Bill's Blog

We are in the middle of a heat wave in Tashkent with temperatures hitting 100F (38C) often. Uzbekistan has a dry climate so most nights it cools down because of a lack of moisture in the air to trap the earth’s heat escaping land after absorbing sun all day. However this month the nights have been warmer than usual. As I am getting older, I appreciate the small things in life much more than when I was younger. Last night I went for a swim in our pool and air-dried on the top chan in our garden. It was so nice to cool off and fall asleep on a sultry summer night. It is so relaxing with the Christmas lights and the quiet of the stars above. I awoke at 2:00 AM and went into the air-conditioned bedroom.

I am savoring life every day and stopping to notice things. On my morning walk to work on Friday, I noticed the woman below (left) selling cigarette lighters, candy, etc. in front of the shops in our mahalla. That must be a tough way to make a living and I would be interested in hearing how many sales she makes a day, where she gets her products from, how long she is out there, etc. I also noticed the donation box of the local mosque. The Al Badr Mosque is located adjacent to our school on the back side. We often hear the call to prayer at school. A nice aspect of Islam is one of their core tenets of helping the poor. You see donation boxes like this all over the city.

This morning I went for a run along the Ankhor Canal and loved the view from the bridge near the Minor Mosque. The Uzbek Rowing and Kayak Association has its headquarters on the canal and a flotilla of kayaks was out on the canal this morning. The new Crowne Plaza Hotel is in the background.

I took Nadia and Ocean to the “Asian Model Competition: Face of Uzbekistan – 2024” model and fashion show on Saturday evening. It was our first time attending a fashion show and it was delightful to be on the front row near the end of the runway. It was a combination fashion show and a reality TV modeling competition. Three of the 24 models (12 male and 12 female) were selected to represent Uzbekistan in the October final competition in Seoul, Korea. The event is sponsored by UzNex (Uzbek crypto currency) and it was led by the Korean Modeling Association. Similar events are taking place in 41 countries all over Asia to select models to participate in the October finals in Seoul.

A highlight for me was the performance of Uzbek recording artist Munisa Rizayeva. She is very well-known musician and is popular in Uzbekistan. She gets about 17,000 monthly plays on Spotify, which is not a lot but I think that more reflects the lack of Central Asians that subscribe to Spotify than her popularity. Musicians and actors have a certain charisma/showmanship/presence and she certainly had oodles of it. She has a booming voice and the music had a rock vibe. I added a couple of her songs to my Spotify playlists.

One of the contestants during the interview section said “modeling is my passion”and it got me thinking. It is a frivolous activity and I thought the young people looked silly after going to NN Model training. I guess it is better practicing being a model rather than playing video games and scrolling through TikTok. The two main winners of the competition I thought were good choices. They both had the classic Central Asian Uzbek facial features and the girl had naturally curly hair, a rarity in Asia. I wish them luck in the finals.

Nadia and Ocean really enjoyed the event and I am glad I am a member of the American Chamber of Commerce and received an invitation. It was enjoyable to see my two models have a fun evening.

Summer and long flights give me the opportunity to read. I took advantage of my free time to do some pleasure reading as well as professional reading.

The West Iron County, Michigan librarians set me up with a new digital media service called Hoopla. My first book borrowed was Stephen King’s latest collection of short stories, “You Like it Darker” I always get swept away with his story telling and it is easy to continue swiping pages to find out how the story will end. I especially like two previously unpublished stories, Danny Coughlin’s Bad Dream and Two Talented Bastids. I don’t believe in the supernatural but really enjoy King’s exploration of all things other worldly.

One of my guilty pleasures is true crime and crime novels. Jordan Harper’s Everybody Knows is set in glamorous and seedy Los Angeles and is an “LA Noir” crime genre. The two main characters work for a firm that protects the reputation of rich people and organizations when scandal hits. They do this by having public relations and communications experts, friendly contacts in the media, high-powered lawyers, security guards (thugs), former police detectives, etc.

