Fred and Valerie

Once again, it’s been too long since an update has been posted here. And, once again, a lot has happened since then.

In October, Valerie and I took a two-week trip to Los Angeles and the Southwest US. We were able to visit many places, including:

• Los Angeles, CA. One of the big highlights was getting to experience DineLA week!
• Joshua Tree National Park
• Grand Canyon National Park
• Hoover Dam
• Las Vegas, NV and the Pinball Hall of Fame.
• Extraterrestrial Highway
• Area 51
• Devils Postpile National Monument, where we had to trek across snow to get to the monument!
• Yosemite National Park
• Kings Canyon and Sequoia National Parks
• Pacific Coast Highway

After missing out on being at a game during last year’s National Championship run, we made a trip to Auburn in October to see the Ole Miss vs. Auburn football game. Thankfully, we got to see Auburn win, which happened fewer times this year than it did last year.

Things finally quieted down a bit in early November, which gave us time to get ready for our week-long cruise to the Bahamas. Photos from the cruise are almost ready to upload, so be patient.

All these trips have given me plenty of time to relax and enjoy some good books. Since the last update, here are the books I’ve read:

• “Lethal Passage: The Story of a Gun” by Erik Larson
  I rated the book 4 stars and overall enjoyed the story. There were times when Larson got a little preachy on the gun control topic — which he promised, in the beginning of the book, not to do — but he mostly did a good job of objectively explaining the ins and outs of the gun business and the trade-offs we make to enjoy our freedom to own these weapons. I’ll definitely be reading more of Larson’s books.
• “All In” by David Thomas
  I rated the book 5 stars and thoroughly enjoyed reading it. The book tells the story of Gene Chizik and how he came to be the head football coach of the Auburn Tigers, despite having a 5-19 career record. The book delves into Chizik’s faith, family, and philosophies to a level rarely seen in this type of book. While the book was published after the Tigers’ National Championship season, this is definitely a story of Chizik and what makes him tick with the season as a back-story.
• “The Hunger Games”, “Catching Fire”, “Mockingjay” by Suzanne Collins
  I rated the first two books 5 stars and the final book 4 stars. I jumped on the popularity bandwagon with this series and am glad I did. Collins weaves a great tale of a future world where citizens are required to subject their children to a ritual known as The Hunger Games. Every year, two children — one boy and one girl — are selected at random from each district in the land and are sent to the Capitol to fight to the death. It’s a more heart-wrenching and gut-wrenching version of Stephen King’s “Running Man” and Collins makes this fast-paced trilogy hard to put down.
• “The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine” by Michael Lewis
  I rated the book 4 stars. Best known for “The Blind Side” and “Moneyball”, Lewis once again takes the reader into the world of finance, as he did with “Liar’s Poker”. This time, Lewis tells the stories of several sets of investors who foresaw the huge bursting of the housing bubble and not only managed to create a way to bet against it, but subsequently made hundreds of millions of dollars by ignoring all the people at all levels who continued to insist that housing prices could not fall on a nationwide level. Warning: reading this book will make you feel like a genius and could cause you to consider becoming an investor. Further Warning: If you don’t get it from the book, know that there is no logic behind the ways the markets move, in general. It takes a big event, like the bursting of the housing bubble, to cause any logical movement.

Currently, as a result of reading Lewis’s “The Big Short”, I’m now reading “Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco” by Bryan Burrough and John Heylar. It’s already interesting to see some familiar names from Lewis’s books, despite “Barbarians at the Gate” having been originally published 21 years ago in 1990.

It’s been a while since the last update and quite a bit has happened.

In late May/early June, Valerie and I traveled North to visit Maine. Neither of us had been to Maine before, which meant I was able to check off one of the few remaining states I haven’t visited. That now leaves Alaska and Hawaii. After those two, I suppose I’ll need to start checking off countries…

Later in June, Valerie was surprised by our friend Kris with an early birthday present: a trip to a local alpaca farm! Valerie was super excited and we all had a fantastic time. Nothing like petting some baby alpacas to make a person smile.

We spent the 4th of July weekend visiting with Valerie’s family in North Carolina and were able to enjoy some letterboxing, BBQ, and bowling before having to head back home.

Finally, we rounded out our Summer vacations with a trip to Lancaster County, Pennsylvania to celebrate my dad’s 70th birthday. Because of my dad’s love of trains, we took him to the Railroad Museum of Pennsylvania and the National Toy Train Museum all in the same weekend!

