Do-It-Yourself Ready-for-Spring Blog Post

Stealing shamelessly from my blog friend Colin here and here, I am hereby providing a handy Do-It-Yourself Ready-for-Spring Blog Post and (at the bottom) an even handier Do-It-Yourself Ready-for-Spring Status Update. (Your options – all of which I have chosen for their perfectly descriptive neutrality – are grouped within brackets [ ] and separated by pipes |.)

Do-It-Yourself Ready-for-Spring Blog Post

Boy, am I [ready to embrace | eager to see | happy about | just like an impatient toddler when it comes to] spring. I can’t wait for the [warm weather | flowers to bloom | incessant rain and endless mud | lung-wrecking humidity | inevitable sign that the seasons have turned | evidence that I am incrementally closer to the grave].

This winter has seemed especially [long | cold | long and cold | cold and long | hard on someone with my delicate constitution], even for [southern Minnesota | Minnesota | the Upper Midwest | the Midwest | the Northern Hemisphere]. I was sure it would [never end | freeze me to death | end life above the Mason-Dixon Line]! We must have had [fifteen significant snowfalls | a hundred inches of snow | an ice storm every other week | a Little Ice Age] between [September | October | November | December] and [December | January | February | March | April].

I mean, a little snow at [Thanksgiving | Christmas | New Year’s Day | Epiphany | Martin Luther King Day | Groundhog Day | President’s Day] is [fine | seasonably appropriate | barely tolerable | far too difficult to endure | a tragedy on par with the Black Death], but honestly, there’s only so long that a person wants to [wear sweaters | don parka, hat, and mittens to go outdoors | occasionally shovel snow | ski, sled, and ice skate | let the Earth renew itself]. When you get right down to it, [being a bit cold | enduring some dry skin | wearing longjohns | scraping icy car windows | relying on the mammalian capacity for self-maintained thermal homeostasis ] is kinda inconvenient. I’d much rather be [too warm | too hot | sweltering | in the E.R. with heatstroke] than [a bit chilled | too cold | troubled to put on another shirt | indoors].

And don’t even get me started on my [cabin fever | weight gain from holiday treats | loathing of the short winter days | mild eczema | reptilian fear of fresh snow] – I’m just ready for this [long | cold | long and cold | cold and long | climatologically appropriate] season to end! Bring on the [chance to wear shorts and t-shirts outdoors | chance to flirt with melanoma | first horrible day with 95-degree temps and 99% humidity | high electricity bills from running the AC all the time | ozone warnings | opportunity to complain about the heat]!

Do-It-Yourself Ready-for-Spring Status Update
(You know, for Facebook or Twitter or whatnot.)

Ready for [spring | warm weather | hot weather | overwhelming my antiperspirant]. The winter was too [long | cold | long and cold | cold and long | true to the geography and climate of the place I’ve chosen to live home]. Can’t wait to wear [shorts | tank tops | a ridiculously brimmed hat | eight ounces of sunscreen] every day!

The Maddening Princess

As I sit here blogging, Genevieve is making her way through the usual bedtime meltdown: calling for me or Shannon, yelling about how she’s not tired, singing angrily, just plain screaming. Julia’s four feet away, in her own bed, enduring it like one of her stoical Finnish descendants might have endured domination by the czar’s troops.

Genevieve, what the hell are we going to do with you? You’re so often charming and funny and wonderful, and you’re always smart and cute, but sometimes – like every goddamn night between 7:30 and 8:30 (if we’re lucky) – you are a horror. Tonight, as I went through the stupidly useless routine of having her teddy bear talk to her about how important it is to go to sleep with “no cry-crys,” I realized that my throat was tight, my heart was pounding, and I had an ache in my jaw from clenching my teeth. Such is the stress of trying to get the maddening princess to go to sleep.

