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

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

Sign of the Times

The view from the back of our house is always pleasant and often stunning. The sheer quantity of sky is wonderful, all the more so when it’s full of incredible clouds, and through the seasons, the treelines and fields go through a full cycle of varying lovely hues, from white to brown to spring green to verdant green and then back to brown.

But in the name of progress and safe left turns, the city of Northfield was just diminished my vista by putting a traffic sign right in the middle of it. Blech. This is almost literally NIMBY.
The New, Diminished View

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.

Carleton Summer Sights

It’s verrrry quiet around campus these days, so it takes a while to accumulate a meaningful (if small) number of unusual experiences, such as

  • The deep, deep quiet of just about any academic-building hallway you’d care to walk through. When the AC is the loudest thing you can hear, it’s pretty quiet.
  • Two technicians repairing the floor underneath the climbing wall in the Rec Center. I know that it needs to be cushiony in case some butterfingered mountaineer falls off the wall, but jeepus: they were laying down a lot of thick rubbery padding.
  • The jungly growth of the community garden between CMC and Olin. Holy produce! You can’t actually see over it anymore, once you’re up close. In case you didn’t know, anyone is welcome to help themselves to anything that’s ripe. Or that attacks you when you approach it.
  • A campus tour being conducted by two student guides for one adolescent tourer. Personal service, anyone?
  • Two guys filming themselves as they jumped onto and off of picnic tables on the Bald Spot. Geeky parkour?
  • A muskrat on the bridge between the Lyman Lakes. When I walked up on him (her?), I received only a cold stare. I let the creature trundle back into the water before I proceeded over the bridge. I hear that a muskrat will kill a man just to watch him die.

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.

Tour de Francing

While I was out east, the city paved the new bike path that runs directly behind our house and connects us – finally! – to the rest of the city’s sidewalk grid. The girls were happy to ride on the path. As we ferried the bikes to the path, Julia announced that she “loooooves Tour de Francing.” Here they are, poised to start the trip to Prairie Street, two-thirds of a mile to the west.
Tour de Francers

I dunno about you, but going one and a third miles on a tricycle is not my idea of fun. Perhaps that’s why, halfway through the trek, Vivi had to stop to “shake out my wegs.”

Tour de Francing from Christopher Tassava on Vimeo.

After this little routine, she resumed the trip, which went very well. Maybe we’ll even be able to bike to the swimming pool this summer!

Independence Day Blowout

Froggy Bottoms for the Fourth

Our Fourth of July continued our tradition of busy Independence Days, including a long walk downtown to hang out with friends and watch the Northfield Criterium bike races, good naps, and a great party at some very generous friends’ spacious house in the countryside north of town. One girl is, at present, worn out; the other is wound up. This is a bad combination, but the day was fun enough that even the prospect of a rough bedtime can’t ruin the good moods.

(The picture above is the river side of the Froggy Bottoms restaurant/bar in downtown Northfield, done up for the holiday. It struck me that it looks a tiny bit like Monet’s Rue Montorgueil, Paris, Festival of June 30, 1878.)

All Quiet on the Carleton Campus

I grant that today was the day before a three-day weekend, but the Carleton campus has been deader than the King of Pop all week. The only excitement anyone can find is a roofing project that requires a gargantuan red crane, apparently borrowed from Dubai, and periodic showers of roofing debris. If you visit the campus center after the snack bar closes (at 1:30 pm! well before my afternoon iced-coffee jones kicks in!), you’ll probably find only some dusty chairs, a groggy clerk in the bookstore, and the post office’s two bins of undeliverable magazines. (Anyone for fifty copies of the current Economist? Or twice as many copies of ESPN The Magazine?) In making – over the course of the week – four round-trip bike commutes and three walks to and from the Rec Center, I’ll bet I didn’t encounter a dozen people, total. Hell, in the Arb, I saw about three times as many red squirrels as people. And I saw three of those surly rodents.

Oh well. The plants in the little garden plot on the lawn between Olin, Goodsell, and Boliou have all sprouted now, as have signs all over campus inviting anyone – anyone? anyone! – to go ahead and pick whatever’s ripe. Anyone? Anyone! I don’t know about you, but I’m having radishes for lunch on Monday.

And the trees! God. The maples and oaks are shimmering with life. If you get too close, you might get knocked down by the photosynthesis. I discovered this beauty in the Upper Arb, just north of the concrete bridge near Bell Field – sublime, in the truest sense of beautiful, awe-inspiring, and a little bit frightening. This giant has already seen more summers than I ever will.

Upper Arb Tree

Funday

A minute ago, in the middle of a conversation about our post-bath, pre-bedtime activities (centered on coloring pictures of Disney Princesses [I’m ready for my lobotomy now]), I commented on how I was having fun with the girls. Julia paused, pencil poised over her sheet of paper, scowled, and said, “But grown-ups don’t have fun, Daddy.”

I’ll grant that I’m rarely having a blast at 7:45 p.m., but nonetheless I did have quite a bit of fun today. I used the bike trailer to take the girls to the Arb for a nice long walk, I went downtown during their naps to do some drawing, and after nap we played outside until the sun said, “Oh my god, can’t you people take a rest?” Julia enjoyed jumping off our Little People slide/climber thingy – jumping being a skill she has lately been cultivating) and Genevieve enjoyed running the bases after her mother helped her use our big new oversized baseball bat to clobber a line-drive triple to center.

Short version of the above: today was a perfect summer weekend day.

Mid-Jump

Runing the Bases