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First walk

Thistle with a bee in McNee Ranch

Dried out tree stump in McNee Ranch

McNee Ranch in the summer

We took B on his first walk on August 20th, in the hills above Montara beach. It was his first time in the carrier, we thought he’d resist but he loved it. The hills are a lot drier than the last time we walked through here, but there were thistles and nasturtiums out. We saw a coyote on our way back down.

We took him to see the sea too. Thought about dipping his toes in the water, but the beach was too steep and the waves too high. Another time.

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Feet on the ground, head in the sky

A stone stile covered in moss in Addingham, West Yorkshire

I’ve been going on a few walks from the front door, no more than one a day as prescribed to maintain sanity. It’s confusing though…

The guidance says, “You can also go for a walk or exercise outdoors if you stay more than 2 metres from others”, so a walk on a quiet public footpath should be OK. Problem is that you can’t predict how many people might be on a path before you get out there, and there are a lot of stiles and latches you have to touch to get over or through fences.

But it’s not like Main Street is any better. You have to step in to the middle of the road in order to maintain distance since the pavements are so narrow, and there are 4–5 times as many people walking there at any one time than out on the countryside paths.

It’s tough to know what to do, particularly with the police doing things like shaming people via drone cameras. I get it, we absolutely have to avoid throngs of people descending on beaches and beauty spots. But, ugh. Staying 100% inside feels actively unhealthy. Just never feel like I’m doing the right thing.

A bridge over a stream in Addingham, West Yorkshire

I’m carrying hand sanitiser and use it after each time I have to touch some apparatus. I’m planning to carry antimicrobial wipes from now on to open / close gates and get through stiles. Maybe it’ll help others too? Who knows. I’ll also spend some time coming up with more bodyweight exercise routines that I can do from “home” or a random park. Definitely one of those times you long for a garden.

The photos above are from a walk along Marchup Beck (see walk 8, the shorter version) with Sam and the photos below are from walk towards Addingham Moorside (see walk 6, the shortest version) with Gemma in London. It was a walk-and-talk over the phone, 10/10 would recommend. I got *hopelessly* lost once or twice, but it’s pretty straightforward to get back as long as you know where the middle of town is and keep the moor at your back. The walk included some stretches of the Dales Highway and the Millenium Way, I probably just needed to pay better attention to the signs.

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Mom’s dry-transfer lettering sheets

Sheet of white dry-transfer type in 36pt Futura Bold

How to use instant lettering

  1. Remove blue backing paper and position sheet on working surface. Shade lightly over the letter with a ballpoint pen.
  2. Gently peel away sheet – the letter is now transferred. Repeat until your lettering is complete.
  3. Re-burnish through backing paper over copy for firmer adhesion.

Finally sat down to take pics of Mom’s old dry-transfer lettering.

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“How high were the bunks?” “Oh, probably about the length of your forearm.”

Grandpa showed me the album of his WWII photos and postcards when I got to see him at Christmas. I didn’t know it existed.

Grandpa couldn’t bring his camera with him when he was deployed, it would have been confiscated during inspection. Luckily his friend Renee Neuman brought his box camera when he came back from leave, so Grandpa got to borrow that sometimes. They developed the photos in soup bowls. He said that Neuman unfortunately passed about 5 years after returning from the war. I asked about the cause, but he said he wasn’t sure.

The photos here are all positioned in order on a single page captioned “Diving for movie film in 40 ft of water”. Grandpa laughed when describing it.

Their LST ran aground in Pearl Harbor, so they had to stay there for repairs. While there, another ship came along and they exchanged 35mm films. Unfortunately the film from the other ship fell in to the harbour. It wasn’t financially valuable, but very valuable in terms of morale so they asked tower to send a diver to recover the movie. The diver wasn’t happy, he had been at a party, but he did recover the film.

Most of the photos in the album are of Grandpa and the others from his ship doing jobs here and there or “just horsing around” as he said. There was a lot of down time. There are a few landscapes of Hawaii, Guam, the Kwajalein Atoll, and the Enewetak Atoll. Some are in the aftermath of a tsunami. There were also some intense images towards the end of the album, hard to tell if they were photos or postcards. Some would be pretty gruesome for postcards, others were of the signing of the Japanese surrender on the USS Missouri. At any rate, Grandpa said he hadn’t taken those final album images. He developed a bunch of negatives for other people, so if these weren’t postcards then they may have been copies of others’ photographs.

There were two photos of a large cemetery in Guam with many small Christian grave markers. Grandpa had gone to school with one of the men buried there, he and Grandma had gone to senior prom with this boy and his date. After graduation, he went in to the Marines and was killed. Grandpa took photos of the grave for the man’s family.

Grandpa carried a pocket-sized spiral bound photo album with him throughout WWII filled with photos of family and friends, but mostly of Grandma. It’s very worn apart now. The sleeve with the photo of Grandma and him in his uniform also includes a pressed four leaf clover and a Japanese stamp.

In the back of the main album, there was originally a college photo of Grandma with a gardenia behind her ear. That’s on the wall of his apartment now, with other family photos.