Author: billkralovec

I said goodbye to my brother Andy, who left yesterday morning to return to his home in Chicago. He was instrumental in our home renovation projects. He takes after my father, and he is quite handy with plumbing, electricity, flooring, etc. I learned a lot from him this summer. We spent our last day together flooring the front porch to convert it into my yoga room. He reminds me so much of my father with his mannerisms, voice, etc. He was not adopted like me and my other brother Jimmer, coming as quite a surprise to my parents after they tried to have children for 8 years. They adopted me in 1967 and my brother Jimmer in 1969. My adopted mother gave birth to Andy in 1972.

We installed laminate flooring in the porch. I cut plywood sheets, and our neighbor, Rocko, drilled them to the asbestos siding that was on the left side of the photo above. We are putting in new windows this fall to give it more light and air. The room is not heated, so we probably wouldn’t use it in the winter if we were here, but during the late spring, summer, and early fall, it will be a nice room to do yoga in. I used to sleep in the room as a kid during the summers because our second floor was too hot. We don’t really get hot weather so often, and many of the homes in the Upper Peninsula, especially the older ones, don’t have central air conditioning.

I took the first shower in our new bathroom yesterday. The water pressure was a bit low. Rocko discovered that the occlusion was behind the faucet, and now it works great. I have never been so enthused to take a shower before, but with all the work we put in, it is satisfying to have it done. I am taking a growth mindset to home renovation, and it is fun to learn how things work in a home, and more importantly, how to repair or improve them.

This morning Nadia and I went for a walk on the Apple Blossom Trail in my hometown of Caspian, Michigan. It follows the Iron River, which flows 30 miles through Iron County. The headwaters are southwest of the town of Iron River and flow through Caspian and Gaastra before connecting with the Paint River. The Paint River connects to the Menominee River, which eventually reaches Lake Michigan’s Green Bay. It was such a gorgeous mid-summer morning in the Upper Peninsula.

I am getting back in touch with the lost art of reading during the summer holidays. I am making a conscious effort to calm and focus my mind to think more deeply about subjects. It is getting increasingly harder to do in this manic-information world of scrolling social media, listening to podcasts, bingewatching television shows, etc. It is so soothing to sink into a good book. Young people, especially young men, should be reading novels and longer works of non-fiction more. I am always surprised when I sit down with my morning coffee and reflect on what I took away from a book. I try to incorporate the ideas into my life while also being entertained. I find reading makes my life richer. That is a message schools should be passing to students. I read two more books and as always, I blog on what I learned.

Callan Wink’s “Beartooth” resonated with me because it is a story of blue-collar guys in a small town barely making ends meet. Lots of guys in the Upper Peninsula are in a similar situation to the brothers Thad and Hazen, who are the main characters in the book. Thad and Hazen are freelance lumberjacks who sell firewood to people who live near Yellowstone National Park in Montana. Thad is the older brother and takes care of his younger brother Hazen, who is a bit of a special needs person. They get mixed up with “The Scot”, a shady character who asks them to poach wildlife in the park to sell bear gall bladders and elk antlers on the black market to East Asian customers who believe in their medicinal value. The story details their misadventures doing illegal poaching in the park, which eventually leads to trouble for Hazen.

The story also struck a chord with me because when I am home in Caspian, the memory of my father is ever present. I miss him. I am beginning to play the role he did with me as an adult. I will probably have a longer time with my children as adults than the 18 or so years you get with them as they grow up. I didn’t appreciate enough the calm, wise approach he took to life as a younger man. In Beartooth, the memory of their father drives the boys to do what is right. I hope I have the same effect on Owen and Oliver.

“He said that no matter what happens between and man and a woman, it’s impossible to regret having children. He said that life can pass you by but having a family is how you make positive the passage of time, how you add resonance to your years.” Thad’s father giving him advice on finding a spouse – “Bear-Tooth” by Callan Wink

• Chinook Winds – These are warm, dry winds that hit the eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains in Montana, Wyoming, and Colorado. The general wind patterns come from the west and pick up moisture over the Pacific Ocean and drop precipitation on the western slopes. On the way down the eastern slopes, they are dry and pick up heat as they descend. A good Chinook Wind can raise temperatures 10-20C in just a few hours. They are named after the Chinook indigenous tribes of the Pacific Northwest and mostly occur in winter and early spring.
• Absarokas and Beartooth mountain ranges are found in Yellowstone National Park in Montana and Wyoming.

The home renovations continue and I wanted to post an update on the second floor bathroom. Because we couldn’t find a plumber to do it, we did it ourselves. My brother can do basic plumbing and carpentry so it directed the project and did the more complicated parts. We put in new flooring, patched and painted the walls, added floor trim, a new sink, vanity, mirror, and toilet. All we have left is the shower.

