“…perhaps he is snatching us away from the jaws of certain psychic and cultural death by asking us to put on our thinking caps.”

Please vote today.

It’s a typical midwestern fall day - cool, sunny, the breathtakingly blue sky a perfect backdrop for the just-coming-on fall color - and this eases my Monday state of mind (despite the fact that it’s, well, Tuesday, and cold/wet weather is on the way). I’m walking to the bank, buoyed by the excellent weather and thinking, offhandedly, about lunch, when across my path mince two young “professionals”, - the kind of women that wear their office clothes a size too small and their shoes with pointy, pointy toes - one of them talking loudly about a new thrift store in town that is run by and benefits a popular local charity.

Mincy Young “Professional”: Well, I mean, you know, I have stuff to donate and they’re all, “We can’t take donations except at certain times?” What the f*ck is that about?.

[I’m finding myself about to agree with her, at least in principle (mainly because I hate showing up at the thrift with donations only to find them closed or unable to accept donations), though I find the eff word unnecessary, especially at such volume (lo, I am old now, it’s obvious), AND I’ve worked for an organization accepting food donations before and understand how difficult it can be when one is short-staffed and overwhelmed, so I end up being on the fence, when she continues:].

MY”P”: … I mean, I’m gonna donate my stuff when I donate it, and they’re going to LIKE it. Those people are going to take what they get..

Click-clack, click-clack, went their heels as they went off to lunch somewhere, and I recalled being reminded somewhere that “those people” is the plural form of “that one”.

Hm.

I’m sorry, I just can’t stop looking at it.

It’s gorgeous outside and the kids are still asleep and I’m thinking school starting this week is going to be rough going in terms of rising cheerfully to greet the day. I’m going to roust them out of bed right now.

Really, though, I want you guys to look at the photos I’ve been taking at work these last few months. Not because they’re awesome, but because it’s been a really intense learning experience for me, and fun, and Cody’s been letting me use his camera so some of the photos actually ARE pretty nice:

Sunflowers aren’t the rarest flowers in the world - there’s no shortage of them in my neck of the woods this time of year - nor are they the prettiest, but they certainly impress me every year with a) their ability to attract all kinds of birds to my yard and b) the fact that they can grow to be 12 feet high in what seems like no time.

Almost August Already. To me August means that Jim and I will note another year completed of marital bliss, that the garden is getting away from me, that a bunch of crap I meant to do didn’t get done, and a host of things I wasn’t planning to do did get done.

Well, lately I’ve been frequenting Memory Lane:

These guys were all seen as totally retro, and not in a respectful way, in 1991. While a few in the scene I inhabited in MPLS back then turned up their noses at KQ92 fare such as Yes and Steve Winwood, I was never one to turn down a free ticket, and I was certainly not about to turn down seeing, live, some of the artists I grew up listening to. I attended the Yes show with my friend Dave whilst in the throes of relationship drama, and I attended Steve Winwood with my dad shortly before I made my final decision to leave MPLS for good (due, in large part, to aforementioned relationship drama). Both shows were, of course, incredible.

[It reminds me, a little, of the time years later I saw a fan club only Pearl Jam show on the South Side of CHGO. (1993? 1994?) I took a coworker who was having THE BEST TIME (as was I) and then, during post-show drinks at Ye Olde Hipster Barre he COMPLETELY and TOTALLY denigrated the evening we had just had. I think CHGO was really much more hipper-than-thou, actually, than MPLS.]

I haven’t been alone whilst ambling down Memory Lane. My dear friend LAP, with whom I was just about to form a posse when I up and left MPLS has, thanks to the Facebook thing, re-entered my life. Even after losing touch for 16 years (how embarrassing), we appear to have led somewhat parallel existences:

She was, as it turns out, exactly right about the D&G Fall 1996 collection (lower right). While I will always remain a devotee of Tom Ford’s collection for Gucci the Fall before, there was something about 1996 (Gucci, Cerruti, Calvin Klein) that wasn’t as louche, a little more severe, that I find totally appealing to this day. Come on, fashion people - bring it back.

At any rate, having LAP back in my life, skipping arm in arm down Memory Lane, hasn’t been an exercise in living in the past as much as it’s been a lesson in context and Getting On With It. I mean, 40 looms. Let’s ALL do - do a zine, do a podcast, blog, collaborate over great distance, write letters, romanticize the past, feel wrenching sadness because we weren’t there when we should have been, plot the future, design a life - there’s more to all of this than a nagging sense of futility and being chained to a version of the past.