The first character is Mae Pruett who is a publicist and assists Hollywood movie stars, politicians, business moguls, etc. The second character is Chris, an ex-cop who is used as “muscle” to intimidate and physically harm people. Both of them struggle with their conscience because they protect immoral people and most of their work for the company is cover-up and deceit. I can tell Jordan Harper has lived in Los Angeles a long time as he describes in great detail the ambition people have to become rich and famous. He pulls from the news in that there are characters similar to Harvey Weinstein and Jeffery Epstein. It was a page-turner and I was not pleased with the ending, but from an interview I heard with the author, this will be the first in a series of books set in Los Angeles.

Some quotes from the book:

• “Don’t worry about the truth. It’s not that the truth isn’t important. It just doesn’t matter. A lie that is never believed by anyone can still have power – if it gives people permission to do what they want to do anyway…Give them horror or give them heartstrings. Nothing else sticks.”
• “She learned how much of our lives is just stories we tell one another, or ourselves.”
• “Real power comes from generating profit for other people.”

The library apps gives me access to great magazines as well as great books. I was fascinated by Dexter Filkin’s reporting from northern Israel and Lebanon “Will Hezbollah and Go To War?” I also listened to Terry Gross interview Filkin on NPR’s Fresh Air. My main takeaway is it is amazing that Hezbollah has so much freedom and power to act seemingly without Lebanese government control. They are funded by Iran and do Iran’s bidding. Their aims are to destroy Israel and start an Islamic Caliphate in the region. Putting it in my context, it would be like a foreign country, say Canada, funding a militia in my state of Michigan whose aim is to destroy Ohio and set an ultra-Christian government instead of our representative democracy. They would not last very long. The national guard, police organizations and maybe in national armed forces would be called in to put them down. Not so in Lebanon. Filkin fears their actions will lead to an all-out war in the region that will destroy both Lebanon and Israel. It was interesting that he mentioned there is a big portion of Lebanese that oppose them.

It is also odd to an American that towns and villages in some countries can be all Christian or all Islamic. In Lebanon, Israel avoided airstrikes on Christian villages, nestled among Shiite villages. We do have pockets of Arabs and other Middle East nationalities in cities in the US, but they are always mixed with others. It reminded me of travelling through North Macedonia this past spring. We would come upon either Orthodox Christian villages or Islamic villages. You could tell immediately by either the towers of a mosque or a big cross above the town in the hills. In the American west, they usually have the name of the town in the hills above. Only in Bethlehem, Pennsylvannia is there a lighted cross, but I think that is just for tourists as part of the Christmas theme and acknowledging the history of the founding of city, rather than a statement that this is a Christian town. I hope the war does not escalate for everyone involved.

This weekend I am picking up our new staff from the airport and delivering them to the hotel. The annual orientation of new employees marks the start of my work year. It is a big responsibility to bring people to a new country and set them and their families up to be comfortable and happy. I am looking forward to school year! We arrived yesterday afternoon after a 90-minute flight from Marquette to Chicago, a 10 and 1/2 hour flight from Chicago to Istanbul, and a 4 and 1/2 hour flight from Istanbul to Tashkent. We made all of our connections and only had a 90-minute delay at O’Hare.

Tashkent International Airport is isolated in the middle of the Eurasian continent. Many flights arrive and depart in the middle of the night. Jetlag is helpful because I am not struggling with nocturnal pick-ups. Last night I was at the airport from 2:30 AM and returned home at 4:00 AM. The spectacular opening ceremony of the Olympic Games from Paris was on last night as well. We love watching the Olympic Games and Peacock, NBC’s streaming service has all of the coverage.

I drove Nadia to BeFit Pro pool for a swim workout. Tashkent is experiencing a heat wave with a high temperature of 104F (40C) at 4:00 PM today. We also did a late night shopping to refill the fridge and kitchen for meals this week.

I missed my dog Obi and took him for a walk last night while Nadia was swimming. I noticed for the first time office lights on inside of the SQB Bank building in the Tashkent City Development (above). SQB is mostly owned by the Uzbek Government’s Ministry of Finance and its name in English is “Industrial and Construction Bank” and it was started in 1922 by the Russians. The bank rebranded to the Uzbek name (Sanoat Qurilish Bank) as part of the country’s move to using more Uzbek language and less Russian language.

