Feeling hemmed in by the double whammy of January gloom and Omicron woes, I couldn't shake the indescribable urge to get out of town.

Naturally, I had ordered tourism brochures from some of Washington State's neighbors, becoming fixated on catching some sea and sunshine. Though, perhaps, I wasn't absolutely hellbent on the sunshine, because I did start imagining Northern California and the Oregon Coast as my location, places likely to be as foggy and wet as my home base.

When I realized Martin Luther King Jr. Day (re: a paid day off at my current job, and not my last one) was coming up, I thought, how better to celebrate the achievements of one of America's greatest Civil Rights Leaders than to go on vacation...

And by vacation, I meant, mostly workcation, obvi.

This, then, is the inaugural post in a "series" covering this road trip. Since it wasn't super long and since Steve was working, there can't be that much to cover, right?

Surely Steve sticks within their limits, right?

Right?!

Well, the text-to-image ratio is probably going to be skewed in favor of "images," but I still managed to be out of town for a nice 9-ish days. Which means you can probably expect 9ish posts, unless I feel weirdly compelled to write one on the mating habits of sea lions. (Not happening!)

So, please, buckle in and enjoy the ride.

Enjoy my triumphs and tribulations, my feeble attempts to capture the overwhelmingly lovely natural beauty that surrounded me and occasionally rendered itself visible through the thick fog.

Since January of 2021, I've been doing these weekly photographic challenges over at 52 Frames. The month of May has not been my strongest; a couple of my entries were half-hearted, due to illness or prioritization of other things. Nevertheless, I am pleased to continue my streak for another month and to unpack the results.

After all, there were five Sundays in May, and therefore five challenges. They can't all be that bad. Can they?!

Lying within easy reach of Seattle, Wallace Falls State Park is nothing if not popular. On the edge of the Cascades, it offers visitors lovely views of a series of cascading waterfalls.

I paid it a visit on a Sunday in late March. Was it worth my while?

Spoiler: yes.

I'm sure that my readers are on the edge of their seats, desperately awaiting a review of the book I was reading while waiting for a tire patch at the Les Schwab in Salem, Oregon.

Well, it took me a month to get around to hitting the "publish" button, so I hope it was worth the wait! As bonus, I am also including in a review of the book I was reading before that one too.

Both these books came out in 2019, and both are about Uzbekistan. The two present very different views from the same(-ish) "country" roughly a hundred years apart. They are both fascinating reads that I would highly recommend to anyone who is interested.

The first, Bagila Bukharbayeva's The Vanishing Generation is a take on religious persecution under the Islam Karimov-led government. I became aware of it through a glowing review on Eurasianet, and added it to my reading list.

The second, Night and Day by Abdulhamid Sulaymon o’g’li Cho’lpon is a turn of the century Uzbek novel, recently translated into English by Christopher Frost. I became aware of it as it was the second in series on "Central Asian Literatures in Translation". I had adored the first book in the series, which led me to be quite intrigued as to the second.

Full thoughts follow.

One of the unsung vermin of American city life is the rabbit. I feel like I see them skulking about at night, crossing the roads now and then, wherever I am, from Pittsburgh to Seattle.

Increasingly, as spring has sprung, I've been seeing rabbits running about near the Seattle sidewalks. Sometimes at day, sometimes at night.

Never before though, have I spotted one from outside my home office window, popping by to provide a lot of entertainment before a discussion about what would make us feel successful at work. It was humongous, and it ate a leaf.

I had a camera at arm's reach, and I pointed it out the window with reckless abandon, not realizing it was stopped down and photographing with a slow, slow shutter speed. The sort that cannot cope with subject movement from a fast paced bunny rabbit.

We are surrounded by history.

Whether we're conscious of it or not, the same ground on which we tread has been walked on by generations before us, whether or not they are traditionally acknowledged in history books. History extends to the natural history of other species' before man, and geologic history before that.

And from that rousing paragraph of platitudes, we bring ourselves to... Valley Forge.

If the Philadelphia suburbs should boast any site of historical mythmaking, it's most certainly Valley Forge, the location of an encampment where General George Washington and his troops spent the winter of 1777-8.

For a long time, I wanted this website to have a "map" feature, where you could look at a nice, dynamic scrolling map of all of the places I visited.

Well, guess what! I've had one on the site since 11/11/21. You can find a map of all posts on the map page, or individual maps of posts in each series on any series page.

At first, I wasn't sure how to get a map set up and working, and even once I got started writing the feature, I was still stuck for a fairly long time before I got it running. It's still imperfect, and my code can get cleaned up, but it's probably worth sharing for anyone else that tries to create something similar.

What follows are a bunch of code/implementation details, specifically related to my choices of the Zola static site generator and OpenLayers javascript map library.