Blowing & Drifting

Vivi loves to do word-find puzzles, but she got a little bored with them the other day, so she decided to make one for me. It was difficult.

Tuesday night, I went out to the garage to mount my new tires on my bike. The old tires had great, but bald as cue balls, and I was eager to run the new rubber.

I decided to start with the back wheel, since – what with the cassette and rear derailleur – it’s messier than the front. Though I removed the old tire quickly enough, I then wasted 45 minutes trying to get the (very, very tight) new tire on the wheel. When I finally succeeded and put the wheel back on the bike, I realized that I’d installed the tire backwards – with the tread direction running opposite to the actual direction of the wheel’s rotation – and that the fully-inflated tire rubbed against my rear fender. Off came the wheel again, so I could take off the fender (two minutes) and reverse the tire (five minutes!). When I inflated the tire, I discovered that I had somehow punctured the tube. Take off the wheel and the tire again, remove the ruined tube, install a new tube, remount the tire, remount the wheel. I probably would have harmed myself if, after all that, the wheel didn’t turn, but thank goodness, it did.

Having learned my lesson from the hour’s struggle with the real wheel, I needed only fifteen minutes to install the new tire on the front wheel – oriented correctly and without ruining another tube.

I’m not eager to do any further wheel work anytime soon.

Sunday night, I returned home from my quick, fun, tiring trip to Madison to discover that the girls had left an “April Fool’s” on my nightstand – an envelope which contained this:

This is funny because they know I’m creeped out by “Budgett’s frog ,” a.k.a. the “hippo frog,” a.k.a. “the frog from my own personal hell.”

I was excited all day about the trip to my bike shop to get my machine back after its spring tune up.
I (semi-ironically) call my bike a “machine.”
I tested several saddles last year and chose one based on comfort and weight.
I call a seat a “saddle.”
I talk about “time in the saddle” when I ride.
I call the shop where I bought my rig “my shop.”
I (semi-ironically) call my bike a “rig.”
I am recognized by voice when I call the shop.
I bought new tires after being out-descended by my riding partner on my last ride.
I care about being out-descended.
I turned down the shop owner’s offer to put my new tires on my rig so that I could do it myself.
I bought a floor pump so that I can adjust tire pressure by 5-psi increments.
I can tell the difference between 45 psi and 50 psi.
I washed my cleats by hand after my last ride.
I prefer one brand of cycling shorts to another, and my bib knickers to either.
I own a pair of arm warmers, and understand their function.
I can go faster, further than I could last year at this time.

Note: The biggest sign that I’m not yet a “real” bike rider is that I only have one bike.

Our garage gets ridiculously filthy over the winter – even a mild, no-salt-and-sand-on-the-streets winter like the one that just ended.

With practically balmy weather this weekend, I had no excuse not to tidy up and clean out the garage, so I did. The process didn’t take long (it’s not a big garage, nor an impossibly untidy one), but I did discover each of the four quadrants of the garage had their own special filthy flavor:

• The northeast corner (nearest the left side of the door in the picture) was the cleanest spot in the whole garage.
• The southeast corner was mostly cluttered with weird stuff like stray nails, loose artificial Christmas-tree needles, and sand from the girls’ sand table, which had been stored there all winter.
• The southwest corner (in front of the door to the house, in the background) had the most regular old dirt, thanks to our crusty shoes.
• The northwest corner had the most spiders, spider eggs, spider webs, and desiccated spider prey.

Julia and I are getting the mail. Julia takes an emvelope out of the mailbox. “Is this a check or a bill?” I glance down and see she’s holding a credit card statement. “It’s a bill.” she sighs. “Darn it. We need checks, not bills.”

