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I had a walk with M.
The babysitter arrived and took T. out for the day. She also had her twin grandsons for part of the day, and he was apparently really helpful with them. I love that he gets that experience.
I took T. to his morning dermatology appointment. No follow up needed! Yay!!
The kids had their physicals. They are obviously growing, and the curve on their height / weight / BMI is going in a direction that the doc is very happy about. This makes me very happy, because I do not want pressure (to be fair, the doc is super good on this topic and in general). I talked to her for a bit about getting T. to lift — I think he should either start with my program, or I should find him a trainer whose perspective overlaps with mine. I sort of wish I had not brought it up. T. is 14, slightly taller than me and, obviously, a young man. From my perspective, at this point, he should be lifting heavy things. I am prepared to be conservative, and start small, 20-25 free weights. She is talking 10-15, higher reps. *sigh* Yes, because our family definitely needs more risk factors for RSIs! I laid out my rationale, and she will talk to some of her colleagues who lift and get back to me. She was low key about it and said it was clear I had really thought about this. It is not like I am proposing any kind of max weight! The kid is already lugging around things in the range I am proposing — I just think he ought to have more experience with it so when he is hauling a heavy suitcase around he does not drag it.
I went to book group (review below — there were availability problems, and one person just could not with all the detail that did not seem to be going anywhere, but others liked it. We had a great, rambling discussion.). We have a new member! She used to work at the library and apparently meant it when she said she loved listening in. I am so glad she is now participating!
It is squash season. I went to book group and came home with three zucchinis and an enormous summer squash. This was not planned (on my part — I mean, obviously the person with the garden had a plan, and I sympathize with her desperation. Also, I bike, AND, I have an air fryer and real plans for that summer squash).
I read _The Great Quake_. I started on Sunday or maybe Saturday — I am having sleep related (hopefully) short term memory problems (aka jet lag). It is about how the 1964 Alaska Quake motivated a field geologist to figure out the details of plate tectonics in enough ... detail to end the debate between the stabilists and the mobilists. Super cool, also, pretty sad in some spots. However, really distressing towards the end in some ways that really bothered me. The author — NYT journalist? — wrote a 50 year article that inspired him / boss / others to go ahead with this project. And that really shows: lots of sourcing from newspapers of the time, lots of personal interviews with the people who participated in events leading up to the time and in the aftermath and in the academic community of geoscientists. I wish there had been a better and more nuanced dive into Alaskan politics, but probably out of scope and not really Fountain’s strong point anyway.
But while I completely understand that Plafker figured out what he figured out via his measurements in Alaska, and his own personal history there, the end of the book, where all that random historical detail comes together in the story of the day of the quake, and then the academic story off how Plafker’s work put an end to the debate, absolutely stunned me by telling me about the Ancash earthquake (a few years later) and the Valdivia earthquake (a few years earlier) and Plafker’s work there in a very small number of sentences. Alaska is where he figured it out, but if he had not been able to show, yeah, and here in these other places, too, it would not have been so compelling. And when you dig at all into those stories, you really start to understand how breathtakingly terrifying this stuff is, and how lightly the Alaskans were treated by a very large one, but probably not The Largest, even with other qualifiers, unless you really seriously think that geopolitical boundaries are interesting qualifiers in this context.
As a person who grew up in unincorporated King County just north of the Seattle City limits, and thus imbibed heavily of all the programming on TV and elsewhere about seismic activity and the Ring of Fire and so forth, and whose search for a first home to buy was strongly influenced by the constraints On a Hill and Not at Risk of Tsunami, a lot in the book was familiar. As a person whose first (brief) marriage was to someone whose family had three generation participation in commercial fishing in Alaska, a lot in the book was familiar. But there was still a lot to learn, and that was enjoyable. I looked up the Alaska Railroad, to see what kind of passenger service is available, and I have added that to the travel bucket list I do not have. GoldStar Dome on the Denali train looks amazeballs. Someday!
