Like Stepping Back in Time

6FPS V3#9 - Photography and More
A Newsletter by Chuq Von Rospach
September 13, 2021

 

Welcome to the new issue of 6FPS.

Hello from Washington!

Laurie and I are settling in here at the new place. We are both now registered voters in Washington. As I write this, my appointment for my drivers license is a couple of days away, and I should have mine by the time you read this (knock on wood). Laurie’s is a day or so later. Once we do that, we can manage the car registrations.

The other night, we were comparing notes on what needed to be done, and we both more or less believed those were the last things that had to happen. There are still various places where I need to find and change my address, but I’ve caught the major ones and I’m getting the rest as I notice.

Downstairs, I have two bookcases and a drafting table to put together out of flat pack and get positioned, and I haven’t gotten the TV installed on the wall yet. We had a 32” TV we’d planned to use, but quickly decided and updated to a 50” for the downstairs. Upstairs I have one more flat pack to build, and a wine glass rack to get on a wall, and the upstairs is done. I haven’t yet put restraints on the tall bookcases, but I will shortly. There are still boxes to unpack downstairs and once I have the shelves assembled will start hauling the hockey books downstairs to shelve. There are < 10 unpacked boxes upstairs, which is great. Downstairs in the offices I’m unpacked, but Laurie is just starting to work on things, now that the kitchen is effectively done.

Oh, and for reasons, I haven’t yet unboxed and placed the upstairs coffee table. We actually bought two, thinking we’d put one in front of each couch, and then decided that was too much for our needs, so the first one I unboxed moved downstairs to live under the not-yet-installed TV.

But beyond that, we’re at the “unbox and shelve books and put art up on the walls” phase, which means we’re pretty settled, way faster than I expected.

We both felt that this was the right time to think a lot of choices and decisions and just spend the money, meaning hopefully we won’t start chanbging things again for a few years. This house has a different shape and needs than our old one, and no built-in bookshelves, so we’re adding more bookshelves to compensate and a few

It means I’m at a point where I’m starting to organize the garage and think about building out the shop — the first shop cabinets are here and waiting for assembly, in fact.

It’s been a busy few weeks, but I think we’ve hit the point where it’s slowing down and turning into a routine.

The New Birdfeeder

I’ve set up a bird feeder station, of course. This is the view through my office window. It took about 36 hours for the first birds to visit it, and those were the Dark-Eyed Juncos that are common in our yard. Since then, they have been joined by some other species: the Chestnut-backed Chickadees arrived next, followed by Black-Capped Chickadees, and Chickadees are by definition a fun, chaotic riot. They have been joined by a group of Red-Breasted Nuthatches, which flit in, grab a seed, and fly back out again (something chickadees tend to do as well). We’ve had a couple of Anna’s hummingbird’s visiting the nectar feeder, one immature male and one that I think is an immature female. We also have two Stellar’s Jays that visit, and bullies that they are (and much larger than any of the other birds), everyone else scatters. And finally, of the regular family that uses the feeder so far, there’s an adult female Hairy Woodpecker I see 3-4 times a day. A bit to my surprise, she much prefers the seed feeder to the suet. The chickadees and nuthatches won’t complain.

I went by the local Wild Bird Center to buy the feeders and seed and get advice, and had a nice chat with the owners on what to expect. The tube feeder is my favorite squirrel-discouraging model, the Brome Squirrel Buster, and generally works well and resists damage from frustrated squirrels. The suet blocks on the right are a seed block and a peanut block, and we’ll see whether there’s a clear favorite down the road.

I always buy my seed from a bird store like this when I can; it may seem more expensive, but it’s a higher quality, fresher seed. Seed you buy at supermarkets or big box stores may be cheaper per pound, but is often filled with high amounts of Millet, which many birds see as trash and therefore throw to teh ground to get to the better bits — and the seed in those stores might be old, stale and/or rancid to boot.

I buy the low-waste or patio type mixes, where the sunflower seeds are hulled and chopped, and so I end up with almost no waste to clean up on the ground, and in fact, the juncoes do a fine job of cleaning it up for me. These seed mixes are more expensive to buy, but last longer due to little wastage, and I love the lack of any significant cleanup.

Now all I have to do is wait and see what special birds might show up during migration.

I have, actually, had a couple already, although not migrating birds. One day I had a hatch year immature Spotted Towhee explore the yard for a bit, but it didn’t stick around and I only saw it that once. We have a few Cedar Waxwings that appear in the trees every few days, and on a couple of occasions, I’ve had a Hutton’s Vireo do the same, hunting insects among the canopy of the trees that surround the house.

I haven’t done much birding elsewhere yet, but believe me, it’s going to start happening now that I’m unpacked…

I have found my camera and batteries and I’m taking some shots out the window that I’m pretty happy with, but I’m behind on processing them… I have gotten some decent ones with the iPhone as well, because those feeders are only about 15’ from my window.

