Saturday Football ☀️🏈🍁

Ray absolutely loves UC football games. Twice we've sat in complete downpours — literal downpours — watching the Bearcats while covered in trash bags to keep us dry. 

So we were owed some good weather, and Saturday's couldn't have been more perfect for college football. It was a bit chillier than I expected, but that just gave me an excuse to shop. A new winter hat for me and gloves and a pullover for Ray. 

And UC throttled Navy, 42-0. It was never even close. Now that I think about it, I'm not sure Navy even showed up. 

Except two Navy pilots did! 

I had a heads-up that there would be a flyover by two Navy F-18 Super Hornets, powered by GE Aviation's F414 engine. Now that I work at GE Aviation, it's my mission to get to know all of our engines, so clearly I needed to see it in action. 

Verdict: It's fast. Lots of thrust. Looks badass on a Navy plane. (The marketing department probably wants to use this in it's copy for the DoD. That's cool.) 

The flyover was courtesy Strike Fighter Squadron 32, the "Fighting Swordsman," based at Naval Air Station Oceana in Virginia Beach. Va.

I was so worried about missing it I was practically pushing people out of the way in the bag check line. 

'YOU WANT TO INSPECT A BAG?! HERE, CHECK MINE! IT'S FULL OF TISSUES AND CHAPSTICK. WE GOOD?!' 

We even bypassed the beer booth right by our seats so we could be comfortably situated when they came thundering over. I had assigned Ray to get photos and I was planning to take video so I could I used them on the GE Aviation blog and social channels.

Guess who missed it? Me. 

I was so convinced they'd come from the other direction that when I finally saw them, I got flustered and stopped filming. Amazing. 

Fortunately Ray got some great shots. After they flew past he goes, "Did you get it?!" 

Ummm, who wants a beer? 

Snitches Get Stiches

This was not the scene I anticipated when Ray told me he had to go the doctor to get his stitches out. 

Chuck Norris is a doctor? Who uses a pocket knife and fingernail clippers? 

I'm not saying it's not possible, ok. I'm just saying it was unexpected. 



He did a good job though. Three removed stitches later and some Aquaphor for the itching and we didn't have to go back to scary Urgent Care. 

Ray has been buying old hand planes on eBay, I think mostly because he likes the competition. And then he likes restoring them back to their original beauty. This one, however, nearly sliced his little finger off. 

He thinks it was made between 1910 and 1918, so it's been nearly cutting off fingers for about 100 years. 

Art Hop Stop 2: The Weston Gallery

Where was I?

Oh yeah, art hopping.

When I first started my role at GE Aviation, I supported the LEAP engine line. So naturally I think it is the most amazing of all of the engines — the coolest, most advanced engine on the planet. I stand by this, and I come with receipts.

Most people don’t think of jet engines as beautiful pieces of art, but they are, and more. They are art, science and cool all factored into a package that can power you around the world. They are so advanced you forget that you are 30,000 feet up in the stratosphere in shirt sleeves reading a book or snoozing against the plane window.

MoMA in New York displays a GE90 jet engine fan blade, and maybe it doesn’t sound like much, but if you saw one in person, up close all black composite curves and silvery strength, you couldn’t help but marvel at its sleek design and engineering prowess. Each blade on the GE90 is four-feet long and weighs less than 50 pounds. The GE90-115B contains 22 of these blades.

But anyway, the LEAP. Ages ago the video team at work developed a timelapse of a mosaic that was destined for the exhibit Work/Surface. The LEAP was part of a series of large-scale murals inspired by the “Worker Murals” created for the Union Terminal opening of in 1933. 

Representing a range of Cincinnati industries and its workforce, including the Formica Corporation in Evendale, the mosaics were created from laser-cut Formica. Like the original murals, the Work/Surface mosaics begin as photographs taken during factory tours and include industries such as Formica (of course), GE Aviation, Rookwood Pottery, Rhinegeist Brewery, Verdin Company and Procter & Gamble.

Ray has never met a factory floor he didn’t love (and he works at P&G), so convincing him to go see a Formica mosaic of a jet engine was an easy task. We didn’t know the exhibit also included P&G before we got there but, lo and behold, there was a Tide mosaic in Formica as well.

Aviation's was the best. Or one of the best at least. No kidding.




It's so well done it looks almost 3-dimensional, but really these murals are gigantic puzzles put together with large and small pieces of Formica. Very cool.






P&G was the only one in the exhibit that didn't take their image from a factory floor. They went with a virtual reality scenario of workers from around the world collaborating via VR. The idea was cool but it didn't show well, and Ray was disappointed. He felt the P&G mural missed the boat on capturing industrial production. Paper plants or a diaper line are inherently fascinating to see, but that's not what they chose to show.  

I posed him by it anyway. 

Tomorrow is the last day it will be at the Weston, so you’ve mostly missed it. (Sorry.) But you can see the timelapse my coworkers created of it coming together.

