Mackinac Island Getaway

In 13 years of marriage, Shannon and I have spent, I think, 4 nights together away from our girls, and never more than one in a row. So, for a three-weeks-after-our-anniverary gift to ourselves, we went away on our own for three whole nights. (Shannon's parents were nice enough to stay at our house with the girls.) We decided to take our romantic getaway to Mackinac Island, which is a small island between the upper and lower peninsulas of Michigan. (Lesson time: Mackinac Island is near Mackinaw City and yes, that's how you spell each of them. They are both, however, pronounced the same - "Mackinaw".)

Part of the allure of Mackinac Island is that there are no cars on the island. So if the whole point of the trip is to have a relaxing weekend with your spouse, no driving sounds pretty good. In our quest for a quiet, car-free weekend, we strapped our bikes on the back of the car and drove 7 hours to get there. Late May is really the earliest you want to try and vacation in northern Michigan. The daffodils were out up there, and the tulips were just starting, but we mostly avoided the rain and had temperatures in the 50s. The advantage to going in late May though, is that the hotels are about 15% cheaper before the main tourist season starts, and the island is much emptier.

We spent 2 nights on the island at the Cottage Inn, which is an 8 or 9 room B&B. Because I'm nuts, I got up the first morning and went for a run around the island. Literally, I ran around the whole thing, because I guess I wanted to be able to say that I had. (It's 8 miles around.) I went back to the B&B, had breakfast with Shannon and then we rode around the island together. There's a state highway that goes around the island, but because there's no cars you only have to contend with walkers, bikers and horses and horse-drawn carts. (The horses mostly stick to town.) Here are some sights:

 

Arch Rock. This is a sea arch from when the Great Lakes were deeper. This shot is from the road looking up at it. Once you climb the 6 kajillion stairs to the top . . . 

This is from the top of the arch, essentially. You can see the road around the island through the trees.

 Panoramic shot from the arch looking out across Lake Huron

Shannon at the beach. You can see the Mackinac Bridge in the distance, which connects the two Michigan land masses. While I did run and bike the island, we didn't do more than stick a finger in the water - it was extremely cold.

 Shannon at British Landing. The British landed here at night and sneaked up on the American fort on the island before they had even realized that the War of 1812 had started.

 Here's the view from the fort looking down on town. This is the main tourist part of the island. We stayed in the yellow house just to the left of the church steeple. The island is basically just tourists and people there to sell fudge and t-shirts to the tourists. I asked one college aged girl working at the fudge store what they all do on the island for the whole summer. Her response was, "I'll be honest with you. We work a lot of hours, and then we drink."

 From the fort looking over the town and harbor.

Having been around the island on day one, we used the second day to explore the interior of the island and head down dirt roads and trails to exciting sounding places like "Skull Cave" and "Crack-in-the-Island".

 Shannon was super impressed by Skull Cave.

This is Sugar Loaf rock.

This is Shannon standing inside Sugar Loaf rock.

 The sign said that there are many cracks in the island. This is the largest one. I can't imagine how we missed all those other ones.

 

Downtown Mackinac. I even saw a horse drawn street sweeping machine.

The Grand Hotel. We're far too poor to get any closer to the place than this, but it is beautiful.

After two days on the island our rear ends were tired of our bikes. We went back to the mainland and spent a night in Mackinaw City and then drove back home through the Upper Peninsula and Wisconsin. (It wasn't all that exciting.)

2013 Year in Review - Good Parts Version

I started writing up 'Year In Review' post, and you know what, it was a total drag.  Unemployment tried its best to ruin our year, and typing up a full year in review sucked - depressing to type, depressing to read.  So I'm packing it all into one sentence and moving on.  I lost my job, it sucked, it was stressful, it was depressing, our finances are in shambles and we moved away from many of our friends.

And now, I am happy to welcome you to the good parts version of the 2013 year in review.  Rather than some sort of chronological listing, we're going through the year topically, in the order that stuff comes spurting out of my brain.

Travels:
It was a light year for traveling.  In April we made the 5 hour trip to Kirtland, OH to see the church history sites there.  Being unself-employed, we went in the middle of a week so we could avoid people (not that April is peak tourist season), and so we could go see the Kirtland Temple on April 3rd.  Rather than re-invent the wheel, I'll point you to Shannon's blog post for more details.

