I was looking to see if I had ever blogged about the time I heard Andrea Bocelli singing on the radio in Vanuatu. I searched my blogs at mistersugar.com, zuiker.com, storian.org, and smol.zuiker.com. Couldn't find it. Then I remembered my 1999 blog, and I found the post.
I was glad to return to Sunday morning soccer. Had fun until my tired mind made some dumb passes and a couple of guys yelled at me. Dug down and played for another 15 minutes, hustling my butt but still getting beat at the goal. I'll be back there next Sunday.
Dave opened up Drummer to the world. I'm using it to blog daily. See me over on storian.org.
I reposted (and edited) the sour cherries post to my main blog at zuiker.com.
I am happy to report that I was able to pick sour cherries again this year.
My usual cherry companions are my friends Rose Hoban and Steve Tell. Rose was traveling, and my family opted out of this unique experience, so Steve and I drove to the Levering Orchard in Galax, Virginia. We arrived at the gate at 8 a.m., but there were already 10 cars waiting in front of us. The word was out: Frank Levering had made clear in his daily answering message that this was a bad year for the orchards after a double freeze this spring. "Come early, because we'll be done in a couple of hours."
While we waited for the gate to open at 8:30, I chatted with the man who had pulled up behind us. He'd driven up from Cary (20 minutes farther east of where Steve and I had started), and he told me his father used to deliver milk in my area of Chapel Hill. I'm sure he would have come up the gravel driveway to deliver milk to the McCallum family in this brick house.
Once into the orchard, Steve and I found our trees and started picking. The trees had cherries, they were ripe and plump but dispersed, so the picking was slow, and the competition fierce -- 20 or 30 other cars pulled into the orchard after us, some older individuals, some young families (my first time picking was with my three children). A couple of hours later, all the trees were bare, and I had a bucket three-fourths filled (about 6.5 pounds of cherries). In past, better years, I could fill a bucket in an hour.
At home a few days later, Anna and I pitted the cherries and I prepared three quarts of cherry pie filling, and one pint of sugary cocktail cherries for my old fashioned drinks in the year to come. The cherry pits are flavoring a jar of white wine vinegar and will make salad dressings that much more interesting.
Steve and I were not in a hurry to end the experience, and we were reluctant to leave as long as we could see any cherries high up in the leaves. We found a tree up the slope where an orchard worker was willing to move the ladder every 15 minutes. I was up high reaching for a last cherry or two when Frank pulled up in his pickup and stopped to chat. I thanked him for investing in new open top ladders, which felt much sturdier than the aged and weathered ladders we've climbed in the last few years.
"I drove to the Baldwin Apple Ladders Company in Brooks, Maine for those -- 2200 miles!" said Frank.
Climbing those ladders is one of the best parts of my annual pilgrimage to Levering Orchard. I love to pause at the top, flip myself around so I'm sitting on a rung, and look down into the valley and toward North Carolina.
Frank invited us back in August, when his outdoor Orchard Theatre will feature his play, Tales of a Waterless Sea. I told him that sounds fun. And I told him I was already praying and hoping for a bumper crop of cherries next year.
The Duke River of News is up and flowing. Hooray!
Going on the assumption that the podcasts section of the opml file has a bad feed. So I rebuilt the river files and while I was at it separated my personal reading list to its own river and moved it and the Duke river to Opalstack.
But I am having problems with the Duke river, and the app even disappeared from the server. Not sure what happened.
Still digging into the Duke River of News downtime. I now think that the the opml file has a bad rss feed.
Yesterday I noticed the Duke River of News was down, maybe because of a Digital Ocean issue. I was able to get River5 started again with Forever, and the river was up all day. Today, though, down again. But I've gotten adept at using the terminal to restart the software, and I'm reading the river again.
Well, shoot, that didn't last long. Something is not right in the river.
Malia texted the family to ask if anyone wanted to go for coffee, and since it was 4 o'clock and I had been going nonstop for days, I jumped out of my chair and into the car. We drove south to Pittsboro to Aromatic Roasters, which we discovered last week on our way through Pittsboro. It was a nice hour with my daughter, small talk and Taylor Swift on Spotify, checking my phone for the latest alert about the sever weather that is sweeping across North Carolina.
I'm not sure the live-blogging feature of 1999 is working for me. This is a test.
More rain today. Erin and I went out for a quick look at a house that is getting built in Carrboro. We also stopped by Gray Squirrel Coffee Shop just before they closed, so I got my daily flat white.
I'm tinkering with an updated design for The Zuiker Chronicles, using the Mustard UI.
This morning, I took Tilly for a walk in the woods on our land. The air was cold, the sky was clear, and the early sunshine filled the area with light. Kivu, one of our cats, followed us all around.
