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Tom Chaffin’s book, Sea of Gray: The Around-the-World Odyssey of the Confederate Raider Shenandoah is the story of ironic success of the Confederate commerce raider Shenandoah during and after the Civil War.Despite the reviews you may read elsewhere, this book is not a gripping page turner. Well, if you find page upon page detailing the drudgery of a sea voyage in the mid-nineteenth century gripping then maybe those reviews are accurate after all. The Shenandoah may have accomplished some interesting things, but very little of what it did was dramatic or filled with danger.

The ship goes months and months without ever firing its guns in anger. In fact, the ship was designed to prey on largely defenseless merchant vessels and to stay far away from actual naval vessels of the US Navy. Unless you find piracy or privateering exciting when the victims are defenseless and never put up a fight, you won’t find much action in the pages of this book.

The parts of the journey where danger actually was involved (a hurricane, getting caught in constantly shifting ice floes) are told with the same dry detachment that characterizes the rest of Chaffin’s prose. Sailors washing their clothing in the rain after a month at sea gets the same treatment as the ship being almost crushed in the ice.

Despite Chaffin’s attempts to make it otherwise, the story of the Shenandoah is a story of incompetent, short-sighted, micro-managing middle management; a crew composed of mercenary sailors enticed by the promise of wealth they will never see to join an ideological voyage; and ill-defined and meaningless objectives generated by upper management. In short, the Shenandoah mirrors that of many modern corporations. If you’re looking for interesting non-fiction to take your mind off your day-to-day concerns, look elsewhere.

Wegmans Announces Voluntary Recall of 18 oz. (6-roll pack) Wegmans Food You Feel Good About Country Wheat Rolls

Yeah, that’s food I feel good about, alright. As a co-worker said, “That’s food you feel good about being recalled.”

When I worked at RadioCentral in San Francisco, I told a friend there that I sometimes got a song stuck in my head for days and that listening to it repeatedly was the best way to clear my head. She was single and living alone in San Francisco. One of the blessings of living alone, she said, was that you could queue up a song on repeat for an entire weekend and no one would complain. If I was living alone, or if it wouldn’t drive Sarah crazy, Adam Carroll‘s song, “Race Car Joe“, would be getting heavy rotation on my sound system. I originally bought the album for the clever “Ol’ Milwaukee’s Best” which is good. But it doesn’t have the haunting nature of “Race Car Joe”.

If you haven’t looked into Josh Ritter‘s new album “The Historical Conquests of Josh Ritter” you’re missing out a good album. Not great, but better than most of the other dreck out there these days. Perhaps he best song on the album is “The Temptation of Adam,” a song about love that blossoms in a missile silo during the Cold War. At the very least, you’ve got to love the premise. The lyrics are amazingly clever:

Oh Marie if you would stay then we could stick pins in the map
Of all the places where you thought that love would be found
But I would only need one pin to show where my heart’s at
In a top secret location three hundred feet under the ground

We could hold each other close and stay up every night

Looking up into the dark like it’s the night sky

And pretend this giant missile is an old oak tree instead

And carve our name in hearts into the warhead

You can listen to most of Ritter’s album at his website, including a full version of “The Temptation of Adam”.

In the time that I haven’t been writing in this space, Sarah and I have been busy both in Madison, and elsewhere.Last weekend, we left Ira in my sister’s care and headed out for South Dakota by way of Minneapolis. We left Friday morning and in a quick four and one-half hours we were in Chaska at the Minnesota Renaissance Festival. We’ve been to the Renaissance festival a number of times over the past five years, so this year we decided to change things up and bring Dalla with us. I won’t go so far as to say that she enjoyed the Festival, but she did enjoy all the food that people left on the ground. All the time I wasn’t actively engaged in keeping her away from food I spent pulling food out of her mouth. She didn’t need to eat turkey skin that had been sitting on the ground for at least a week. Nor did she need to eat turkey leg bones that could perforate her digestive tract. Despite her single-minded interest in scavenging morsels of yuck off the ground, she was a people magnet. More than a few people asked if she was a Norwegian Elkhound and wanted to greet her. As Sarah noted, we met many more people there because of Dalla.

As usual, we went to see the shows as much as the arts, crafts, and food. My favorite is the Dew Drop Jugglers. This year, they had a new line-up and we saw their Danger Show. In the past, the line-up was three high-quality jugglers. This year, there were two jugglers and one professional knife thrower. This changed up the act quite a bit. Perhaps the most amazing trick they did was when the knife thrower hurled knives at a wall and the jugglers caught them in mid-air before they hit the wall. That was an amazing trick.

After we left the festival, we spent the night at our friends’ house in St. Paul before heading out for South Dakota. We were a couple of hours out of the Cities on a two-lane highway when a dump truck came roaring down the highway in the opposite direction. Just before it passed us, a stone slightly bigger than a golf-ball came off the back of the truck and right at our car. It hit the windshield with a loud *CRACK* and placed a bullseye pattern about four inches in diameter right in the middle of the windshield. The crack was mostly hidden from the driver by the mirror, but it was obvious that we would have to get the windshield replaced.

Fortunately, we made it to Watertown without any further car-related mishaps. Once there, we helped my parents pick the apples off their apple tree, which yielded about five grocery bags full of apples.

On Sunday, we went out to the Dakota Sioux Casino for breakfast. It was supposed to be brunch, but I figure that if you eat brunch early enough in the morning, and follow it with a meal around lunchtime, that you can call it breakfast.

My father, Sarah, and I went out to a Game Fish and Parks shooting range in the early afternoon to give our .22 rifles some exercise. We brought along all the accoutrements you might expect: tin cans, paper targets, and (Sarah’s good idea) rotten apples. For an hour or so we happily plinked away at those makeshift targets and a good time was had by all. The apples were especially fun to shoot as they often exploded quite satisfactorily if you shot them just right.

Today we dropped almost $400 to get the windshield of the Avalon replaced. Our auto insurance deductible is conveniently $500, so we got to eat the entire cost ourselves. We’ve owned the car a bit over 18 months and it has been rear-ended twice and now has a new windshield. I like the car but I’m starting to wonder if it isn’t snakebitten.

Sarah made applesauce yesterday from the bag of apples that we brought back from my parents’ house. She didn’t process the whole bag, but maybe two-thirds of it. In the end, she ended up with three jars of very attractive looking pink apple sauce.

A couple of weeks ago Dalla was swarmed by bees while she and I were out for a walk. She ended up with multiple stings that bothered her for a day or so. For two weeks after that I didn’t take her near the area where the attack started because I didn’t want it to happen again. Since then, however, we’ve walked by the area, on the other side of the street, and everything appears to be normal.