I was very exciting when I arrived on campus this morning to see that Carleton is immediately starting to put up a new building, the William H. Sallmon Administrative Building. As President Oden says in the video announcement of the project, the building will be devoted to offices for Carleton’s large and growing administrative staff. In other words, me! Thank god. I need a new office, with room for a sofa and, I hope, a nice view.
Note the heavy machinery in place to start construction right away this morning.
This morning on my ride to work, I finally stopped to take some pictures of one of the maple trees that’s been tapped in the Arb. The white bucket was kinda pretty in the early-morning light:
The bucket was maybe an eighth full, not including the big moth that had drowned in the sap:
A truly bizarre situation – the girls going to a tea party with Shannon, leaving me unscheduled for two hours – let me to do a nice long run through the Arb on Sunday afternoon. The weather was perfect, and though early spring is not the most beautiful time to be in the Arb, it was nice to establish a “before” against which to compare the verdant lushness of late spring and summer. To that end, a few photos…
This afternoon, Shannon and the girls went to the mother-daughter tea party that a family friend throws every year. This is a Big Deal, and the three of them got all dolled up for it.
Not visible in this picture is the enormous number of delicacies that they all enjoyed at the party. This is a tea party I can support.
Exactly midway through our pre-dinner bike ride around the block tonight, Vivi hopped off her trike, climbed on up on this retaining wall, and lay down on the grass. “Vivi,” I asked, “what are you doing?” She looked over at me and said matter-of-factly, “I’m doing a sunbathe!” I couldn’t disagree.
Never mind the endowment’s slow growth, delayed building maintenance, the lack of pay raises last year, or helicopter parents: the real threat to campus is beavers. It looks like a beaver (or three) took care of a tree that had already been neatly trimmed with a chainsaw.
Sometimes spring skiing is great: warm temperatures, sunshine, interesting and fun snow. Today was not that day here in Northfield, but goddamn if I didn’t have One Last Ski™ – a solid and sweaty hour in conditions that included foot-deep slush, inch-thick ice, and various obstacles. I prefer to think of these obstacles as increasing the technical difficulty of the course. And thank god for “rock skis”!
Bare Ground
Ten feet further, I had to ski over a foot-wide isthmus of ice between two open expanses of ski-eating gravel.
Deer Crap
Perhaps the fiftieth collection of deer crap on the trail.
Standing Water
You can’t really see it, but there are numerous inch-deep puddles of water here on this “snow.”
The temperature hit about 45° F here on Sunday afternoon, which thus might well have been our last moment for winter fun. We made most of it, building two snowmen with our neighbor friend (who just learned how to do rabbit ears) while a cardinal serenaded us from the tip top of a nearby tree. Not a bad sendoff for winter, if that’s what it was.
Adding to my unintentional but now tripartite (part 1 and part II) chronicle of the spring melt here in Northfield, another compare and contrast.
The girls, our next-door-neighbor, and I built big snowman (probably a good 5’5″) in the backyard on Christmas Day. Below, he appears on the day of his creation and this morning, on what might be his last day as anything but a stub. When we build a big snowman next year, I’ll remember not to put him at the exact bottom of the sledding hill: more than one run this winter ended by crashing into his backside.
The lovely curved benches out from of Laird Hall at Carleton are emerging from the colossal snowbanks which have buried them since Christmas. It’s not much, but it is a sign of spring.
This afternoon, after another 40-degree day, I noticed this stark evidence that the sun is still quite southerly right now. The snow on the north side of the sidewalk is melting rapidly; the snow on the south side is mostly untouched. If only this could be harnessed to ensure skiable ski trails in June.
Overheard, 6:15 p.m.
Vivi, pointing at the easel. “Julia, what you tryin’ to show me over dere?”
Julia: “I was just showing you the word ‘vowel,’ and that it starts with the letter ‘v’.”
Vivi: “Oh. I a growd-up, so I don’t hear you good. My ears don’t work.”
Me: “Genevieve, most grown-ups’ ears work fine. It’s just me who has bad ears and can’t hear so well.”
Vivi: “No, I don’t hear Julia too well e-fur [either].”
Seen, 6:30 p.m.
