Category: diversions

Perfect Evening

The girls wanted to hit the playground after dinner, and since it was pretty much the perfect summer evening out there, we did. Usually these outings are brief and end when someone, too tired to really have fun, loses her $#!%. Tonight’s outing couldn’t have been more the opposite. They cheerfully let me put on some sunscreen, happily put on their sandals and sunglasses, and energetically raced out the door.

Ten minutes of jogging later, we were at the playground, which was totally deserted and thus perfect for two sisters to do whatever the heck they wanted. Having forgotten my phone, my iPod, and even any paper, I had nothing to do but sit, hum “Smells Like Teen Spirit” to myself (why, I dunno), and watch Julia and Genevieve race around, giggling and laughing and having a great time.

After half an hour of fun on the ladders and slides – easily the longest they’ve ever played at a playground without my intervention – they switched to playing “Princesses and Monster,” which entailed more running, climbing, and sliding but also a good uptick in shrieking. The monster, it seemed, kept capturing one of the sisters and locking her in the playset tunnel, which was actually an oven. The other sister, luckily, could always rescue the inmate, allowing them both to flee to the top of the “castle” and then down the slide. Shriek and repeat.

After another fifteen minutes of this, the girls abruptly decided they were very thirsty, so we headed for home – which required us to slip past the monster’s hiding spot at the edge of the park. Luckily, Vivi found a long stick that she could wield as a sword (“dord”) to poke the monster, which was – Julia informed us – “made of beef that’s very soft and new.” We dispatched the monster and made our way back to the house.

Halfway there, we saw that our neighbor had just returned from a nearly month-long trip overseas. Julia and Genevieve have sorely missed the six-year-old member of the family, so we ran the rest of the way, getting to our shared entry just before they went inside. The girls’ friend was terribly jetlagged, but still excited to give them their presents: identical sets of Hello Kitty pencils, notepads, and erasers. J & G thanked her profusely, then went inside to enjoy a well-deserved snack – five Wheat Thins and about ten glasses of ice water for each kid – and get ready for bed. What a perfect evening.

My Man Crush on Jens Voigt

Jens Voigt
Jens Voigt

The German cyclist Jens Voigt – an important part of the SaxoBank team that vied for the yellow jersey throughout this year’s Tour de France – crashed out of the Tour on Stage 16 after losing control of his bike on a fast descent in the Alps.

Original Video – More videos at TinyPic

Yeah, he landed on his face. Concussion, broken cheekbone, broken jaw, lacerations and bruises like nobody’s business.

Voigt – as demonstrated by paeans like Bonnie Ford’s on ESPN.com or le Grimpeur’s on his eponymous cycling blog – is one of the most respected guys in the pro peloton, and for lots of good reasons – not least of which is his age – almost exactly the same as Lance Armstrong. Voigt’s sheer toughness is legendary, as is his combativité. He’s won “just” two stages of le Tour, both on long attacks, but he regularly animates the racing by joining breakaways or just burying himself for  his team. In addition to his performances in the Tour, he’s twice won the Tour of Germany and a healthy number of other races and stages. (And he wears a team bracelet that reads “HTFU” – pretty much summarizing his approach to racing.)

But Voigt is also, by all accounts, a great sportsman, as they still say in Europe. In 2005, he invited two German fans – a married couple, both of whom are blind – to his house and took them for a ride on a tandem bike. During the next year’s Giro d’Italia, he demonstrated his sense of fair play in the best way a bike racer can:

… in stage 19 of the Giro in 2006, with 4,000 metres of climbing over four mountains[,] Voigt stayed with all the mountain men but refused to contest the sprint after sitting on the wheel of Juan Manuel Garate on the final ascent. “I always like to win, but if I don’t work, I don’t win,” he was reported saying. “That’s just not me. I cannot win like that.”

That’s good stuff, and fodder for the cult of Jens Voigt, which features “What Would Jens Do?” bumperstickers and t-shirts, alterations of those Chuck Norris jokes (“When the Boogeyman goes to sleep every night, he checks his closet for Jens”), and of course great interest in just when the guy will be back on the roads. In this video from his hospital bed, he says – with a broken face! – that he’ll be racing again later this year. I hope so.

13 Things That Make Summer Better

About halfway through the summer, there are quite a few things worth mentioning as being notably good.

1. When we’re not having weird weather, we’re having very nice weather – even spectacular weather, like today. (Julia took this shot the other day.)
Neighborhood Sights

2. Wheat ales improve every dinner, even one made from scratch from CSA farm produce.

3. Facebook has put me in contact with an amazing number of interesting people who are doing a wide range of fascinating things this summer.

