aerie

Are you watching the eagle cam? It seems to be all the rage, and I understand exactly why. A mated pair of bald eagles is nesting high in a pine tree overlooking Big Bear Lake, and recently their three eggs have hatched. If you’re feeling terrible about humanity right now, and lord knows I am, this is just the right balm for your battered soul. Watch these glorious animals care for their little fuzzballs (and each other!) so gently against a backdrop of stunning mountain beauty. I keep a tab open with the sound on all day, as I find that soothes me, too.

Danny’s home for spring break. It feels good to have a full house again. The energy is just completely different when any one of us is missing, and you’d think that after almost three years of him being at school, I might be getting used to it, but I haven’t yet. I am only starting to imagine what it’ll be like when Leah takes off for college¹ next fall.

Her high school career winding down brings up all sorts of feelings, too. We’ve been involved pretty deeply with the school for seven years now, and that’s ending in just a couple of months. It’s more than just a milestone, though. It’s something of an existential inflection point. We moved here fifteen years ago expressly for the school districts. The area has a lot of other great things going for it, but when we made our initial list of places to consider, that was the first and most important decision variable. Soon that reasoning just won’t hold any longer. I used to say we’d have the For Sale sign in the front yard by June of this year, but I don’t feel that crushing urgency any more. We’ve got some time. The kids will need a place to come back to that feels familiar for a while, and of course preparing to sell a house and moving is its own kind of agony. Still, though. Those wheels are starting to turn in my mind.

This week Jason Isbell released a new album, Foxes in the Snow. This time he didn’t use his incredible band, the 400 Unit. It’s just him and a guitar, like I saw him live a couple of weeks ago when his performance took my breath away. As the new songs he played at that show foreshadowed, the album is absolutely spellbinding, an intimate masterpiece. It sounds like he’s right here in my living room. This record will collect a Grammy or two, and be high on every critic’s year-end list. If there’s any surprise here, it’s that it’s not quite the divorce record I expected. About half of the songs are about his split from Amanda Shires, and those are mostly tinged with sadness and regret. I don’t hear any anger.² The surprise, to me, is that the other half of the record is dewy love songs about his new partner, the artist Anna Weyant. If we can take him at his word, and we always could before, he’s in pretty deep already, talking about the long haul. It’s none of my business, of course, but I have questions.

I’m going back to Mexico this week; gonna be a lot of that this year. Sadly, I won’t be staying in Polanco again this time since the hotels my firm uses there are all booked up, but I will be in the next neighborhood to the east, Condesa, which looks pretty great it its own right. According to Wikipedia, Condesa is known as the “Barrio Mágico Turístico,” or the “Touristic Magic Neighborhood.” Hell yeah! Sounds like another place I can joyfully eat my way through, and come home five pounds heavier. On the other hand, our team has a metric crap-tonne of work to do on this trip, and our gustatory wanderings may be limited to whatever we can scare up in the hotel.

Since I started running about ten years ago, I’ve tried to run roughly one race per month during the outdoor running season, which for me stretches from about March through November. Some years it’s been fewer due to injury, travel, whatever. I don’t kill myself over it. I keep a spreadsheet of them all (of course I do) and depending on how you count them³, I’ve run about 70 races, starting with a 5k at Brookfield Zoo in the fall of 2014, up to a recent competitive effort just a bit longer than that. I’ve got two on the calendar for this spring before I go under the knife. It’s not clear exactly when I’ll be road ready after that. It’ll be at least two months after surgery before I can run at all, and then who knows how long it will take me after that to get back into shape. It’s really coming into focus right now because, if you’ve ever run a race, you know how unrelenting they are about 1) selling your email to every other race organizer in the world and then 2) spamming the living shit out of you about them all. Right now I’m getting 5-10 emails a day about races I can’t run this summer, and I hate it. Not enough to unsubscribe from their lists, though, because I will be back.

A (literal? meta?) programming note: I fixed a couple of bugs in the blog software this week, one that should allow the emails to render correctly in Outlook (thanks for pointing it out, Amy!), and another where clicking on tags with spaces in them didn’t work. If you see something that doesn’t look right, please let me know. Everything you see here is DIY, and I can’t possibly test all the bits in every browser and email app out there in the wild. You’re my beta testers; sorry if the pay isn’t what you expected.