was one thing I was doing unambiguously right: I was still making my own website, and holding all of my own content and data. Unfortunately, that was about to change.

The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine took its first snapshot of Lyza.com on March 31, 2001. I could call the time between 1997 and this 2001 crawl the Dark Ages of Lyza.com because it’s undocumented, and, consistent with the theme, the site’s background was literally black for the first year or two.

I remember animated, glowing, purple accents — I was still a teenager — and perhaps dalliance with the brand-new <FRAME> tag. Then later, definitely, DHTML to make positioned drop-down menus and, if insane memory serves, a car that floated across the viewport (I liked cars, still do).

What this was: joy, unhindered by wisdom. Just getting something online. Self-doubt would come later, in spates. But for those years, everything was wonderful and ugly.

First proof: March 31, 2001

This is the Wayback Machine’s recollection of my website on March 31, 2001.^[1]

Themes: self-absorption, photography and over-reliance on humanist-geometric typefaces, manifested as an ongoing obsession with Futura.

This is one of the few times of my life that I, a chronic un-fun-haver, can say that I was having fun. (I was also entirely miserable). I won’t speak to the reasoning behind the apparent lowercase letter-spacing being committed here; I cannot recall my own agency in the offense. Let’s go ahead and gloss with forebearing grimaces right over the palette — though I’m sure those are all web-safe colors.

This homespun nonchalance would persist until 2005: no frameworks, no tooling, no CMSes. Just my own naïf’s PHP, a MySQL-backed photo database, an overabundance of Photoshop gimmickry (transparent GIFs!, and, O!, the layer effects and glass filters!) — but again, all of my own hand. Stolid, unglamorous LAMP — this was an era when it was not formidable to be a soup-to-nuts webmaster^[2]. Also, I had created blogging software by this point, but I didn’t know that’s what it was supposed to be called.^[3]

If you view source of this capture, you can regale in the inlined CSS, spacer GIFs and table-based layout. I regret nothing.

And for my next trick…?

May, 2002, as captured by the Wayback Machine.

A new Lyza.com “is coming soon now”…but is/was it? (And why would anyone care to wait?)

If you close your eyes and picture today’s rural American small-town police chief, that’s the guy who conducted my TSA PreCheck^[1] interview this week in C⸻, Vermont. Shaved head, folds at the back of the neck so that the head can fit onto the big shoulders, overloaded and outward-tilting utility belt with its medley of options both partially and entirely fatal from which he could select to suit the moment. The TSA PreCheck processing area, with its private-sector equipment, was situated across a narrow hallway from the department’s single holding cell.

Chief M⸻ asked me for my email address as we were wrapping things up. After I spelled it out L-Y-Z-A-at-L-Y-Z-A-dot-com there was a pause. This happens, more these days. I’ll admit to pride. Owning a four-letter TLD that matches my legal first name ranks alongside being left-handed in terms of identity aspects whose loss would cause me profound grief and self-confusion. Huh, he said after a moment, and asked me how this had come to pass. And I unshipped my usual vague answer: I’ve had the domain a long time, I dunno, the late nineties? I’ve been doing this web thing a long time.

With Lyza.com about to evolve, technically and philosophically, yet again, it’s a natural navel-gazy time for me to be curious about its genesis and history. To put a timeline to this little domain that has shadowed more than a quarter century of a human’s life and echoed the shape and moods of the web.

27 years old in May, 2024

I registered Lyza.com on the 18th of May, 1997. I don’t know that because I wrote it down, or because it has enough weight with me that I remembered it on its own accord. I know because an ICANN lookup today told me so. I was 19 years old then. I know that because I am more firm on my birthdate; that is a date I know.

Not that it was my first website. That would have likely been associated with my university computer account, along with my first email address, which was — and I do remember this without struggle — [email protected]. Then a series of accounts at local ISPs like Hevanet. These were the tilde-FTP days, basically serving straight out of your shell account’s home directory. All this before lyza.com.

