A warm sunny day in January is a great day for a walk. So with two colleagues from the office, Sharon and Mimi, we explored the trails of the arboretum. We started out on the Grady tract, the southern most part of the arboretum.
2017 was a year of surprises, as I wrote in our family update a few weeks ago. The biggest surprise, our move from Monona to Fitchburg. We have been east siders since we moved back to Madison in 1982; that’s 35 years.
The last day of 2017 brought me back to the first neighborhood where we settled 35 years ago, Olbrich Park.
Don’t usually shop much on Black Friday because I don’t like crowds.
But this year I ventured downtown to a quiet camera shop on the square where I was the first customer of the day, and the only customer for awhile. I bought a new zoom lens for my camera, the lens was on sale.
Another adventure begins as the train rounds the bend and approaches the Columbus Amtrack station.
Part of being a journalist is having the opportunity to be able to ask anybody, anything. That’s part of the job. But sometimes it’s possible to go beyond that, and actually spend some time with people who are doing amazing things. That’s what happened yesterday.
Brent Seales, who got his PhD at the UW Madison 25 years ago, returned to Madison for a lecture at the 50-year anniversary celebration of the Madison Biblical Archaeology Society. But he also spent some time on campus talking with students and professors, and me. It was a great day.
By way of background, here’s a video that details his research, at the University of Kentucky, where he is professor and chairman of the Computer Science Department. His work involves digitally unrolling scrolls that have been damaged far beyond any possibility of reading their contents.
Brent Seales, describing the synagogue at Engedi, where a carbonized scroll was found in 1972, which he was able to digitally unroll and read in 2015. Over the noon hour he spoke to an audience of professor and grad students in the Computer Science building on the US campus.
Forty-two years ago I left Rockford, Illinois after a seven month stint at a local radio station. At about the same time a local resident named John Anderson was beginning to convert some marsh land near his house into a Japanese themed garden. Eventually the garden became quite the thing and it was donated to the Rockford Rotary Charitable Association to be run as a non-profit attraction. And attractive it is. In remembrance of the wonderful time we had visiting our son Brian and his family in Japan a year ago, Anne and I made a visit to the Anderson Japanese Gardens today.
One of my goals for this summer was to bike out into the countryside early on weekend mornings. So far I’ve made it once early in the summer and twice in August, and enjoyed some peaceful beauty each ride.
An old barn along the Badger trail, south of Madison.
Summer is a great time for a road trip, and a summer wedding is an even better reason. This has been kind of a regular thing most of the past few years.
We began by heading north and made a stop to look at the distant highlands across Wisconsin’s Black River State Natural Areas.
This is the fourth and final report on my New England road trip that began with a visit to Virginia, included a short stop at Yale, and a short week at InterVarsity’s Toah Nipi Retreat and Training Center in New Hampshire. (more…)
This trip began with a visit to Virginia and a short stop at Yale.
InterVarsity has a retreat and training center in New Hampshire called Toah Nipi. I volunteered to spend a few days assisting one of our student conferences for New England campuses.
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