Blowing & Drifting

Tonight while drawing at the kitchen table, Vivi had an itch on her back. She reached around to scratch it, then jumped in shock. “What’s wrong, honey?” I asked. Eyes wide but arm still reaching back, she said, “I felt something! What am I touching?” I leaned over to look behind her, expecting her to [...]

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Carleton’s annual reunion is a huge deal, literally taking over campus for three days in the middle of June every year. The aftermath is always impressive: giant empty tents, scores of recycling bins, trodden-down grass… This year the aftermath included some new seedlings – maples by the look of the leaves – in a part [...]

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Following on yesterday’s post about my experience in Steve Kelly’s jazz history course, here are the best ten songs that I heard for the first time in the course. 10. Coleman Hawkins, “Body and Soul” (1939) 9. Nina Simone, “Love Me Or Leave Me” (ca. 1965) 8. Count Basie Orchestra, “One O’ Clock Jump” (1937) [...]

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Vivi, bless her heart (and mind), is obsessed with Julia’s homework. Thing is, she can do all the spelling/reading homework just as well as Julia, so that’s actually a breeze. But math is much more complicated, and so she gets awfully frustrated trying to figure out, say, how to work out “10 + 10″ or [...]

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I was traipsing around the house this afternoon, just before dinner, when our neighbors pulled up in their car and leapt out excitedly, looking down at a spot in their driveway. “Christopher,” one called, “Did you see that snake?” I hadn’t, so I went over, expecting to see a footlong garter snake wriggling away. Oh, [...]

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Genevieve has followed up last week’s artistic breakthrough, drawing bodies on her stick people, with fingers and toes this week. Look! Digitized art! Click through for the full image, and notice who gets top billing in the dedication on the roof of the house.

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1. Genevieve has been playing constantly with a tiny dog from one of her Little People playsets. She’s named him “Woofy Woofy” and spends a good chunk of each day feeding him(toy food from the girls’ kitchen, putting to sleep on one of the girls’ chairs, and especially hiding him in the couch cushions, then [...]

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(Cross-posted from my other blog) Last week, the FIS linked to a video of one of Matti Heikkinen’s training days at Ramsau. The video’s sponsored by Polar, the Finnish heart-rate monitor company, so it is a bit Euro-cheesy and pretty heavy on the HR data, but it’s still an interesting look into an elite athlete’s [...]

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While Julia makes “cooking chapter books”, Vivi is making more abstract works like this, which includes several “letters” (running left to right, a orangish V, a purplish S, a green L, a blue O, and a black “wowa case” B), a  nice black box in the center, and in the upper right, the jagged shape [...]

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I’m jittery with excitement for tomorrow’s penultimate day of the Tour de France, an unprecedentedly late mountain stage which ends with a summit finish on Mont Ventoux, a colossal limestone ridge that, in dominating the skyline of Provence, has long been called le Géant Provençal – the Giant of Provence. Ventoux is widely considered the [...]

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Hans Holbein’s portrait of Richard Southwell is incredible to see and study. The drawing is even better when you know more about Holbein and especially about Southwell, who was both a murderer and a sheriff, and complicit in the killing of Sir Thomas More.

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It probably won’t happen (or at least to the extent that it will matter), but I still like this forecast:

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The girls are thoroughly enjoying their Valentine’s Day, and they haven’t even reached the best part – a cookie making project. The lunchtime sunshine did a nice job of using some of the girls’ handmade decorations to improve our dining-room floor…

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(This is a “meme” floating around Facebook, but by god I’m not going to author web content that can’t be repurposed. Apologies if you’ve seen this on FB. Links to responses – on FB or elsewhere – are welcome.) 1. I grew up in two snowy ex-mining towns in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan – [...]

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Check out the parallel but divergent photos on my friend Matt’s Flickr welcome page the other day: Via his blog, “Status Quon’t”

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