LoveFood

FoodPorno

NomNom

Food Porn

WantMore

 

My dad was born in 1926 during the height of the Roaring 20’s. It seems rather fitting because my dad always loved a party and had a way of becoming the center of attention without really trying.

He could be exasperating at times, but you could always count on that lopsided smile and twinkling blue eyes to turn your frown of frustration into an “oh well” shrug.

That smile is something I always remember about him.  Whether he was turning the crank on the ice cream maker surrounded by hungry nieces and nephews or throwing a stick deep into the water for Goldie his Labrador Retriever that smile would accompany the action.

My dad was happiest when he was with people. He found those people in many places.  One place was the American Legion where he found men who had experienced the same war he did. When I would ask him about the war, he would tell me about all the places he had been-Calcutta, India, Ceylon (Sri Lanka today), Karachi, Pakistan.

I just realized he never talked about anywhere else although he circled the world twice. One time, he did talk about the North Atlantic and how cold and dark it was and how the storms where brutal. He said that seeing the Northern Lights for the first time made up for all the scary times when he felt more alone than he ever had in his life.

He hopped a ride to Cleveland to Join the Navy but he was only sixteen and they wouldn’t take him. A recruiter told him that the Coast Guard took recruits at seventeen. When he got there, he lied about his age and said he was 17, filled out the paperwork and handed it to the recruiter. The man said “you are only sixteen”. Dad replied “Yes sir, but I will be seventeen when I finish basic training.” The man looked him up and down and stamped the form. I am sure that infamous smile made an appearance.

When he returned home his cousin John got him a job in a foundry called Wooster Products.  A group of fellow workers convinced him to run for Union Steward because his smile could change anger into calm. He served for many years, but his heart was never really in it. He didn’t like always having to convince everyone that compromise had given them all the best contract available.

He began as a pattern maker and the only way to move up was to become a molder. It was hot and dangerous work. His nose was broken twice. After twenty years, he decided he needed a change of scenery and went from an inside job to working construction in the heat of the summer and the cold of the winter, but he loved it. I never heard him complain once about either job, but he never told stories about the first one. My father’s blue eyes would twinkle and a smile would cross his face when he talked about all of the men on his construction crew. This time he stayed far away from union politics simply paying his dues and exercised his right to vote.

He found friends and companions everywhere he worked, every bar he frequented and every barbeque or fish fry he and the guys threw for one cause or another. He and a group of fellow hunters and fishermen formed the Shreve Farmers and Sportsmen’s Club.  They pooled their money and bought acreage from a farmer south of town.

It was centered in a beautiful oak forest perched on a ravine. They dammed a creek and made a pond stocked with fish.  On the weekends, they built a clubhouse where they held monthly fish fries to defray the costs of buying more property around their ravine. He took every opportunity to show it to anyone who gave the least bit of interest in where it was and what it looked like.

He was always most pleased when someone wanted to walk the trails in the woods with him.  He would point out the twisted trees that he was convinced had been used for marks on an Indian Trail.  If the man had his kids with him  and it was spring, he would find a plowed field to hunt for arrowheads.  I would often tag along because walking in the woods with my dad is in my top ten things that I loved to do when I was young.

When I close my eyes,  I can still hear him tell me “we aren’t lost Cat. We just don’t know where we are. We will know soon.” And we always did find our way back.  I would be elated and he would reward me with one of those big smiles.

Now that I am closer to 90 than I am to that young girl I realize that that smile was probably because he had always known.  Happy Birthday, Dad!

I was looking for a technical-ish discussion on the differences between IRC and Slack, and I found this thread on...

I have no comment on this. I just wanted a placeholder to mark the date. From Sam Ruby: Microdata: [Microformats...

Flash vs. Silverlight: What Suits Your Needs Best?: You're doin' it wrong...

The Bullitt Center in Seattle has been called the greenest building in the world. Its developer, Chris Rogers of Point32, credits the Bullitt Foundation, which subscribed to the Living Building Challenge, a paradigm shifting green building process that Rogers says, "goes way beyond LEED."

Living Buildings put in to bricks and mortar (or bio-based materials) the vision that two decades ago the likes of architect Bill McDonough and futurist David Orr spun from beautiful prose in to the first generation of green buildings. The vision was always to design buildings that act like a tree, that are abundant, producing more than taking. How will the Bullitt Center, which embodies those ideals, shift the paradigm in how we build?

"I think would be great if we were the greenest building in the world—for a week," Rogers told the Building with Nature Symposium which is introducing new ideas about building for the future in to the Cleveland Museum of Natural History's rebuilding process. "What we learned can be replicated, but you need to look at local conditions to fit with your climate and culture."

read more

"We want a building that itself embodies how we can live in the future, in a highly sustainable way," Cleveland Museum of Natural History Director Evalyn Gates explained to 450 attendees the purpose of the museum's Building with Nature symposium, a free and open to the public event at the museum today. "Our experience with the SmartHome showed us that we want a (new) building that cost less to operate and maintain and will inspire all of us about how we live on this planet."

To inspire the museum to reach for the stars, Dr. Gates, an astrophysicist, and GreenCityBlueLake Institute Director David Beach assembled a high wattage panel—from the designer of literally the world's greenest building to the country's foremost experts on energy who figured out how to green the renovation of the Empire State Building. These are big thinkers but also the 'do-ers' -- practitioners who have faced skepticism and long odds and in the end broke new ground for all of us. That list started with Curtis Fentress whose firm is the architect of record for the Museum's proposed redevelopment and addition.

read more

Why is Case Western Reserve University supporting Gig.U? Universities have a critical role to play in the R&D efforts of... lsg8 http://blog.case.edu/lsg8/ lev.gonick@case.edu