Category: diversions

Back to Reality

If you have to make a lickety-split trip to New York City, it’s good to come home for a nice low-key holiday like Mother’s Day. The girls are very into the whole idea of “being nice to Mama” (as Julia puts it), so things tend to go smoothly, from the joint project of making a wonderful (and crazy) M.D. card yesterday night and loudly urging each other to be quiet this morning (the better for Mama to sleep in) to happily going to pick up gifts for Shannon – flowers from a local nursery (from the girls to her) and sandals from the cozy little shoe-and-clothes shop downtown (from me). Julia was a little perplexed as to why Mother’s Day does not feature a cake, or at least some cookies, but she eventually accepted the fact that today no such “weets” (as Genevieve calls them) were in the offing.

Following all the morning activity, two good naps gave everybody a nice break and equipped the girls for a run to the library and to Central Park – the 3.8 acre park in Northfield, not the 843 acre park in Manhattan. Julia was a whirlwind at the park, conquering without assistance three or four different structures that she had never – to my knowledge – even tried to do before. Gymnastics is paying off for her! Delectable homemade pizza for dinner capped the day in just the right way. 

 

(Free semi-related Wikipedia fact: Central Park NYC has been estimated to a value as real estate of $528,783,552,000. That’s, like, most of an AIG bailout!)

Gotham

At 4:30 am tomorrow morning, I’m heading off to New York City to see about a short-term consulting gig. I can’t yet (or maybe ever) say much about the job, owing to various legal angles on it, but suffice to say that this will be one of the only times that anyone has had any real interest in my knowledge of World War II shipbuilding. Since same-day trips between the Twin Cities and New York are actually fairly difficult and costly to arrange, I have to bear the heavy burden of spending Friday night in New York. Luckily, I was able to scrape up a few things to do, like see the Brad Mehldau Trio at the Village Vanguard. Now I just hope I can find something to eat.

(And I hope that none of the three girls back at home get sick – or rather, sicker. C’mon, cosmos: can’t I go out of town just once without illness laying waste to the rest of the family?)

Die Down, Wind (Or, I Butcher the Bottle Rockets)

With apologies to the Bottle Rockets, I offer this Northfield-specific ditty. I “wrote” it tonight while fighting the wind during an abbreviated run; it’s based on the BRs’ great “River Get Down,” which I blogged last month.

I live in a prairie town, it’s pretty little
There’s a ridge on the side and it’s flat in the middle.
When the wind comes up, it whips us around,
And blows the trash cans all over town

Die down, wind; wind, die down, won’t you
Die down, wind; wind, die down
Once again you have almost knocked all my kids down
Die down, wind, die down

Over to the park’s where my kids want to go,
To ride on their bikes, but I don’t know
When it gusts like this, you can hardly go
It’s like a tornado, down by the Econo

You can fly around town when the winds gust high
Daily gales are just the prairie style
There ain’t nothing you can do to stop them
Just hope for the best and lash down the rest

Anybody know of a good Americana band that needs new material?

Maple Syrup Run 2009

This morning, I did the River Bend Nature Center‘s “Maple Syrup Run,” a 5k trail race through the RBNC’s wonderful property on the (quite curvy) Straight River in Faribault, Minnesota. I didn’t quite hit my goal time but it was a great race, just as family friends who’ve run the race several times assured me. 

The event took place in hand-numbing drizzle which probably slowed everyone down (and which didn’t make it fun for Shannon and the girls to watch) but which didn’t much affect the course’s dirt trails over the RBNC’s hilly terrain. After the usual scrum in the first 50 meters, the racers sorted out into a single file that crossed a bit of pavement and then plummeted down to the river bottom. We wound along the river on a twisty, wet path that was reminiscent of high-school cross country races and perfect for moving up the field – you could see everyone up ahead, count off the seconds after they went through a curve, and push harder to close the gap before the next curve. I was pleased to see that my heart rate was staying at the low end of my highest range – around 165 or so, or 90% of my maximum – and that I felt pretty good.