4. We’re just 146 days away from the first day of winter.

5. The Carleton library has an enormous collection of art books, which includes a lot of wonderful folios of master drawings that are perfect for perusing.

6. Every time I bike past the golf course, I enjoy the thought (but not [yet?] the act) of shrieking “Fore!” just as some duffer swings his club.

7. The 96th Tour de France – a fantastic edition.

8. Open Hands Farm is furnishing us with a ridiculous amount of delicious fresh produce this summer.

9. I have the time and some of the skill to do some drawing almost every day.

10. The girls, more often then not, are up for a bike ride.
Tour de Francers

11. The green, green, green Arb.
Rec Center Prairie

12. Finally being back in good-enough shape to run for an hour without either my knees or my lungs giving out.

13. The girls are having a great summer with Shannon.
Farm Girls

The 2010 Tour de France

Started today. First we had Alberto Contador saying, in a Spanish paper, “My relationship with Lance is zero. He is a great champion and has done a great Tour, but on a personal level I have never had a great admiration for him and I never will.”

(Quotes via Velonews.)

In response, Lance Armstrong talked some trash on Twitter, opening by writing,
“Seeing these comments from AC. If I were him I’d drop this drivel and start thanking his team. w/o them, he doesn’t win.”

and then sharpening his point by posting,
“hey pistolero, there is no “i” in “team”. what did i say in March? Lots to learn. Restated.”

It’s early days, as they say, but Armstrong is about five minutes ahead of Contador in the psychological-warfare general classification. I don’t doubt for a minute that this is part of the Texan’s scheme to beat Contador next year: first, drive him nuts with the head games; later, out-train him; and last, beat him with a stronger team next July.

Masters of the Playground

One of the nicest things about the summer so far has been watching Julia and Genevieve apply their increasing physical abilities to new challenges, from riding bikes to tackling new playground equipment. Julia’s never been terribly adventurous when faced with a new kind of ladder or slide, but her reluctance is trumped almost immediately nowadays by her sister’s eagerness. Vivi is almost always ready to zoom up a novel ladder or plunge down an unknown slide, and once Julia sees “my little sister” succeeding, she has to try it too – whereupon she finds that she too can do it.

Friday, we hit a new park, a playground behind one of Northfield’s elementary schools. The play structure was fantastic: huge, complicated, mixing easy stuff like bridges and steps with difficult stuff like twisty tunnel slides and steep climbing walls. The strangest thing we found was a “ladder tunnel” – a cylinder with wall made from a grid of that grippy playground rope. On discovering it, Julia took one look and walked away, shaking her head and muttering, “I’m not trying that.” Five minutes later, though, Genevieve found it and instantly, intuitively figured it out: duck through the low opening, reach up for the highest horizontal rope you can, and then “pull-lift” (as we say) to get your feet up. Repeat, repeat, repeat, and then step carefully over to the platform. By the time she had reached the top, Julia was back, watching. “Oh, I guess I will try it,” she said, as Vivi crowed, “Wook, guys, I did it!” Sure enough, Julia made it up too. I was proud of them for trying it, and happy to see them succeeding – in large part because once they master a new piece of equipment like this, they do it over and over for ten minutes or more (which is an eternity for a 2- and a 5-year-old).

Ladder Tunnel

Ladder Tunnel

Vivi’s Towering Talent

Vivi, far more than Julia ever has, delights in blocks – laying them end to end for yards, using them to build elaborate “houses,” stacking them into towers as tall as she is, and of course knocking them down. On Tuesday, I came home to a massive “house” of Duplo blocks: a little structure with a few Duplo people inside and entirely ringed by a fence or wall that enclosed about six square feet. It was more like Southfork than anything, and it wasn’t a bad little construction project for a 2.94 year old kid.

A few hours later, after bath, while Julia was working her way through a few Disney Princess coloring pages, Vivi pulled out a different box of blocks, retrieved a sturdy book on which to build, and put up this complex of towers, which she called – inexplicably – “the funnel.” She carefully used an especially important alphabet block to decorate “the funnel.” I love it. It’s a beautiful structure.
Vivi's "Funnel"

The Most Epic Race

Taking a cue from the jokers at Versus – with their ultimate-fighting commercials and “Lance vs. the World” hyping of this year’s Tour de France – Julia and Genevieve decided to stage their own race on the new bike path this week: Julia on her bike, Vivi on her feet. The result? A tie, which they strive to arrange through all sorts of means. Thankfully, the rest of the race was pretty amusing.

