Ireland Revisited: Prologue

View from our hotel window: two planes departing from San Francisco International Airport.

One year ago today, Diane and I left home on our way back to Ireland, but we didn't leave Northern California that day. We stayed the night of Monday, August 2nd, 2010 in a hotel near the San Francisco airport, thinking that we would be more rested for the long flights to Dublin that way. That was probably true, but we were both so excited that neither of us slept much that night, anyway.

What follows for the next five weeks in this blog will be short, day-by-day accounts of our second trip to Ireland on the one-year anniversary of the days -- or at least that's my intent. Despite having had a year to prepare for this exercise, I haven't written out the posts ahead of time, so the project might morph a bit as we go on.

Destination: the Bothy, Birr Castle Demesne.

My main hope for these blog entries is that they provide context for photos from the trip that will appear over on sharrington.net, as a similar project did a year after our first trip. Those photos will start to appear on August 4th, but each entry here will have a picture or several, too, as this one does.

The Ft. Harrington pickup, waiting to be picked up in the hotel parking lot. Adam and Lynda met us at the hotel to say good-bye and for Adam to take command of the Dodge. (Viewed in a larger size by clicking on the photo you can read the stickers: Offaly and Tipperary, the two Irish counties in which parts of Birr Castle Demesne lie.)

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A HUGE THANK-YOU

Regular readers of this blog know that we live in a place that isn't exactly easy to care for or, for newbies, to get to. It is inhabited by more animals than is reasonable unless you're in a business that requires them, like farming or chicken-racing. It requires a lot of work just to keep the rain forest from taking over, let alone keep "clean," a word I seem to remember meaning something other than what it does after a dozen years of living in Fort Harrington.

It is, in short, a hard place to take care of.

It's especially hard to take care of it if it's not where you live, is two hours or more from your home and your spouse, and is not set up properly for you to do what you need to do for a living (say, for example, has no suitable studio space but does have a dog that barks at random times, both of which can be a hindrance if you're in the voiceover business.)

Adam in Ft. Harrington

Thank you, Adam Harrington. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

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Next: August 3, 2010 -- The return begins.

Happy Birthday, Adam!

Christmas, 1972. We both look a little different now.

Happy birthday, Adam! You're 41 now, the biggest such number a son of mine has ever had. Keep 'em coming.

I'm proud of you, you know. But I hope you also know that's just a bonus, not something necessary.

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(Happy birthday also to Jax, Red, Sugar, Bratty, Goldie, and Sir Paul.)
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Two Days in May

Spanning four generations: Adam Harrington, Grace Harrington, Calvin Murphy.

We had an all-too-rare happy circumstance at Ft. Harrington this weekend: a visit from part of the Atlanta branch of the family tree.

My late mother's youngest brother, Calvin, and my cousin Edith's husband, Joe, came by for an afternoon and evening as part of a two-week swing through California. They arrived here after a four-day culinary tour of San Francisco -- but we fed them anyway -- organized by the Road Scholar (formerly Elderhostel) organization. The next day, they were on their way to Southern California for more action.

Their visit to Boulder Creek was on a Friday, but Grace's teacher let her skip school for the day to come meet her great-great-uncle Calvin, and her Uncle Adam (being his own boss) provided her ride from the East Bay.

The memories and the laughter flowed abundantly, and Grace had the grace (young lady that she's becoming) to listen attentively and smile a lot. She also impressed me with some astronomy that she's been learning, not just of the memorizing factoids kind, but that's a topic for a different time -- the point here is that she's fast becoming perceptive as well as smart, and that served her well on Friday.

In a neat small-world coincidence, a very longtime close friend of Joe's -- childhood and college -- lives in Boulder Creek, so he was invited to the gathering, too. He and Joe spun some pretty good reminiscences about their college days in Southern California (including one from Joe's job as a meat delivery boy involving Ronald Reagan and Jane Wyman). Their longtime connections to film and tv production had us all fascinated, but Adam especially so given his profession as a voice actor.

Clockwise from left: Joe, Diane, Calvin, and Dick enjoy the spaniels. If you click on this and view at a larger size, you'll see Kelsey's butt in the background as he watches Adam's posterior go up the walkway toward the gate to the road. Kelsey loves company, and is distressed when any seems to be leaving.