The riverside path ended abruptly with a sharp right turn onto a stiff, steep climb that recouped all the earlier elevation loss in about 50 meters but was for good for making a couple more passes. From there, we skirted the edge of the center, keeping just inside the treeline but also passing by the Faribault prison. Talk about irony: I paid cash money to run in the cold drizzle right past a place where you can’t run more than a couple hundred feet in any one direction.

Not long after that, near what must have been the end of the second mile, the course pointed back toward the interior of RBNC’s grounds and started a long, steady climb up the ridge that overlooks the interpretive center. This section wasn’t incredibly hard, but it did have a couple false ends – turn the corner and oh crap there’s more climbing to do. My heart rate spiked and stayed high here, and I started to feel some burning in my legs, but the effort was worth it, helping me pass another three or four racers on the climb. I couldn’t quite catch one kid who was just a few meters ahead…

At the actual top of the ridge, the course bent and went almost straight down to the prairie at the core of the center. I should have tried to speed up here, since it turned out that we were less than three minutes from the finish line, but I hadn’t studied the course map well enough, and didn’t want to blow up by trying a 100 yards-to-go pace with a half mile to go. Instead, I just maintained my pace until it was obvious we were finishing. And at that point, there was no one who could either catch me or be caught, so I just cruised in at 23:15, feeling pretty good in all the right ways – tired, but not crushed and pleased with having carried out my race plan. And Julia ran right up to me to hug my legs, shouting, “Good job!” All in all, a nice way to start the season.

With my intermittent personal history of running and fitness – a lot of cross country running and skiing and track in high school, then nothing for a decade until slowly starting again to run and rollerski and cross-country ski in the last few years – I am struck by the “types” of runners encountered at races like the Maple Syrup Run and the Defeat of Jesse James Days road races in Northfield every September. There are always a few obviously fast men and women – the whippets who use their extreme fitness, paucity of body fat, complicated shoes, and $75 shirts to take the top spots. There are quite a few the more-or-less fit but not very fast folks like me, and a smaller number of people who are pretty clearly out of shape, but trying hard to get back into the swing of things (and who often run, bafflingly, in full sweatsuits). Commingling with those groups are the kids, the teens and tweens who run with each other or with parents and who invariably take off like bullets, only to fade badly by about the 1-mile marker. Today’s run had a good number of racers in this last group, and I guess the top two men’s spots went to high schoolers. On the other hand, I spent the first five minutes of the race weaving through fast-starting young guns and caught a few more during the rest of the race – though I never did catch the kid who had to actually stop and walk up the last bit of the longest climb. He was saving something for a big sprint to the line. Crazy kid.

Woodchuck Run

Apropos of my post yesterday, I wound up today talking with Nancy Braker, the director of the Carleton Arboretum and, as such, someone who knows much better than I do what sorts of animals inhabit the Arb. Though gently supportive of my desire for yesterday’s creature to have been a fisher, she equally gently told me that in all likelihood I saw a woodchuck. A Google image search for woodchucks turned up photos of a creature that looks intolerably like the beast I saw yesterday on my run. How wrong could a runner be if a runner could be wrong? Really, really wrong.

Woodchuck
Woodchuck

Get Down River

I’ve been thinking incessantly, for the past week or so, about the imminent Red River flood. My parents-in-law, a sister-in-law, and three nieces and nephews all live in Moorhead, Minnesota, right across the Red from Fargo, and my sister-in-law lives with her family upriver in tiny little Hendrum. The flood this weekend is certainly going to mess up their lives even more than the high water has already. I just hope the mess is more inconvenient than dangerous – but given the high water predictions, that might already be a hollow hope.

The slowly but steadily mounting disaster reminds me of the Bottle Rockets’ fantastic song, “Get Down River,” which rocks as played by the Bottle Rockets in the video below but sounded even better when covered the other weekend by Matt Arthur and the Bratlanders.

