Today was pretty much the perfect fall day: sunny, crisp, and fragrant, with just enough of a wind to remind a person that it won’t be long before the snow will start to fly. Here’s what campus looks like these days:
Category: autumn
Novemberiding
I’ve never gone on a pleasure (okay, “training”) ride this late in the year, but today’s gorgeous weather (and the possibility of a bike race next weekend!) pulled me out onto the roads today. In between some intervals, I enjoyed fantastic scenery. Click here for a small set of photos, including these two.
Southeast of Northfield, looking southwest. (Compare to the same scene on September 12.)
A great vine-shagged silo (and its inexplicable counterpart, a miniature lighthouse) at a farm just a bit down the road from our house.
The Girls’ Other Halloween Song
Halloween Song from Christopher Tassava on Vimeo.
The Girls’ Halloween Song
Genevieve invented this song on Friday night as we were leaving their gymnastics lessons; Julia joined in right away and they’ve been singing it ever since:
It’s dark and it’s moony
And the stars are up above
We’re driving home to have a little snack
Then we’re gonna wash our faces and brush our teethes
And then we’re going to go to bed
It’s dark and it’s moony
And the stars are up above
We’re driving home to have a little snack
Then we’re gonna wash our faces and brush our teethes
And then we’re going to go to bed
Little Girls and Innocent Squash
Julia, Genevieve, and I carved two pumpkins last weekend. They thoroughly enjoyed every aspect of the process, from helping “gut” the squash (pictures 1 and 2) to specifying (in impossibly minute detail) just how the faces should look. Being who they are, they both requested rather cheery jack o’ lanterns (picture 3). Next year, I’m getting my own pumpkin and carving something scary in it – a collapse in Carleton’s endowment, a dirty bomb, health care reform without a public option, the thought of Transformers 3.
Current Reading
I have four books underway right now, all of them enjoyable and commendable.
This is an installment in the fascinating “Animal” series by Reaktion, which (so far) comprises thirty-six book-length essays on particular animals. Since I’m fascinated by bees, this was the first one I picked up, and it’s wonderful. There’s less natural history or science than I expected or wanted, but the material on the bee in human history, society, and literature is excellent. What’s not to like about a book with an epigram from a Pooh story?
This is the tenth novel in the 28-book series of “Parker” novels written by “Richard Stark” – actually, Donald Westlake. I’m only a third of the way into this one, but so far the plot has not yet included the master criminal Parker. Instead, the plot is focused on Parker’s sometime-accomplice Grofield, who is himself a great crime-novel character – a sometime-actor who gets typically himself into and out of trouble with his mouth, not his fists. I have literally no idea how this book is going to proceed over the next hundred pages, except to guess that Grofield will entertainingly survive his ordeals, probably with Parker’s laconic and murderous help.
Donald Westlake, What’s So Funny?
I read the first five pages of this last night, almost by accident as I was trying to put The Damsel back on the shelf, and found it to be just as hilarious as Westlake’s other Dortmunder novels – which are about a criminal, John Dortmunder, who is as hilariously hapless as “Stark”/Westlake’s Parker is calculatingly brutal. Last week, I laughed my way through the most recent Dortmunder, Get Real (released after Westlake’s death last year), so I’m looking forward to this one.
Another crime novel, Child 44 is as “propulsive” (as they say when talking about mysteries and thrillers) as the Stark and Westlake novels above, but roughly a million times darker, being concerned with a Soviet security agent’s hunt for a serial killer who murders children in the paranoiac Soviet Union of 1953. I’ve had to put it down several times after reading brutally wrenching, superbly written scenes. I can’t wait to pick it up again for another dose.
Julia, Phoneticist
These days, pretty much everything Julia creates with paper and pencil (or crayon or marker…) makes me smile. Yesterday, Shannon brought home from a conference with Julia’s teacher a packet of materials that included this two-page assignment to try and write the word that goes with each picture. I’d say she did a good job. I especially like her takes on “elephant” and “xylophone.” That poor zebra, though – she thinks he’s a zero!