At some point in the late afternoon, one of our three guests -- I don't remember if it was Calvin, Joe, or Joe's friend Dick -- remarked on how rapidly the light changes here in the fort because of the surrounding tall sequoias. I woke early the next morning, just before sunrise, and that remark came back to me. That day, Saturday, was to be clear after the morning fog dissipated, so I decided to set up the camera to try my hand at a time-lapse through the day to see exactly how the light's patterns marched across at least part of the yard.

View of the time-lapser from the front (and the boy spaniel from the rear.)

I set up the tripod and camera to capture a view generally northward from one corner of the house toward the little rose garden with some of our redwoods providing backdrop. I set the camera's computer to take one exposure every two minutes and set the process in motion at 6:15am. I stopped the series when the fog started to come back in at 7:11, 390 photos later.

The result surprised and tickled me for the most part. The one disappointment was that I had selected too shaded an area for the exposure meter to monitor, so some of the foreground during midday is badly overexposed. One thing that I thought would be disappointing turned out to be an advantage: the wind picked up during the day, and I thought that would make leaves and branches move around too much from frame to frame. Turns out, on viewing, that was a big plus -- the trees and bushes appear to be dancing through the day.

View of the time-lapser from the rear.

The surprise was the four chickens. I knew they moved around during the day, but had never paid much attention to just how active they are. Lucky for us, they spent a lot of this particular day in the camera's field of view, rather than in any number of other places in the fort where they wouldn't have been seen.

View through the time-lapser.

You can view the result in the little box below here, of course, but it's really better viewed at higher resolution -- 720 or 1080p if your connection and patience will allow such a large download -- and in full-screen mode. If you don't, there's a lot of little detail trying to flash at you that you might miss, like this, for example:

Small detail, cropped from one of the time-lapse frames.

How ever you view it, watch it all the way to the end (it's only about three and a half minutes long.) The background still photo behind the music credit is worth the wait.

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Monsters of Accordion Death-Metal

Recent work by Adam "That's-My-Boy" Harrington

In-game "radio ads" from Test Drive Unlimited 2:

... and a brief gig as God in the web-cartoon EddEgg:

Mustsee Teevee

Adam after a hard day's work on the set. The blood and the tats are fake, but the pride is real.

Tomorrow night (Tuesday, December 28th) is the debut of my boy's first-ever featured role on a TV program. He plays the villain-of-the-week on an episode of I (Almost) Got Away With It titled "Got to Fetch a Hooker."

Details:
Investigation Discovery ("ID") channel
10pm Eastern, 7 and 10pm Pacific

ID is one of the Discovery suite of cable channels. (Click here to see if your tv provider carries it and, if so, on what channel.) If you don't have ID as an option, the episode will run later on the main Discovery channel and will be available for download within a couple of days on Amazon and iTunes for two bucks.

I make absolutely no guarantees concerning program quality, since I've never seen an episode of the program -- but you can bet that I'll be riveted to the one tomorrow.

Late November Clan Subset Gathering

(Note: this post was composed using Microsoft's "Live Writer," which I don't think I'm going to use again.)

A subset of the extended clan gathered at Ft. Harrington on Thanksgiving (US variety) weekend to indulge in non-turkey feasting – and to gather up presents from Ireland that somehow had not yet been distributed.

Dessert Time. Clockwise from left: Grace, Andrew, Lynda, Adam, Gisella, Ryan (behind his mom), Mrs. Fort. Grace’s mom, Adrianne, had to leave before chow time.

Lasagna, salad, garlic bread (yummily not turkey, which all of us had over-ingested in other places the previous Thursday) followed by two kinds of pie: apple and pumpkin (pies accompanied by an ice cream option, of course) – Diane put on her usual fare with country flair.

Adam and Gisella, closer-up.

Gisella is Lynda’s daughter Jamie’s little girl, which makes her Adam’s step-granddaughter.

Which makes her my step-great-granddaughter!

Ryan and his hat from Donegal.

Ryan took an afternoon off from his waiter’s gig – and from studying for his EMT course. (If all goes well, he should be licensed for the latter by early next year.) He couldn’t bring the lovely Casey with him this time, but we all were thinking of her.

Adam and Grace with their Irish souvenirs. Note old Kelsey-the-Dog in the lower-right.