On the book front, it was another unfortunate adventure with “The Girl Who Played with Fire” by Stieg Larsson. I just couldn’t make it through the book, no matter how much I wanted to. I don’t even remember when I finally put it down in terms of the calendar, but it was somewhere around halfway through the book with me still wondering when the pace was going to pick up to at least something resembling a snail.

I was also wondering when the “investigators” and other characters were going to make the apparently unbelievably wild leap to the conclusion that the two people murdered early in the book were killed because of their extremely controversial research. You know, given how there were zero other reasons for them to have been killed and the people involved in the research had many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many reasons for the research to be “kept quiet.”

Currently, I’m reading “Lethal Passage: The Story of a Gun” by Erik Larson. I’m starting to think Larson might be my new favorite author following the death of Michael Crichton in 2008. I started reading with a passion again after I picked up a copy of Jurrasic Park while I was in college. I had just seen the movie and was thoroughly interested in discovering the basis of such a fun film. Crichton didn’t let me down and he never really did as I read through his entire life’s work. Sadly, there will be no more books from Crichton, but again and again, I find myself reading Larson’s books with the same enthusiasm that I did Crichton’s. I’m hoping Larson keeps up the good work…

One of the fantastic features of the Amazon Kindle is that you can download samples of books. The sample is usually the first chapter or bit of a book and it really helps to give you a sense of what to expect.

It doesn’t always work. With “The Wild Trees,” the first part of the book was great, but the rest never lived up to the “burst from the gates” that I got from the sample. Still, the book wasn’t terrible and it did fall within the range of what I should/could have expected from the sample.

And this is why I’ve stopped reading “Room” by Emma Donoghue. It may have an average of 4 stars from 858 customer reviews, but it’s just not working for me.

First, the story is told through the eyes and words of a 5-year-old. Surprisingly, that makes for a more difficult read. While reading, your mind expects certain words to work together and it just doesn’t happen here. The author almost does too good of a job writing as the mind of a 5-year-old and it causes you to have to re-read some pieces, just like you might have to ask a 5-year-old to repeat what they said when talking in person. Those frequent re-reads makes things a bit tedious and I found myself wishing the author had gone the route of Winston Groom with “Forrest Gump,” which has a much better flow.

Second, I had a real problem with Jack (the narrator) and his vocabulary. He clearly doesn’t know some very basic words, but then throws out words like penis and vagina. Seriously. As one reviewer at Amazon stated:

I couldn’t reconcile a child who knew words like omnivore, nutritional and antenna and then at other times would describe something as “the hurtest”. The first time he sees his mother vomiting he describes it as “stuff falling out of her mouth like spit but much thicker”, but next moment he’s calling it vomit and using the word freely from then on.

Exactly!

Lastly, the sample never got to any point in the story where something is actually happening. You understand that something has happened to put this mother and child in captivity, but the entire sample (beginning of the book) is focused on their mundane day-to-day activities. Yes, the picture is painted well, but it’s not very intriguing. Having an “Old Nick” (the abductor) visit would have at least created some tension or something other than a point-by-point trip around the obviously small room.

In the end, it’s time to move on.

Next Up: “The Girl Who Played with Fire” by Stieg Larsson
Time to pick up this three-part series again. I didn’t care much for part one, particularly compared to the hype it received, but I’m intrigued enough to give the second book a sample read and then decide from there.

It took me much longer to finish “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” by Rebecca Skloot than I had anticipated. It’s not that it was a bad book; the second half just didn’t have the same pace as the first half.

In the book, Skloot tells the story of Henrietta Lacks, a patient at Johns Hopkins Hospital that unknowingly became one of the most famous people within the medical research community. While admitted to the hospital for cancer treatment, a sample of tissue was taken from Lacks. The cells from the tissue were used in an attempt to create a cell line and the attempt was more successful than had ever been considered. Not only did HeLa (shortened form of Lacks’s name) survive, it actually thrived and Henrietta Lacks’s cells instantly became immortal.

Though no consent was required at the time (1951), the book does a great job of raising all the necessary ethical questions surrounding the acquiring, development, and usage of HeLa cells. The author also does a great job of bringing Lacks’s family in and telling the “other side” of the story; the story of a family who thought their loved one was dead and buried.

Unfortunately, the Lacks family story gets a bit monotonous and the second half of the book offers surprisingly little new information compared to the first half. While the first half has all the intensity and rush one could imagine the doctors had when they discovered the wonders of the HeLa line, the second half has the boredom of the long car rides Skloot survived to finish out the story.

Were the book about 25% shorter — all of that trimming coming out of the second half of the book — this would be a must-read for most people. As it is, “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” ranks as a consideration for those who would be interested in the topic.