You can see it in her here, right? A certain sense of herself, serving both good and ill purposes? I can’t take my eyes off her, or stop thinking about her, but nobody’s ever made me more deeply or frequently angry than Vivi.
Queen of the Slide

Meltdowns

Perhaps as a way to distract myself from the colossal meltdowns that occur regularly at our house each evening between, say, 7:30 and 8:30, I’ll here post about two fantastic articles by Michael Lewis – the author of Liar’s Poker, Moneyball, and some other good stuff – on the financial meltdown:

“The End,” Portfolio, December 2008

An engrossing and shocking look at the deep and wide pool of stupidity that was Wall Street during the boom -and the recent bust.

“Wall Street on the Tundra,” Vanity Fair, April 2008
A long examination of how Iceland, without even really understanding what it was doing, remade itself as a capital of world finance, and is now suffering a calamity of its own creation.

Albums

Continuing my goal of achieving convergence between this blog and Facebook, here is my response to the Facebook “meme” on the fifteen (give or take) albums which have been important to my life…

The only albums I can really remember from childhood (ours was not a musical house) are Johnny Horton, “Greatest Hits,” and Kenny Rogers, “The Gambler,” which I played on our giant old record player/stereo. “The Gambler” speaks for itself as a peak of 20th century cultural production, but Horton’s “Sink the Bismarck” is probably the main reason that I was ever interested in history. You can draw a straight line from that song’s opening drumbeats to my dissertation on World War II shipbuilding. I’m not even kidding.

In junior high and high school, I slowly discovered, thanks to WIMI radio in Ironwood, Michigan, and then the Musicland in the Copper Country Mall, Houghton, that many people listened to a lot of music, much of which was pretty damn interesting. In high school, I basically burned out my tapes of R.E.M.’s “Document” and “Green” (only later working backwards to the earlier, better albums) and two rap albums: Public Enemy, “It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back” and N.W.A., “Straight Outta Compton.” The former album opened me up to all kinds of politics, and put me on to reading everything from The Autobiography of Malcolm X to histories of Marcus Garvey and slave rebellions. The latter album, I played incessantly while driving around and around and around downtown Houghton.

I brought those albums with me to Macalester in 1991, but literally from the first day on campus I started listening to stuff that they didn’t even carry at that Musicland, much less play on the radio in the U.P. The tattooed guy next door lent me his copies of Nirvana’s “Bleach” and “Nevermind,” both of which I immediately bought at Applause in St. Paul – a store that dwarfed Musicland in every important way. From various friends, I discovered, among other music, the Pixies, “Trompe le Monde,” the Smiths, “Louder Than Bombs,” Jack Logan, “Bulk,” and especially the holy quartet of Uncle Tupelo albums: “Still Feel Gone,” “No Depression,” “March 16-20, 1992,” and “Anodyne.” The first two UT albums were the first pieces of music that really spoke to my experience growing up in a depressed, alcoholic Midwestern town that seemed fit only for escaping – and they fucking rocked, too. “March 16,” on the other hand, sent me backwards to classic American music: the Smithsonian folk music collections, Leadbelly (whom, I was happy to discover, was also a favorite of Nirvana), the Carter Family, Johnny Cash, and especially Hank Williams. I never acquired much Hank, but a cheap copy of his “40 Greatest Hits” has been a constant companion ever since.

Moving to Chicago immediately after college, I tried and mostly failed to keep up with the music scene. Coincidentally, the UT successor band Wilco located itself in Chicago around then, as well, which made it easy to follow their development. Just as UT had sent me to the historical record of American music, “Being There,” “Summer Teeth,” and “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot” sent me out to weirder contemporary stuff, including especially Radiohead. I had no idea what to make of “OK Computer” when I bought it on the spur of the moment at (oddly) a Musicland store, but my god it was fun to contemplate as an underemployed 20-something and then as an impoverished grad student. I loved (love) all of Radiohead’s later albums (“Kid A,” “Amnesiac,” “Hail to the Thief”) too, but “OKC” was and still is it: “For a minute there, I lost myself.”

