I had occasion to wander across the Macalester campus today for the first time in quite a while, taking in the new Markim Hall at the corner of Grand & Snelling. I was impressed by how well it blends in with the remodeled Kagin Commons – and by the tiny size of the grassy area out front. Weren’t there acres and acres of grass there when I was at Mac – fifteen or more years ago?
I usually keep my office moderately tidy, neither at the “clean desk = sick mind” end of the continuum or the (in)famous “Geologist’s Office” end of the continuum.* But on deadline days like today (especially like today, with two big federal proposals going out), all bets are off. Click through for notes.
*This photo by Alec Soth is part of a stunning 2002 exhibit of photographs of locales around the Carleton campus, “Vantage Points.”
This is why I don’t mind doing bus-stop duty and getting to work a bit late:
I’d planned to do hill repeats this morning, but various changes to the household plans forced me to shift to a shorter, less intense ride this evening, through the hazy light. In the course of the ride, I watched a kewl d00d take a laughably bad swing at his golf ball, smelled fields that had been tilled literally ten seconds before I rode past, giggled at a car that had a “Kennedy|Johnson” bumper sticker, managed to ride without braking through a particularly tough S-turn, and heard a pheasant squawk at me. The scenery was damn good, too:
8:00 a.m.
Goodbye Blue Monday
Perfect for coffee, bagels,
A scone, and homework
11:00 a.m.
Talking with a friend
While our three girls play outside
Unprecedented
3:00 p.m.
Vivi steams along
Julia rides by herself
For a long minute!
6:00 p.m.
A ride of my own
Cool, but ideally lit
Quads staged a revolt
7:30 p.m.
The girls are wound up
Richard Scarry can save us
Stories wind things down
The girls and me enjoying cupcakes after my birthday dinner. The family that desserts together stays together. (The cupcake baker took the shot.)
I dunno if it’s the longer days or what, but I’ve noticed a lot of Carleton students sleeping all around campus lately:
I’m halfway amused by the kids’ abilities to sleep almost anywhere, but halfway inclined to shake them awake and shout, “You’ll never feel more energetic than you do in college! Get moving!”
Last week, I realized that – except for a short work meeting in the next town (a nice enough place, but hardly a destination) I’ve been outside Northfield only once since October 2009. No wonder I’m going stir crazy.
July 2009
July 8-10: took business trip to upstate New York
July 20: attended morning workshop in St. Paul, afternoon visit with friends in Minneapolis
August 2009
August 13-15: took family trip to Moorhead
August 26: biked to Faribault
September 2009
September 5: saw friends in Minneapolis
September 15: went to work meeting in St. Paul
September 18: biked to Kenyon, Minnesota
October 2009
October 4: saw friends in Rochester, Minnesota
November 2009
no trips outside Northfield
December 2009
no trips outside Northfield
January 2010
no trips outside Northfield
February 2010
February 7: raced the City of Lakes Loppet in Minneapolis
February 22: attended work meeting in Faribault
March 2010
no trips outside Northfield
April 2010
two work-related trips scheduled, to St. Paul and Collegeville, Minnesota
Against this backdrop, that possible business trip to Grinnell, Iowa, in July is looking awfully tempting.
Vivi loves to put her favorite toys on her dresser. She loves a lot of toys, so the dresser can get crowded.
J, as we pick up some takeout for dinner: “What smells? It smells like someone burped!”
G, musingly: “When a mama has fwee babies, does they aww come from one spewm en one egg, or is dere fwee spewms en fwee eggs?”
J, as we do origami: “This is WILDLY funny.”
G, watching our cat sniff at G’s Easter basket: “Hey Kitty, did you get an Easter tweat from the Easter cat?”
J, as we’re drawing: “Now draw a werewolf coming out of a volcano and eating lava!”
Me: “I don’t know how to draw a werewolf.”
J: “Just draw a wolf and then, you know, add a were.”
G: “Daddy, it’s better to do things that I tell you that you should do.”
Riding down the hill from the Arb toward my office this morning, I saw a mess of shining somethings on one of the lakes at the edge of campus: metallic litter? armored geese? those new aluminum fish I’ve been hearing so much about?
Better: pots, pans, and other kitchen utensils dangling from a rope tied between Mai Fête Island and the south shore of the Lower Lyman Lake. Nearby, there’s a banner reading, “Farm 1/Canoe 0” – suggesting a prank war between two of the College’s interest houses, Farm House and Canoe House. Hilarious. I’d love to be there to see the denizens of Canoe House try to get the stuff back.
My bike’s nameplate was clean before I started my ride home. It also summarizes my mood after riding home in sloppy, cold, wet weather. Give me snowy, 20° conditions any day.
Julia decided, since the sun had risen in the east or something, that today was The Day to take the training wheels off her bike. Being pretty interested in hastening the glorious day of the first family bike ride, I acceded to this request right away.
Little did I know that I should have followed this simple act with six ibuprofen tablets, a cortisone injection, and a shot of whiskey.
Julia and I actually had a lot of fun getting from our house to the park a couple blocks away, tooling around the paved path at the park, and riding back home. In fact, we did this twice: once for a short ride in the morning and then again for a longer one in the afternoon. Vivi rode along with us on her little red (training-wheeled) bike – meaning, usually, that she was about twenty yards ahead of us and pulling away. She’s a regular Fabian Cancellara: all power.
Julia and I, on the other hand, went more like a tugboat than a steamship. True to her personality, she was very tentative about the entire experience, though she was helped along by the fact that she’d asked me to remove the training wheels. So long as I had one hand on her seat and one hand near her handlebars, she was fine.