So, yeah, that’s one of the other places I’ve been.

So - yesterday I set out at about 8:20 AM in search of some whole bean coffee, as we were fresh out. It was lovely outside, and where we live is quite walkable to most things, so I decided I’d take a half hour or so - maybe a bit more if I stopped to smell the flowers - and take a brisk, invigoratingwalk to the local independently-owned cafe and then a local convenience store for the aforementioned coffee and a copy of Cody’s Favorite Reading Material - the Sunday NYT. Because, you know, I am all about supporting the local scene. Easy, right? As I approached the cafe after a delightful walk through my old neighborhood, it dawned on me that the possibility of there being no beans for retail sale was a distinct one, especially since I’d walked and not called first. A weird dry spell regarding beans at this particular establishment had happened before, and it wasn’t pretty when it did (I still don’t understand how a cafe could think it was OK to be entirely out of decaffeinated coffee for over a week). Since I was after fully-leaded beans, however - you know, the stuff regular people drink - there was no way this was going to be an issue. Right? However, I really wasn’t surprised when I walked in and discovered the only whole bean coffee they had for sale was a single pound of decaf. Swiss water-processed decaf, but… decaf. Onward to the next place - the Hippie Health Food Store! Surely they’d be open by my ETA, which was 9 AM as I was on foot and had already stopped to pick up the NYT. The smell of lilacs (which I stopped for several times) was overpowering along the way, bringing my last spring in MPLS (1991) to the front of my brain’s Memory Line. I admired some local architecture as I walked, and cursed myself for not wearing sneakers. It was with little surprise as I approached the HHFS and discovered they did not open until 10 AM. Drat. I strolled through downtown, on my way to the (regionally owned/operated) grocery store to procure doughnuts and some bananas and maybe, just maybe, some coffee. I looked at some excellent shoes in the window of the local high-end shoe store, checked out some Irish pottery in the window of another establishment, and lamented the fact that the Fancy French Bakery was not open on Sundays (it never has been, but I still lamented). Construction has begun on the county courthouse, I noticed, and the excellent maples near one of the busier intersections in town had finally leafed out. I crossed the street and walked past the Giant Coffee Conglomerate, which would have made everything easier, and on to the grocery store. Turns out the cafe in the store actually has better-than-passable beans. I waved to a co-worker who was there, buying orange juice and a newspaper. As I walked toward home, I saw a City Council member, a lot of rabbits, some interesting yard sculpture, my favorite flower garden, and the Blue House of Self-Sufficiency (more on that in a minute). I took a slightly different route at the end of my trip, the better to check out another one of my favorite gardens, hoping to catch its caretaker so I could ask about the yearly bamboo harvest. I heard a great many House Wrens, a bird I haven’t been hearing much over the last few summers, but seems to have settled in my neighborhood in force this year. Mogul Geoff and Hooey Jill were out in their enviably space-efficient front yard with their dogs, so I went over to say hello. After a lengthy conversation about rock n roll reunions, coffee roasting, container gardening, and heirloom seeds, I left their place with 3 packages of seeds (melons and pole beans) and three tomato seedlings (2 of them Black From Tula). Home was less than a block away; I arrived and delivered the coffee, bananas, and doughnuts. It had taken me two hours, but in that time - which went by really fast - I’d done something I used to do all the time but have had little time to do this spring - I observed. I took notice. Most of those places are places I’ve been walking past every day, but haven’t been noticing beyond a perfunctory registering. ****** Fun news from Chank - Wordier Diva and Li’l Diva will soon be available to font nerds/freaks/devotees everywhere. Wordier Diva is a twelve-years-in-the-making re-draw of Wordy Diva, and Li’l Diva is, of course, Lilly’s contribution to the Wordy Diva family. Lilly is hoping to get Li’l Diva into the Artemis Fowl series. Could be an excellent case of like mother, like daughter. ***** Obligatory Market at the Square photo, taken Saturday, May 24: Note especially for locals: the Market now has a Facebook fan page, a Flickr photostream, and a weekly preview page that gets updated the Thursday before the Market. Also for locals: would love to see you at the Illinois Local and Organic Food and Farm Task Force Listening Session in Urbana this Wednesday, May 28, from 7-9 PM at the Urbana Civic Center in downtown Urbana. The Facebook page is here, a link to the (PDF) flyer is here, and I really hope some of you can come and contribute to the dialogue. I’ll be there, too! ***** I was going to keep going, but this is plenty long enough for today. More soon, this time on Motorpsycho, the Blue House of Self-Sufficiency, and gardening-as-responsibility, plus whatever else…