If I had to put a date on it, that is, My First HTML Document, I’d wager 1995, possibly late 1994. My mother was the personal technology reporter at The Oregonian at the time. She showed me news groups, the NCSA Mosaic web browser.

The 1990s happened before universal self-promotion and the ceaseless, obsessive contributions of tiny pieces of our lives to entities that we neither fathom nor like much, and the concomitant digesting and compaction and mashing and indexing of all of those bits of humanity online. I was 19 when my domain arose. I wasn’t anywhere near parts of my life to which terms like stewardship or archival could be applied. Thus the fact that any traces remain cannot be credited to me. I wasn’t careful. And those traces are faint.

But let’s start here: Lyza.com will turn 27 on May 18, 2024. Now I know.

I made oak angels today at the Robert Frost Farm in Derry, New Hampshire, on a day trip with my friend DG. I just dropped down in the duff and scribbled my limbs for a while. The oaks are the last to relent before stick season, their leaves so gone hard copper it is difficult to credit that they don’t clank or shatter when they hit the ground.

The sun was out, all day, and this is so unprecedented of late here that the digital signs on the New Hampshire highways warned: SUN GLARE POSSIBLE. Which was true, and I flipped visors restlessly on both the outbound and return-bound drive to staunch the migraine-encouraging tattoo of tree-tree-tree-tree-tree-tree shadows over the road from my left.

I can count on no fingers how many times I’ve been to Manchester, New Hampshire, before, and I got to fix that today, with D, my friend. It, Manchester, has alleys and wide thoroughfares like it believes it’s a metropolis. In this regard, it reminds me of the misplaced urban exuberance of Pittsfield, Mass. Signs in a park said NO DOG FOULING. Cold today, everything steaming, again like bigger cities.

We looked at Charles Sheeler’s perfect take on Manchester’s mill and canal district, ambiently eerie and emotionally distant, in the Currier Museum of Art. I got very emphatic and almost shouty when I spotted it from across the gallery; “The Charleses” (Sheeler and Demuth) are a pair of my favorite American painters, who, true story, almost inspired me to get a Master’s degree in art history, with a focus on 20th century painting between the Wars.

This day was a gift for driving, and my car has the dopamine feedback package that encourages one to give it the foot. Get it in the hammer lane, stomp it, and after the briefest holding-of-breath, agony-and-ecstasy pause, it grunts and f-ing goes and it is beyond my willpower not to do that again and again. Unfortunately, the most exhilarating BLAAAWRT happens around 83 MPH, not that I’d know, of course. The exhaust system is tuned for the sensibilities of a 19-year-old. It’s genius.

But no, I was out for stars;
I would not come in.
I meant not even if asked;
And I hadn’t been.

-- Robert Frost

I’m posting these photos mostly because I got in trouble for taking them in a Market Basket supermarket in Keene, New Hampshire.

Just after photographing the meat sign I was confronted by a man in a bloody butcher’s apron (such striding along the length of the meat cases!) who asked if I was an “agent” or a “vendor”, which I denied but had the unsettling guilty feeling the non-guilty get in wrong-footed surreal situations. “We have special rules about taking pictures.” I guess I nodded. I imagine the special rules are: “don’t.”

The dressing down continued for a while and I don’t think I dissuaded the guy of his hypothesis that I was stealing corporate secrets. “I just like your sign ,” I said, “it’s very...” (in the moment I couldn’t think of the word that means the opposite of disingenuous).

And, really, that Market Basket is a photographer’s dream, it’s a bonanza; moments before, I had buried myself in a display of Jeff Koontz-like, exquisitely reflective silver mylar balloons in every digit, 0-9, which they, Market Basket, in their presumably well-researched retail wisdom, stock directly across from the meat. I was tempted to buy out the whole set, because we could have done such profound things together, me and The Digit Balloons! (forgetting for a moment the fiscal irresponsibility of this idea vis-a-vis my current unemployment).

