Orel Family

10:42pm, May 10, 2024: The Northern Lights over Silver Lake near Pinckney Recreation Area I'll keep this one simple. I saw the Northern Lights! Aurora Borealis! Barely a month after witnessing a total solar eclipse in Ohio , I got to witness something that is rarely seen in Southern Michigan. Twice! Night 1: May 10, 2024 For the eclipse, of course we all knew years in advance that it was coming. For this... it was on the local weather report Thursday night. We were panning to get Ezra in Ann Arbor for dinner. At 2:55pm I texted, "Northern Lights might be visible tonight. Want to try?" Just like that. 10:50pm, May 10, 2024: The Northern Lights over Silver Lake near Pinckney Recreation Area Finding a dark spot was going to be the challenge. We drove to Chelsea, but the place we tried was too bright. So onwards to Pinckney Recreation Area . At 10:23pm, I received a text from my friend Kim: "It's out. Just get out of car." I was on a dirt road in the middle of n...

a local reminder about voters' rights Four years ago, as I walked to my local precinct to vote, I took a picture of the path. My premonition was that the election would not turn out the way most polls were predicting, and I just wanted one peaceful snapshot before things started to change. The next day, I wrote a blog post on my election thoughts, using the title from a Bruce Springsteen song. I called the post, "A Really Long Walk Home." This year, I had no such premonitions, and now that the results are in, and in light of the national direction over the past 46 months, I suppose I could have written a follow-up called, "An Even Longer Walk Home." But my own vantage point has changed in way I couldn't have predicted in 2016. Last year our township clerk contacted me to ask if I might be interested in being an Election Inspector in the November 2019 election. Lori's been working elections for years, and eventually I said "yes."  In March, I si...

Bob Seger at Pine Knob, June 19, 2019 Bob Seger lives across the other side of the school district . Our kids went to the same public high school . Our kids played in the West Bloomfield High School Marching Band , and we were both active in the Band Boosters Association, separated by a couple of years. And... ok, there's no "and." We live in different zip codes. One summer afternoon, Lori and I visited friends who have a home on Upper Straits Lake and went kayaking. Almost immediately, we saw an immense mansion on the right. "What's that ???" "Oh, that's Bob Seger's new house." But Bob remains a Michigan man, and there's a strong "he's one of us" feeling to many people who grew up here. But in all this time living in the area, the only time I'd had a full concert with Seger was when we just happened to be seated directly behind him at a Bob Dylan concert in 2007. I'd seen him perform just once, a rendition ...

Our Maple Tree -- what's left of it after an ice storm -- bloomed. Michigan, February 22. The old saying is that, if a frog is put in to a pot of boiling water, it will immediately jump out. But if the frog is put in to a pot of cold water, and the water is heated only gradually, the frog will sit there, unaware of the danger until it is too late. The metaphor is so obvious that Al Gore used it in An Inconvenient Truth , more than a decade ago. So here we are. Te GISS data shows that, for the 3rd consecutive year, we had the warmest year since the start of record-keeping in 1880. In January, I wrote , "It took a little longer than I expected, but the final numbers for 2016 were finally posted today. As expected, 2015 is the warmest year on record. As expected, December was warm. Very warm. December is now the warmest month ever, compared to average." By the end of March, December 2015 was only the 4th warmest month ever. But I also wrote, in that piece: "...

Graph 1: Ascending: The global temperatures of my life. (data source: GISS) January 9, 2016:  Last January, I posted a piece I titled, "Just a Little Bit Warmer," just after NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) released the final piece of data for 2014 global temperatures. As expected, the data showed that 2014 was the hottest year since the beginning of record keeping in 1980, albeit by a very small margin. In a few days, GISS will publish the final data for 2015. Once again, it'll be a new record. This time, by a wide margin. The data will be at  http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/tabledata_v3/GLB.Ts+dSST.txt . In October, the Global Land-Ocean Temperature Index crossed 1 full degree celsius above normal, for the first time ever. November became the 2nd month in a row above that mark, and December may well make it 3 consecutive. 2015 will also mark the 4th consecutive year of rising global temperatures; the last time that happened was 100 ...

A few weeks ago, The Detroit Jewish News published its annual "Cap and Gown" issue. This issue has a section with the names and faces of all area students who sent their information to the newspaper; generally, this consisted of the high school name, some information about their activities in high school, and what they're doing next. Although the list is by no means comprehensive -- many families may not subscribe to the paper or, like us, may simply have forgotten -- it seemed to me to provide an interesting slice of the local community. Between the listings in The Jewish News and a handful whose information I have because we know the families, I found I had records for 283 students. Of these, 20 have not listed a college, either because they listed only a gap year in Israel, or because they listed themselves as "undecided." I decided to take a look at the other 263. Of the 263 students with a listed decision, 99% are headed off to a 4-year (or more) college...