The babysitter arrived and took T. out for the day. She also had her twin grandsons for part of the day, and he was apparently really helpful with them. I love that he gets that experience.
I took T. to his morning dermatology appointment. No follow up needed! Yay!!
The kids had their physicals. They are obviously growing, and the curve on their height / weight / BMI is going in a direction that the doc is very happy about. This makes me very happy, because I do not want pressure (to be fair, the doc is super good on this topic and in general). I talked to her for a bit about getting T. to lift — I think he should either start with my program, or I should find him a trainer whose perspective overlaps with mine. I sort of wish I had not brought it up. T. is 14, slightly taller than me and, obviously, a young man. From my perspective, at this point, he should be lifting heavy things. I am prepared to be conservative, and start small, 20-25 free weights. She is talking 10-15, higher reps. *sigh* Yes, because our family definitely needs more risk factors for RSIs! I laid out my rationale, and she will talk to some of her colleagues who lift and get back to me. She was low key about it and said it was clear I had really thought about this. It is not like I am proposing any kind of max weight! The kid is already lugging around things in the range I am proposing — I just think he ought to have more experience with it so when he is hauling a heavy suitcase around he does not drag it.
I went to book group (review below — there were availability problems, and one person just could not with all the detail that did not seem to be going anywhere, but others liked it. We had a great, rambling discussion.). We have a new member! She used to work at the library and apparently meant it when she said she loved listening in. I am so glad she is now participating!
It is squash season. I went to book group and came home with three zucchinis and an enormous summer squash. This was not planned (on my part — I mean, obviously the person with the garden had a plan, and I sympathize with her desperation. Also, I bike, AND, I have an air fryer and real plans for that summer squash).
I read _The Great Quake_. I started on Sunday or maybe Saturday — I am having sleep related (hopefully) short term memory problems (aka jet lag). It is about how the 1964 Alaska Quake motivated a field geologist to figure out the details of plate tectonics in enough ... detail to end the debate between the stabilists and the mobilists. Super cool, also, pretty sad in some spots. However, really distressing towards the end in some ways that really bothered me. The author — NYT journalist? — wrote a 50 year article that inspired him / boss / others to go ahead with this project. And that really shows: lots of sourcing from newspapers of the time, lots of personal interviews with the people who participated in events leading up to the time and in the aftermath and in the academic community of geoscientists. I wish there had been a better and more nuanced dive into Alaskan politics, but probably out of scope and not really Fountain’s strong point anyway.
But while I completely understand that Plafker figured out what he figured out via his measurements in Alaska, and his own personal history there, the end of the book, where all that random historical detail comes together in the story of the day of the quake, and then the academic story off how Plafker’s work put an end to the debate, absolutely stunned me by telling me about the Ancash earthquake (a few years later) and the Valdivia earthquake (a few years earlier) and Plafker’s work there in a very small number of sentences. Alaska is where he figured it out, but if he had not been able to show, yeah, and here in these other places, too, it would not have been so compelling. And when you dig at all into those stories, you really start to understand how breathtakingly terrifying this stuff is, and how lightly the Alaskans were treated by a very large one, but probably not The Largest, even with other qualifiers, unless you really seriously think that geopolitical boundaries are interesting qualifiers in this context.
As a person who grew up in unincorporated King County just north of the Seattle City limits, and thus imbibed heavily of all the programming on TV and elsewhere about seismic activity and the Ring of Fire and so forth, and whose search for a first home to buy was strongly influenced by the constraints On a Hill and Not at Risk of Tsunami, a lot in the book was familiar. As a person whose first (brief) marriage was to someone whose family had three generation participation in commercial fishing in Alaska, a lot in the book was familiar. But there was still a lot to learn, and that was enjoyable. I looked up the Alaska Railroad, to see what kind of passenger service is available, and I have added that to the travel bucket list I do not have. GoldStar Dome on the Denali train looks amazeballs. Someday!