Eventually, meat-man conceded that I wasn’t technically “in trouble,” and allowed me to complete my shopping. A vivid example of that famous New England hospitality and warmth. I shop there because they reluctantly, very begrudgingly, barely let me.

Then again, I’m the one who (sometimes) drives to the Granite/Live free or die! state, (considering the state’s position on motorcycle helmets, I tend to think of it as Live free and die!) to do my grocery shopping. I suppose that part’s on me.

At least I put all three cylinders in the GR to work getting myself back to Vermont and home, enjoyed a cloudburst on the brief I-91 stretch, saw two bald eagles, one rainbow.

Up until a few months ago, I lived in a space-constrained duplex in a happening urban neighborhood in happening Portland, Oregon. Now I live in the middle of a mountainous forest in Vermont, on a dirt road, next to a river. I changed jobs. I got rid of about 75% of what I owned. On the face of it, everything has changed. Or has it?

Here are some thoughts on all of the changes, as well as some thoughts on how much hasn't changed at all. In the form of a FAQ, because: why not?

Wait. Where exactly do you live now?

In a town in southern Vermont. When I say town, I mean it in the New England sense: a square-ish area of land roughly 6 to 10 miles on a side. Not all towns have villages or any form of conurbation; ours does but it is about eight miles distant.

We live on a dirt road that is well-maintained but is, still, dirt. Our nearest neighbors are across the river, about 800 feet as the crow flies but a quarter-mile walk to get there. They're the only neighbors within screaming distance.

Where the heck do you buy food and stuff?

There's a general store about six-and-a-half minutes away by car. The two local villages are each about a 12-minute drive. One has a grocery store I'd roughly equate to Safeway on the west coast: it's sufficient but not inspiring.

It's remarkable and rewarding how much of our food is obtained directly from the humans who made it. We belong to a little CSA up the road—it's personal enough that they'll notice and comment on our absence if they don't see us for a week or two. There's a Jersey dairy—raw milk and eggs—down the road. Pork and chicken often comes from another farm run by a couple in the next town over. And one of our neighbors raises grass-fed lamb (and may—CROSS FINGERS—scale into acorn-fed pork soon).

What's the landscape like?

Tons of local relief. Our house is at the bottom of a valley. We are surrounded by forest, save for a small field on the east end of our property which is used for hay for our neighbor's sheep. I usually say that, aside from that field, you can tell when you're on our property because you won't be able to stand up properly—it's that steep, most of it.

There's a river. Technically it's the North Branch of the Williams River, but no one ever calls it that. It's just the river. It's a small river; you can walk across it easily, a large creek, really. The water is clear and the rocks various and interesting.

So, you're off-grid or whatever?

No, not entirely. So, no. We do have a grid-tied pole-mounted 3kW solar array, but it doesn't power the whole house. We're also connected to civilization through our phone/Internet lines (more on that shortly). Aside from that, though, yes: we have a well, septic. Our heating fuel is provided by an in-ground propane tank.

Getting online must suck?

Is that a question or a statement? Here's the best part of all the parts, when taken as part of the beautiful whole: our Internet is fantastic. The local telecom got a grant from the federal government and used it to invest in a fiber grid. We pay a reasonable amount and we get reliable 1G symmetric connectivity (real-world performance between 600-800Mbps). Yee haw!

Aren't you terribly isolated?

This has been the most surprising thing about this change. I expected to have loneliness, to have to work intensely to have contact with other humans. And yet. We know all of our neighbors. Our front yard and porch are visible from the road and sometimes people just drop by if they see us. Our friends and family visit us.

Sometimes we won't leave our property for four or five days at a stretch and it isn't bothersome at all.

So you work from home?

Yep! I'm lucky to have my position as an Open Web Engineer at Bocoup. Their systems and people are well-oriented for distributed teams. We're fortunate to have a real, dedicated office portion of our house: a separate staircase, large shared office room and a half-bathroom. So "going to work" feels like a thing, still.