The poignant lyrics – don’t miss the last two lines:

I live in a river town, it’s pretty little
It’s high on the side and it sinks in the middle.
When the rain comes down, the river rolls up,
And fills up the low spots, all over town

Get down river, river get down, won’t you
Get down river, river get down
Once again you have messed up this old town
Get down river, get down

To the far side of town’s where I want to go,
To see my honey, but I don’t know
Looks like I’ll have to row
It’s like the Gulf of Mexico, down by the Texaco

You can drown downtown when the water is high
It’s been happenin’ here since I was a child
There ain’t nothing you can do to stop it
Just hope for the best and mop up the rest

Fisher Run

Winding up a run in the sodden, glistening Arb this afternoon, I was heading back toward campus along the river trail when I saw a cat-sized brown animal dart across the path ahead of me and up a dead tree. “Weird  – a raccoon out at noon?”

I slowed down to look up at the animal, but then stopped when I saw that it had no mask. The little beastie nestled into a vee of two branches and peered down at me with a frank black-eyed look, clearly wishing I’d move along. I walked a couple steps to get a different angle. The creature had a wide, furry body and a long fuzzy tail – the size and shape of a raccoon, but a solid dark brown or black, rather than the grays and light browns of a raccoon. “Weird – a mink? a weasel?” I jogged off to let the whatever-it-was get back to whatever it was doing.

I wondered about the animal all day. When the girls went to bed, I paged therough my Mammals of Minnesota field guide and the Minnesota DNR’s excellent online guide and figured that – based on size, coloration, and the funny look of its eyes – it was a fisher, one of the rarest mammals in Minnesota, and much more common up north.

Fisher
Fisher

Spring Skiing

I’m too trashed by all that sunshine and outdoor time to do more today than simply mention that the cross-country skiing World Cup is coming to a head this weekend with a huge series of races in Falun, Sweden – the wonderfully named “Svenska Skidspelen” or “Swedish Ski Games.” Along with a friend, I’m capitalizing on my interest in this ridiculously obscure, Europe-centered endurance sport (ROECES) to blog the racing to death over at the Nordic Commentary Project. Check it out, if at all inclined.

Along with my co-blogger at NCP, we’re running a sort of low-rent fantasy-sport scheme predicated on predicting the top five racers in all the events this weekend. I’ll brag a bit by saying that I’m (ever more narrowly) winning, having made more accurate predictions (and fewer inaccurate ones) than the other participants. Yes indeedy, my knowledge of this ROECES cannot be matched, yet, by my three competitors. (Proof: I’m putting all the results of our little contest up on a public Google spreadsheet.)

Competing as the “Northfield Nine,” I’m also not doing too badly in a fuller sort of fantasy-skiing contest being run by SkiTrax, “North America’s Nordic Skiing Magazine.” Currently, I’m in fourth place out of 1o9 entrants – which puts me in line to win a pair of $500 ski boots that wouldn’t fit my skis. As a white elephant goes, this is marginally better than the prize I won in a similar contest run by SkiTrax earlier this season: free attendance at a three-day ski training camp at a resort in British Columbia. I’d love to go, but the prize didn’t include the cost of travel to BC or lodging there. Oh well. At least the prize validated my otherwise-useless knowledge of the ROECES.

Bizarro Gym

My trip to the gym today was a bizarre one, from the moment I stepped out of my office building into a ridiculously loud cacophony of birdsong. For a second, I thought maybe some students were filming a movie and running a high-volume recording of birds. Nope, just a zillion returned migrators in the trees out front.

I avoided any sort of Tippi Hedren incidents, and made it to the gym. There I discovered that the new fluorescent lights (like many, but not all, others around campus) were producing a horrible low-pitched whine in my hearing aids. (I can barely go to meetings in one campus building, the light-induced whine is so bad.) Luckily, I don’t wear my aids when I work out, so this didn’t bother me for long. As I changed, someone’s cell phone – entombed in a locker – started ringing, a crazy 120bpm rhythm with a rising melody. It rang for an appropriate number of seconds, went quiet, and then started again. Quiet, then ringing again. In a hurry to get the hell away from it, I tied my shoes in the hallway.