Jawa Daughters
Julia and Genevieve are like Jawas in at least five ways: they are small relative to other humanoid creatures on their planet, they like to wear hoods, they often speak incomprehensibly, they often invest junk with great value, and they are always eager to haggle over the slightest issue.
They are unlike Jawas in that they are awfully cute.
Trivia Benighted
Tonight, I attended the near-legendary “Quiz Night” at the Contented Cow, one of Northfield’s three decent pubs. My team didn’t win, and honestly we barely completed with the winning team, which trounced everyone else, but I was very pleased to see three questions based Disney Princess lore all in the final round, which related entirely to witches. One of these questions required the identification of this witch:
Another question required the identification of both this witch and the movie in which she appeared:
Given that a husband-and-wife on my team are also the parents of 5- and 3-year-old girls, it’s little surprise that we earned all three of these points.
Next week’s Quiz Night promises to be heavy on Halloween questions, so I’m going to be reading every Halloween-related Wikipedia page I can find. And I may resort to dark arts to win.
Fall Perfection
Today was pretty much the ideal fall day. Not only was the weather perfect, but the daylight hours were full of fun, from a kids’ obstacle course/fun run with some friend (free pumpkins to all finishers) and a short visit to library in the morning to great bike rides (me in the Arb after lunch, the girls on the bike path before dinner) and a satisfying dinner. All that, and both girls were just about as even-keeled and cooperative as we could reasonably expect from them. Like I said, ideal
Cows, Colleges, Contentment
With the girls in a wonderful early-bedtime, deep-sleep groove, my evenings have become radically more open to doing something besides dealing with the awful bedtime routines of last spring and summer. (May they be gone forever, and may I forget them soon.) I can now go off and do stuff without guilt (or a penumbra of ire and exhaustion) at 7 p.m., which both makes life a lot more tolerable ad coincides nicely with the high season of activities at the colleges. Accordingly, I’m indulging, especially but not only in the evenings. Over the last month, I’ve seen one rock show at Olaf and one at Carleton, done some figure drawing at Carleton’s open modeling sessions, seen art exhibits at both Olaf and Carleton, and attended the opening artist talks of a new exhibit at Carleton’s art gallery. Over the next month, I’ll hopefully draw at more of the modeling sessions, see another concert (at Carleton this time), squeeze in some runs in the dark autumnal Arb, and try my legs at a cyclocross race at Olaf. Northfield is a good place to be right now, figuratively and literally.
“War Work”
I spent the evening at the artists’ talks and opening of “War Work: Artists Engage the Iraq War and Other Wars,” the new show at the Carleton art gallery. The talks were delivered by John Risseeuw, who makes paper objects to decry the epidemic of land mines (and to raise money to help victims of land mines), and Megan Vossler, who teaches at the alma mater and makes drawings based on photographs of the Iraq War. The talks were great, and the show is fantastic, too – often in a depressing, intentionally revolting way, but also full of beautiful stuff. It’s well worth a visit.
Autumn Ride
I hit one of my favorite gravel roads for a short ride this afternoon between lunch and our annual visit to the pumpkin patch. For the first half of the ride, I suffered by heading into a 15mph wind. For the second half, I suffered by trying to get some energy out of legs that had been trashed from standing at the concert last night. Even so, it was a gorgeous ride. I hope I can do it a few more times this fall, and maybe even give it a shot this winter.
The view south down Ibson Road, which was about 90% of this ride:
A tattered windmill on a farm along Ibson Road. Anybody see Don Quixote nearby?
The view over my bars – though this shot doesn’t capture any of the zillions of caterpillars wandering west to east over the road. Why so many? Why were they all going west to east, and always so perfectly perpendicular to the road? Strange…
Holding Steady at Olaf
Ears: not quite ringing. Crowd: frenetically jumping. Oles: illicitly drunken. Hold Steady: steadily rocking. This pretty much sums it up:
Here’s the band in action elsewhere, with a song they opened with tonight.
Sisters in Arms
I curtailed the fussing on a walk this afternoon by showing the girls how to walk arm-in-arm, which they loved immediately. And it was ridiculously cute, too.