I hit the roads with my cycling friend Joe today for a hoped-for 60 miles of gravel. We came in near that mileage, with four hours in the saddle. The conditions were magnificent: windless, relatively cool, mostly sunny. We hit some interesting roads, too: an outbound route of endless rollers and the occasional wall, nice connectors running between small prairie lakes, and – most memorably – a “low maintenance road” that was little more than a mile of thick mud. I jammed up both wheels – twice. We probably needed a half hour to navigate that section, and almost that long to knock the mud out of our cleats when we finally stopped, a few miles later, at Franke’s Bakery in the tiny town of Montgomery. The kolacky went down easily.

The roll back home put us mostly on pavement, but we made excellent time back to Northfield. I was surprised at how good I felt – but as Shannon reminded me when I got home, “You should have felt good. You weren’t riding into 35mph winds!” I realize that that’s true. I also realize that it’s time to break out the sunscreen.

I took the afternoon off today so that Shannon could go to the beauty parlor salon and catch up with a friend. Julia spent most of that time at a playdate, so Vivi and I had to amuse ourselves. She played on my iPad while I worked out, we built a giant Duplo castle, and we even went to the park, even though it was raining.

When dinnertime approached, I decided I didn’t want to “make” any of the convenience foods in the freezer (my usual culinary forte), so I asked the girls if they wanted to help me make pancakes. They first gave me identical “YOU? Make pancakes?” looks, then happily agreed. They helped me make the batter, and then I cooked them with a minimal number of burnt edges. By the time I was done, they were hungry, and dug right in. Polishing off her second serving, Julia cheerily told me, “Lots of the dads in the books I read are good at making pancakes, and so are you!”

I love that kid. And the other one, too. Next up: waffles.

Shannon took the girls to a low-key magic show at the library this afternoon, an event put on by Tim Freeland, the town’s only radio impresario/magician. As so often happens, this inspired Genevieve to try her own “magic tricks” when I came home. Specifically, she tried to replicate the magician’s success at guessing the number chosen by a member of the audience. “It was 33! It was amazing!”

So for five minutes after I came in the door, one of us would think of a number and then the other one would try to guess it. We probably tried about thirty times, but only got one right (46). It was still hilarious, which I guess was the magical part.

Today I left work early to ride for a couple hours. Conditions were pretty much perfect, so the outing promised to be great. I was surprised by just how great I felt, though. I did a simple out-and-back 30-mile course (flat in the first and last thirds, fairly hilly in the middle) in a hair under two hours, for an average speed that well exceeds the speed at which I was riding last March. I hope this bodes well for the gravel centuries later in the spring. Even if it doesn’t, this was a great time.

Plus also, I got both some excellent helmet hair and great pad marks on my forehead.

(Cross posted to my gravel-riding blog, Think Gravel.)

This is what happens when you let your kindergartner loose with a camera:

I brought this book home from the library for Julia before Christmas, when she was obsessively rereading Charlotte’s Web.

She wouldn’t even open the darn thing. Then earlier this week, the book showed up on our coffee tabl bearing the barcode of her school library and bookmarked at a spot that suggested she’d read most of it that afternoon. I asked her why she was reading the book now, having been totally uninterested just a few months ago. She closed the book patiently (keeping her thumb on the page), looked at me, and said, “I guess I’m just older now.”

Thanks to an jesting link from a Facebook friend, my girls heard Malvina Reynolds’ “Little Boxes” the other day, via a YouTube clip of the opening to the TV show Weeds. Unbelievably, they love the song – Reynolds’ unique voice and delivery, the funny lyrics, even the message. We listened to it about ten times in the first sitting, which was more than enough to equip them to sing the tune all weekend. I guess Raffi is the gateway drug to Sixties protest songs. (Speaking of drugs, I had to tell them that Weeds is actually about lawns.) Follow the second link above to hear Reynolds’ version, or watch Pete Seeger’s here:

I’ve been a parent for almost eight years now, but tonight was the first time I’ve ever carried a sleeping kid in from the car. Genevieve fell asleep on a five-minute drive home from a friend’s house, and stayed asleep through the closing of the garage door, through the unbuckling of the safety-seat straps, through the opening of the entryway door, through the trudging up the steps. She finally woke up just as I reached her room, murmuring, “I don’t even have my jacket off yet.” She was only half awake for the next ten minutes of bedtime routine, and then fell asleep again as soon as she was tucked under her covers.