Down in the fitness center, I chose a treadmill offering equally good views of two different TVs. I figured that both would probably be airing the usual sorts of noontime crap, but that it would be different crap, and since I could look back and forth between them, that I would consume just half as much crap. Sure enough, the right-hand screen showed first a soap opera (all dark-haired men with lantern jaws and blonde women with Victoria’s Secret cleavage) and then live coverage of the AIG hearings on Capitol Hill (all pasty white guys gesticulating wildly and talking sternly back and forth).

Thankfully, and in utter distinction from those two sorts of drivel, the left-hand screen was tuned to a show on the History Channel: the history of ice cream. It was educational and entertaining! I actually learned quite a bit about the differences between regular ice cream, soft-serve ice cream, and frozen yogurt, and about the corporate niches of Dairy Queen, Ben & Jerry’s, and TCBY. (I also learned about the insane “Vermonster” sundae at B&J’s. The 20 scoops of ice cream just start the craziness.) Actually, come to think of it, the show was basically an advertisements for those companies and their products, a point reinforced by actual ads for DQ between the segments of the show. Well, DQ ads and ads for debt-relief agencies. Which are basically just two forms of commentary on American indulgence.

As the show wound on, its educational aspects were replaced by an insanely strong desire for ice cream, and lots of it. I ended my workout just as the show ended and headed back to the locker room, where, of course, the cell phone was still ringing, and ringing, and ringing. Again hurrying to get away from its satantic ring tone, I chose the nearest shower stall and cranked on the water – and discovered that the shower curtain was a good four inches narrower than the space between the sides of the stall. It was like showering in a hospital gown. I hurried through my shower and went back to the locker room, where the owner of the cell phone – someone who did not look like the sort of person who likes 120bpm music – was happily chatting away. Naked.

I’ve never gotten dressed so fast. I was heading out the front door of the gym within five minutes, back toward the still iced-over Lyman Lakes and my office.

Hide and Seek

The girls love to play hide and seek, but my god, they are terrible at it. This afternoon, we played a version of the game in which they hid two toy cats in various spots around the upstairs. For the first round of the game, I had to sit in the playroom and count to 20. “No, 50! No, 100!” So I dutifully (if quickly) counted up to 100 while the girls bustled around in their bedroom. I hit the magic number and yelled, “Ready or not, here I come!” The girls instantly responded, “No! We’re not ready!”

This meant that roughly two minutes wasn’t enough time to hide two toys in a 10’x10′ room. So I waited until they told me they were ready, then headed over to make like the CIA with bin Laden. The girls met me halfway down the hall. Julia said, “We’d better give you some hints. My kitty is on the floor, near the changing table. Along the wall.” Vivi, bouncing with excitement, added, “My ditty is under da bed.” Faced with this dearth of information, I had to look in other places until the girls, unable to resist, grabbed their toys out of the “hiding” spots and showed them to me, shrieking happily at my inability to find the cats.

We continued to play like this for another fifteen minutes, until Julia decided to read a book instead. Vivi closed the game out by telling me to sit on the guest room bed and count to 20 while she put her cat under the same bed and left, only to burst back in when I reached 20, pull the cat out, and show it to me, saying “Dat was a wary good hiding!”

Albums

Continuing my goal of achieving convergence between this blog and Facebook, here is my response to the Facebook “meme” on the fifteen (give or take) albums which have been important to my life…

The only albums I can really remember from childhood (ours was not a musical house) are Johnny Horton, “Greatest Hits,” and Kenny Rogers, “The Gambler,” which I played on our giant old record player/stereo. “The Gambler” speaks for itself as a peak of 20th century cultural production, but Horton’s “Sink the Bismarck” is probably the main reason that I was ever interested in history. You can draw a straight line from that song’s opening drumbeats to my dissertation on World War II shipbuilding. I’m not even kidding.

