Notes From A Bear's Journey

    One of my laptop computers died the other day, as in gone.  Yes, tried all the tricks, of holding the power button down while disconnecting the power cable, the F12 button (and all the others), the pulling out the battery, that sort of stuff.  But it was gone.  Hey, it happens.  And ever since being robbed last summer, I've been a bit more fanatic about backing things up and had purchased a rather inexpensive twin to the laptop to serve as an additional backup, this in addition to an external hard drive AND the cloud.  So truth be told, very little (at least that I can remember) was lost.  But one never really knows, for stored among those lost gigabytes of data were photos, documents of whatever, and other things, most of which I couldn't even conjure up (in addition to the external drive and the cloud, I had burned almost all of my photos and music to CDs and had also placed many of those files on sim cards).  They were likely trivial bits of days long past, gathered as s

   Not long ago I posted a few musings about things I didn't quite understand; in that particular instance the subject was the Congressional approval to open once-safe havens for wildlife --places termed refuges whose definition would be exactly that, a place where wildlife would seek refuge-- into areas now open to the hunting of wildlife, both adult and those just-born such as pups and cubs.  There's more of course, including the Senate's recent allowance of big companies such as Verizon and Comcast and AT&T to view and retain and track your browsing history, something once available only to law enforcement or national security but now possibly able to be sold for advertising purposes (this means that cache and history from searching things on the Internet which you feel you've successfully deleted but --as with the movies-- can still be accessed years later, all those texts and images and searches sent over fiber optic lines and satellite routers which are oops,

   In many parts of the U.S. the weather is finally beginning to break, the snow storms coming more as rain and the crocuses and primroses blossoming in response as if instinctually better gauges of what's to come.  This is also a time when many animals awaken from hibernation and others such as wolves stand ready to begin weeding out the weaker newborns.  In the wild refuges, areas so named as protected enclaves for the last of the wild animal populations in the U.S., such species have learned the boundaries and how far to remain or stray.  Some areas used to make the news as bison stepped just feet over the Yellowstone park boundary and were shot by waiting hunters, a challenge about as difficult as shooting a resting sea lion on a sandy shore.  And one would think that with Congress so enmeshed in possibly confirming a new justice for the Supreme Court and dealing with a new health care plan and new immigration orders and travel restrictions, well, that hunting would be way down

   So here's something that's difficult to understand, this war thing.  How can there be so many places in our world where war is a normal thing?  Imagine a six-year old child; in certain parts of Syria that child would have by now grown up knowing only the sounds of mortar rounds and bullets (the civil war there enters its sixth year).  In the child's mind there is likely little initial thought that stepping outside could mean his death or a serious injury, an injury that likely wouldn't be treated until he had undergone a long period of pain and agony.  A child.  Such stories of ongoing war and fighting, perhaps just isolated incidents or perhaps not, still prove difficult for me to understand.     Much of this came home in a recent interview from Terry Gross and her series, Fresh Air , in which reporter Rukmini Callimachi talks about her front line reporting on the fighting in Syria, what that means to be so close (generally as in a block or two away from the actua

The Moon over Sedona      Certain places seem to almost pull you outside with a gentle force, something that we've found here in Sedona and as with many places, something we became even more aware of as we departed; as with many a vacation spot the towering cliffs and deep crimson colors of the ancient layers in this area seemed to lure us out at a steady pace, much as the lapping waves on a beach seem to do after an hour or so spent tanning in the sun.  For my wife and I, it's always exciting to see so many people out on the more popular trails in Sedona, from families with young adults to elderly seniors who seem ill-prepared for the heat and the length of the trails ahead...but they're out there trying so bully for them.  Add in the seasoned hikers and bikers, some just visiting and others being locals who have yet to tire of the spectacular vistas (one of the young mothers waitressing us at lunch went hiking almost daily), and you can sense the energy that this place

    The sounds came late in the night as in late when one is dead to the world, a colloquial term that somehow accurately describes that feeling when you've mentally left our phyiscal world and begin dreaming, drifting through that deep complex mist of a what seems another dimension.  But even in that state, the sounds will awaken you instantly...a baby crying, a dog pawing at the bed, a whimper from your spouse having a nightmare.  In this case it was the coyotes, lots of them.  They were pups most likely, about six or eight or twelve of them all howling and chattering like they were feasting; security came (we were back in Sedona for a getaway), the coyotes all just over the stuccoed wall but sounding as if they were mere car lengths away.  They're just playing, the guard said, relatively unconcerned (the howls after a kill do indeed sound quite different, much as the sounds of children screaming differ from the sounds of children playing); but for us city-folk the coyotes so

   There are times when one needs to just pause, to take a break from what one was doing and to step away if only to recharge or to get a fresh perspective.  This is not really the full-on vacation where one can forget one's troubles or bills or problems entirely (if temporarily), but rather a bit more like a weekend jaunt, something almost unconsciously done as if taking a breather after a long workout.  In nautical terms, this would likely be called the doldrums where winds stop and terms such as " horse latitudes " emerge (a horrible term but one based on earlier times when cargo sailing ships would throw horses overboard due to a lack of drinking water); admittedly the term "doldrums" sounds a bit more radical than needed, and in the colloquial sense negative, but sometimes those pauses we take are just that, the winds that once pushed you along so gracefully and took you to new lands and sights have suddenly just disappeared for a bit and left your sails f