“My dad went to Ireland and all I got was this rugby shirt.”

Adam’s shirt – identifiably Irish by three discreet shamrocks about where Grace’s wrist is – came from Kenmare as did Grace’s cap. Her necklace is from Mullingar, as is a belt-watch for Andrew (which can’t be seen in the picture below.)

Andrew with Emma

Grace and her mom compare knit goods. The champagne flute is also from Mullingar.

In the above picture, Adrianne is not wearing a significant new piece of jewelry that she recently acquired: an engagement ring! She and her Ryan (“her” to distinguish from Diane’s Ryan) will marry in May or June.

Grace models her new bling. Notice Emma-the-Spaniel in the lower-left: she still absolutely adores Grace, and is never more than a few feet from the girl whenever she visits.

Now eight years old, Grace has developed a wide variety of facial expressions and uses them to great effect.

Grace and old Fonzie.

After the ruckus

Once the leftover containers had been filled and taken, after the last hug and kiss good-bye of the evening was done, the various animals in the Ft. Harrington menagerie had a variety of different reactions. Extremes of that spectrum are shown here. Jax, bred as Cavalier King Charles Spaniels are to be sociable and intoxicated by children, was exhausted, collapsed on his pile of pillows on the couch, and was dead to the world for hours. Finn McCool, on the other hand, still not comfortable with people he doesn’t know, hid under the bed all day, so when everyone left he was wound up, energized, and ready to rock and roll! If this were a video, you’d see his tail whipping back and forth.

I hope you all had a pleasant Thanksgiving weekend, too – and, from all of us at Ft. Harrington of any number of feet, we wish you a warm and happy holiday season ahead!

Gone Fishin' -- Back in About a Hundred Days

The residents of Ft. Harrington have a very, very busy three months ahead of us, including a lengthy return to our favorite island for some research and some relaxation, but also including some frantic times at school as we approach the fiscal year's end in a continuing sense of impending financial Armageddon. I am thus closing down most of my online activities until school starts back up in the Fall. (The wags among you, looking over the infrequent posts here this year, will be tempted to say that it's been closed down for quite a while, anyway. Don't -- or I'll send my tough-guy son after you.)

Tough-guy son. He will be assisted by the ferocious Kelsey and the bloodthirsty spaniels for the five weeks we're gone, so don't even think about trying to rob the joint then. Best plan on doing that while we're actually here.

We all -- humans and four-feet -- hope you have a great, great summer... and that you haven't completely forgotten about us come mid-September.

Newsflash: Astronomers' Spawn Do Cool Things

If you live long enough, you're certain to rub shoulders from time to time with some pretty remarkable people. If you live even longer than that, you've got a good chance to encounter remarkable children of those remarkable people.

I'm lucky enough to work side-by-side with Karl von Ahnen, the technical director of the planetarium in which I teach my classes. Karl is worth an entire blog post all by himself... but this one won't be about him.

It will be about recent works by his son, and by mine.

Karl's son, Garth, recently graduated from the University of California, Santa Cruz campus, with a major in fine arts and a minor in astronomy. He combines the two fields in animations, and one in particular will strike a chord with long-time readers of this blog. Called "Arcada Fog," it is a romp through the Copernican revolution.

Garth
(Photo from Garth's Facebook page)

The animation's central and unifying figure is Tycho's moose. The music is by a group of Garth's college buddies, "Acid Westerns," who are just now embarking on a career. I really, really like their soundtrack for Garth's trip through our most colossal paradigm shift. Turn the sound up, if you can, for the treat:



My own boy, Adam, has a career in voice acting that seems right now to be on the first stages of an exponential launch. As the economy recovers, his gigs increase -- but it's more than that. His abilities and opportunities seem to be revving up like some of us remember a Saturn V's engines did before the huge clamps on the pad let go. He has worked hard for the ignition, and that alone is worthy of my salute.

But listen to this, in the context of its delivery -- W.E. Henley's most famous work delivered in an environment he couldn't have dreamt -- and turn the sound up. Don't bother trying to maximize the video window -- it will eventually do that all by itself. And, as Adam says, you'll have to "watch it all the way through to appreciate the incredible effects."

Shivers.

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Oh, Shoot!

... Photoshoot, that is.