Central Asia culture has a tendency to put fairy lights and neon lights all over buildings and trees. As you can see above, Nadia’s gym, BeFit Pro does this with the trees in the parking lot. My theory is because most of Central Asia is a vast darkness of steppe and desert, people wanted the comfort of lights in the evening to light up their lives. I also noticed for the first time public bikes have been added to the fleets of electric scooters. When I first arrived here five years ago, bicycles were not allowed. An amazing pace of modernization in Tashkent! I wonder what the statistics are on accidents and injuries. I had a scooter whiz by me last night while walking Obi. The kid was going very fast, weaving through pedestrians. There must be pedestrian-scooter collisions or car-scooter collisions occurring in the city.

We completed our summer holidays helping Oliver prepare to be on his own. It is heartbreaking to leave behind another of our children! The house is so quiet now with only one child left. 😦 We had a great final day in Caspian with our son Oliver. He is not coming back with us and it was strange to only have Ocean, Nadia, and I traveling. It was a busy final day. 

In the morning Oliver and I dropped off a truckload of junk at Waste Management. We continue renovating and cleaning the house. We still have a long way to go, but clearing a couple of rooms felt good. Ocean and I did errands in town, including closing one of our bank accounts and donating clothes to Saint Vincent DePaul, the local Catholic Goodwill store. It is depressing to see all of the second-hand stores, closed businesses, and dilapidated homes that are signs of depopulation and economic decline. Iron River and Caspian are much different towns from the one I grew up in, in the 1970s and 1980s. I wonder if the area will ever return to its economic zenith when the iron ore mines were working and small manufacturing businesses were able to be profitable. 

Nadia and I went grocery shopping with Oliver. His aunt and uncle are coming tomorrow and his brother will be back in the UP on Saturday. We had a nice final night having drinks with our neighbors, Vicky and Rocko. It brought back memories of my neighborhood when I was a child. The neighbors were like family and without internet and modern digital entertainment, we spent a lot of time together. 

We also improved the protection around the trees in the front yard. Oliver and Andy will plant the fourth tree when it arrives. Earlier in the week we set up Oliver’s room at St. Norbert College in DePere, Wisconsin. They were kind to allow us in there before moving day because we will not be there on the official moving day.

We planted three trees yesterday in our front yard. Two Northern Red Oaks (Quercas rubra), a type of Oak that can withstand the colder temperatures of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. My village of Caspian is located at 46 degrees north latitude. I also planted one Sugar Maple (Acer saccharum). This was the first time doing this and I would probably give us a grade of “C”. The western Upper Peninsula ground is quite rocky and it was difficult to pound the poles into the soil. We need to protect the trees with fencing because deer will eat the young leaves. I am curious to see if they will survive and for how long. Hopefully, my children and grandchildren will enjoy the shade and autumn color they will provide and wildlife will be sustained by the trees fruits and seeds.

Douglas Tallamy, a professor of Entomology and Wildlife Ecology at the University of Delaware’s book “The Nature of Oaks: The Rich Ecology of our Most Essential Native Trees” really opened my eyes to how homeowners can improve habitat in their gardens and yards to support wildlife. Humans have greatly damaged the ecology of North America, especially after European settlement. The cutting down of forests, extinction of large animals (mastodons, ground sloths), and importing non-native species have devastated nature.

The tree genus of Oaks, Quercus, is one of the most woody genera in the Northern Hemisphere. They are famous for being huge, long-lived, and having the distinctive cup fruit, the acorn. There are around 300 species worldwide, with 90 oak species in North America and 14 oaks native to Michigan.

Professor Tallamy concentrates on promoting property owners to plant native plant species to help the web of life. His research counts caterpillars and other insects on native vs. invasive species and found that today’s North America provides only 4% of the food for insects than it did at the time of the European arrival. Tallamy advised planting more than one oak tree so the roots can support each other and not get knocked down in the high winds of the summer storms. He also advises not to plant older trees because they don’t establish roots well. I am planting a young and an older tree and hope that both make it. Finally, he asked owners to plant native plants and shrubs under oaks and keep the leaf litter on the ground. Homeowners usually sweep or burn the leaves to preserve their lawns (Americans love lawns), but actually, this is a sterile environment for insects. Insects provide food for birds and other animals, so fewer plants means fewer insects and fewer insects means fewer birds. Below are other things I learned from the book.