We also made the 1,685 mile trip (each way!) from Michigan to Utah for my little sister's wedding.  I'll try not to get too judge-y about Jessica getting married in the middle of a day that was like 102°.  I'll leave that for my sister who was like 8 months pregnant at the time.  Being the lame people that we are, we produced two blog posts on the traveling.  But only one on the month we spent in Utah.  So what did we do?  The wedding went well, and more importantly, Jessica picked a good guy.  (Jess: Have we fully explained how much better Tyler is than pretty much every other guy you ever hung out with? Not like the other guys were bad people or anything, but . . . well done.)  We did the standard Utah things: hike the Y, drink BYU chocolate milk, ride the train, see downtown and temple square, weenie roast in the canyon.  Some of our favorites were probably kayaking in Oquirrh Lake (Daybreak) with Shannon's parents and I really enjoyed my hike (with Stewart) from Lamb's canyon to Little Cottonwood Canyon (via Millcreek and Big Cottonwood).  It was about 17 miles, and we never got seriously lost, despite heading onto some trails that we were probably the first people that year to hike.  Even thinking about that hike makes me miss Utah.

Running:
This year was a banner year for running for me.  This was partly made possible by slacking off sufficiently in all other years that the bar was set reasonably low.  I ran only a single race, the Dow Run 10k, in which I got a medal for taking 2nd place in my age group.  I ran it in a personal best 43:08.  I'd be lying if I said I wasn't checking the mail every day for weeks waiting for the silly thing to arrive. I'm going to end up with new records for number of runs in a year (96) and miles (452).  I struggle a lot with running consistency; every month this year I've either run more than 40 miles (6 times), or less than 20 (6 times).  I have hopes of run a lot more next year, provided it quits being so freaking cold.  (High of 6 °F on Monday)

Blog:
blogger doesn't let me look at yearly stats (day, week, month, and all time are the options), and I don't want to bother to add up page views or anything.  But, I can say that the two most popular blog posts of the year have been Enders Game, the Movie and I like big Books (and I can not lie).  Those had 99 and 76 page views, while nothing else I've written this year had more than 40.  Ender's Game also won with 6 comments. (2 of which were me.)

Reading:
At the start of the year, Shannon and I set out to record every book we read for the year.  We gave up on the children's books after a month or two.  It was just too much work.  By the time we quit we had amassed 97 unique books, which we had read 227 times.  We did keep up with our adult reading lists though.  Currently, I'm at 10,937 pages from 29 books and Shannon is at 9790 pages from 35 books.  (Don't worry, Shannon will get to 10,000 before the end of the year!)  My top five books for the year are:

1. "Moonwalking with Einstein" a book about memorization
2. "Born to Run" perhaps you've heard about people running in silly footwear?
3. "Signal and the Noise" by Nate Silver explaining how predicting stuff is really hard.
4. "Mistborn" I'm currently reading the second book in this fantasy series.
5. Wheel of Time #14 was an excellent conclusion to a very long series.

Girls:
Julia reads all the time now.  We never really taught her how to read, but at the age of 5 1/2 she's pretty much an expert reader.  We went to the library the other day and got her two Junie B. Jones books.  Both done by the end of the day.  We're pretty sure she understands everything in the books - I mean, who would sit there hour after hour reading if they didn't grasp the story?  It's been amazing to see Julia learn manners and to pay attention to other people over this year.  She long ago learned that we demanded the use of words like 'please' and 'thank you', but now she's actually learned to mean them, and to go out of her way to use them.  On the other side of that, she's also developing an attitude sometimes.  If we ask her to share a toy with Ella her response is often something like, "Fine! I'll just never play with any toys again, and Ella can keep it forever!!!"

Ella is goofy.  She has the most toned legs of any little kid I've ever seen.  I don't think toned is the right word.  They're muscular. She can't walk, she only skips, hops and twirls.  Just this morning she was laying in bed at 6-something in the morning singing jingle bells. Not just jingle bells though, the Barenaked Ladies version, which means that it starts out slowly, then she does the swirling interlude between verses where it picks up energy and roars into a raucous double-time chorus.  Julia, meanwhile, was sawing logs on the other side of the room.  Neither of my girls have ever been snugly, but we went and saw Frozen the other day, and Ella cuddled right up to me for much of the film.  It was heavenly.