And you're not going crazy?

Nope.

Really?

Really. But we'll see what happens once winter comes!

The past month has been blurry, due, in part, to some health fun I'll gloss over here. But before I'm off again (it's travel season), I wanted to jot down a few highlights.

Tech

Responsive Field Day: Cloud Four's first conference!

For Cloud Four staff, Responsive Field Day was a big ol' deal, one of the bigger things about our 2015 so far. Everything I have to say about the quality of the talks, the community feel of the event, and the contributions of Cloud Four-ians is so laudatory that it doesn't leave much else in my brain. Maybe that's part of being so close to the planning and execution of it. Maybe I can't see the proverbial forest for the trees. But, as well, all of the feedback I've received has been emphatically positive. So, I don't know. It seemed, just...damned good.

It was the first event Cloud Four has put on, and the first event for which I was deeply involved in planning. I enjoyed the hell out of it.

You can find videos and podcast-ed audio of everything from the day, talks and panels, on the event's web site.

Photo copyright 2015 Win Goodbody

Writings: On Service Workers and Progressive Enhancement

My column this month for A List Apart struck a nerve! On the good side, it's kicked up some good conversation about how to get things done to make offline-first a reality, now. For example, David Walsh from Surge explains a tool for managinge App Cache more simply.

The Web is complex and fun and I hope we keep making it the best we can.

Non-tech

On British village names...

A habit I've had since I was about ten is poring over maps the way someone else might read novels. I was in Wales a few years ago, whiling away a country evening flipping through a British driving atlas when I started to obsess over how wonderful British village names can be. I'm going to save diving into this until later, because it absolutely deserves its own post, but the esteemed Chris Higgins used an early spreadsheet I made of some of the choice finds to inspire a recent article on Mental Floss.

On the domestic front...

Here's proof that I can Pinterest with the rest of 'em. I got bored with the scraped-up crappy melamine top of the rolling coffee table in the living room (Ikea, and how).

Before

Then

Sanding, priming, and gold spray paint.

After

It's an awkward time of the year. People with little ones are pushing them back toward school buses. The weather is doing something transitional. Vim held strong when entering the season faded into a mild flatness by the end of it.

A Quick Summer Retrospective

July and August were cerebral for me. I managed to ship my video about life and springtime, I read a dozen or so books, and, ultimately, coded this site from scratch, but I'm left feeling as if I have little of interest to show to anyone outside of my own head.

And Now for Something...Completely Different?

It's time for something new, something forward. I've been on a hobby moratorium for a few years, out of guilt for my languishing pre-existing ones, but maybe it's time to shrug off that mantle and get excited about something new. Any ideas?

Last weekend, I went to Alaska. I don't know why it took me so long—it's been almost five years since I went to my last new state (Hawaii). In fact, Alaska makes a cool 50—I've been to 'em all now.

Sea canaries

Turnagain Arm is a dead-end, long finger of sea extending eastward from Anchorage off of Cook Inlet. We drove around it to get to the Kenai Peninsula.

Cook Inlet—including Turnagain Arm—has a population of Beluga whales. Most of the world's population of Belugas is more arctic, and the Cook Inlet Belugas are genetically isolated. DNA suggests no inter-breeding with other Belugas for something like 6000 years. Unfortunately, about half of the Cook Inlet Belugas died off mysteriously in the 1990s and the herd (pod?) is still struggling to slowly re-establish itself. So I feel doubly lucky that I was able to spot a few, just white humps, out in the water on this trip. Who knows how long they'll be around? (Source for this: various interpretive signs at Beluga Point and Bird Point along the Seward Highway. I have a generally-reliable memory, but this is non-robust, source-wise).

Belugas are one of my favorite whales (perhaps only beaten out by narwhals, which are amazing). They have this lovely demeanor and they look like they'd be good friends. I learned by watching Wikipedia that they are sometimes called Sea Canaries because of their "high-pitched twitter". And also, through associated Wiki-drift, that echolocation and such elaborate chatter are restricted to whales that have teeth (Odontoceti).