I’ve learned a lot this summer on the building trades. A challenge in the Upper Peninsula is a lack of young people here and going into the these types of jobs. The other obstacle is a lack of homeowners requiring work, especially in the winter and late spring months. It limits the number of contractors and tradesmen that can make a living. Almost all of the people I contacted had full schedules, up to a year in advance full. It will take time for me to become good enough to projects on my own. I struggle with loosing a tight connection on a pipe or what tool to use for a particular task. I now understand basic plumbing however, and it is amazing that in 2025, everyone can get hot showers at anytime in their homes. 200 years ago that was a luxury.

We are staying in my childhood home this summer. I have so many fond memories of growing up here, but the house needs some TLC. We are starting to renovate the house to make it more comfortable and modern. It is a bit of a hall of fame/shrine to the 1980s right now. We did a couple of projects this summer.

Basketball Court Removal: We removed the concrete slab that was once a basketball court between the house and the garage. We played for countless happy hours there, both basketball and wiffle ball. At one time, we had three baskets and lights, including an 8-foot high rim. The basketball rims and lights were taken down years ago, and all that remained was the concrete slab. The slab was in two sections, the first put in by my grandfather, Art Heikkala, and the other section by my dad and his teacher friends. An excavating company quoted us $6,000 to remove the concrete, add topsoil, and seed the grass. We saved money by having my cousin’s husband, Tom, come with his skid steer for the day. He is an experienced skid steer driver and we were able to remove all of the concrete. It was a long day, and I want to thank him for helping us. We then contracted the excavating company to dump and spread topsoil and sow seed with straw. Hopefully, the grass will be in by next summer, and we plan to put a fire pit and portable seating area to enjoy the cool Upper Peninsula evenings. I might even plant another tree.

Bathroom Renovation: The second-floor bathroom was dated and frankly, a bit disgusting. We couldn’t find a plumber or a carpenter to renovate it, so we did it ourselves. My brother Andy takes after my dad and is good at carpentry, electricity, plumbing, etc. I was skeptical that we could do it, but once we got going, it was not as bad as I thought. In May, we removed the plastic tiling and cabinets to start. We next removed the carpeting and the cast-iron tub. A search on YouTube showed the best removal method was to sledgehammer it into pieces and take it out. My brother and I then laid new flooring, took out the vanity and toilet, and replaced them with new models. I learned a lot from him, and thanks, Andy, for your patience and effort in getting the job done. I think I made about 10 trips to the local Ace Hardware store to buy parts and tools. We finished installing the sink and toilet and started using it with the ceremonial “first flush” yesterday. Next week we will install the shower. Doing the labor ourselves saved a lot of money.

There is still a lot to do! The next phases will be to replace the old asbestos siding and install new windows. The four trees I planted last summer (white pine, 2 oaks, sugar maple) survived the first year. Our biggest challenge are the numerous white-tailed deer that roam our neighborhood. The other day I saw 9 of them just a few houses down the street. Especially during the late winter and fall, they forage for all they can. I didn’t think they would eat pine trees, but they do! Oliver, Andy, and I added fencing around the pine tree behind the garage. It is growing back so we think it will survive.

(SPOILER ALERTS in this post – do not read if you want to read this novel!)

Summer holidays mean more reading time for me, and yesterday, I couldn’t put down Blake Crouch’s Dark Matter (2016). It combines thriller and science fiction story, similar to Michael Crichton’s books. The main character is an award-winning physicist named Dr. Jason Desson who has created a technology that allows a person to enter any personal alternative universe. The idea is that we make hundreds of decisions every day, some very consequential, that define the outcome of our lives. Desson’s machine gives access to the alternate outcomes. The big decision in this story is his choice not to marry his pregnant girlfriend and instead pursue his career in science. The result is that the career-focused Jason (Jason2) violently switches places with family-focused Jason (Jason1), and the action begins there. Eventually, dozens of Jasons converge on Jason1’s universe in a battle to become the husband of his beautiful wife and father to their son.

On a broad, simple level, the story is about the choice between career and family. Dr. Desson in one universe gets married and becomes a professor at a small college. In another universe, he wins the “Pavia” prize for his quantum physics discoveries and becomes a giant in the field of physics. Most of the time, life is not that simple and more nuanced. Crouch touches on this as there are an infinite number of universes because we make so many choices in a typical day, month, year, and life. It made me think about the decisions I made an overall I am quite happy that I was able to balance an engaging career (international education) and marriage and fatherhood.