Adam C. Harrington

My son, Adam, is represented in his career as a voice actor by a major talent agency. The agency has a website that, for reasons that I might discuss later in this blog, appears to have been designed to drive visitors, clients, fans, or anybody else far, far away.

Adam @ work.

But they want photos of him now. Of course, they won't pony up for an actual photographer, so they get me instead. (This is a national, big-time agency, folks. You wouldn't know it.)

Part of the reason for wanting photos is that they want to market him for on-screen gigs. He has had a few of those before -- in-house training videos for large companies, mostly -- always as a "heavy," a bad guy.

Heavy heavy. Yes, those arms are real, inherited in part from Art Harrington.

So, last weekend, we got together for some amateur glam-snapping. Here are some out-snaps:

Looks like he's auditioning to fill a vacancy in U2, doesn't he?

Pony tail liberated. Adam says of this shot, "I liked this one at first, but the more I look at it the more I look like a serial killer trying not to look like a serial killer. 'Could you help me move this couch into my van? Mind going in first?'"

The photographer, setting up framing. The camera's remote control is in my right hand, just offscreen.

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Some Glimpses of Christmastime, 2009

(Note: If you're not family, then this is probably too many snapshots to be of much interest. If you are family, it's probably not enough.)

Guinness observes the tree. Mrs. Fort did her annual wonderful job decorating the living room and kitchen with all manner of warmth for the season. (Speaking of Mrs. Fort, she doesn't much like the way I doctored this image in Photoshop, and you might agree with her if you look at this comparison of the pre- and post-alteration versions.)

Like last year, this year's big gathering was on Christmas Eve at Adrianne and Grace's (and now Adrianne's new fella Ryan's) home. Many more photos from that fete will show up in the album, but I particularly like this one (taken by Adam) because it shows her dad Pat and her brother Corey in the background. Wish you could taste the hors d'oeuvres on the tray.

Grace (left) and her friend Danielle serenaded us with Christmas carols...

... and Grace unintentionally channeled her father, who was also known to do the hair thing while performing:

Doug, performing with Defiance about a quarter of a century ago, complete with flying V and flying hair. (Photos of Grace and Danielle by Adam; photos of Doug courtesy of Jim Adams and Defiance.)

Adams: Jim A. at left, A. Harrington at right. Jim, Mike Kaufmann, and a renewed Defiance recently released their first new album in a while, The Prophecy, which includes a number of tracks written by Doug in his last months.

Diane and I had a leisurely Christmas morning to ourselves -- or as "to ourselves" as anyone ever is in a house with five cats and three dogs. Old Kelsey, a veteran now of a dozen Christmases, waited patiently by the tree for us to use our opposable thumbs to liberate the colorful paper and bows from whatever boring things they were wrapped around.

Fonzie and Cooper spy a brand-new cat-teaser being opened.

Sometimes you play with the toy...

...and sometimes the toy plays with you. Cooper's big, but not especially quick.

Emma asks us to please notice that the floor next to her has no toys or snacks on it because...

... her bratty brother stole them all. Notice that he has also filched a catnip mouse, even. There's a reason he's called "The Prince of All-Mine" around here. (It's actually not such a wonderful personality trait, resource hoarding, and one we have to continually discourage.)

Cooper, in the process of recovering his dignity.

Hope you had a marvelous few days, too! See you in 2010.

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If You Need a Short Break from Jingling Bells...

... here are three short diversions from Adam, Uncle Bob, and me that have nothing to do with the holidays:






(Click on the last picture to be taken to a short gallery of photos -- again, having nothing to do with sleighs or egg nog.)

Okay, now we can all get back to joy and so on. Merry Christmas!

Farflung. Family. Freaky.

Everybody's got a family somewhere. Everybody's family is a hiccup in the flow of ordinality. There's normal, and then there's "us", and that dichotomy applies to all of us, always, especially here in the blogosphere.

Here's the most recent salvo in the "we're weirder than you are" contest: another short, masterful video clip from Adam's Uncle Bob:

The above video clip is another in Adam's Uncle Bob's continuing series of alternate-sensibility visuals, some of which have been highlighted here on SherWords before. What makes this one notable for SherWords is the collection of talent: Adam's faux-lingo background, cousin Bill's growling guitar, and, especially, Reva's smooth voice make this a multi-generational and cross-lineage collection that should help braid disparate genetic threads together.