Around that same time, I started to discover jazz, thanks to a confluence of forces that included some worldly grad school classmates and friends, a great jazz scene in Chicago, and a deeper appreciation of the heritage on which Wilco and Radiohead were building. A grad school prof suggested that I try Charles Mingus, “Mingus Ah Um” first, owing to its deep connections to the history of 1950s and 1960s, and I was hooked. It was easy to slide over to other great jazz, like Bill Evans, “Portrait in Jazz,” and of course Miles Davis, “Kind of Blue,” and to pick up newer stuff like the Brad Mehldau Trio, “Places,” or the Bad Plus, “There Are the Vistas” and “Give” – all of which are notable not only for being excellent jazz but for covering tunes by the Pixies, Nirvana, and Radiohead. When the Bad Plus cover Johnny Horton’s “North to Alaska,” I know my musical history will have come full circle.

Bouncing Around

Like I said, there was a lot of physical and psychological jostling in that last weekend, nowhere more than in the “bounce house” put up at the Northfield Nursery School‘s winter social on Saturday morning. The last time Genevieve tried one of these things, in fall, she literally couldn’t even stand up on the bouncy floor. I had to retrieve her, crying, from a far corner.

This time, she joyously walked, ran, bounced, fell, crawled… She and Julia had a grand time. We need one of these things at our house.
NNS Winter Social Fun - 04

Overfull

Even more than most, this weekend pretty much entailed two days of nonstop childcare, seven a.m. to eight or nine p.m. Shannon has some rough days during the week, for sure, but she at least is more-or-less off duty before I go to work and after I come home around 4:30 every day. (Definition of off duty: you can sit under a blanket and read a magazine without worrying that the girls are beheading themselves in the kitchen, scalding their hands in the bathroom, or choking on Playmobil toys in the playroom.)

This weekend, the benefits usually derived from the girls’ naps disappeared in the frustrations of unusually frequent and intense meltdowns, as well as healthy doses of general obstinacy. All in all, I think Gmail inadvertently summarized the too-much weekend when it miscalculated the emails in my inbox:

Uff da.

Yuck You Very Much, or, Modern Air Travel

The best moment of this week’s trip to D.C. came early, as I stood at a gate at MSP, waiting to see if I’d move from the standby list onto the plane. I was #4 on the list, then #3 when one guy took himself off, then #2 when another guy got a spot in first class, then #1 with two ticketed passengers still missing.

After roughly a zillion intercom calls, the gate agents said they’d have a spot for me. “Just a second, though. We have to find you a seat.”

One turned to the other: “What seat is the last boarder in? He’s eligible for an upgrade.” The other checked the passenger list: “He’s in 22-C.”

The first one curled her nose dramatically. “Yuck. Worst seat on the plane. Move him up!”

She turned to me, smiling brightly. “We have you in 22-C! Enjoy the flight!”

As the Snow Ends

I took the day “off” today to recover from the harried trip to D.C., to spend some time with the girls, and to give Shannon a bit of a break. I say “off” because eleven hours with the girls – as delightful as they are – isn’t exactly restorative.

But the girls did take a good long nap, during which I snuck off to the Lower Arb for what might be the last ski of the season. Though last week’s snow is already thin in many spots, all of the trails were skiable, even over the wet sticky snow. Trying to glide was basically a war with surface tension: I could actually hear my skis adhering to the moisture in the snow, then popping loose. This made movement slow and laborious.

On the other hand, going so slowly made it easier to notice that there are already tiny little buds on some trees and a certain green hue to the fields. As much as I hate to admit it, spring is on the way.

Money, Money, Money

Though the conference I’m attending is, in fact, quite off-the-web, I don’t think that I divulge too much if I say that it’s all about the money. Generally, federal grant funding. Specifically, federal grant funding flowing out of the stimulus bill. Even more specifically, federal grant funding flowing out of the stimulus bill to liberal-arts colleges like the one that employs me.

The news is, by and large, good. Fuzzy, still, but pretty good. The words “astounding” and “stupendous” were thrown around pretty freely as descriptors of the size of the monetary figures. Thankfully, novelist William Gibson has recently provided a little guide to the million/billion/trillion scale:

A million seconds is 11 days
A billion seconds is 32 years.
A trillion seconds is 32,000 years.