Julia couldn’t get herself going on the slight uphill, so Vivi helpfully gave her a Tour de France-style push start:
Push Start

In giving Julia a push, Vivi generated enough momentum to run past Julia and get into the lead:
Running Ahead

But then Vivi lost her shoe, allowing Julia to surge into the lead.
Lost Shoe

Not pictured: Vivi’s recovery, which helped her reach the finish line at the same time as Julia.

No, there were no doping tests.

Bees, Please

Open Hands Potluck & Tour

Saturday, in what must be considered one of the hippiest things I’ve ever done, we went to a potluck dinner for members of our organic, community-supported agriculture farm, Open Hands, just outside Northfield. We are – thanks to Shannon’s bottomless industriousness, creativity, and plain old hard work, eating a ridiculous amount of fresh Open Hands food this summer, so it was fun to use the potluck to sample a lot of great food, to see who else belongs to the farm, and to get a tour of the farm’s five or so acres.

While Ben and Erin – the proprietors of the farm – did an excellent job showing about twenty of us around the property, I was most struck by the bees that they’d rented to pollinate the fields this summer. I am fascinated by bees, but I’ve never visited an apiary or even really read much about them (excepting Jay Hosler’s excellent Clan Apis graphic novel and current coverage of colony collapse disorder), so it was a treat to actually go right up to the multicolored hive boxes
Open Hands Potluck & Tour

and see the bees up close, both as they came and went from the hives
Open Hands Potluck & Tour

and as they wandered singly over the boxes.
Open Hands Potluck & Tour

It was transfixing to crouch next to the boxes (right near the cluster of entering and exiting workers shown above). My first impression was visual: hundreds of bees were zooming everywhere around me, individually too fast to track but collectively present like a living cloud. My second impression was auditory: a gentle hummy buzz emanating from the hives and ambient in the air, building and fading as bees flew around. My third impression was tactile: the tickley feeling of a dozen or so bees landing on me – bare arms and legs, face, hair – before realizing their mistakes and heading off again. Far from being scary or even unpleasant, having bees brushing against me felt almost exactly like walking through a thicket. My fourth impression was olfactory: a very subtle hint of baked treats, which I only gradually realized was the smell of the honey in the hives. Thankfully, I never had the fifth impression of tasting a bee. Equally thankfully, I have had the luck of eating pounds and pounds of food they’ve helped create.

Tom Lewis, The Hudson: A History

The Hudson: A History The Hudson: A History by Tom Lewis

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I picked this book up a week ago, just after seeing a northerly section of the Hudson – near Saratoga Springs and the Saratoga battlefield in upstate New York – and hoping that the book would offer a decent history of the river. Lewis certainly fulfills that hope, writing a wonderful overview of the discovery and settlement of the river, which was unusually important in early American history (from about 1600 to 1850), and not only because it was the waterway which New York City could use as its highway into the continent. Among other topics, Lewis discusses Henry Hudson, the river’s European discoverer; early Dutch settlers up and down the river; the coming of British dominance and then Britain’s loss of the river to the new United States; and the centrality of the river in 19th c. American visual and literary art. A concluding few sections treat, somewhat less satisfyingly, 20th century topics such as environmentalists’ battle against Con Ed’s plan to destroy Storm King Mountain for a hydroelectric project. (I expected more on the environmental history of the river, but there is relatively little such content.)

All in all, this is a wonderful, fluently written, and satisfying look at the history of the river. My only regret is that I didn’t read this before my trip, or I’d have known to have seen the river further south, along the great fjord that begins south of Albany. A cruise up the Hudson from New York to Albany sounds like a future dream vacation.

The book is full of excellent, illustrative anecdotes, but this is my favorite one:

On a cool and brilliant June day in 1939, King George VI and Queen Elizabeth of England arrived at Hyde Park for a weekend visit. Roosevelt and the king drank cocktails in the library, spent an afternoon chatting on the lawn overlooking the Hudson, and the following morning attended services in St. James’ Episcopal Church. Afterward Roosevelt escorted the royal couple up to Top Cottage, a new fieldstone structure he had designed. There everyone feasted on American luncheon favorites, Virginia ham, turkey, and hot dogs. It was said that George –for by this time the presidnt had abolished formalities between them completely–ate two. Later, Anglophile criitcs said that hot dogs were not the dish to serve a king and queen, and certainly no one should address the royal couple the way the president had. But Roosevelt brushed the criticism aside. After all, he said, his family had lived in New York for centuries longer than the royal family had lived in England. In the Hudson Valley, where his great-grandfather had settled until [sic:] 1813, he counted himself (through his wife) a descendant of Robert Livingson. Compared with the Roosevelts, the Windsors were mere arrivistes.