And it's really, really cool, too.

To Adam, for Adam

I don't know where it was that I first heard of Red Molly. Maybe it was in a comments stream from Chocolatepoint on Flickr, or maybe somewhere on Facebook.

Wherever it was, the reference led me to "May I Suggest," which is a poem with music that I would have written to my son Adam, were I smarter than I am. It is appropriate in more ways than I want to make explicit, but I can say that the "seven generations" and the "from the west" parts are exquisitely in harmony with what I feel.

Adam is making sacrifices in his personal life now for people who may or may not appreciate his efforts. I want him to know that somebody appreciates it, in a very, very big way, and this song sings that vision, too: his efforts are, ultimately, beneficial to him as well, and in part make this "the best part of [his] life."

Enjoy:




More Red Molly, this time from an appearance at a small branch library, covering Nanci Griffith -- God, I hope these women hit the big time like they should; they are as good as the Indigo Girls or the Story were, as far as I am concerned:

New (to SherWords) from ACH and AGH

New (to here) from ACH
(Adam Charles Harrington)

Man at Work

Adam's Uncle Dick, his mother's oldest brother, trained hunting dogs in Minnesota for the last several years of his life. In fact, Dick died little more than a year ago (of a heart attack) while doing what he loved: hunting with his dogs.

Last month, Adam came across a recording of a radio ad that he did for his Uncle Dick several years ago, and it's remarkable for a couple of reasons. First, it's one of Adam's first commercials, but, second, his "co-star" is none other than Adam's late brother, Doug. You can hear it by clicking here. Doug is the straight man; Adam is in character.

As long as I'm in bragging mode for my boy, here are a few more references:

His longtime mentor, Susan McCollum, touted his work after her training in her October newsletter thusly: And once again, Adam Harrington leads the pack with work On EA's Ironman 2, numerous sessions for Lucas's "Monkey Island", characters for both "Assasins Creed" and "Shattered Horizons" for Emeryville's SomaTone and "Infinite Space" for WebTone. My boy's almost 40, and finally he's a teacher's pet! More seriously, Susan is a very fine and highly-respected voice actor and teacher, so her praise is significant. Her website can be seen by clicking here.

Voice acting sometimes requires patience and forbearance when auditioning -- especially when the voiceover artist recognizes that what he's reading is flamingly horribly written. Here's a four-minute audition for Celebrity Cruises that Adam sent in without listening to the product all the way to the end. His brief critique at the end is priceless: Adam says, "Here's why one should always, ALWAYS listen back before one sends an audition in. Don't bother listening to the whole (four effing minute long) audition. Just skip to the very end." Not surprisingly, he didn't get the gig.

[Note added post-production: You know what? You really do have to listen to the whole four minutes to enjoy the fraction of a second at the end appropriately. My boy soldiers on beyond any reasonable expectation until then, and the longer it goes, the more impressive his achievement in soldiering on is. I was about to split a gut even before the ending.]

Voice acting doesn't always go smoothly, even for simple, short items. When I do that sort of thing in lecture, I usually look over the tops of my glasses at the students and say, "Can you believe that they pay me to talk?"

New (to here) from AGH
(Arthur George Harrington)

After a two-month gap, Satchel of Ordinary Treasure is active again, this time with another set of short reminiscences from my grandfather (and Adam's great-grandfather) Arthur G. Harrington.

Art Harrington in 1946; the hand on his shoulder is his daughter Mary's. A startling realization for me while typing this very caption: Art is only ten years older in this picture than I am now. Holy smokes!

My grandfather's stories were transcribed near the end of his life by his eldest surviving daughter, Mary, who also cared for him day and night for the last few of his 80 years. Mary was a spinster (to use a painfully quaint word) and a talented teacher and writer in her own right, so she almost naturally kept notes on the old man's stories, and typed them up in a compilation called "Tales Told by your Grandfather Arthur George Harrington 1874 - 1954," which she distributed to Arthur's dozen or so grandchildren in the mid-1970's.

The booklet consists of photocopied small pages of typewritten text, with numerous hand-corrections and alterations which make it unsuitable for OCR (optical character recognition) scanning software, so entries in Satchel from it have to be hand transcribed via keyboard. That turns out to have been a blessing in an unexpected way.