So this new place is starting to be what I’d hoped if would be when we decided to buy it. I’m happy we were able to make it happen.

Meanwhile, Back in Silicon Valley

I got word from my agent that my house in Santa Clara is through renovations, and should be on the market by September 20. I’ve been getting updates every week from the contractor with pictures, and the transformation is amazing; I love what they’ve done to it. we don’t expect it to be on the market long, given the market and it’s location, so I’m hoping this chapter of my life closes in the next few weeks. Completely redone with new floors and lighting, an updated kitchen with new counters and appliances, complete remakes on the bathrooms and they took my advice and took down a couple of walls to really open some of the living space up. I think it’s going to be a gorgeous space for whoever takes it on for its next phase of life.

I killed my Facebook Account (and I feel great)

One thing that happened since the last issue of 6FPS: I logged onto Facebook for the first time in a couple of weeks and deleted my account. It took me a few months to untangle myself from obligations that I had running stuff there, but I’m now Facebook free and with one exception — an alumni photography group hosted by David duChemin — I miss nothing that was there. I keep hoping someday David will replace his Facebook group with a Discord area, but those kind of changes are hard, and I sympathize with the chaos it can create. But still maybe someday.

Not Owing Anyone Anything

One of the things I feel weird about is that at this moment, I am not volunteering to any group, and I’m not running anything — not even a mailing list — for others to use. This is the first time in — 20 years or more — I haven’t had commitments to others I had to make sure I handled and had time for.

I am not, for the record, looking to start any new commitments any time soon. Honest.

About the Switch from Mailchimp to Squarespace Campaigns

So, let me talk a bit about the mad switch from Mailchimp to Squarespace Campaigns for this list… As I tried to publish the last issue on Mailchimp, it triggered some automated content filter, which put my account on hold and sent me stern warnings about improper content.

What was that content? I have some ideas — I’m guessing that I added links to my real estate agents and said nice things about them triggered the thing — but to be blunt, Mailchimp never bothered to respond to my appeal of the ban and request for advice on what to fix.

As a long-time fan and promoter of Mailchimp, this bothers me, because the only way to interpret it is that they believe if you’re on a free tier usage level and trigger their automated ban monster, they want you to go away and not bother them. I’m still 100% convinced that at worst this was a false positive from their filter system and five minutes of review and chatting would have solved it, but — they never bothered to engage with me. So I left Mailchimp for Squarespace’s campaign setup instead.

I’ve captured the archives that are hosted on Mailchimp and plan to migrate them onto the site as web pages; they won’t look exactly as published but the content will be there. Once I do that, I’ll nuke my Mailchimp account and move on.

I had been considering a move to Squarespace Campaigns anyway; it costs me a few bucks a month (but I would have paid that money to Mailchimp if being on a paid tier would have cleared the ban flag); my initial feelings about using the service are positive; not having a free tier, I think, means they can be a bit less worried about abuse and spam. There are aspects of the new system that aren’t quite as functional as Mailchimp but only in minor ways — astute viewers will notice below I’ve built single image files of multiple images in places where I want side by side images below.

But overall, the creation and management process is fine, and works as well as the Mailchimp system does, at least so far. It’s very similar to working on Squarespace web pages, not a surprise, but with a simpler rendering model due to the joys of just how bad email clients are at rendering content in so many cases. Mailchimp has a few more features (like image galleries) but that’s easily replaced doing it different ways.

So, so far so good with the new system, and we’ll touch base about it in a few issues after I use it for a while. And Mailchimp, sigh, is no longer my recommended email delivery tool, at least if you want to play in the free tier. The lack of any response from them to me means any innocent tripping of their filter system means you’re dead there, and I can’t recommend them in that kind of situation, unless you want an emergency migration on deadline on your schedule some day.

I didn’t appreciate how they handled this (by not handling it at all) one little bit. And now that I realize it, test messages on drafts of each newsletter from Mailchimp invariably ended up in my spam folder; not so from Squarespace. I wonder if that is telling me something about Mailchimp I hadn’t thought of until now.

What's New from Chuq?

Like Stepping Back in Time

I’ve been trying to figure out how to explain what it is like moving from the core of Silicon Valley, which is very urban, very busy and very intense, to our new place here in Kitsap County, which is across the ferries from Seattle. I think the best way to describe is this way:

A recent headline from the Seattle Times: ‘Two truths’ to downtown Seattle living: Vibrant, diverse atmosphere butts up against drug use, street crime

A recent headline from the Kitsap Daily News: Recycling bin filled to the brim? (there is a driver shortage, according to Waste Management)

Yes, I’m cherry picking a bit, but less than you might think. You’ll also be happy to know that the Stickleball league has found a new home for their contests.

Silicon Valley has gotten very big, very busy, very intense, very “national chain”, and very impersonal. You can still find the small, individual stores and restaurants, but if you talk to them, you’ll find most of them are finding it harder and harder to hang on and afford Silicon Valley.

Here in Silverdale, it’s a lot slower. Silverdale and nearby Bremerton could be considered urban areas, I guess. We’re far enough away from Seattle we aren’t suburbs, really, but to me, I feel like these areas are more like if we’d moved out of Santa Clara to a place like Half Moon Bay or perhaps Salinas or Vacaville.

Our place is up in the hills a bit on the way to Seabeck (Seabeck reminds me a lot of, oh, Pescadero, maybe, or Davenport), but we’re still ten minutes away from Silverdale’s downtown core and all of the shopping and food.

Silverdale in a way is a Big Box town; within 15 minutes of here I can get to both a Lowe’s and a Home Depot, a Safeway, Costco, PetSmart, Best Buy, Trader Joe’s, and a Target, along with many of the usual suspects that show up in the same neighborhood whenever these get built. There are two Fred Meyer stores within 20 minutes of us.

What we don’t have until we cross the Tacoma Narrows Bridge is a Whole Foods (and there’s no Amazon Fresh delivery here). When you fire up Grubhub there are about a dozen places available to order for delivery, where in Santa Clara is was a couple of hundred.

There are a good number of owner run restaurants and stores; we have our chains, but the chains haven’t pushed everyone else out of the market.

So if I had to define the cultural change I’ve seen from the move, it feels in a way to have moved back in time 20 years, away from the bleeding edges of “always pushing to the future” Silicon Valley. It isn’t rural living by any means, even though we have a well and septic here on the property, but… It’s slower paced. It’s more personal. It’s less crazy and busy.

I will also note another big change I’m still wrapping my head around: this area is a lot less diverse. Way less diverse. Not “crazy enough to elect a QAnon guy as mayor” like Sequim, but it’s a much whiter population than Silicon Valley. And I do notice that as I wander the towns a bit.

But so far, not in a negative way. Ask me again in six months as I learn the problem bits I’m not seeing yet, but if the biggest change in routine is driving down to Safeway or Target or Fred Meyer to have bags loaded in my trunk for me instead of magically appearing on the porch — I’m good with that…

I wanted to step away from the rat race, without excising the bits and pieces of modern life that I find useful and pleasurable. Silverdale and Kitsap County, from my first few weeks here, seems to be exactly the kind of place I was hoping it would be in terms of the life change of pace to a smaller, slower and less intense life — while still having megabit internet and a nearby Starbucks.

So so far, so good.

Photo Wednesday

(I am finally getting everything back on schedule and happening… ) Every Wednesday I'm posting an non-bird image from my collection and talking a bit about the image. And on Fridays, I'm posting a bird image as well. So twice a week I'm now starting to share my images again to the world at large with some bit of story about how and why the image came to be.

To see all of these images at full size and read the stories behind their creation, you can visit:

For Your Consideration

Birds and Birding

Photography

Health and Fitness

Science and Technology

Interesting Stuff

Recommendations

Two books I’ve read in the last month for you to consider:

  • Lessons from the Landscape by Sarah Marino: The first ebook I’ve read by Sarah, this is a fine combination of some wonderful photography taken within Yellowstone National Park, and a series of essays where she describes various aspects of how and why she takes images. It also includes a final section where she breaks down her decisions processing images in some detail. Some nice insight into the why’s of photography.

  • The Meaning in the Making by Sean Tucker: Tucker is one of the Youtube photographers I follow and support. His vidoes tend to be more about the why of creating and photography then the how, very much a philosophical bent over a nerdy technique channel. This book is very much the same: it’s a series of essays about various topics that all tie into the idea of the mindset of being a creator, as opposed to the nuts and bolts of operating a camera. It is also somewhat of an autobiographical book in that many of the chapters are told around a framework of times or happenings within his life. Well written and interesting, and very much a recommended book to anyone who’s curious about the why aspects of being a maker — not just for photographers.

  • The Pale Horseman by Bernard Cornwell (Book 2 in the Saxon Chronicles). I love the time of Arthurian myth and legend, and some of my favorite books are written in that time about the historical Arthur — for instance, Sword at Sunset by Rosemary Sutcliff or the Camulod Chronicle series by Jack Whyte (book 1: The Skystone). Bernard Cornwell is a writer who has written multiple series about Arthur or set in this time, and yet for some reason, I’ve been slow in reading his works. Pale Horseman is set in the time of King Alfred, telling a story around the real events of his defeat of the Viking King Guthrum. These are good books, and I’ve already lined up the next book in the series and the start of another series of his in my in box. If you are a fan of Arthurian fiction, or historical fiction in general, this is one to check out.

  • Another Day Not Wasted by Guy Tal: The latest book by photographer/artist Guy Tal, this includes a number of really interesting photos and essays that talk about his love of the deserts he explores and photographs and his philosophy towards image making and life. Very interesting read and highly recommended