Population Densities and the Wilderness's Edge

Introduction to Cabin Trip, 2018

I have too many things to post about before work resumes, but maybe it feels like that because of the emotional weight the main projects hold. One is our trip to the Farm for Corrie's family reunion; one is Tuxedo's eulogy; and one is our recently finished trip the Cabin. Anyway...

I had an idea that I wanted to examine using Google Maps and some crude tools of my own.

It started with an idea about the edge of the wilderness and our Cabin up north near Mt. Lassen. Then I went back to find places where I, and then later, Corrie and I lived, and tried to compare population densities.

Here's my crude tool:

I would drop a pin in the location and set the Google Map zoom at essentially the same magnification, take a screenshot of my map, then go an image editor and tape that paper to my screen centered on the pin and crop the image to the rough outlines of the square above the black line. 

The dimensions of the square were about 4400' x 4200', which, when calculated out gave squares that were about 2/3 of a square mile.

Seems like a strange number, right? The reason will become apparent with the first picture.

Where I grew up, on Basswood, in Citrus Heights, a suburban satellite city of Sacramento:

That pin in the center is essentially where I spent the bulk of my childhood. This is the first map I dealt with, and it is this size so I could capture Norm and Holly's house in it in the upper quadrant on the left-hand side. So is our elementary school, Lichen, and our Westwood Park stomping ground, and the freeway and the railroad tracks boxing in the neighborhood. Pretty neat.

Next I did the same thing for our Oceanaire place:

The lake on one side buttressing the mountain, and the farm on right hand corner. It's weird for me to think that Norm's place compared to Basswood is further than the old Albertson's.

Next up was our Palm St granny unit:

Old McCarthy's was closer to us than Norm's is to Basswood, but not New McCarthy's. Notice the density being tighter, but that makes sense considering the college-town nature of the city itself.

But speaking of density, check out the same square of Brooklyn's Bed-Stuy:

The A-train's Utica stop at the bottom, and the J-Z train's Gates stop in the upper right-hand side, frame what we could guess about our neighborhood back while we lived there.

Next I put our place on Dwyce, in Austin in the same setup. The rendering of the trees sucks, so it looks more blurry that the others, but you get the idea:

Still pretty dense, but that makes sense for an area that sprang up on what was then outskirts of downtown Austin as a suburbia of sorts.

How about now, in Long Beach:

As we guessed, the sand is closer to us than the A-train was in Bed-Stuy. There's the small park up by the MoLAA and even Beachwood Barbecue and Brewing, which is a phenomenal place.

Check the differences in density. Suburban Sac, the "other side" of San Luis, the outskirts of downtown San Luis, madly dense yet "provincial" Brooklyn, not-quite-suburban Austin, and urban beach-side southern California...they all have their own rhythms and feelings, and different amounts of people in those relatively similar squares. 

Now here's the same view of the Cabin:

The edge of the wilderness? This looks like the wilderness proper. The Cabin is either the first settlement on the edge of civilization or the last cabin in the community of Mill Creek, depending on which way you're driving. The national forest starts on the other side of our "yard," right on a former meadow that has turned marsh, a green smear coming down and right from the pin.

Of course it's awesome there.

For good measure I included the same experiment with Corrie's family's Farm, outside Clarendon, Texas:

The farmhouse and surrounding buildings are discernible, as are the property lines on the west, north, and eastern sides, while the southern edge is out of sight.

This experiment has opened my eyes to a few things, and I may have plans to make something like this as assignment, but as the summer winds down (for me), I'm trying to wrap all of these ideas into a series of posts. This has helped with the other two things I mentioned earlier, about Tux and about the Farm, as well as the Cabin.

Wilderness...

Humidity Hits Southern California

Our weather has been brutal this past week.

It hasn't been hair-bursting-into-flames Phoenix hot, or even skin-melting Sac hot, nor even early-summer-oppressive-early-morning-heavy-air Austin miserable, but it has been a combo.

It's almost like it's been Manila outside. Or Bangkok. The air starts out not so bad, but by 10 am the sweat has begun to bead on my forehead and my neck feels like it's got a halo of heat production surrounding it.

Then it goes off.

Our apartment begins to warm, despite keeping the shades drawn to keep out the heat. We keep some fans blowing to help keep us cool by evaporative means. By 11 or 12 the apartment has started the severely-uncomfortable times, and it only gets worse, topping out by 3 or 4 pm. From about 5 until we go to bed around 11 or midnight, inside the apartment remains sweltering, between 85 and 95, and sticky.

Outside at 10 pm is glorious, but inside, at 87 degrees or so, is awful, and we can't get the air inside fast enough to cool it.

No AC! Makes for a steamy day. Today it seems like the heat has broken, but not the humidity, as I'm pouring sweat already. Yesterday I had some errands to run and saw something that made me want to snap a picture:

This is a random banana plant on the street, and because of the heat and humidity, it's begun to sprout bananas. The sky was the perfect combo of hazy heat clouds blacked by blue sky, and there isn't enough building to tell where it was taken, unless you're familiar with the structure and have been told which it is.