I logged into Radio3 tonight to post a few links to CSS frameworks to consider as I update my website. But in Radio I saw a Test menu with two commands I don't remember: Apocalyze Link and Build Linkblog JSON. I've searched the Radio3 blog and docs, searched Duck Duck Go and Google, and even checked the old Google group with no luck. I'll have to ask Dave what those commands are for. I did get my linkblog embedded into a page on my site: zuiker.com/cube.html.
I wrote a blog post about the Jan. 6 Insurrection (putsch) and the U.S. flag patch and shemagh that I proudly wear to counteract that mob.
My father sent me a couple of photo albums in which he collected photos from my life.
And, I'm back.
I liked using 1999, but had a few years of web host nomadism. I'm home now with OpalStack, and I tried anew to get 1999 to work, with success. I moved the files from before into the new folder, and my previous posts are below.
My thanks again to Dave for this software.
My boss came into my office at the end of the day, sat down, and told me his idea for how the Department of Medicine can address the issues of burnout and resiliency that the health system is focused on these days. Dr. Rogers wants to relieve the various stresses on our faculty, clinicians, and health care providers. We can do this. I told Dr. Rogers how, the day before, I'd been annoyed by the painful screech that a highly-trafficked automated door made every time it opened, and how a call to Engineering and Operations got it addressed the same day. That's the kind of availability and responsiveness that can help reduce frustrations throughout the medical center.
I'm on a few committees exploring these issues and the innovative solutions - simple or systematic - that we can implement. I'm not quite sure how best I can be involved, so I'm thinking about how I can evolve to be a park ranger, or a community builder and culture creator.
Over my morning cappuccino, I reread Duke's recent academic strategic plan, Together Duke. It's clear, ambitious, inspiring.
Oliver was to have a friend spend the night, and he was brimming with excitement because it was to be the first sleepover. Alas, the friend wasn't able to come over, and Oliver was quite bummed. So Erin decided we needed a family movie night, and off to the theater we went, to see Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle.
I wasn't sure I was going to like this update of the 1995 movie with Robin Williams. But this new film, with Dwayne Johnson and Kevin Hart and Jack Black and Karen Gillan, was hilarious. I laughed so much that I was crying. Through my tears, I heard Oliver busting up, too.
Fun night.
On the Football Show on Sirius XM yesterday, Charlie asked Ray to name the best soccer books.
"The Miracle of Castel di Sangro, by the late, great Joe McGinniss," Ray said, launching into a long answer about why McGinniss, who'd written a bestseller about Nixon's 1968 presidential campaign, had gone to Italy to write about a small team newly elevated to Serie A.
The book sounded interesting, so I requested it from the Duke Library, and picked it up today.
I'm a few pages in, and wanted to note this passage on page 30:
The sidewalks, in fact, were filled with walkers spilling out into the street. "This is the time of the passeggiata," Barbara said. "Everywhere in Italy, in early evening, almost everyone turns out for a walk. No destination. No purpose. Just to walk slowly and to look and to talk occasionally with one's friends. Maybe to shop, but that is usually an afterthought, not the purpose. The charm of the passeggiata is that it has no purpose beyond itself.
What a great idea. A daily walk, to be outside, with people without purpose.
I see from the McGinniss entry on Wikipedia that Hudson spoke at McGinniss's funeral.
Duke Health is building a new bed tower, and the construction crane is in the process of being installed, the pieces lifted and lowered into place by another, mobile crane. This morning, men are walking up there, guiding the heavy counterweights into place.
This is fascinating to watch, engineering in the open, and it made me think about all the amazing medical procedures that happen in the operating rooms and intensive care units above my desk (my office is on the ground floor of one of the older bed towers of Duke University Hospital). I wonder if we made more of medicine visible, would we inspire more wonder in ourselves and those we serve?
Last week, I attended a Duke Health resiliency ambassadors workshop, with excellent presentations, activities, and tools to help managers infuse wellness into our teams.
Bryan Sexton leads the workshop, and opened the second morning with a presentation about awe -- he showed stunning, inspiring photos from around the world. These were great examples of visual awe.
That got me thinking about the awe I feel from music, and smell, and even the touch of a breeze or sun's ray on my skin.
Today the Health Arts Network Duke had a jazz duo playing in the hospital concourse. As I walked by, they were singing Louis Armstrong's What a Wonderful World.
That reminded me, yet again, of my brush with the angel Israel Kamakawiwo'ole.
When I got back to my desk, I found (via Kottke) this awesome video of a choir singing Toto's Africa.
It was a day of uplifting sounds. I feel good.
The new Ed Sheeran and Andrea Bocelli 'Perfect Symphony' duet is beautiful listening, and there's a new movie about Bocelli, The Music of Silence.
This brings back a great memory: During my Peace Corps service in Vanautu, I was in the capital, Port Vila, sitting outside, eating a hamburger, and Boccelli's Time to Say Goodbye was playing on the cafe speakers.
Erin and I have planned our return to Vanuatu, and we're excited to get back to Vila, and Paama, and to hear the sounds of village life again.