Art Hop Stop 1: The Taft

Whatever I knew of f-stops and shutter speeds I have long forgotten. But I still remember the smell of the darkroom chemicals (vinegar mostly) and my love of burning and dodging light onto prints. The process as much as the product was the goal... of getting the light just-so, the shadows just-so, and considering if the final print accurately captured the feeling of the moment.

At the Taft Museum of Art's current exhibit Ansel Adams: A Photographer's Evolution there is a replica darkroom to illustrate the printing process Adams underwent in his photography. Ray and I, on a self-guided art hop Saturday afternoon, both marveled at how much we still remembered about wet baths and red lights and how interactive and engaging (and time consuming) printing a single print was. 

So we're putting a darkroom in at our house. Ray doesn't know this yet but I've already ordered a few vats of stop-bath so Erie Avenue should be smelling like nostalgia and acrid fumes in no time. 

Well, probably not. But I did want to hold the exhibit and in my hands and not let it go. Retrospectives are great because you get to consider an artist in whole. What changes and iterations evolved over time, and how the world and friends and mentors shaped those changes. 

"‘Here is the equivalent of what I saw and felt.' That is all I can ever say in words about my photographs; they must stand or fall, as objects of beauty and communication, on the silent evidence of their equivalence.” Ansel Adams

From his smaller, intimately sized early works to the grand-scale landscapes of sweeping mountain ranges later in his career, the exhibition showcases his changing aesthetic as a photographer and the ways he experimented with contrast and light on the same landscapes.

I admit, I had never seen nor or heard of Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico before Saturday, apparently an icon of 20th-century photography. Thank you to the Taft Museum for enlightening me. 

Adams made over 1,300 prints of the image. 

"Over time, he printed Moonrise progressively darker, with a jet-black sky, brighter clouds at the horizon, and crosses gleaming with light against a shadowy landscape." Exhibit Curator

Two of those prints are in the exhibit, an early print and another made 30-years later. It's marvelous to see how the same image changes in his mind over time. The story of how he captured the image is great too. 

"The situation was desperate: the low sun was trailing the edge of the clouds in the west, and shadow would soon dim the white crosses."

The people I like best are those who describe the race against the setting sun on their perfect image as "desperate." Indeed, it would not be the same image if those crosses were not lit up in the churchyard. (And that star just above the moon... a star? Jupiter? Venus perhaps? Maybe Mars?)

Seeing 'Moonrise' and 'Grand Tetons from Jackson Lake, 1940' is worth the price of admission for those three photos alone. You have until Sept. 16, GO. 

On the way out we checked-out Twisted, which is six tons of willow tree saplings twisted into a sculpture called "Far Flung." It's imaginative and cool and a bit bizarre. 

Next up on the blog, stop 2, The Weston Gallery. Ray and I aren't often so cultured and ambitious, but we made the most of our Saturday with two different exhibits. Stay tuned.

The Old Man and Ray

Ray was wildly flipping off the the Hemingway House. 

"You sonuvabitch," he scowled. "He didn't have a pot to piss in and look what you did. He lost his knife. His harpoon. He broke his tiller. ... He lost his oar!"

He sat there steaming mad and indignant, passionately shaking his middle finger at the house. 

We were in Key West staying in a little cottage directly across the street from the Ernest Hemingway Home and Museum. When in Rome and all that, I told Ray he should read the Old Man and the Sea. So we rode our rental bikes to Key West Island Bookstore on Fleming Street and I bought it for him.

He read most of it that afternoon lounging by the pool. We were sitting on the porch of our cottage that evening when he finished it. And slowly, surely, across from Hemingway's home with his second wife Pauline, he started to lose it. 

I was doing a good job of holding it together until he mentioned the oar. As if the oar was really just the last straw. I started to laugh, which is exactly what someone wants to hear when they're angry.  

This what I love about literature. It makes you laugh, it makes you cry. It makes you flip off the old Hemingway homestead.

"Well, I guess he should be pleased with himself," Ray said, his anger smoothing out.  "Eighty years later and people are still reading his little book and feeling sorry for that old man."

But a few minutes later his anger returned and he started cursing Hemingway again. 

"You bastard. I hope you're happy," he sneered. "And another thing, I've never been so mad at sharks in my life! Sharks are complete monsters. Hemingway could have saved me an afternoon of reading by just writing a few paragraphs about what a-holes sharks are. Would have saved us both a lot of time!"

I starting laughing again. 

Anyway, I think he liked the book. 

Ray on Hemingway's balcony, 2016, one day before the meltdown. 

It's not delivery, it's DiGina-o

I have all sorts of blog posts in my draft folder, mostly book reviews and stories from Ray and I's travels... I'll get around to posting them one of these days. 

But first things first. You all need to know that these pizza slice rafts are genius. For one thing, they're so comfortable and big you can easily nap on them. For another, you can hook multiple pizza rafts together to make an entire pizza. A pizza flotilla, right in your pool.

