Gigs, trapnets in Lake Erie, and international travel rants
Kim Goodman and I play a wedding at the Graystone Wine Cellar on Saturday. I'm not such a fan of wedding gigs, but I've never been to Graystone and am keen to see it.
On Sunday, I'll be playing solo (rather casually) at The Santa Maria's Navigation Day festival. I'll be there 1-5 pm and don't yet know if anybody will help me in this effort, so I expect my approach to performance will be especially casual.
I won't go into too much detail, but many of Ohio's commercial fishermen were indicted (with many convicted and a few more hearings pending) of harvesting yellow perch over their quotas and racketeering to process the illegal catches. I'm a little torn by friendships in the Ohio Department of Natural Resources-Division of Wildlife (ODW) fighting to buy out all commercial fishing interests on Lake Erie, a desire to support legal commercial fishing as a potentially useful management tool and constituency of Ohio Sea Grant, and my presidency of the Ohio Chapter of the American Fisheries Society (most OCAFS membership is ODW biologists, but several commercial fishers and their associates suddenly sent in their dues, I'm certain with the intent to vote down a badly written resolution against commercial fishing that we tabled at the winter meeting). There has been much heated discussion. I'm trying to be the peacekeeper, but thinking of hiring bodyguards for the OCAFS meeting later this month. Next week, our Sea Grant staff is meeting with ODW management to discuss the situation.
I'm off to Costa Rica for a 2-week workshop in October. In applying for a passport, my birth certificate is shipped off to the Department of State (I didn't realize it would need to be shipped out of the post office where the application materials were submitted). Well, we're on our way to Ontario in just over a week for vacation and need an official copy of my birth certificate to cross the border. Of course, it takes about 2-3 weeks to mail another official copy. It's a good thing I live here in Columbus because I need to pick up a copy in person (a ca. 0.5-hr wait) at Ohio's Office of Vital Statistics.
By 2008, the US expects all travelers to Canada to carry a passport. For a family of four on a relatively cheap fishing trip in a place that's relatively remote to tourist destinations, that represents an increase in travel expense of almost 50%! Frankly, I suspect this requirement is as much to artificially inflate demand for a government "product" as it is to protect our borders from evil.
On Sunday, I'll be playing solo (rather casually) at The Santa Maria's Navigation Day festival. I'll be there 1-5 pm and don't yet know if anybody will help me in this effort, so I expect my approach to performance will be especially casual.
I won't go into too much detail, but many of Ohio's commercial fishermen were indicted (with many convicted and a few more hearings pending) of harvesting yellow perch over their quotas and racketeering to process the illegal catches. I'm a little torn by friendships in the Ohio Department of Natural Resources-Division of Wildlife (ODW) fighting to buy out all commercial fishing interests on Lake Erie, a desire to support legal commercial fishing as a potentially useful management tool and constituency of Ohio Sea Grant, and my presidency of the Ohio Chapter of the American Fisheries Society (most OCAFS membership is ODW biologists, but several commercial fishers and their associates suddenly sent in their dues, I'm certain with the intent to vote down a badly written resolution against commercial fishing that we tabled at the winter meeting). There has been much heated discussion. I'm trying to be the peacekeeper, but thinking of hiring bodyguards for the OCAFS meeting later this month. Next week, our Sea Grant staff is meeting with ODW management to discuss the situation.
I'm off to Costa Rica for a 2-week workshop in October. In applying for a passport, my birth certificate is shipped off to the Department of State (I didn't realize it would need to be shipped out of the post office where the application materials were submitted). Well, we're on our way to Ontario in just over a week for vacation and need an official copy of my birth certificate to cross the border. Of course, it takes about 2-3 weeks to mail another official copy. It's a good thing I live here in Columbus because I need to pick up a copy in person (a ca. 0.5-hr wait) at Ohio's Office of Vital Statistics.
By 2008, the US expects all travelers to Canada to carry a passport. For a family of four on a relatively cheap fishing trip in a place that's relatively remote to tourist destinations, that represents an increase in travel expense of almost 50%! Frankly, I suspect this requirement is as much to artificially inflate demand for a government "product" as it is to protect our borders from evil.