The book is set in Chicago and near the end of the book, Jason1 escapes with his wife and son to northern Wisconsin. They take refuge from the multiple Jasons chasing him in a seasonal cabin by a lake. It is probably pretty close to my house as he drove around 6-7 hours north from Chicago.

In doing a bit of research of Crouch, he is most famous for his Wayward Pines trilogy that was made into a Netflix television series. I may want to watch it as well as this book, that was developed as a television series on Apple TV. He is a prolific author and if his other books are like this one, they make for a thrilling read.

We spent a delightful Sunday exploring the shore of Lake Superior just north of Marquette, Michigan. Owen showed us a nice spot where he watched the Northern Lights (Aurora Borealis) when he was at Northern Michigan University. Little Presque Isle is a stretch of the Lake Superior shoreline that has a combination of sandy beaches, old-growth trees, and 2.3 billion-year-old granite outcrops/ledges/cliffs. There is a nice trail that runs along the shore and many trailheads in the area.

The term “Presque” comes from the French, meaning “almost,” which refers to a peninsula that is connected to the mainland by a narrow strip of land. Early explorers and the Ojibwe tribe members used this location as a landing area to access the mainland. It was also an area where lumberjacks could bring logs to float down to Marquette. William Wetmore was a 19th-century businessman who owned slate and iron mining companies and other business interests, including logging. He founded the company town of Arvon, which we visited earlier in our holidays.

Our son noticed that the KP Index which measures geomagnetic activity on a scale from 0-9 was measuring a 5 for that particular Sunday evening. A “5” indicates a moderate level of geomagnetic storms and the Aurora Borealis might be visible in northern US states like Minnesota, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Maine. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Space Weather Prediction Center has an informative visual map that I didn’t learn about until after we spent a couple of hours on the beach that evening. It didn’t matter because

I write this post with a heavy heart as Nadia and I drove our son Owen to the Rhinelander-Oneida County Airport. He departed for a two-year mission with the United States Peace Corps in Costa Rica. It is a bittersweet morning for us as we are so proud of the young man Owen has become and heartbroken that we will not be seeing him in person for quite a while. He brings joy and positive energy to our family when he is with us.

The flight left at 6:30 AM to Minneapolis, where he will connect to Miami for two days of orientation and training. My village of Caspian is a 1-hour and 20-minute drive from Rhinelander, so we left early this morning at 4:05 AM. It is a standard small-town regional airport. It was raining this morning, but it cleared up on our way back to Caspian.

We celebrated our final day with Owen by playing tennis, helping him pack, and then we all went to see the new Superman movie in Quinnesec. It was an OK movie, giving us the typical DC movie experience.

I wish the best of luck to Owen and hope you have a formative life experience and do some good in the world! It is funny that both Nadia and I shared a Costa Rican experience and now our son will be having his time in the land of “Pura Vida”. Our family believes in service to others, and we are so proud that Owen will be representing the USA and making a difference in the lives of “Ticos”.

My favorite professional baseball team is the Detroit Tigers. My mother was a huge fan and watched or listened to every Tigers’ game, and the radio broadcast was the soundtrack of my summers in the 1970s and 80s. The Tigers in 2025 have the best record in Major League Baseball (MLB), and we were looking to go to a game during our visit to the USA. Unfortunately, Michigan is a big state, and Comerica Park, where the Tigers play, is an 8-hour drive from Caspian. The Milwaukee Brewers (4 hours) and Minnesota Twins (5 hours) are actually closer to my hometown than Detroit (8 hours). When I saw the glamorous Los Angeles Dodgers playing the Milwaukee Brewers this week, I decided to see the final game of a 3-game series yesterday. It was an afternoon game, so we could drive down in the morning and return in the evening.

The Los Angeles Dodgers are “glamorous” because their principal owner, Mark Walter, is a very wealthy man (estimated $12 billion in personal wealth). The team is part of the Guggenheim Partners portfolio, a global financial firm controlling $335 billion in investments. The Dodgers have the MLB’s highest annual payroll at $338 million. The average MLB payroll is $171 million. Being able to spend twice as much as the other teams gets you players like Shohei Otani ($70 million/year) and yesterday’s pitcher, Tyler Glasnow ($33 million/year). The Milwaukee Brewers, as a small-market team, have a payroll of $115 million.

We had a great family day at the American Family Field stadium in Milwaukee. The Brewers came from behind to tie the game in the bottom of the ninth inning and win it in the 10th inning 3-2 on Venezuelan centerfielder Jackson Chourio’s single.