I'm basically counting down the hours until after July 4 when these babies will go on sale and I can buy an entire raft pizza at a major discount.

Carry on, my fellow supreme lovers. 

Look Kids, The Grand Canyon

Unlike most great features, the Grand Canyon is invisible until you stand on its rim. You aren’t drawn to it as to a river’s source or a mountain’s peak. You have to seek it out, and then cope with its visual revelation. It simply and suddenly is. 

Source: The Conversation

Every time we go on a trip, I declare it was my favorite. Either we keep topping our last vacation, or all of them are my favorite. Maybe both.

I never wrote about our trip to Yellowstone in 2014, but it was transformative. I was not prepared for the sheer awe and emotional impact of it all. The breadth and expanse of the Yellowstone wilderness atop a volcano made my eyes well with tears of awe. It was unlike anything I had ever seen. Profound, even. 

And it made me question what I thought Earth is, or what it abides. 

The enormity of the Grand Canyon of Yellowstone, the clockwork predictability of some of the geysers and the sheer unpredictability of others, the curiosity of the Grand Prismatic Spring, the surreal aqua blues of Earth's deep chasm pools, and the boiling, bubbling and violent heat of the springs, the travertine terraces of Mammoth Hot Springs. 

And then there are the animals. The hundreds of bison just walking past your car, standing in the middle of the road just trying to get across. We saw elk, deer, a bear and countless bison. I've never in my life been so close to such raw nature. 

Bison in Yellowstone.

Just moseying along. 

It was after that trip to Yellowstone that we started better appreciating the National Parks. This past fall, we went to Acadia. (We previously went to Haleakala on our honeymoon and Grand Teton during our Yellowstone road swing.)

So when we were planning a spring break, we thought Arizona would be perfect — a bit of warmth, plus the Grand Canyon, one of the seven wonders of natural world and our fifth National Park. And somehow, neither Ray nor I had ever been.

"I'm pretty sure this makes unAmerican," I told Ray. "We are ripping apart the very fabric of our country until we see it."

He agreed.  

Grand Indeed

We first saw it from the lookout at Grand Canyon village, waiting on the bus to take us to the overlooks. Honestly, I wasn't expecting it to be there. I don't know where I thought it would be — further out on the bus trail, I guess — but we looked over and holy shit, there it was. It was so vast it's hard to comprehend. It took us probably a good hour of seeing it from various vistas before our minds could really grasp it. 





To call it a "canyon" seems a bit of misnomer, really. The Grand Canyon of Yellowstone makes more sense visually. It is a clear canyon, with clearly defined steep sides. But the Grand Canyon... it's more like a mountain range you are able to peer down upon. 

And the colors. The unbelievable colors. The muted buff and grays on the peaks, the pinks and sunset oranges on the buttes and bluffs, there was white lining the outer rim, and staggering reds diving into the ravines and gorges, and then, the blue-green of the Colorado river, looking like a trickling stream against the magnitude.  

View of the Colorado River from Navajo Point.

View from Hermit's Rest.

It takes time to stitch together all that you are seeing. 

We spent the entire first day just looking at it from different vantages along Hermits Rest Route, the bus route of the Grand Canyon. It was insanely windy, with gusts from 35 to 50 miles per hour. Not surprisingly, one of the gusts knocked me over and caught my Reds hat, sending it sailing away. But Ray was able to scramble over and grab it before it tumbled into the Canyon. I'd have been embarrassed to think my hat would litter the Grand Canyon and befuddle ancient visitors. 

"Why was this unknown ancient a fan of the Reds? Weren't they in a 'rebuilding' year for about 20 years? We can only ponder the thoughts and hopes of the ancient Americans." 

But my favorite part was the Grand Canyon from Desert View Drive, on the east side of the South Rim. It was less crowded and yet views were equally as spectacular, if not more so. The Canyon ends to the east, physically, at Desert View. It's seeing the Grand Canyon up against that unfurling plateau that helps shape its grandness. Navajo Point was my favorite vista to the east, where you can best see the high Colorado plateau flatten out. 

View from Navajo Point. 

Ray with our rental truck, Wauneta. Because you just never know when you might need to off-road into a canyon. Or need extra space for gas station beef jerky.  

Driving into Tusayan to get to the Grand Canyon on 64 North is the definition of barren. Literally, beyond there lies nothing. Nothing but the Grand Canyon anyway. But driving out of the Canyon east toward Cameron is extraordinary. The road follows the Little Colorado River, with its own deep gorge carved into the high plateau. It's also where we met this Raven. 

We weren't home 24 hours before I started to feel depressed. One minute you're out taking in this incredible geological wonder, the next you're back in Ohio washing the red rock dust off your boots. I was writing a check to the cat sitter when I reminded Ray that we never go anywhere. I think I heard him scream into a pillow. 

So if you haven't been, either to Yellowstone or the Grand Canyon, go, immediately.   

Ray overlooking Desert View.