Not tonight, either. I am a little le bored with the whole 365 Days of Music thing, to be honest. It’s not the recent lack of feedback (though I suspect the preponderance of boy-noise is an issue, and where are you, Steve??) as much as it is the tiresome task of scanning all the different CD covers and then uploading them to Flickr and then sitting here listening to the record, all the while being assaulted by a bunch of feelings when I really should be hanging with my kids and my husband or reading a book or plotting the rest of my garden or washing the dishes or sitting on the couch, doing sweet NOTHING. I am just not the kind of person who can commit to doing something every day that is relatively superfluous to the off-blog day-to-day life that I lead. I mean, I can barely do the stuff I’m supposed to be doing sometimes. I will review more records, though. Eventually. In other news, Ed With the Breakaway Head is providing me and my friend P with some weight training at the gym. We hung out in the seriously-testosteroned free-weight area and everything today. I am a total weakling - like I told Jim, I’ve turned into a person with a desk job with a body to match. Sore does not even begin to describe how I’m going to feel in the morning; I wish I could get more sleep. I’m very much looking forward to when my work schedule switches to Tuesday-Saturday, though. Mondays off, people. For 7 months. My new local pal The Sandwich Life tagged me for that book meme, the one where you ask 5 of your pals to tell you what’s on page 123 - the three sentences after the 5th sentence. I don’t read much fiction, so you’ll be getting a selection from the wonderful (truly!) Kitchen Literacy by Ann Vileisis: “Pettijohn’s claimed that, unlike other ready-to-eat ‘fad foods’, its cereal, was genuine, humble ‘whole wheat not altered in an attempt to improve on nature.’ Shredded Wheat ads plainly asserted in large boldface capitals: ‘MAN CANNOT IMPROVE NATURE.’” “Transcending mere pleasantries, a dialogue about the grand existential question so pressing in the face of rapidly urbanizing culture - what was the place of people in nature? - occurred in so mundane a venue as newspaper food ads.” I know what you’re thinking, and you’re not wrong, but I love it so! Finally, an old high school friend of mine got in touch last night, praise Facebook. Among the pleasantries tossed my way was a link to a series of articles about the son of a pair of friends from high school. It made me feel feelings about my high school experience and my friendship with the female half of this union and gifted children and kids leaving home to pursue excellence and the opportunities available to kids whose parents have money and live in the suburbs and how maybe those opportunities are slipping away even from those folks and then, even, a little bit of pride in this child - he’s 16 - that I met one time when he was seven-going-on-eight and his father was the hockey player in the family.

photo by Cody



I wish I had witty things to say, or informative things, or funny things. Nope. No incisive commentary here, no heartwarming anecdotes, no self-deprecating witticisms. No, I don’t really have much to offer up, other than the fact that my life right now revolves around things happening at my job, things happening with me personally (nothing bad, just uncertain), my family, and some of my extracurricular activities. I read blogs and see recipes I’d like to try, plants I’d like to grow. I look outside and wish I’d brought my camera (though I rely heavily on Cody’s photos now - why not? He’s SO GOOD!). There are letters to write and… I don’t know, stuff, mundane-yet-pleasant things that just seem so insurmountable right now because I’m just trying to get through this week, much less this month.



So here are a few small and basically meaningless observations:



The end of Veronica Mars Season Three (also the end of the series) SUCKED. I hated that last episode. Jim was sure we were missing a disc.



It was 68 degrees here yesterday. While I enjoyed it a great deal, somewhere deep in the recesses of my lizard brain I knew it was wrong, wrong, wrong.



I can’t help but note with glee that we’re 1/4 of the way through January, which means February’s coming, and when that’s over, it’s March! Spring! Planting!



I am tired of football on teevee.



By tomorrow at noon my time, I will have gotten something very important out of the way. By Thursday, an important decision having nothing to do with me will have been made and acted upon.



On Friday, I’m getting a massage.

Oh, 2008, why’d you have to come in so chilly-like? It was one solitary degree when I got up this morning to exercise. One. Degree. The car complained about being started and my feet complained about being outside at all in such weather, but we made it. It’s 5 degrees as I type.



I always thought it was fully corny, the way grownups went on and on about how time flies by (when I was a kid, Christmas seemed to take forever to arrive; summers boringly stretched on forever and ever and ever), but now I find myself quite humbled by how fast it all goes. I’ll be 40 this year; my baby will be 10. It’s been twenty years since I first cast my vote for a President, 16 years since I was pregnant with my firstborn, and three years since we bought our first house.