Achievements:
There weren't any round numbers this year, but we did manage to turn 32, 31, 5 and 3.  Unemployment did manage to come to an end, finally, and in September I started working at a place called Rubicon Technology.  I do roughly what I've always done, and by this point, you either have an idea what it means to grow crystals or you don't.  With the new job, oh hey, we moved.  We've still got a house for sale back in Michigan, because selling empty homes is a hobby of ours.  Julia is doing great in Kindergarten, though it's eye-opening how little we really know about her life at school - and it's only half day kindergarten.  It's a mystical world full of kids and teachers that we don't really know.  We finally got to see Ben Folds Five in person, along with Guster and BNL.  For about 15 years I've been bummed that I missed BFF and Cake at the Big ___ Show in SLC.  It was the same night as the priesthood session of General Conference.  I don't regret my decision, but I was disappointed that I could see them.

Sunrise, Sunset

Blog post 3 on the topic of sunlight was supposed to be the first (and only) one, but you know how I get . . .

The solar year has two big, fun words that everyone knows: solstace and equinox. You can wiki them up and get the specific Latin roots for them, but I remember it this way. Sol = sun and stace = stay, so Sol + stace = Sun-stay, i.e. the time of the year where the sun isn't moving in the sky. This is the time of year when it is either highest (summer) or lowest (winter). Then we have equi = equal and nox = night so, equinox = equal night (and day). It's the time of year when we've got about 12 hours of each. We passed the autumnal equinox about a week ago, which means this is the time of year where the length of the day is changing fastest. Also, up here in the north, the summer days are longer, the winter days are shorter, and in order to hit those times, the days have to change length even faster this time of year. Here's a few numbers for comparison between a few places that I've picked.

                           Midland, MI          St. George, UT          Tucson, AZ
Shortest Day             8:56                         9:37                       10:02
Longest Day            15:27                       14:43                      14:16
Fastest Change          3.1                          2.1                           1.7
   [min/day]

So, up here in the North, in the summer, we get nearly an hour more daylight than we used to get, and similarly nearly an hour less in the winter. These days I'm really feeling the effect of losing 3 minutes per day for the last week. I have to get up for work before it's light, and I can't go running after the girls go to bed, at least not without some sort of lights so I can see and be seen. I guess it's time to buckle down and get ready for winter!

Here Comes the Sun

The days are getting shorter (at least for all my northern hemisphere readers) these days. And they're doing it quickly. Which means it is time to talk about . . . . math! This blog post has already been split into at least three, so get pull out your slide rules and compasses . . . .

Most people know that the Earth orbits the Sun in an eliptical orbit. However, in our efforts to get everyone to appeciate that the orbit is eliptical, the eccentricity (oval-ness) of the orbit is always greatly exaggerated in diagrams in textbooks. The difference between the aphelion (furthest point from the sun) and the perihelion (nearest point) is over 3 million miles, but that's only a 3.3% total variation. Imagine going out in a field, and walking in an oval around someone standing in the center. At the furthest point you're 100 feet away from the other person, and at the nearest point you're only 97 feet away. The difference is going to be almost completely unnoticable. But somewhere along the line, we decided that it was important that everyone know that the orbit is eliptical, so we really stress that point. Now, a 3% increase in distance does mean that we get less light from the sun when further away, and the effect is increased because when you move double the distance from a light source you only get a quarter the light. So the 3.3% distance variation turns into a 6.5% maximum variation throughout the year. Here's a picture:

You should note (and perhaps be surprised at) one detail of the graph, which isn't really visible because of where the year cuts off: we are closest to the Sun on about January 3rd, and furthest from the sun around July 3rd. For those of us in the northern hemisphere this is probably a good thing. During winter, we get to scooch 3% closer to the warm sun to compensate for the fact that we're angled away from the sun due to the tilt of the earth.

Oh! Hey! What about the earth-tilting-thing? Well, yeah, that's obviously important, because it's clear that our seasons aren't coming from the ecentricity of our orbit. ("But," you say, "what if . . " and then I cut you off right there and reply, "Quiet, we'll get there in a minute. I have more charts first.") The rotational axis of the earth is about 23.4° off of normal (perpendicular) to the plane of our orbit. This is the number that also defines the lattitude of the tropics of Cancer and Capricorn. (By the way, they're moving towards the equator a few hundred feet each year, currently. The tilt has been varies from about 22.5° to 25.2° every 40,000 years.) So, if the magnitude of your lattitude is less than 23.4°, then at some point in the year, the sun will be directly overhead. If not, you've always got to look towards the equator to find the sun. (From here on out, everything I mention will be specifically talking about when the sun is at its highest point each day.

If the sun is directly over head, the sunlight is as concentrated as it can be on the surface of the earth. Imagine going outside while the sun is directly overhead and make sure to bring with you a sheet of stiff paper. If you hold the paper out horizontally, it will cast a shadow and, provided the light source is very far away (I think the sun qualifies), the shadow will be the same size as the paper. The shadow is the area of light that the paper is blocking, and can be thought of as how much light is striking the paper. Now slowly rotate the paper away from horizontal. The shadow shrinks. Less total light strikes the paper, but that light is still spread out over the entire sheet. As the paper approaches vertical, the light on the paper gets dimmer and dimmer. For someone tiny microbe living on that paper this means two things: less light and less heat. All we have to do now is replace the paper with the earth, replace the microbes with people, and that describes our seasons. So, we all know from practicle experience that at different times of the year we get more or less sunlight, and that this is also dependent on where we live on the globe. Here's a picture that shows the amount of sunlight the earth receives throughout the year at different lattitudes:

I've picked 5 different lattitudes to show here. For someone at the equator, the sun is sometimes a bit off to the north, and sometimes a bit off to the south. Someone directly on the Tropic of Cancer line will see the sun directly overhead on the day of the solstace for maximum sunlight in June, with less in the winter. The next two locations, St. George (37.1° N) and Midland (43.6° N), have some personal significance to me. The final line I picked was Fairbanks, AK (64.8° N), which is about as far north as you can go before you get any days without a sunrise. (That line would be 66.6° N (or S) which is 90° - 23.4°.) You can sort of visually fill in a line inbetween the ones I have drawn for where you live, based on your lattitude. Once you are out of the tropics, the graphs looks basically the same, with a peak in the middle (summer) and a low spot on the edges (winter). You can see that Midland gets 5-10% less sunlight than St. George at any time in the year with this model. The variance between the seasons also increases as we head towards the poles. St. George ranges from 0.49 to 0.97 (compared to a value of 1.00 when the sun is directly overhead), while Fairbanks ranges from 0.03 to 0.75.

Well, now we've finally reached the question that I had when I started on this journey. (Yes, I was bored and had a question in my head that prompted me to make up a spreadsheet modeling the orbit and tilt of the earth around the sun. What's your point?) To what extent do these two factors constructively (or destructively) interact to influence the amount of sunlight we receive? The answer, as you can see from the vertical scales on the graphs is that the tilt of the earth is vastly more significant than the distance from the sun. In a sense, 23.4° >> 0.0167 (Earth's eccentricity). The next graph is the product of the first two, which looks, pretty much like the previous one. The two curves are pretty well out of phase, with one hitting a max around June 21st, and the other around January 3rd.

Now I know that you're all curious about the locigal next step, which is to ask questions about what if the orbit was more elliptical, or the earth was tilted more or tilted less. Well, we'll save that for the next post, but if you've got anything you specifically you want to see, let me know and I can cook it up!

Midland, MI - aka Babel

We went to the library today to return 8,000 kids books (and check out another 6,000).  While there, we always go and play with the toys they have there, and there are generally other kids there, too.  Since it's Saturday, the crowd was pretty good, and for most of the time we were there, there were 4 other families there, and, as it turns out, we were the only ones who spoke English exclusively with their kids.

But the even more interestingly, the other 4 families were speaking 4 other languages, and I couldn't identify any of them.  We had one family that looked European, but wasn't speaking anything from Western Europe or Scandinavia.  There was a woman with her 2 kids that looked African, and could have been speaking African French, but maybe not.  There was an Asian man with his 2 daughters which was speaking either Chinese, Korean and Japanese (and I maybe could have figured that one out, but they spoke very little), and finally there was a Middle Eastern family and I can't even make a reasonable guess at what they were speaking.  Persian?

Now, I'm certainly not a linguistic expert or anything, but I can recognized a fair number of languages, particularly many of the most common ones in the US.  Wikipedia (2000 census) tells me that 82% of the US claims English as their mother tongue.  (96% claim to speak English either "well" or "very well" and as far as I could tell, everyone at the library fits the description.)  The next 19 most common languages are (in order): Spanish, Chinese, French, German, Tagalog, Vietnamese, Italian, Korean, Russian, Polish, Arabic, Portuguese, Japanese, French Creole, Greek, Hindi, Persian, Urdu and Gujarati.  It's not surprising that there is a lot of drop off in numbers along that list, with #2 (Spanish) having 10 times as many speakers as #3 (Chinese) and 100 times as many as #19 (Urdu).

If only I had spent my time teaching Shannon and the girls Portuguese, then we'd finally be able to fit in around here!