“Genevieve, why do you have a Post-It on your face?”
“I dunno, Daddy. Julia put it dere. We thought it was funny.”
When Yitta Schwartz died last month at 93, she left behind 15 children, more than 200 grandchildren and so many great- and great-great-grandchildren that, by her family’s count, she could claim perhaps 2,000 living descendants. Mrs. Schwartz was a member of the Satmar Hasidic sect, whose couples have nine children on average and whose ranks of descendants can multiply exponentially. But even among Satmars, the size of Mrs. Schwartz’s family is astonishing. A round-faced woman with a high-voltage smile, she may have generated one of the largest clans of any survivor of the Holocaust — a thumb in the eye of the Nazis.
B. Geek “Ski Switching and Waxing in the 30km Classic” (Topher Sabot, Fasterskier.com, February 28th, 2010)
A great, if technical examination of an interesting new twist to cross-country ski racing: allowing athletes to change skis in the middle of certain long races so as to find a faster or otherwise better pair. Ski switching builds in new tactical element, since athletes have to carefully choose when to take the 10 to 20 seconds needed to change, as well as an element of luck, since they (and their technicians) might choose the wrong skis, and thus ruin a good race.
2. Book I Started At a friend’s recommendation, I started Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, a novel about Thomas Cromwell, a power behind the throne of Henry VIII. I’m going to dole this book out to myself in very, very small doses, because – as signified by winning the Man Booker prize last year – this is a fantastic work of art. The writing is superb, but even more impressive than the prose style is the intellectual power deployed by Mantel in making someone like Cromwell both comprehensible and admirable. (Here’s a laudatory review of the book, which mentions a sequel.)
4. Video I Watched: “Demong sprints away” | NBC Olympics – the “raw feed” of Billy Demong attacking from the front of the last nordic combined race, dropping Bernhard Gruber of Austria and Johnny Spillane (USA), and surging to America’s first-ever Olympic gold medal in a nordic discipline.
5. Music I Enjoyed “You’ll Never Walk Alone” by Shirley Bassey (composed by Rodgers and Hammerstein). Ignore the goofball sentimentalism of the commercial and enjoy the goofball sentimentalism of the song.
The nordic events at the Vancouver Winter Olympic Games were colossally exciting to watch. The best single moment for me was Billy Demong’s gold-winning attack in the last nordic combined race, last Thursday. Demong’s medal – part of huge American haul in nordic combined which also included two silvers from Johnny Spillane and a silver in the team competition – was just one great moment, though. Many of the biathlon events and virtually all of the cross-county events were exciting, down-to-the-wire affairs.
The last cross-country race, the men’s 50-kilometer, lived up to its precursors at the Games, with a mad final sprint culminating two hours of hard racing. Petter Northug, the world’s best male XC skier right now, took the gold by finishing three-tenths of a second ahead of Axel Teichmann, a German who is himself a phenomenal racer but who also has a knack for losing to Northug. The bronze went to Johan Olsson, a hardworking Swede whose efforts animated three of the XC races at Vancouver and who crossed the finish line another seven-tenths after Teichmann. A half second behind Olsson came Tobias Angerer, another German and now the possessor of the dubious “wooden medal” that goes to fourth-placed finishers.
Then – just a tenth of a second later – came one of my favorite racers, the Canadian Devon Kershaw. His fifth place matched the best-ever finish by a male Canadian XC skier (a record set last Saturday), but it also capped a herculean effort in the race from Kershaw, who had raced well but not up to his standard at the Games. A prolific blogger and Twitter-user, Kershaw seems to be a great guy – someone who works hard, who doesn’t take himself too seriously, and who has overcome no small amount of tragedy in his life to become one of the world’s best cross-country racers. If he’d somehow just been a half-meter further up the straightaway, he’d be wearing a medal right now. But the near misses are as much a part of the Olympics as the medals. I hope he gets another chance in four years. I doubt he’ll miss it then.
Along with some friends, the girls and I enjoyed a long walk in the Arb on Saturday afternoon, soaking up the sun and visiting a huge igloo that some Carleton students put up a few months ago. As Julia’s posture shows, these photos are from before the walk and after it.