This lines up pretty well with how long it’ll take to pay off the debt.

D.C. United

After yesterday’s travel debacles, I made it to “the District” this morning around 10:30, at which time I discovered a city pretty much locked up from Sunday’s snowfall. Relative to Minnesota’s recent storm, this one wasn’t much, but it was obvious that the city’s not equipped to handle it. The streets were slush ponds, the sidewalks were iced over, and people were bundled up for Arctic expeditions.

And but so, my taxi ride to the conference hotel took about ten minutes over the empty streets, allowing me to check in, unpack, and still make it to the afternooon conferene sessions.

Lemons thus made into lemonade, I was pleasantly surprised to find the sky still full of light when the day’s sessions ended at five. Spring is coming! I headed directly to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, of which Julia had asked me to take a picture. The first and second times I had been to the see the White House (last March and in October 2000), the people on the sidewalk across from Lafayette Park were businesslike, solemnly taking the requisite pictures.

This time, I snapped my pictures as part of a shifting group of twelve or twenty other people, all grinning happily and all taking pictures like crazy. My favorites were  three French-speaking black hipsters who each took a turn standing at the fence directly in front of the White House portico, counting “Un… deux… TROIS!” and then leaping into the air while the others took pictures. While they were having a great time, everyone else (except maybe the cop who was cursing at his squad car’s steaming engine) was having a good time, too, even four months after the election and six weeks after the inauguration.

Early Makes for Better Late than Never?

Right about now, I should be checking into my hotel in Washington, D.C. Instead, I’m sitting at my desk in Northfield. This afternoon, I had literally just zipped up my suitcase when I decided to check my email one last time, and there discovered a message from Northwest informing me that my Sunday-evening flight to D.C. had been canceled due to bad weather out east. Crap.

After an hour making calls to the airline, to the MSP and D.C. shuttle services, and to the hotel, I finally hit on a tentative plan for getting to D.C. tomorrow, one which entails a very early ride to MSP, an early flight to DC (if I can get promoted from standby – otherwise, a later one through Boston!), and finally making it to the conference halfway through the first day.

Better late than never, but this is pushing it.

On the plus side, the girls were in great moods all afternoon, so I feel like I got some bonus time with them.

Greatest Commute Ever

Watching the blizzard on Thursday, I was seized by a renewed desire to ski to work. The notion originated in a blog post by Alex, an e-quaintance (and a fast skier) who roller-skied to work in Boston last summer.

The idea really took hold earlier this winter, though, when I realized that my house isn’t too far from the Northfield golf course, which runs close to the Arb, which abuts campus, which contains my office.* Then the snow melted, leaving me to my wheeled devices.

Until today. Yesterday’s “Snowmaggedon” made the ski commute feasible again (as a commenter noted), so I worked out the timing and did it. Owing to an, shall we say, indirect route, I had to budget quite a bit of time, but  I reached the Carleton Rec Center (where, for perspirational reasons, the commute ended) after a solid 55 minutes of skiing.

My route (about 4.2km/2.6 miles altogther) took me out my backyard, along a street, across part of the Northfield Golf Club‘s course, and then through Carleton’s Upper Arboretum. I climbed up and over eight snow berms, sank to my hips in one deceptive drift on the golf course, and made four road crossings, one of which included a satisfyingly odd look from a passing motorist.

It was, in a word, fantastic. Under a brilliant sun and sky, the pure white snow was untracked except by a few critters – deer, rabbits, squirrels, and either a Yeti or a snowshoer. The whole thing was great, but the best moment came as I skied down an incline on the golf course fairway: behind me, the sun suddenly emerged from a cloud, lighting up everything around me and casting my dark black shadow down the hill. Amazing. The view back up the slope wasn’t terrible, either. (Click through for other photos, including one shot by a nice young woman who agreed to take a picture of the dude in the weird hat.)

Down the Fairway I

* My other oddball goal for the winter is to do a 50km ski session in the Lower Arb. It’s harder than it seems, since the trails only let you create 8km or 9km loops. Anyone for a few laps?