Blowing & Drifting

If mining made the Upper Peninsula great in the period up to about World War II, it’s logging that – along with, arguably, tourism – that is keeping the place viable. My late grandfather spent his whole life handling logs, either skidding them out of the woods with horses or driving log trucks from the [...]

[Read more →]

While up in Hancock earlier this week, I passed by the house where I lived from 1988-1991, at the corner of two steep uphill streets. It is, I think, a nice little house – though the current owners could be taking better care of it. Apart from the view to the south (a view I [...]

[Read more →]

By predilection and by training, I love calculating “as far as” spans between two dates. It can be cheap history, but can also be useful to see how closely in time two events occurred, especially when one of those events seems “closer” to the present day. Personal information is great for this: Julia is about [...]

[Read more →]

Julia is totally enamored of the Betsy-Tacy books by Maud Hart Lovelace, a Minnesota writer who turned her experiences as a young girl in the 1890s and 1900s into a long series of novels published in the 1940s and 1950s. They’re good books, full of very tame mischief and exciting-for-a-kid adventures and just enough period [...]

[Read more →]

Julia’s fascination with the Magic Tree House books has reminded me of treehouses I have known. Growing up, lots of my friends had tree houses that ranged, in later elementary school, from a wooden pallet temporarily nailed to some low pine-tree branches to, in early elementary school, an elaborate room permanently fixed high in a [...]

[Read more →]

Though I knew that Cinco de Mayo commemorates a victory by the Mexican army over a French one in the 1860s, I didn’t know much about the actual battle, at Puebla, in 1862. In sketching out the context of the Battle of Puebla and its significance, Wikipedia offers up a few choice bits of history, [...]

[Read more →]

Tonight, the moon is waxing toward a full moon on New Year’s Eve, which makes this as fitting a moment as any to note that almost exactly four hundred years ago, between November 30 and December 18, 1609, the Italian scientist Galileo Galilei used a hand-made telescope (and other tools, as shown in this excellent Smithsonian article) [...]

[Read more →]

On my way back from a bike ride the other day, I saw something surprising and impressive: hundreds of pieces of farm equipment lined up in a field on the farm of Palmer Fossum, a well-known Northfield farmer who died in 2007. The whole lot of them will be auctioned off next month, and could pull in [...]

[Read more →]

For the first time in our four summers here in Northfield, we ventured as a family to the town’s famous (or at least well-known) Defeat of Jesse James Days, a huge celebration centering on the town’s counterattack and defeat of Jesse James and his gang when they tried to rob the First National Bank of [...]

[Read more →]

Walking across Carleton’s campus, you don’t have to look hard to see 9/11. Carleton’s Olin Hall of Science was designed by the prominent modernist architect Minoru Yamasaki (who also designed four other Carleton buildings), built in 1960-61, and opened in 1961. (The building currently houses the departments of psychology and physics & astronomy.) A webpage about [...]

[Read more →]

Here are my two girls standing in front of the lockers at preschool… Julia on the first day of preschool on September 6, 2007 (For what it’s worth, she still wears this shirt.) Genevieve at preschool orientation on September 8, 2009 (For what it’s worth, Julia wore this dress to preschool orientation, too.)

[Read more →]

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 [...]

[Read more →]

I skipped tonight’s conference-organized social activities (a chi-chi dinner and the New York City Ballet) in favor of a little drive down to the Saratoga battle site, which is just a few miles southeast of town. (My friend Rob recommended this outing, but I initially thought I wouldn’t have enough time. I was as wrong [...]

[Read more →]

Today was the full-on conference day, from the breakfast chit-chat at 7:30 a.m. through the cocktail hour and dinner, ending at 9 p.m. In between, we had four good sessions (and a lunch!). Throughout, I caught up with some colleagues I’ve met before – including a hilarious staffer from Barnard who is, and knows she [...]

[Read more →]

I was surprised this morning to discover that a blogger on the Motley Fool personal-finance website quoted me – or rather, an article I wrote a few years back on the US economy during World War II – in an op-ed on the need to move to renewable and green energy. This would be gratifying [...]

[Read more →]