Fantastic.

View all my reviews >>

Tour de Paris

A 1978 short film by New Wave director Claude Lelouch may be the most thrilling single piece of driving ever filmed. The director, who had no permits to film or to stop traffic, hooked a camera to the front bumper of a Mercedes-Benz (in the only bit of film trickery, the sound of the motor was played by a five-speed Ferrari) and filmed the entire movie in a single cinema-verité take: He drove through the streets of Paris at five in the morning, through red lights, around the Arc de Triomphe, down the Champs-Élysées, against one-way traffic, over sidewalks, at speeds up to 140 miles per hour. The film ends after nine terrifying minutes when the driver parks the car in Montmartre and a blonde comes up the stairs toward Sacre Coeur. (It was a date.) After the first showing, the director was arrested for endangering public safety. (From Slate)

Consider taking some Dramamine or at least buckling your seatbelt, then watch the video of “C’était un rendezvous”:

Claude Lelouch’s Rendezvous… from Dat on Vimeo.

Sotomayoralty

Perhaps because pretty much every aspect of society is going off the rails, I haven’t paid enough attention to the hearings to confirm Sonia Sotomayor. Judging by the Times’ coverage today and by a zillion tweets from liberal commentators like the guy behind DailyKos, today’s opening session was a chance for the Republican senators on the Judiciary Committee to set fire to any rickety bridges between the Grand Old Party and Hispanic Americans and for the Democrats on the committee to affirm that she is, in fact, eminently qualified to serve on the Supreme Court.

Though of course I’m eager to see Sotomayor confirmed – for political and sociological reasons as well as judicial and legal ones – I can’t quite decide which is a worse symptom of the Republic’s political health. On the one side, we have powerful white men who belong to a venerable party that was founded, in part, to pursue a form of racial equality now embarrassing themselves with borderline-racist attacks on someone who – but for the color of her skin and maybe her gender – exemplifies every up-by-your-bootstraps story they love to tell. On the other hand, we have powerful white men and women (Feinstein and Klobuchar!) having to assert, with the backing of an Everest of evidence but against shrill cries from the American Falangists, that Sotomayor can, in fact, do the job that her entire professional adult life has led toward.

Sigh. Patrick Leahy, don’t fail me now.

And Jeff Sessions? Here’s my favorite tweet of the day:

RT @KagroX: Hilarious to hear Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III of AL decry Sotomayor’s reference to “heritage.” Never happens in Alabama.

Being Right Brings No Satisfaction

As we often do, the girls and I broke up the Sunday-morning monotony with a little outing in the neighborhood. Since the new bike path is so nice, I proposed that they ride their bikes up the road a ways. Vivi liked this idea, but Julia said, no, “I prefer to walk and push Care Bear in the stroller.”

I knew that there was no way in the world she’d actually push the stroller the whole time – and thus that I’d end up carrying it for most of the walk – but I decided to let that go in favor of encouraging her to wear actual shoes and socks, rather than the sandals which she is literally wearing to shreds and which are also pretty terrible to wear while actually walking. This recommendation was rejected on her usual grounds: “Daddy, I don’t like the way shoes look with skirts! Sandals are much prettier with skirts!”

This is an argument I cannot win, so after my usual grumbles about how she’d be picking pebbles out of the straps and stumbling over rocks, we headed out. Vivi rode up ahead, riding her Big Wheel at a million miles an hour, and Julia trailed behind, pushing Care Bear in the stroller and stopping frequently to minister to the doll. After we stopped for our snack, Julia decided that she didn’t want to push the stroller anymore. I folded the $#&(#% thing up and started carrying it, trying at the same time to keep Vivi was veering off the path into the weeds.

Noticing that Julia wasn’t next to me, I turned around to find her sitting in the dirt, shaking rocks and sand out of her sandals. “Daddy, the rocks really hurt my feet!” I didn’t even respond, mostly because Vivi was again motoring toward some obstacle. As I corrected her course, I heard a scream from behind us. I whipped around. Julia was just getting up off the pavement after falling. Her right knee was magnificently bloody, and her left sandal was falling off her foot. “What happened, honey?” I asked, wiping the blood off her knee with my hand. She sobbed out, “My sandal strap wasn’t tight and the sandal made me trip!”

I derived no satisfaction from being right on every count. Thankfully, she got over the accident quickly and enjoyed the rest of the walk – even though sometimes we had to jog to catch up to Vivi.