The main attraction in the game was to see Shohei Otani. He didn’t have a particularly good game with 2 strikeouts, two walks, and a fly out to center field in his 5 plate appearances. His size (6 feet 4 inches tall) and speed on the bases were impressive! We got to see a close game and some outstanding, athletic plays by world-class athletes. American professional sports really know how to provide a comfortable and entertaining fan experience. There was free WiFi, bars, restaurants, food stalls, shops, etc., on the concourses around the stadium. Our seats were in the sun so the girls spent much of the game walking around the stadium and enjoying the atmosphere of the game. Oliver, Owen, and I focused on the game.

I remembered during the game the last time I attended a Milwaukee Brewers game, exactly 40 years ago this summer. In 1985, my godfather, Bill Leonoff, who was working for the local radio station, WIKB, aired Brewers games on the radio then, and so he took me up into the press box for a two games against the then-Oakland Athletics. I remember getting all the free food I wanted, and it was cool to receive the media packet of statistics for both teams.

Overall, it was a great experience. My one complaint is the cost of attending a game. We paid $30 per ticket (5x=$150) plus $40 for parking, $12 beers, and a tank of gas to drive there ($60). A day at the ball park costs between $300 and $400 for a family of five. That is OK for a one-off experience, but I don’t see how people can afford to attend a lot of games. The attendance was over 33,000 people for a Wednesday afternoon game, so it has not hit the point of being too expensive, obviously. It would be nice if everyone involved in MLB would take less money to provide a more affordable experience for fans. I don’t think this will happen, though.

Ernest Scheyder, a senior correspondent for Reuters, has written a fascinating book about mining for the critical minerals that are the foundation of green and renewable energy technologies. Copper, Lithium, Antimony, rare earth metals, etc. are components of electric vehicle batteries, solar panels, LED lighting systems, iPhones and high-end electronics, computer processors, magnets used in wind turbines, etc. Sourcing these is driving humanity’s move away from fossil fuels and possibly saving future generations to the ravages of climate change. There is a cost however to this as mining for minerals is complex, costly, and damages the environment. Often these mines are huge open pits, requiring transportation links to the outside world, have toxic tailings ponds or evaporation pools, that may damage the local ecosystems. One of the challenges of trace minerals huge amounts of rocks need to be dug out, crushed, chemically treated to extract the desired mineral. Scheyder goes around the country and into South America to interview the key players in this story. He gives the views of all sides, mining company executives and engineers, government officials, environmental activists, etc. to tell the historical and modern story

My life has been greatly influenced by the mining industry. I grew up on Iron County in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. In the 20th century, there were approximately 70 iron ore mines but many ended post World War II as higher percentage iron ore mines developed around the world. A few mines hung on into the 1960s and 1970s when I was a child, the last mine, the Sherwood Mine closed in 1978. In my village of Caspian, there were six iron mines with the Voroner Mining Company operated three mines:

• Baltic (1900) – It by the way is the name of my street.
• Young’s (1904)
• Fogarty (1907)

Other mines included the Caspian (1903), Berkshire (1908), and Dober (year unknown). The population of Caspian has dropped from 1,912 in 1920 to 800 in 2020 and declining at a rate of an average of 8% per decade. When I was a kid, the entire woods around Caspian and Iron River was covered in red dust/rock, and the Iron River going through the town was known to us kids as the “Red River”. 50 years later nature has healed itself. The open pits are now filled with water and create wetlands for wildlife and recreation, there are iron ore waste piles that have been mostly covered up by trees, and the Iron County museum preserves the Caspian Mine Headframe and tells the story of the mining industry here. There is a spider web of underground shafts and tunnels in the county. Back in the 1950s the road between Caspian and the neighboring village of Gaastra caved-in, killing a young man driving home in the middle of the night. I’ll do a blog post someday of that incident. Caspian was part of the greater Iron Range, an area in the Upper Great Lakes from Minnesota, through Wisconsin, to Michigan. Scheyder reports from Ely, Minnesota in the book about the attempt to develop mining in the Boundary Waters National Wilderness area just north of the town. It would be nice to have mining companies come back through the Iron Range, looking for these critical minerals in the remnants of the iron mines.

I got my first teaching job in Nevada thanks to the need for schools because of the gold mines in Elko County. They mined microscopic gold and along within came a booming economy but also cyanide-laced, leaching ponds and huge mountains of waste rock. Scheyder spends a lot of time out in the American west, in Nevada, Idaho, and Arizona, detailing the challenges of developing mines in the face of environmental concerns and indigenous people’s rights.