• Periodically, all oak trees in a region will produce an incredibly huge number of acorns in the same year. This is called “masting” and ecologists speculate that every so often, oaks put their energy towards acorn production instead of growth. The idea is wildlife cannot possibly eat all the acorns and so more young oaks will develop roots and start growing.
• Cicadas have 13-year and 17-year life cycles partly because as larvae, they eat xylem in tree roots which has a low nutritional content. If they ate phloem, they would not have this problem. Trees transport nutrients through the phloem and only a bit of nitrogen and water through the xylem. The long periods between adult cicadas being abundant prevents predators to specialize on cicadas.
• Oaks mostly maintain their dead leaves on trees in the winter. This phenomenon is called marcescence and is thought to be beneficial by protecting young buds in the spring.
• The percentage of oaks in eastern North American forests has dropped from 55% pre-European settlement to 25% today.
• Eastern forests were less dense before Pleistocene mammals were hunted to extinction by indigenous people. Today’s suburban landscapes mimic this savannah and mixed forest landscape.
• I never thought that when the glaciers retreated and the temperate zone offered a huge amount of insects, this drove birds to develop the habit of migrating north to take advantage of this food source. Human development has lessened this.

“Healthy oaks will grow for 300 years, maintain a stasis between new growth and canopy loss for the next 300 years, and then decline for 300 years or more. During each one of those 900 years, these magnificent plans are making outsized ecological contributions to the life around them.”

We spent most of the day improving my childhood home in Caspian, Michigan. Our big goal for the day was refurbishing my brother Jimmer’s former bedroom. I remember when my dad created that bedroom for him on the second floor, probably around 1978 or 1979. Jimmer and I slept in bunk beds (me on the top bunk) on the ground floor when we were little. I moved upstairs I think in grade 6 or so. The second floor originally was a separate apartment when my parents first bought the house with a kitchen, bedroom, bathroom, and living room. My dad converted the kitchen into a larger living room and added a wall to create a bedroom for him to join his big brother on the second floor. This also created space for my youngest brother, Andy, to occupy our former bedroom on the ground floor.

Jimmer’s former bedroom was basically used for storage. We hauled out an old television and furniture stand, an old futon couch, lots of clothes, a filing cabinet, etc. Some of the items will be dumped at Waste Management on Wednesday, the clothes donated to Goodwill Store, and the rest was stored in our basement. I found my vintage 1973 Scooby Doo Lunch Box which I’ll give to a friend to sell on E Bay. We took out the old carpeting, removed old glue and carpeting, mopped the floor, and painted the room. Nadia and I went to Home Depot for supplies and Walmart for an area rug. We should have taken a before photo, but in the cleaning frenzy, we didn’t do it. Ocean now has a bit of privacy and we have an extra room where someone can stay. Prior to this, we put mattresses in the living room. Much better!

For another project, Oliver and I removed a portion of the old basketball court concrete between our house and the garage. We found a place to dispose of the large concrete chunks. We also replaced it with top soil and turf and bought a Northern Red Oak tree to plant nearby. I ordered another Northern Red Oak , a Sugar Maple, and an Eastern White Pine, the state tree of Michigan, to plant. They should arrive this week.

We are slowly improving the house over time. I would like to use it as one of my retirement homes. It holds so many fond memories of my youth and my family. Caspian is so quiet and peaceful as well. The UP is boring for teenagers and young adults, but for families with young children and old people, it is great. I want to put the planned projects we are thinking about before I forget. I don’t think we’ll be back here next summer.

• Renovate the second-floor bathroom. Buy a new toilet and sink, install vinyl flooring, and figure out what to do with the old bathtub, a second shower would be great. The plumbing probably needs to be replaced and this could be an expensive renovation.
• Remove the carpeting on the second-floor living room to expose the wood floors underneath. Replace the couch, too and install 4 new windows.
• Build indoor/outdoor back and front porches to create two more quiet spaces on the ground floor.
• Install vinyl flooring in the kitchen and dining room on the ground floor.
• Remove the rest of the old basketball court, plant trees, and put in a picnic table and fire pit.