Last Sunday, too cold to venture out to Durham for the weekly soccer game, I sat around with a mug of coffee and a pile of magazines.
A few of the engrossing articles I read:
That article in Saveur had me thinking the food magazine was regaining some of its previous heft. Even though I previously decided to discard my many-years' collection of Saveur issues, I still have the boxes (more procrastination from Anton). Now that I see Saveur is cutting back – half the staff laid off, and moving to quarterly publishing – I may just save these back issues for their history.
The annual Turkey Bowl is a football game played by the Duke internal medicine residents since 1973. My friend Scott Huler stopped by this year to watch, and he produced this audio postcard for Duke Magazine:
Another nugget from McPhee's Draft No. 4:
The worst fact checking error is calling people dead who are not dead. In the words of Joshua Hersh, "It really annoys them."
I gave dukeriver.co a new river icon.
Today's Eno River Run was fun, though challenging. The trails present many rocks and holes and roots. The morning was chilly, but once we were running, the air was perfect. I ran the 6-mile race, finished in 1:12, 10th for my age group.
Have been trying to get another instance of 1999 working on my Webfaction server space, for the Duke Narrative Medicine Colloquium blog. I can log in and write a post, but when I try to view the blog, 1999 crashes. Don't know if Webfaction doesn't like competing instances of 1999, or whether I've got a bad setting somewhere in the colloquium 1999.
Here's a fun TEDx talk by Tess Walraven about the joys of speaking Bislama:
It's time to review my blogging habits:
Today, on a walk across the Duke University campus, I saw my friend Mark Schreiner standing in front of the engineering school where he works, and I asked him to accompany me to the coffee shop. Mark and I have been friends for nearly 30 years, since our days at John Carroll University.
From work, over to watch Anna's final volleyball game. The team won, a few points after Anna had a block and a tip over in quick succession.
Then, to the home of my friend Russ Campbell to chat and join his family at the dinner table.
A conversation with Jeffrey Baker, MD, PhD, director of the Trent Center for Bioethics, Humanities & History of Medicine, about his recent presentation on the history of Duke Hospital and Durham (watch here) and the many activities across Duke Health relating to health disparities and helping our trainees and students understand the history of Durham.
Lunch with John Rose, PhD, associate director at the Kenan Institute for Ethics, about the Arete Initiative exploring ‘characteristics of a life well lived’ and Rose's expertise in Aristotle's philosophy of a virtuous life.
Following on the heels of the successful Narrative Medicine Colloquium plan, I have submitted a proposal to the Duke Institute for Health Innovation pilot projects program, for a Voices of Duke Health listening booth and podcast.
I want people - staff and visitor alike- to leave Duke Health thinking, "They listened to me."
Erin read my proposal, and had me listen to Really Long Distance, a segment from This American Life, about a "phone booth in Japan that attracts thousands of people who lost loved ones in the 2011 tsunami and earthquake."
In the Harvard Business Review, former U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy writes about the loneliness epidemic and the workplace.
At work, loneliness reduces task performance, limits creativity, and impairs other aspects of executive function such as reasoning and decision making. For our health and our work, it is imperative that we address the loneliness epidemic quickly.
I finished reading that article, which urges companies to "create opportunities to learn about your colleagues's personal lives," after I submitted my Voices proposal. I think I'm onto something.
Our proposal for a Narrative Medicine Colloquium at Duke University has been approved.
The Narrative Medicine Colloquium will be a year-long exploration of the activities and programs already in place at Duke that give faculty, caregivers, students, and others the opportunity to reflect on their lives through stories. The colloquium is also a focused effort to look for new ways to build narrative into the research, medical education, clinical care, and employee health at Duke. It's especially a chance to ask how narrative can strengthen the resiliency of us all.
This colloquium will be one of many interdisciplinary activities funded by the School of Medicine that bring together basic science, translational and clinical faculty members with common interests in a biomedical problem or area.
Now, where to put our narrative medicine blog to keep track of our discussions and explorations and events?
For example, the David M. Rubinstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library will present an Oral History Workshop with Craig Breaden on October 20.
Maybe we'll use the MedicineNews blog, or maybe we'll use 1999.
I bought the domain dukenarrative.blog.
Yesterday, drove through the rain to work with Guns N' Roses playing on the radio. Today, on my way in through the fog, played Resphighi's Ancient Airs and Dances. Glanced up to see a cyclist, sitting up on his seat, silhouetted against the mist.
I know I'm living in the Matrix because each fall the algorithm provides more and more roadside goldenrod and tickseed sunflower for me to enjoy.
Went with my daughters last night to see Wonder Woman. Enjoyed the film very much.
Went today with my daughters to the mall, then to Gray Squirrel for coffee and chai. Enjoyed spending time with them very much.
With Erin, my wife, we are doing our best to raise our daughters to be strong, energetic, and kind-hearted. Our world needs saving, and I believe they can be part of the answer.