Graph 1: Ascending: The global temperatures of my life. (data source: GISS) Last Friday, NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) released the final piece of data for 2014 global temperatures. The numbers are published in several places, and the newspapers pick them up almost instantly, but the page I've always used is  http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/tabledata_v3/GLB.Ts+dSST.txt . It's a simple text page, and NASA's been using the same address for it since at least the 1990s. Sometime around the middle of each month, they just add another number, showing the final data for the prior month. And then I can look for myself, as is my preference. I follow the data pretty closely, so I already knew that May had been the warmest May since the beginning of record keeping in 1880. I also knew that 2014 set new records in August and September, too. I knew that, when looking at records, even monthly records, it's pointless to look further back than 1998. And...

For the ninth consecutive year, Aaron and I rode in the annual Tour de Cure  ride to help support the American Diabetes Association (ADA).  It was the 5th ride for Elianna and Lori. First things first:  We are still accepting donations through the end of June.  The link is:   http://main.diabetes.org/goto/teamorel We may have a date conflict next year, so this ride may be our last for a while. So I am posting some pictures of our rides over these past 9 years... Aaron during the first ride, in 2005 At a rest stop in 2006. Elianna was still using the bike in 2012. On the ride, in 2007 2008: Prepared to leave 2009: The first full family ride, and the last at Island Lake. 2010: Aaron and Elianna at Brighton High School before the ride Lori and Elianna during the 2011 ride. Before the start of the 2012 Tour de Cure 2013: At a rest stop. Aaron says he wants to go 62 miles next year. 2013: After the ride. We've gone from 7 mile rides to 15 to 25, ...

This past Friday evening at a recording studio in Birmingham, about 50 people gathered to witness Stewart Francke and his band record a DVD. The invitees included those who had contributed to a kickstarter campaign for Stewart's excellent new CD, Love Implied . The session, however, wasn't simply a rehash of the album tracks, but a bit of a career retrospective. Spanning two full sets at 23 songs, it included several that I had never seen him play before; songs that hopefully will have some listeners checking out some of his earlier work. While the main focus of the set was on tracks from Stewart's last 3 albums ( What We Talk Of...When We Talk , Heartless World , and Love Implied ), a key highlight was a rare performance of a composition that predated those albums: Letter From 10 Green , written as a letter to his children when Stewart was a patient at Karmanos Cancer Center, at a time when he didn't know if he would live to return home. It is difficult and person...

March 23, 2012: Extreme heat caused cherry trees to bloom a full month early, dooming the crop. In March 26, 2012, I wrote a blog piece titled, Cooked and frozen - the looming disaster for our tree fruit.   Due to a ridiculously warm March and the near inevitability that temperatures would return to normal, I could foresee the impact: "Tomorrow evening, the low temperature here is predicted to be 28 degrees. Assuming that prediction -- or another one for later in the week -- is accurate, our cherry crop will be wiped out. We have no rational or affordable defenses against it." Sure enough, a frost on March 27th -- it got down to 27 degrees here -- wiped out the cherry crop. What a difference this year! Oh, we've had freezes. 10 of the last 11 nights, including three that were colder than that coldest evening last year. But we haven't been outside to run water to the trees. Haven't even looked. Because this year, the trees haven't bloomed. The hollyhocks ...

I Played the Fool The first time I saw Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes , I hadn't yet seen my first Springsteen concert. It was May, 1980, I was a high school senior in New Jersey, and the Great Adventure Amusement Park had an event called "senior night" aimed at us on warm Friday evening. Mt. St. Helens had recently erupted , and as the volcanic ash drifted eastward we'd get glorious sunsets unlike anything we'd ever seen. After school that day we wedged many of us in to two small cars and headed down the New Jersey Turnpike to exit 7A, and eventually to the amphitheater, which was basically a round concrete slab with a stage on one side. Southside performed 3 shows that evening, though we went only to the first. The band featured the famed horns, as well as "The Girls," decked out in spandex suits. So I can say that I saw Patti Scialfa perform live before I saw Bruce Springsteen perform live. That first show, I couldn't even persuade...

The late, lamented Michigan Schedule 2 Over the weekend, I finally sat down with my documents and TurboTax, and settled in to my 2012 taxes. It's still a bit early for me, as I don't have all of my documents yet, but I wanted to get a sense of where I'd be this year. I finished the Federal taxes, leaving gaps for the unreceived documents. Then I got to Michigan. I completed the 1040 and Schedule 1, and went to fill out Schedule 2. That's my favorite. It's where the "Nonrefundable credits" are. For many years, Michigan has had a "different" tax system. Michigan didn't mimic Federal taxes for deductions, Michigan ignored most of those while giving direct credits for select favored items. The credit was 50% of a donation, up to a modest limit, for gifts to Michigan colleges or universities, Michigan public broadcasting stations, homeless shelters, and a few other select recipients. For 2011, my nonrefundable credits totalled $361. For 20...