There is so much more that needs to be done. We still have about 4 or-5 large dumpsters worth of old stuff that needs to be removed. My goal is to create a comfortable place that we can use for family gatherings with the grandchildren. Right now it has four bedrooms and with the two porches, it could have 6 bedrooms.

We drove from Ellicottville, New York, a small town 45 minutes south of Buffalo, New York, to Caspian, Michigan on the final day of our road trip. We decided to take the northern route from DC and drive through southern Ontario, Canada. It was cool to cross Rainbow Bridge between Buffalo and Niagra Falls. I was disappointed with Niagra Falls. Not that they were not beautiful and powerful, but the tourism development around the falls was sickening to me. The street right next to the falls is filled with hotels and casinos with rooms overlooking the river. There were also hundreds of classic tourist attractions (Ripley’s Believe or Not Museum, Wax Museum, Amusement Rides, etc.) Tourists look like hundreds ants going down the side of the falls and going under the falls in packed boats. I think officials could have done it better by making it more of a natural experience with preserving the wilderness on the banks with hiking trails. Instead, they went with making as much money as they could and turning it into a Disney like experience.

We stopped by to use the internet, our phone plan did not work in Canada, and see the falls. We didn’t want to fight the crowds and pay for parking so we just drove along the falls and stopped for some quick photos. I really enjoyed watching Oliver learn how to use an actual paper map. We picked it up at the tourist information center because we didn’t have a GPS. Something is lost with GPS and it was comforting to use a map again.

I hadn’t been through downstate Michigan in about 25 years. We drove from Port Huron to the Mackinaw Bridge. It felt good to come back to the UP. The severe high temperatures and humidity of Virginia was replaced by the cool breezes and cold air of northern Michigan! I loved having a second driver in my son Oliver who is learning to drive. We made it back safely, arriving at 2:00 AM on Thursday morning.

My nation’s capital is a center of wealth and power in this country. There are a lot of excellent people and brain power in the 6.6 million metropolitan area. It was designed to impress and it makes me think what Rome would have looked like at the height of its empire. I would like to thank our Michigan Representative from District #1, Jack Bergman, for giving my son the opportunity to be an intern this summer. DC is also one of the few cities in the USA that has a train system that the majority of people use. Because parking is limited and expensive and there is a lot of traffic, upper middle-class people take buses and trains into the district for work. Most people live in Maryland or Virginia because of limited homes and the cost of real estate.

While we were there everyone was talking about the NATO Summit that was taking place in the city. It is the 75th anniversary of NATO and with the ongoing war in Ukraine, it was an important meeting. Security was tight with many blocked streets and a security presence, including military helicopters. As you can see in the photos below, they were still screening people and had lots of barriers up around where delegates were meeting.

We stayed at the Grand Hyatt located in downtown Washington DC. We were very close to the White House and Capitol so Owen stayed with us in the hotel room. It was so nice to have all five of us sleeping in the same room again, like old times! I felt so proud to meet Owen in the lobby of the magnificent hotel and see him with his tie and briefcase. I am happy that our family got to experience Washington DC and we hope to go back again sometime.

It is always sad to say goodbye to family, especially our children. Our oldest son Owen is completing an internship this summer for our Michigan Representative in the House. We only had a week to see him and tried to spend as much time as possible with him and making his last couple of weeks there comfortable. Nadia and I are proud of the progress he is making in his maturity and this has been a valuable experience for him.

We spent our final day together playing tennis at Kings Park Park on an extremely hot day. We then went back to his accomodations and prepped the car for the long drive back. It was special to have my Uncle Jack with us who came down from Pennsylvania to see us. He is super organized and helped us with Owen’s flights and accomodations. The night before we went to the movie A Quiet Place: Day One at the Regent Cinemas in Springfield. The movie was entertaining but not special. We all wish they would have given us more details on the alien invaders and how humans survive them instead of just focusing on a small group of individuals.