The book gives an overview of the global critical metals mining industry, with of course, China leading the way. It is a strategic need for governments around the world and Scheyder contrasts the policies of Trump and Biden, as well as spending a lot of time in our other home of Bolivia. The Salar de Uyuni is the biggest salt flat in the world and underneath it is a brine of dissolved lithium and salt, the largest lithium resources in the world. Due to its elevation, distance from markets, difficulty of extracting lithium, and poor governance, it just has not been developed yet. Nadia and I spent a summer break touring the Salar de Uyuni in the late 1990s, one of the most striking landscapes on Earth. I should try to find the photos from that trip and digitize them.

I also found it interesting that the mining industry will eventually end when recycling takes over. The lithium and copper in batteries can be recycled over and over again without degradation. Scheyder interviews a couple of companies trying to start recycling businesses. I highly recommend this book for anyone wanting to learn more about mining. I think it would be a good career to get into and I will encourage my students to consider a career in mining engineering.

Other facts I learned:

• A 55.4 kWh Tesla car battery has around 6 kilograms of lithium. A typical Tesla car needs 10 pounds of cobalt. The conditions of “artisanal miners” in Congo supplying the cobalt is appalling.
• The USA is moving its petroleum dependence on OPEC to mineral dependence on China, Congo, and others. The geopolitics around OPEC countries and the West is moving towards nickel, magnesium, graphite, cobalt, lithium, and rare earths.
• USA holds 24% of world’s lithium reserves but only produces 3% of annual lithium ready for use.
• Mining has a big impact on the environment. Chile is the world’s largest copper producer and #2 in lithium and 65% of the country’s water is used by the mining sector alone.
• The average 747 Boeing jetliner has 135 miles of copper wiring, and the average American house has 400 pounds of copper wiring and piping.
• If I have time, I should read the Standard for Responsible Mining (June 2108) IRMA – Initiative for Responsible Mining Assurance
• Parking your car backwards is a mining industry safety standard because backing up a vehicle in an emergency is considered a safety hazard.
• The Great Basin Resource Watch is a nonprofit focused on biodiversity in the American West.
• Center for Biological Diversity is another environmental group that advocates for rare slivers of the plant and animal kingdom.
• EV (Electric vehicles) generate 500,000 tons of battery waste in 2019, will rise to 8 million tons by 2040.
• I would like to visit the Salton Sea in California, which is similar to the Salar de Uyuni in regards to the potential of filtering the salty brine could produce a lot of lithium for the USA.
• Lithium is the lightest metal on the Periodic Table of Elements, so great for batteries.
• “Despite attempts to find alternative ways to produce metals for the green energy transition, there was no way around the fact that mining is loud, dangerous, and disruptive and will remain so for the foreseeable future, a reality that continued to fuel the global battle over our collective future”

I like the quote, “Here was a corporate leader encouraging dissent, asking for free thought, and demanding frank dialogue.”

On Wednesday, we went to the FireBrick Bar & Grill for Trivia Night at the beautiful George Young Resort right here in Iron County. We had a lot of fun and scored 30 of 40 correct in the quiz. The winners had 33 correct, so we were not that far off the lead. The best part was spending time with the family and laughing over our general knowledge skills. It was full, and the kitchen and wait staff were struggling with getting orders out on time. I am noticing that while I am in the Upper Peninsula is there is a lack of younger people wanting or needing to work. Bars, restaurants, gas stations, contractors, plumbers, electricians, etc,. They are all complaining about a lack of workforce. I’ll blog more about that later this month. My daughter Ocean is looking more and more beautiful every day. What an angel.

We had a quiet Independence Day Celebration. I worked in the morning online, taking care of school business, and then did some banking/organizing our finances for most of the day. I did get out for a bike ride (36 kilometers). Iron County is great for cycling with almost no traffic and lots of country roads. The Western Upper Peninsula is not mountainous but has many hills that are the perfect slope for giving you a workout, but not killing you. Uzbekistan is like the Alps or the Pyrenees in the Tour De France. Michigan has the rolling hills of the French countryside. I am trying to ride my bike and do a yoga workout daily this break. In the late afternoon, Oliver, Ocean, Nadia, and I swam at Hagerman Lake. I love summer in the UP with the cold water lakes, the pure blue skies, the massive walls of green trees, and having time to talk with family. We skipped last night’s fireworks and had a Mexican dinner at home.

I managed to get the girls out for a 4-mile hike on the Lauterman Lake Trail System, just south of the Michigan/Wisconsin border, earlier this week. I am familiar with the trails only in winter, as the Department of Natural Resources keeps the trails groomed for cross-country skiers. It is much different in the summer, and we got a little lost trying to hurry up to get back home for Trivia Night. As you can see from the video, Nadia and Ocean survived the experience.