Other Things Waterbound

We also saw a sea otter in the harbor at Seward. I've been reading James Michener's Alaska, which has a goodly amount to say about sea otters, so I wasn't taken by surprise by how big she or he was. He or she was big! And relaxed, swimming on his/her back and grooming and pausing to let us take photos and video. Did you know that sea otters have the densest fur of any animal? (Both roadsign park signs and Wikipedia agree on that so it must be true.)

Late August is spawning season for silver salmon on the Kenai peninsula, and we timidly peered into solid creeks of flipping, disintegrating fish, nervously scanning around for salmon-keen bears.

We were ill-timed (being mid-moon-cycle) and so weren't able to see the legendary bore tide in Turnagain Arm, but I, fascinated with tides in general, console myself by the claim that (from highway signs!) the bore tide hasn't been nearly as amazing since the 1964 Good Friday earthquake dropped the entire arm's seafloor by about six feet. The magnitude-9.3 quake put a number of communities (Portage, Girdwood, Hope) partially or completely under flood. They moved Girdwood up the mountain a couple of miles. They gave up on Portage entirely. Hope starts further inland now, the former water-frontage streets now part of the sea.

Late-summer Trip Perks

Flights and crowds in Alaska in the summer are usually painfully expensive and painfully present, respectively. However, we seem to have found a loophole. Maybe it was fare wars between Alaska Airlines and JetBlue, but round-trip flights in August to Anchorage from Portland could be had for as little as $157. And since we opted to camp, Anchorage's seizure-inducing lodging prices were mostly avoided other than the $275 or so we had to drop on an airport Holiday Inn Express because our flight (cheap, but...) landed at 2:00 AM. The return flight was also oddly-timed, leaving at nearly 1:00 AM, but on the flip side, I got to stare, ecstatic, at 90 minutes or the northern lights through my window, pale green and beautiful.

I recommend visiting this part of Alaska in late August—it's still summer, but the locals are all starting to talk about how winter is coming. The aspens are just starting to go gold (though the alders are still summer-leafed) and the crowds seem to have tapered a little. I'd also like to tout that I didn't get a single bug bite—another benefit of the later season. Camping on the Kenai is pleasant and easy, not bush wilderness but accessible landscape, landscape far bigger than average.

• Aerogel is so not-dense that it's hard to see the edges of it, which tend to diffuse into nothingness subtly. (for more, read: Stuff Matters: Exploring the Marvelous Materials that Shape our Man-Made World )
• In Naples, there are DOC-designated pizzas. If you make a margherita pizza with the wrong kind of tomatoes or mozzarella, you're not in the club.
• Perhaps Charles Lindbergh's greatest feat in his first transatlantic flight was that he found the airfield in Paris after flying from New York using dead reckoning. Imagine that. (for more, read: One Summer: America, 1927 )

The following is nifty ES6/JS 2015 goodness:

class Whatever {
  constructor({ foo = "bar", baz = "bing" } = {}) {
    // Yeah, baby
    console.log(foo); // => 'bar' by default
  }
}

Hat-tip to @tylersticka on that one!

My co-workers highlighted this recent video on digg, part of a series entitled "Atlas Obscura" (thus, presumably denoting its informational contents are, well, obscure), about the salad-bar poisoning by the Rajneeshees in The Dalles, Oregon in 1984.

Except this information, to me, is anything but obscure. In my memory, the Rajneesh situation flavored several years of Oregon culture and news reporting. My mom still occasionally references it in casual conversation.

It made me curious: How many people know of this event? Is it really so banished to the obscure edges of history? Is it just a sign that I'm getting old, and/or that I am hopelessly from Oregon in that entrenched way? Do I already sound like I'm my porch rocking chair, creaking on about how In my day, cults poisoned salad bars?