Next Up: “Room: A Novel” by Emma Donoghue
I can’t remember how I came upon or why I read the reviews of this book, but it instantly intrigued me. Preview first, then full book if I like it.

The weather in our area has been pretty spectacular lately… not in a good way.

On April 16, an F1 tornado touched down in our area and carved a path of destruction across the land for several miles. Thankfully, the damage was limited mostly to structures and trees and there were no fatalities or serious injuries.

An F1 tornado is characterized by “moderate damage.”

The lower limit is the beginning of hurricane wind speed; peels surface off roofs; mobile homes pushed off foundations or overturned; moving autos pushed off the roads; attached garages may be destroyed.

On April 28, an F3 tornado cut a path through Washington County, VA. Four people died and  over 500 structures were damaged or destroyed by the tornado that hit along Interstate-81.

We were on our way to Tennessee just this past weekend (over a week since the tornado hit) and happened upon the damage. There really are few words that can adequately describe the damage. A house that was once surrounded by trees was looked like a doll house. Another house had its roof completely ripped off, while a factory was shredded and insulation strewn across the surrounding fields.

Returning from Tennessee, we got a true sense of the magnitude of the tornado when we saw all the damage that was also on the Northern side of the interstate.

Looking at Google Maps Streetview, the area looks beautiful. However, I can say with all honesty that most, if not all, of the trees in along US 11 are no longer there.

An F3 tornado is characterized by “critical damage.”

Roofs and some walls torn off well-constructed houses; most trees in forest uprooted; skyscrapers twisted and deformed with massive destruction of exteriors; heavy cars lifted off the ground and thrown.

Here’s hoping this Spring gets a little more quiet…

There are certain types of weather that I think should be “illegal.”

For instance, it should be illegal for there to be rain on a day when the temperature is below 50 degrees. Either it needs to warm up or it needs to get much colder and snow.

It should also be illegal for the sun to come out immediately after it rains when the temperature is above 80 degrees. Ever been in a sauna?

And weather like we’re getting today and tomorrow should be completely illegal. Today isn’t so bad. It’s currently 82 degrees and sunny. Actually, that’s kind of perfect. But, tomorrow’s high temperature is only going to be 51 degrees. That’s a swing of 31 degrees in 24 hours. That should be illegal.

If you read “The Hot Zone: A Terrifying True Story” by Richard Preston, you will likely be a bit terrified by the time you reach the end. Same thing with Preston’s “The Demon in the Freezer.” Because of that, I was a bit disappointed by “The Wild Trees: A Story of Passion and Daring.”

Overall, “The Wild Trees” is a good book. Good, but not great. And, surprisingly, it’s Preston that seems to get in the way of this being a great book. Where he hit hard with a fast-paced, don’t take time to breathe story in “The Hot Zone” and “Demon in the Freezer,” Preston turns to long descriptions and far too much detail to get his story across in “The Wild Trees” Too often, Preston lets his proclaimed “passion” turn into dull rambling that seems to take as long to read as it takes to climb one of his giant trees.

Despite this, “The Wild Trees” still manages to stay a good book because Preston makes the reader care just enough about a handful of people. These giant tree climbers are one part conservationist, one part explorer, one part adrenaline junkie, and one part crazy. All combined, it creates the kind of people that not only look for the tallest trees in the world, they climb them and become one with them.

And THAT is interesting.

Next Up: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
It’s a top book in the Kindle store and a friend of mine just finished reading it and gave it a good score. The story of the woman whose sample tissue paved the road to countless medical breakthroughs, well after her own death, is too intriguing to pass up.

After our first three tastings, all covered in the previous post, we opened up three more cheeses and tried them out. To say the results were mixed would be an understatement.

• Cave-Aged Gruyere: Apparently, this type of Gruyere cheese actually is aged in a cave. We’ve had plenty of Gruyere in the past, as Valerie found a fantastic homemade Mac and Cheese recipe that called for it. So, what could be better than regular Gruyere? Cave-aged Gruyere. Right? Right! This really was a delicious cheese. We both enjoyed its strong flavor, which became extremely helpful in getting rid of the taste of…
• Drunken Goat: I don’t know if this cheese requires an actual drunken goat or if the person making it is drunk, but whichever it is, the taste was so horrible that it needs someone who’s sober to point out that this cheese isn’t for everybody… and possibly for anybody. (The real reason it’s called “Drunken Goat” is because it’s soaked in red wine for two to three days, but that doesn’t help how horrible it tasted.)
• Uniekaas Reserve: A specialty Gouda, we enjoyed this cheese. It wasn’t quite as strong as the Cave-aged Gruyere, but it still had a nice taste. We’d probably just stick to the cheaper, normal Gouda for cooking, but the Uniekaas Reserve was worth a couple of bucks to try out.