It's not usually like this, and because it's not usually like this, we in the Southland are ill-prepared for it.

Grandpa Visits for a Birthday Party

First birthdays are for parents, to celebrate the adults who care for an infant having made it a year. Second birthdays are similar, but the baby/toddler is starting to be a person. The days have melded together for over seven-hundred in a row, and now I have a son who can look over the table-top and grab things, who loves to climb up on the our bed and fall backwards in an impressive trust-fall onto the mattress only, who can loudly shout, "DAA-DEE! HELP!" in the mornings when he wants out of crib.

My dad visited, and Cass was funny with him. It seemed to me like Homer and Grandpa, like for Cass there was Daddy and there was old-Daddy. The Boy was very warm with him, taking him by the hand back to his room to play very early in his stay.

My cousin and his wife and their eight-month-old son made the trek from Santa Monica, and they got see their Uncle Luke---my dad. Dad got see both his grandson and grand-nephew.

My mom and Auntie Peg came as wqell, as did Cass's buddies, Ari and Vera, and their folks. Even a colleague from a career ago made the trip. It was fun and at a Park. It was too windy for the bubble machine, but fun was had.

On the way to breakfast:

On the day of, and we haven't fully come to grips with purchasing Mylar balloons:

My cousin Jake, in the yellow shirt, is a few weeks older than me. We grew up on opposite coasts as kids, but lived oddly close together over the years--he and his wife lived in Hoboken when we lived in Brooklyn, and they've lived in Santa Monica as we've been here in Long Beach. It will be so cool to watch Cass and Jackson (one of our boy names) grow up together:

Somehow, my boy doesn't care for frosting:

Family portrait:

"Trading Places" Could Run for President

I'm not sure how I had never seen "Trading Places" before, the classic Eddie Murphy and Dan Aykroyd comedy about commodity trading. Having come out in 1983, it's now old enough to run for president.

IT'S SO GOOD. First we follow Dan Aykroyd's character's morning, as he gets ready for work and how work goes for him. It's a pretty familiar world for the richest Americans. After meeting Eddie Murphy's character briefly, we get the first piece of action that sets in motion the events: a sadly familiar misunderstanding made by a rich white man at the expense of an innocent black man.

Eventually the extremely rich white brothers hatch their bet---that if they were to force the roles to be different, Eddie Murphy would do just as good at Aykroid's job as Aykroyd, while Dan would resort to crime if left for nothing on the street---and the rest is film history.

This is definitely a canon Eddie Murphy movie, especially when his Billy Ray starts to crush it as a commodities trader. The whole movie is executed with a grand precision that I found...invigorating?

I'm not sure how to describe it. We waited a while to watch it after finding it on Netflix, and that was probably my doing. I'm not sure if I was reluctant because I didn't want to be disappointed. I'd heard that it was fantastic, but lately things people say about movies aren't quite doing it for me...maybe it's the people I work with.

But IT'S SO GOOD.

Corrie and I were talking about how this movie, made thirty-five years ago, is a perfect movie for our time. It's got a pair of super-rich a-holes playing with commoners for their own amusement, and getting it in the end. Comeuppance in a stroke of complicated Wall St shenanigans.

Also, nobody ever told me that Jamie Lee Curtis, older than in Halloween (1978) yet younger than in Blue Steel (1989), got bare-chested multiple times in "Trading Places." Besides her natural ability to be funny, smart, sexy, and above all else, commanding of the camera, she showed off her body's natural gifts.

If you have never had the pleasure of seeing "Trading Spaces," make the time.

Lazy Monday Mornings of Summer

The Red Devils are taking on the Blue Samurai on channel 11 right now.

We have trips to plan, boxes to ready for a storage unit, safety bars to get for our second-story windows, but right now I'm chillin' watching a World Cup knock-out-stage game, Belgium vs Japan.

And I love the full color outfits: Red vs Blue. No white kits here; almost looks like a Crips vs Bloods match from afar.

I was thinking about soccer kits the other day instead of doing other chores. Every four years I end up down a rabbit hole of thoughts about laundry, it looks like.

I like international teams that I can recognize with the sound off from a distance. Like: canary yellow shirt and blue shorts = Brazil; sky-blue and white vertical stripes shirts and black shorts = Argentina; solid sky-blue shirts and black shorts = Uruguay; red shirts and blue shorts = Spain; solid red shirts and shorts with green socks = Portugal; solid blue shirts, shorts, and socks = Japan; solid red shirts and shorts and socks = Belgium...

And two of these teams are playing each other.

A whole bunch of my books arrived the other day, and I have a few more projects I should be working on...but...lazy days help recharge my batteries...

I need to make some changes to those proofs, like changing some cover issues and fixing a few typos, but it's still work.

Yesterday there was a crazy accident outside the apartment, which happens too often:

LeBron has signed with the Lakers, my Yankees beat their own record for team homers before the All Star break, Uruguay has reached the quarterfinals and will face a tough French team...

I sliced a hunk of meat from my left index finger, but it's growing back nicely.

Lazy summer Monday mornings...