Trees, Swaying in the Summer Breeze

OK, I guess it's more or less over -- although they are saying we have some 80-degree days coming this week. Still, I've been wearing a lot of long pants lately, and even a jacket for the cool early-morning trip to the bus stop. Of course, that could be just because my temperature control hasn't had a chance to reboot.

But the calendar tells us that the end of summer is just days away. And it's already been a couple of weeks since I celebrated Labor Day in my traditional fashion: I sat at home and mourned the fact that summer had ended basically before it even felt like it started.

So it's perhaps emotional self-preservation that prompts me to look back more intentionally on my summer. Granted a lot of the carefree spirit was leached out of it by the move and all the attendant stress, work, and expenditure... but somehow we still managed to shoehorn our share of summery fun:

• # We didn't spend an inordinate amount of time at camp, but we managed a handful of days.
• # Thanks to one of our new neighbors, the kids were able to swim almost at will.
• # There were a number of picnics, including one that served as a reunion for us with some friends from a previous congregation.
• # I attended (and brought my daughter to) my first minor-league baseball game in a lot of years.
• # We got to have a date at a fine local theater production of "On Golden Pond"...
• # ... and also brought the whole family to a delightful, and absolutely free, outdoor production of "Annie Get Your Gun".
• # You might already have heard about this, but it's worth re-emphasizing that the family vacation consumed about 15% of the summer all by itself.

While I am well-known from sea to shining sea for my generally sunny outlook on life, even a dyed-in-the-wool optimist such as myself can benefit from an effort to remember more of what goes on in my life than working and laundry and running the kids back & forth to childcare. Hope you also have some summer events that you can recall with satisfaction.

Classical Gas, I Know

I still remember the first research paper I ever wrote -- I think it was in fourth grade*. We had to choose a state to report on, and since I had recently visited friends in Delaware with my family, that's what I chose. They helped out by sending me some brochures, and since I didn't know anything about research (and nobody taught me anything about it, either) I mostly cut out the pictures and pasted them on construction paper, then wrote a few sentences loaded with really basic facts -- you know, chief products, population, etc. Of course, I did have one really cool feature: since it was Delaware, the map I included was actual size.

*OK, I don't have to work too hard to "remember" -- I still have it.

I did a lot more papers over the years and it took awhile for me to get any better at it. I got pretty much called out for it in 7th grade when I wrote a paper about baseball. One of the problems was that the topic was baseball, and since I never narrowed it down from there, I never did get a handle on what to wrote. But again: I didn't feel like anyone ever taught me anything about writing papers, and it took me several tries to get the hang of it.

In college, I wrote a paper about lobbyists... which turned out not to be an awesome paper, due in part to my stupidity in being born too soon to use the Internet in college (and my college was so isolated that literally the only source available was the college library). But it was notable for the fact that it might have been the first paper I ever did where I picked the topic because it was something I wanted to know more about.

I didn't write too many more papers after that, and when I was out of school for good, I was actually disappointed, because I felt like I'd lost that chance to find out about more interesting topics. Nothing stopping me from learning, of course, but if there's no way to "present" it, it's like it's unfinished.

Now fast-forward 20+ years and I'm pondering creating a blog. I remember thinking at the time, hey, here's a place to write some research papers (although somehow I forgot to mention it)! That was until I discovered that merely writing the thing was plenty time-consuming enough, so more often than not I just make stuff up.

However, I still get curious about stuff, but this time I'm going to turn the research on its head: I'm going to ask the readers to supply the answers to a question that somehow got stuck in my brain this week.

I was reading about Aroldis Chapman, rookie pitcher for the Reds, who was clocked throwing a pitch 105 mph, fastest of the year and one of the fastest ever. There's been a lot of discussion about the theoretical limits of the human arm -- this on the heels, of course, of Usain Bolt and the parallel discussion of how fast a human can run.

From there, my mind made the leap to music, and I wondered how far you can push a particular musical genre -- like the Beatles did for pop and Miles Davis for jazz.

What about classical music? When I think of classical -- and I freely admit I'm totally naive here; it's not music that I actively seek out or think about much -- the names that come to mind are the guys like Bach and Mozart. While I could probably throw in Aaron Copland, I'm curious: if I were a classical music fan and were listening to the radio all the time or seeking out the hottest CDs/MP3s... would I be hearing primarily music that's 200 years old? Or are there current "classical" composers who are really considered in the same breath as the traditional masters? Contemporary classical seems kind of like a contradiction in terms.

As a rule, I don't get a lot of comments on my blog posts... but then again, when I read blogs, I probably comment 5% of the time or less, so that enables me to convince myself that I have a vast readership just waiting to be tapped. So this time there's no punchline -- I'm counting on you all for that.