Note: This is the second essay in my (prospective) series of monthly essays. In January, I posted the first essay here.

In some sort of poetically proportional process, I think more and more about my childhood the further I get from it. I’m not awash in waves of capital-m Memory, but constantly splashing through puddles of remembered events, places, people.

For whatever reason, much of what I am remembering these days took place when I was a little kid living, from third grade to eighth grade, in Ironwood, Michigan. (Actually, I know exactly why I’m thinking so much about that time and place: because I was then about as old as my kids are now.) Ironwood was, and still is, a tiny town at the far western end of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Not knowing any better, I didn’t know that the place was almost incredibly remote. Despite the fact that many inhabitants root for the Tigers, the Lions, the Pistons, and the Red Wings, Ironwood is much closer to Green Bay, Duluth, and Minneapolis than to Lansing or Detroit – and closer to North Dakota’s biggest city (Fargo) than to Michigan’s biggest city (Detroit).

Being so remote, Ironwood and its environs – really, the entirety of the Upper Peninsula – is thinly inhabited but thickly endowed with natural resources. The most notable one is snow. Tons and tons of snow. In fact, Ironwood serves as the de-facto capital of “Big Snow Country,” a swath of Wisconsin and Michigan along the southern coast of Lake Superior that – thanks to the Big Lake – gets as much snow as any place east of the Rockies. All that snow means that Big Snow Country is a mecca to skiers and snowmobilers, especially those from further south who bring their big-city money with them. If there’s one thing that Ironwood needs to survive, it’s that snow.

The Ironwood area is blessed with natural resources besides snow, though. A hundred years ago, the area’s iron ore attracted thousands of immigrants, including my paternal great-grandparents, who came from Finland – that is, from Russia – sometime before the First World War. As family lore has it, the Finns worked in the mines just long enough to earn the money they recreate the lives they had enjoyed (or at least led) in Suomi: to live in or near the woods – the area’s third major natural resource – and cobble together a livelihood out of farming and logging. The area’s forest must have been magnets to 19-teens Finns, just as they’re magnets to present-day vacationers – in the long, snowy winters or the short, temperate summers – and for good reason. Never as thoroughly cut over as Wisconsin, the Upper Peninsula still has decent-sized tracts of virgin timber, nowadays almost indistinguishable from cutover areas that have long since grown back.

My grandfather Leonard Tossavainen didn’t quite follow the mythic mines-to-woods path. He was born on a farmstead north of Ironwood in a district full of Finlanders like him. His father, my great grandfather, must have acquired that land, maybe by working in the mines. I don’t know about that, but I do know that Grandpa lived his whole life on those acres, farming and cutting timber outside while his wife, my grandmother Helmi, tended to the big square farmhouse and to my dad and his two siblings. (Grandpa also shortened his extremely unwieldy and unpronounceable surname to the merely unusually unwieldy and unpronounceable “Tassava.”)

Twenty-some years after moving away to go to college in the U.P.’s biggest city, Marquette, my dad moved back to the farm with my mom, my sister, and me, partly to keep Grandpa company after my grandma’s untimely death a few years before. I spent four years living on the farm, which was in many ways a very good place to grow up.

Here’s the farmhouse in 2007. My old bedroom is behind the double window on the second story; the windows below on the first story open onto the kitchen. My grandpa sat there all the time, looking east toward the barn. His dog slept on the roof of that cellar entryway.

* Ironwood is 115 miles from Duluth, 230 miles from Green Bay, and 240 miles from Minneapolis, but 550 miles from Lansing and 610 miles from Detroit. Ironwood is closer to the biggest city in North Dakoka (Fargo, 350 miles) and to the capital of North Dakota (Bismarck, 540 miles) than to its own state capital.