(For the record, I think it is awesome that we had people from 3 or 4 continents speaking 5 different languages at the local library today.)

edited to, you know, use complete sentences.

Birds

One of the things I love most about Michigan is the birds.  Yeah, that sounds a bit silly, because I wouldn't ever have thought of myself as someone to get too worked up over birds, but there you have it: I like 'em.  (This is also a commentary about my general feelings about living in Michigan: it's not that different!  There is no major adjustment; as such, minor things like birds can move their way high up the list of good things about Michigan.)  For my western dwelling friends, I'd like to introduce you to my favorite two birds.

 

Cardinal

Like 14 states have the cardinal as their state bird, which is totally unoriginal, but I can see why.  (For the record, Michigan's state bird is the robin.)  Cardinals are strikingly red.  I love seeing such a bright color in nature.  There is one cardinal which I hate though: the one who sits in the tree outside my bedroom window and whistles his little heart out every stinking morning starting at 5 O'CLOCK IN THE FREAKING MORNING!!!  Other that him, I think cardinals are great. 

 

 

Red-winged Blackbird

I'd never heard of a red-winged blackbird prior to moving out here, but they're my favorite of them all.  Their name describes them pretty well; they're black with a patch of red (and a little bit of yellow) at the base of their wing.  As with most birds, we're primarily talking about the males here, because the females look pretty blah.  Sucks to be a girl bird, I guess.  The red-winged blackbirds live in the more wetland-type areas, which out here means in the ditches on the sides of the road (in the rural places).  This makes driving to and from work (I work next to a corn field) like a little adventure every day looking for these birds in the tall grass.  (I also get to look for deer on one of my two routes.)

photo borrowed from wikipedia

Valentines day post: My new love

Some time ago Shannon brought home some Corn & Black Bean salsa from Meijer*. I'm in love. We seem to always be out of either salsa, or chips now. Just thought you should all know.

*Meijer (pronounced like "Meyer") is like Super Target out here. It's named after the owner, Fred Meijer. As far as we know, he's not related to Fred Meyer.

Michigan Minutiae

We've been in Michigan for nearly 2 months now, so I thought I'd let you all know what it's like:

- We live in a small town. How small? Between 10pm and 6am, most of the traffic lights in town are turned "off". They blink yellow one way and red the other.

- It's cold here. The lowest we've seen thus far is -4, I think. The wind chill at that point was something like -11. It's snowing right now, and Julia and Shannon have just come inside from playing in it.

- The butter is a different shape here. It has a smaller cross section, and is longer. Why? I have no idea what the purpose is. But it does mean that our butter tupperware doesn't work now, unless you've used at least 2 tablespoons.

- Back to traffic, they've got blinking left turn lights here. Blinking yellow means yield.

- Back to weather, it's cloudy here. Every day. We've been told that there are as many cloudy days here each year as there are in Seattle.

- Lots of houses and apartments don't have overhead lights inside, particularly in the bedrooms. We now own a lot more lamps than when we used to.

Now, back to watching the BYU football game, where UTEP has -40 yards rushing so far. (Their QB apparently doesn't know how to take a 5 yard sack. He avoids those so he can run back and lose 12 yards. I like this guy.)

Incommunicado

96% of our stuff is all packed up. At this point we have beds and a computer. Obviously these are the things we can't live without. Chairs, dishes, food. Meh. Who needs 'em.

Once we tear this thing apart tomorrow we will have very sparse internet access for about 2 weeks, give or take. The rough outline has us pulling out of here Sunday morning. We plan to make stops in Canon City to see my sister, Kansas City to see multiple old friends, Omaha to look at houses and cemeteries (a Blockburger vacation standby), Nauvoo and then finally Michigan. Provided no one goes insane along the trip, we will be in Midland in time for the ward Trunk or Treat on the 30th.

By the way, I know of a great home for sale in St. George, if you know anyone looking to over pay for some property!

Crazy Lives -- Crazy Phones

We're moving. Which means we have 8 million things to do. I'm falling behind on about 2 million of those things right now just by writing this blog post.

One of the results of our move is that my phone number will change. (My work pays for the phone, and something tells me that once I no longer work there, they won't want to pay the cell phone bill anymore.) While my phone won't work anymore (or might possibly be given to someone else at work), Shannon's still will. My number is a 435 number, so don't try and use that one after Oct 7th. Keep using Shannon's 801 number. If you have any more questions, send an email or leave a comment and we'll make sure you know how to contact us.