In junior high and high school, I slowly discovered, thanks to WIMI radio in Ironwood, Michigan, and then the Musicland in the Copper Country Mall, Houghton, that many people listened to a lot of music, much of which was pretty damn interesting. In high school, I basically burned out my tapes of R.E.M.’s “Document” and “Green” (only later working backwards to the earlier, better albums) and two rap albums: Public Enemy, “It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back” and N.W.A., “Straight Outta Compton.” The former album opened me up to all kinds of politics, and put me on to reading everything from The Autobiography of Malcolm X to histories of Marcus Garvey and slave rebellions. The latter album, I played incessantly while driving around and around and around downtown Houghton.

I brought those albums with me to Macalester in 1991, but literally from the first day on campus I started listening to stuff that they didn’t even carry at that Musicland, much less play on the radio in the U.P. The tattooed guy next door lent me his copies of Nirvana’s “Bleach” and “Nevermind,” both of which I immediately bought at Applause in St. Paul – a store that dwarfed Musicland in every important way. From various friends, I discovered, among other music, the Pixies, “Trompe le Monde,” the Smiths, “Louder Than Bombs,” Jack Logan, “Bulk,” and especially the holy quartet of Uncle Tupelo albums: “Still Feel Gone,” “No Depression,” “March 16-20, 1992,” and “Anodyne.” The first two UT albums were the first pieces of music that really spoke to my experience growing up in a depressed, alcoholic Midwestern town that seemed fit only for escaping – and they fucking rocked, too. “March 16,” on the other hand, sent me backwards to classic American music: the Smithsonian folk music collections, Leadbelly (whom, I was happy to discover, was also a favorite of Nirvana), the Carter Family, Johnny Cash, and especially Hank Williams. I never acquired much Hank, but a cheap copy of his “40 Greatest Hits” has been a constant companion ever since.

Moving to Chicago immediately after college, I tried and mostly failed to keep up with the music scene. Coincidentally, the UT successor band Wilco located itself in Chicago around then, as well, which made it easy to follow their development. Just as UT had sent me to the historical record of American music, “Being There,” “Summer Teeth,” and “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot” sent me out to weirder contemporary stuff, including especially Radiohead. I had no idea what to make of “OK Computer” when I bought it on the spur of the moment at (oddly) a Musicland store, but my god it was fun to contemplate as an underemployed 20-something and then as an impoverished grad student. I loved (love) all of Radiohead’s later albums (“Kid A,” “Amnesiac,” “Hail to the Thief”) too, but “OKC” was and still is it: “For a minute there, I lost myself.”

Around that same time, I started to discover jazz, thanks to a confluence of forces that included some worldly grad school classmates and friends, a great jazz scene in Chicago, and a deeper appreciation of the heritage on which Wilco and Radiohead were building. A grad school prof suggested that I try Charles Mingus, “Mingus Ah Um” first, owing to its deep connections to the history of 1950s and 1960s, and I was hooked. It was easy to slide over to other great jazz, like Bill Evans, “Portrait in Jazz,” and of course Miles Davis, “Kind of Blue,” and to pick up newer stuff like the Brad Mehldau Trio, “Places,” or the Bad Plus, “There Are the Vistas” and “Give” – all of which are notable not only for being excellent jazz but for covering tunes by the Pixies, Nirvana, and Radiohead. When the Bad Plus cover Johnny Horton’s “North to Alaska,” I know my musical history will have come full circle.

Bouncing Around

Like I said, there was a lot of physical and psychological jostling in that last weekend, nowhere more than in the “bounce house” put up at the Northfield Nursery School‘s winter social on Saturday morning. The last time Genevieve tried one of these things, in fall, she literally couldn’t even stand up on the bouncy floor. I had to retrieve her, crying, from a far corner.

This time, she joyously walked, ran, bounced, fell, crawled… She and Julia had a grand time. We need one of these things at our house.
NNS Winter Social Fun - 04