So that’s what I did, walking next to her as she moved steadily and slowly along. I did pull my hands away a few times to show her that she’d already gotten a pretty good sense of how to maintain her balance, but this worried her more than it pleased her, so I stopped doing it – at least so obviously. By the end of our last lap around the playground, she was (unbeknownst to her) regularly getting about ten pedal strokes of distance on her own before I’d have to correct her direction or get her back in balance. Not bad for someone who, last summer, would have a screaming meltdown at the suggestion of a bike ride. Today, she said more than once, “This is fun! I’m so proud of myself! I love riding like a big kid!”
I was pleased by all this, and I’m 98% looking forward to our next try for two-wheeled solo riding. I can’t say 100% because oh my god does guiding a newbie rider on a kid’s bike do terrible, horrible, no-good things to one’s back and hamstrings. When we pulled into the garage at the end of the afternoon outing – after probably 30 or 40 minutes of cumulative time helping Julia – I finally stood up straight, which elicited vertical bars of holy shit running from shoulder blades to knees and a horizontal bar of what the hell along my waist. Seriously: I was nowhere near as agonized from skiing either the City of Lakes Loppet in February or my 50k Oakebeiner tour in March. I guess it’s true: raising kids is the toughest thing you can do to your body.
Since that unpleasant moment, I’ve taken four Advil, and I plan to chase this here DQ Blizzard with a little whiskey. I should be back to full strength by morning – and ready for Monday afternoon’s try to get Julia biking on her own.
Today was my first real bike ride of the year. After driving and taking the bus during most of the brutally icy winter, I’ve been bike commuting for a while again now, but two miles each way (even if they’re through the reawakening Arb) just doesn’t compare to a real ride.
Today, I had only thirty minutes to ride, so I headed out from our place, up and down a sizable hill that’s literally 90 seconds away, and then back over the hill and up a nice easy road to the edge of campus, where I took a few laps of the fun, technical trails in the Upper Arb. I cleaned the junk out of my legs from my last workout, and built up some new junk for tomorrow.
Besides the pure pleasure of riding – which is second only to skiing as a wellspring of joy – today’s ride was notable for the incredible skies. Northfield is frequently blessed by some spectacular skies, but today’s were especially amazing. While I rode, Northfield was under blue sky that was bounded on all sides by the ragged-veil clouds of distant rain. It was stunning to see: literally a ring of rain all around us, but not on us. The late-afternoon sun was doing some wonderful things to the rain, too: making it a deep purple off to the west, a paler indigo to the north and south, and a light blue to the east. For a few minutes of the ride, I was tracked by four circling turkey buzzards, as black as the jets heading in to MSP were silver.
1. Things I Read
A. Online Article
“Blogging, Now and Then” by Robert Darnton, in the New York Review of Books‘ NYRBlog
How new, then, is bloggery? Should we think of it as a by-product of the modern means of communication and a sign of a time when newspapers seem doomed to obsolescence? It makes the most of technical innovations—the possibility of constant contact with virtual communities by means of web sites and the premium placed on brevity by platforms such as Twitter with its limit of 140 characters per message. Yet blog-like messaging can be found in many times and places long before the Internet…
Short, scurrilous abuse proliferated in all sorts of communication systems: taunts scribbled on palazzi during the feuds of Renaissance Italy, ritual insult known as “playing the dozens” among African Americans, posters carried in demonstrations against despotic regimes, and graffiti on many occasions such as the uprising in Paris of May–June 1968 (one read “Voici la maison d’un affreux petit bourgeois”). When expertly mixed, provocation and pithiness could be dynamite—the verbal or written equivalent of Molotov cocktails.
To appreciate the importance of a pre-modern blog, consult a database such as Eighteenth Century Collections Online and download a newspaper from eighteenth-century London. It will have no headlines, no bylines, no clear distinction between news and ads, and no spatial articulation in the dense columns of type, aside from one crucial ingredient: the paragraph. Paragraphs were self-sufficient units of news. They had no connection with one another, because writers and readers had no concept of a news “story” as a narrative that would run for more than a few dozen words. News came in bite-sized bits, often “advices” of a sober nature—the arrival of a ship, the birth of an heir to a noble title—until the 1770s, when they became juicy. Pre-modern scandal sheets appeared, exploiting the recent discovery about the magnetic pull of news toward names.
B. Book
Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, a novel about Thomas Cromwell, a powerbroker in Henry VIII’s England. This novel has it all: an incredible (and historically-grounded, if not “true”) plot, fascinating characters, ridiculously good writing at every level from the sentence to the chapter, and the an ending that both closed the book and didn’t. Incredible stuff.
2. Things I Watched
A. Movie
The September Issue, the 2009 documentary about the production of Vogue‘s mammoth and influential September issue. I expected to like it okay, but I found it engrossing. Watching the magazine’s staff put together the magazine was interesting enough, but the politics at Vogue specifically and in fashion generally were gripping. Anna Wintour makes Thomas Cromwell look like a doofus.
B. Presentation
Designer Kacie Kinzer talking about her fascinating “Tweenbot” project, in which humans help a dumb but cute little robot navigate a New York City park. The idea is simple, but her execution of it and her exposition of it are brilliant.
C. Sports Video
The first 15 seconds are literally jaw-dropping. (We could have ski flying right here in the Upper Midwest, if Copper Peak near Ironwood, Michigan, were refurbished.)
3. Things I Saw
A. Stupidest Picture
“No Excetions,” in the “Teabonics” photoset on Flickr, a collection of misspelling or just dumb signs from Tea Party rallies.
(http://www.flickr.com/photos/pargon/ / CC BY 2.0)
B. Sports Picture
From Boston.com‘s “Big Picture” set on the 2010 Winter Paralympics:
“Haitao Du #5 of China competes in the men’s standing 20km free cross-country skiing race during Day 4 of the Winter Paralympics on March 15, 2010 in Vancouver, Canada. (Jamie McDonald/Getty Images)”