Several weeks ago, we bought some odd cheeses from the Whole Foods cheese Bit Bin. The Bit Bin is essentially a collection of the bits and pieces leftover from when they split the cheese into reasonably sized portions. These bits aren’t big enough to be sold as a full portion, so they wrap them up and sell them as bits.

We found out this was a great way to taste new cheeses without having to sink a lot of cash into large portions of something you may not like. Instead of $5, $10, or even more expensive portions, most of the bits are about $2.

So far, we’ve tried the following:

• 1200 Day Gouda: As its name suggests, this is Gouda cheese that has been aged for four years. It was very brittle, like an aged Parmesan, and had a much darker color than the usual Gouda we eat. Unfortunately, it was also had a stronger taste than a typical Gouda. I’m not talking about a slightly stronger taste, either. No, this was a LOT stronger. Both of us could only eat a few small squares before we gave up. We won’t be buying any larger portions of this cheese.
• Grass-fed New Zealand Cheddar: We thought it would be interesting to try a cheese that comes from the other side of Earth and we’re glad we did. This cheese had a nice, smooth taste and its texture was very similar to normal cheddar. Nothing fantastic, but it did taste good. We’d probably pass on this cheese in favor of a normal, cheaper cheddar.
• Emmi Swiss Ementaler Center Cuts: Looking it up online, this cheese is imported from Switzerland and is aged a minimum of 4 months. The larger-sized holes in the cheese point to a stronger taste and this cheese delivered on that promise. Much like the 1200-Day Gouda, this cheese was overwhelming and neither of us could finish much more than a single, small square. We’ll stick to our more standard Swiss cheese.
• Robusto: According to Cold Bacon, Robusto cheese is a Dutch, Gouda-style cheese with a “slightly sharp flavor of fine aged Parmesan.” This is an accurate description of the cheese we tasted and it was pretty good. However, like the Grass-fed New Zealand Cheddar, we’ll probably stick to a standard Gouda or Parmesan in the future, as opposed to this more expensive alternative.
• Goat Gouda Yodeling: The Cheese Mistress has an excellent description of this cheese, including the highlights for us: “a little sweet and buttery, but the goat flavor is very faint. It tastes rich and almost fatty. This is a sweet little cheese, literally.” I could see us buying this cheese again in the future. It’s a very smooth and tasty cheese that’s not overpowering, nor overwhelming.
• Mahon D. D.: Mahon cheese is a Spanish cheese from the island of Menorca. Apparently, it’s one of the few cow’s milk cheeses from Spain. The supposed sharpness and salty flavor were out in force when we tried this cheese and neither of us ate more than a single, small square. We won’t be buying this cheese again and will probably stay away from it if we travel to Spain again.

We still have more cheeses to try and are hopeful that we’ll find more that we like.

It was a busy Fall and January has been no different.

After the Family Trip to Cape Cod in September, we headed out to LA and Las Vegas in October.

We followed that up with a cruise aboard the Star Princess to the Eastern Mediterranean. On the cruise, we visited Italy (Rome, Naples, and Paestum), Egypt (Alexandria and Cairo), Turkey (Istanbul, Kusadasi, and Ephesus), and Greece (Khios and Athens). With all the unrest in Egypt right now, we’re even more thankful that we decided to go visit sooner rather than later.

Instead of just visiting the family in December, we also took a few days to go to Orlando to visit the Wizarding World of Harry Potter, Epcot, and my old neighborhood. It made for a fun Christmastime!

January was supposed to be a bit more restful, but that hasn’t been the case at all.

While we were returning from our cruise in November/December, Auburn Football obliterated South Carolina to win the SEC Championship. I was able to follow the game via the 3G experimental web browser on my Kindle in a hotel room in Brussels. The time difference meant I didn’t know the final score until really late. It was worth it.

Auburn winning the SEC Championship meant they were going to the National Championship. Valerie found out about the Richmond Auburn Club and we joined them on January 10th to watch Auburn win the National Championship on a last second field goal.

The next weekend, we traveled South to see our newest niece’s Christening.

We finally had a weekend off before we left this weekend to celebrate my dad’s 70th birthday by surprising him for a visit.

All in all, we’ve been busy and are looking forward to some more restful weeks and weekends.