Dryden Is Home

An Extra Hour

This week we were given an extra hour. What a gift!

Of course, this is a gift that was taken from us back in the spring.

An extra hour! What will you do with it? 

An extra hour of sleep? Time to watch an episode of your favorite show? More play time with your 2 year old daughter? Returning those deliquent emails? Writing a blog post that you've been putting off?

A few minutes split up between a bunch of activities that you've been neglecting?

Are you saving that hour for later? Maybe if you save 10 of these over the next 10 years you can give yourself a whole day at the spa or in the woods or in meditation. Can you be patient enough to wait 10 years to spend those 10 hours?

Did you over spend that hour a bunch of times yesterday? Well I have an extra hour so I can say yes to a lot more things or just a few more things. I have time to take it easy. I have time to start one new thing. I have time to read. I have time to sleep, to nap, to rest, to do nothing. Are you more rested with that extra hour? Or more tired?

If you can't figure out what to do with it, be patient. In the spring it will be taken from you. 

If you want to meet someone who has been thinking a lot about time, join me in seeing Alan Lightman at Ithaca College on Friday evening. Lightman wrote "Einstein's Dreams" (1993) and I first read it as a freshman at Northeastern in 1994. It was the beginning of my shift from computer scientist to reader. Can you join me Friday evening at Ithaca College? Do you have an hour to spare?

http://www.ithaca.edu/hs/events/series/cpsnow/fall14speaker/

Help in finding a boat

My friend Mariann's husband Bill is on a search for a boat.

Not just any boat - he's looking for the one that took him to Tortola where he met my friend Mariann. He sailed and lived on the boat for 16 years. He sold the boat in 1990 and at that time she was in City Island, New York. She is a wooden lapstrake hulled Folkboat built in Norway in 1959 named Norse Dancer. (The name is carved into her transom).

Yesterday (Sunday, October 7th) Mariann, Bill, and a couple of friends drove to City Island on a journey of discovery looking for her. Following various leads they ended up at The City Island Nautical Museum and Historical Society where they found a connection to the woman who owned the boatyard where the boat was docked.

If you know of anyone in the wooden boat world put the word out...Bill wants her back...all is forgiven!

Email me to get in touch with Mariann and Bill: [email protected]

Thank you!

BJ and the walk

IMG_4141
Originally uploaded by dmakar

I've posted some photos to my flickr account from my walk yesterday with BJ Hill, of walk across America 2008 fame.

We started walking in Lake Mohegan and finished just east of Jefferson Valley in Baldwin Place (A little southwest of Mahopac). It was a 6 mile day and I think our total number of entries in the book was 8 or 9.

One couple (pictured here) had seen BJ on the news the night before and then saw us walking and pulled over. Here we are at a somewhat busy intersection (rt. 6 and rt. 6N).

A complete set of photos is here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/dmakar/sets/72157611932587945/

  
Happy 2009!

Death of a Hero

Jack Palance died today. I will probably always remember him first as that spooky guy from Ripley's Believe it or Not when I was growing up. I used to think he was Ripley. He was so convincing and scary. He always had a young female co-star on the show - I always thought they were his daughters.

I remember him walking across a bridge over a geothermal heated pool and he put an egg in the water and took it out and it was hard boiled. That always amazed me. They were always traveling all over the world.

I used to watch this show with my dad and sister. My dad told me that Jack Palance was Ukrainian, like us. That was always a good thing. Even though he could be frightening, he could be friendly - I always thought he was letting us in on a secret.

Since I always thought he was Ripley, I never realized he had done other work in movies. I was 5 when Ripley's premiered in 1981 and was only 10 when it went off the air. Not many kids that age watch Shane or any movies that aren't animated.

Later in my life, he was in City Slickers and I realized that he wasn't Ripley. He told this story about having just finished being in Shane and having this director tell him he would win an academy award. And bam, 50 years later he won for City Slickers. After that I was always attached to Jack Palance. He was the grandfather I never knew. My own grandfather died in 1979 and I have no real memories of him. Jack was Ukrainian. He was successful. He was a hero in City Slickers - playing a parady of himself as a bad guy in all those westerns. He was an original and I think I always liked that about him.

I haven't yet seen any of those old westerns. I just read a little bit about him as a fighter and a veteran and read that he grew up just 155 miles south of Dryden, New York in Lattimer Mines, Pennsylvania. He was born in 1919, the year before my grandmother and three years before my own grandfather.

When you're a kid you dress up as your heroes at Halloween. When you're an adult and get invited to costume parties and Cowboy and Farmer parties you go as your heroes as adults. After knowing Jack almost my whole life and knowing him from City Slickers I think I was happy to attend a party last fall as a cowboy. Hold onto your heroes as long as you can. Learn from them, look up to them, emulate if it is what you want. Find your heroes and follow if you can.

Jack Palance, February 18th, 1919 - November 10th, 2006