The old man died when I was only seven years old. My only direct memories of him are dim ones of a mammoth, almost immobile, old man, and of a scent that seemed to evoke darkness and musty places. When Aunt Mary first distributed his little book of stories, I was in my twenties and full of myself -- I read them, sure, but they didn't seem like much to me then, busy as I was with misguiding my own life. So I put the little book away, and didn't look at again for years.

But an interesting thing has happened as a result of my having to key in each letter of his stories now. He has changed in my mind's eye from being an old, enfeebled mountain of a man, or even from being a name in a genealogy, to something progressively more human. As I feel like I have spent more time with him (because I have!), his name has changed for me from "Arthur G. Harrington" to "Art."

Art is a guy I think of now as a friend, someone I'd be very comfortable with at a bar after our workday on the machine gang or at the trolley barn was over, having a couple of beers and swapping mundane stories before heading home. And Art is a guy I'd like to have on my side.

It's a one-way street, of course: I can hear Art's stories, and thump my hand on the bar as I laugh, but he can't hear mine or Adam's. I have confidence that he would like ours, though, every confidence in the world.

Click here for Art's latest clutch of after-work stories. Don't get your expectations up for great literature or side-splitting comedy. Just have a little bowl of peanuts handy to munch on, and think of what you'd offer in riposte.

Oh, My Poor Son, He Has...

... very odd people on both sides of his family tree. Entertaining, but odd.

His uncle, Bob Kroeger, probably fits both adjectives. Bob is one of the most interesting people I have met in my life, and I met him a long time ago. Bob is the youngest brother of Adam's late mom, Mary, and I taught him his first guitar chords in his family's basement in 1965 or thereabouts.

After that, Bob went on to graduate from the Berklee College of Music and to a career in... oh, gosh, lots of stuff. He is the only professional croquet player I know, for example, and his audio and visual creations are not famous only because we (as a civilization) haven't come up with neat verbal tags within which to categorize them.

Which leads to this blog entry: three collaborations between Bob and two of his nephews, Adam and Bill (Bill is the older son of Bob's late brother, the eldest of the Kroeger siblings, Dick.) Adam provides some of the voiceovers, Bill works guitar, and Bob provides absolutely everything -- concept, music composition, and sense of disconnect from every frame of reference we ordinary people depend on.

WARNING: These videos are completely safe for work in the traditional sense: no pr0n. On the other hand, they may be NSFW if anybody looking over your shoulder thinks that your sanity is suspect.

ADDITIONAL WARNING: Not everybody "gets" this stuff. If you don't get it -- if you think it's just precious self-congratulatory vapidity -- well, okay. You're probably not alone.

But I'm not with you. Or maybe I will be as soon as I stop giggling. In about 2039 or so.

Movie Trailer
Concept: Bob Kroeger
Music: Bob Kroeger
Guitar: Bill Kroeger
Voices: Adam Harrington, Bob Kroeger

Tank Farms
Concept: Bob Kroeger
Voice: Adam Harrington

Pumps on Spools
Concept: Bob Kroeger
Voices: Bob Kroeger, Adam Harrington

Bob Kroeger, Christmas 1966, with his very, very young nephew, Doug. Amherst, Massachusetts.

Bob Practicing his Craft:


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Voiceover Hornets' Nest?

As most readers of this blog know, my son Adam is a voice actor. Also, most (but not entirely all) readers of this blog are familiar with Matt Groening's Futurama animated series.

Here's the connection: Futurama, having taken a lengthy hiatus from production for tv, is in the works for new episodes. However, there's trouble in labor-land. The studio recently released a statement which said, in part:

" We love the 'Futurama' voice performers and absolutely wanted to use them, but unfortunately, we could not meet their salary demands. While replacing these talented actors will be difficult, the show must go on." (For "these talented actors" you can probably just read "Billy West," who does most of the characters.)

This has stirred up a bit of a firestorm among Futurama's fan base. Click here to see hundreds of comments on the "Can't Get Enough Futurama" website, virtually every one of which is a variation on "if this happens I'll never watch the new episodes, ever," or "Cthulu will devour the loved ones of whoever replaces Bender's voice," or something like that.

At any rate, an audition's an audition, and in these times ya gotta respond to a call. Click on the character image below to hear Adam's audition therefor: