I’ve traveled close to 5240 miles over the past 13 days.
Of course I started in Nashville, but then:
I’m like the Matt Lauer of my particular address.
I finished reading Steve Jobs on Wednesday. As someone who mostly shies away from anything over 400 pages, I’m proud that I was able to finish it in under a month. If only the book itself was any good. It’s certainly a thorough and interesting collection of facts but those 575 pages have absolutely no narrative drive. Even in its organization, endlessly sectioned by handy and frequent headings, served to turn a life into a list of bullet-points. Granted, biography is a different beast than current events, but to me the gold standard is Bill Carter’s TV work, or Michael Lewis’s writing about (well, most anything). Those authors find the through-line in their subject matter and create gripping reads even when the reader knows exactly what is going to happen next. It’s not like Isaacson didn’t have the quotes – the book is packed with them (and should bump the phrases “is a bozo,” “blew-it,” and “it’s shit!” back into the lexicon). But by the time I came to the end, Steve Jobs, the book, unlike the man, just felt a little lazy. Informative, but lazy.
Lander, Wyoming. A lovely town.
My week mostly consisted of work, and very little sight-seeing. That said, it’s been one of the best weeks of travel I’ve had in a year chalk full of travel. I say this for two reasons:
I wouldn’t mind coming back.
There is a situation going on in the backyard right now (actually, it’s been going on for about a week). One of our trees is full of some sort of nut. It is a largish, smooth, green beast of nut that fall from the high branches and hit the roof and our deck with a loud thud. This is annoying, but can be dealt with. However, the nuts attract squirrels. The squirrels eat the nuts on the deck and make cute little piles of the leftovers. Those piles accumulate rather quickly. After about 4 days, the deck looks like this:
Annoying? Yes. A pain to clean? Absolutely. Dangerous? Let me tell you, the biggest problem of this whole late-summer nut exodus, is that the squirrels, high up in the trees, find it fun to throw the nuts on the non-squirrels below. Say someone is playing with their dog, they may have the unpleasant sensation of having a siver-dollar-sized nut hurled at the cranium from 50 feet. And let’s also say that you happen to be the dog in this scenario and you are, already, a bit skittish. Well, this nut-pelting just might make it so that you no longer will choose to go outside and need to be drug out by your master. This is not the natural order of the earth.
Here is the tree in question:
Unrelated backyard difficulties:
There is a raccoon or raccoons living under our deck. They enjoy getting into heated stand-offs with the dog and they do not seem to the be kinds of animals that will just run away — even if they’ve been pelted with, say, a nut, from a worried human standing on the deck. Developing…
The following is an in-progress list of things I will do if I ever find myself living in a universe completely absent of the time dimension.