Damn!



It’s back to business, after a fashion, today - I’ll be doing some work from home this morning, running errands with Lilly in the early afternoon, nursing Jim back to health after a dental procedure later this afternoon, and getting a closer look at those seed catalogs after a thankfully simple dinner (you don’t want to know how much we ate during all the football yesterday). It’s time to start planning what kind of garden we need to grow this year - more flowers and medicinal herbs? Can I really manage a huge food load or should I scale back a little bit (I get all gung ho about it now, but I know myself too well to really believe that January’s boundless enthusiasm will carry over into August)? What about the fruit trees and the berry patches I keep insinuating I’ll be creating? There’s a gulf between what I think I want to do and what I know is feasible. Hm. I’m all about Dreaming Big and Thinking Positively and all, but in keeping with my desire to not give myself any ammo, I may drop a few things off the list, but food of some permanence (fruit trees/plants) is not one of them.



Tomorrow it’s back to work, and Cody comes home from Chicago. I’ve missed him, as I always do, but I’ll be especially glad to get him back. He warms the place up quite a bit.

We put Cody on the Amtrak to Chicago on the 26th and eased into an extremely short work week (I just worked Thursday and half of Friday). Saturday and Sunday were spent running errands, deep-cleaning the kitchen, working on some lighting and furniture issues on two floors (which makes our place sound big… it isn’t), and, of course, knitting and watching football. Today I puttered around, much satisfied with my total lack of progress toward anything productive, took Lilly and her best friend R to see Enchanted, and Jim has just returned with our traditional Chinese takeout dinner.



Tomorrow is another day of food and football (the university in my backyard has a berth in the Rose Bowl this year, so of course we’re watching), with some bonus couch-lounging, recipe-perusing, and garden catalog-scrutinizing taking place as well. The gym is closed along with everything else, plus the weather’s supposed to turn iffy, so I am completely content to stay here and do absolutely freaking nothing tomorrow. Wednesday is another day off - which really won’t be a day off as much as a day to put into place the projects I have in front of me for January - and then it’s back to work Thursday. And part of Friday. Whew.



What can I say about this year?



It’s been a good, slow end to what has been a confused year, a year falling short of many expectations but exceeding others in weird ways. If there’s a single lesson I’ve learned from the events of this year, it’s that excessive worrying is fruitless. That hasn’t stopped me from worrying excessively, but the realization that worry accomplishes v little is something new.



I fell off the food wagon a bit. I didn’t grow as much of my own stuff as I would have liked after a good seed-starting beginning. It got hot and nasty dry in late July and the garden was out of control by mid-August. Work definitely put a huge cramp in my food preserving (and, shamefully, harvesting) style, and a few weeks ago I relinquished my last chicken to her former owner. My tiny farmlet was and still is in disarray.



We did incorporate meal planning this fall, though, and it’s been awesome to shop the markets/supermarkets WITH MY SPOUSE knowing what’s needed to make meals we agreed upon before embarking on our voyage to the grocery store or farmers’ market. It’s not really like me, but this is a place where I don’t mind rigidity, because dealing with what’s for dinner? with no plan often means going down Easy Street, which is just not OK with me more than occasionally.



Also, where I fell short at home, I made gains at work. My work now has me much more involved with food policy and advocacy, and some of my work has been at the state level. I’m not doing anything important yet; that’s what 2008 is for. My garden will be better, though. I also learned this year that Jim is a more-than-willing partner and does awesome work back there.



Dudes, I joined a gym! It took a full year of feeling like total, unmitigated crap, but in December I joined a local fitness center (after much judgement on those who join fitness centers, so hahaha on me) and I’ve been going damn near every day. It’s too early to tell if it’s helping in terms of chronic pain - the dampness of this winter so far has done a real number on my back, plus you can insert other complaints and ailments worthy of someone twice my age right here - but I know that getting up and exercising in the mornings has helped me feel better in the brain. I get up at the asscrack of dawn and I do something just for myself, which brings me to another point:



Martyrdom sucks. I spent the better part of the year in a fog of mild resentment about a lot of little things, which, I’m sure, contributed to my general feeling of malaise. I made an at-first-uneasy peace with a lot of things having to do with work and money and the kids; I started asking more of my family, and I started trying to carve out time to myself. I’ve never spent much time alone - I’ve always had roommates, then a kid, and now a family - and it still takes some getting used to sometimes. Finally admitting to one of my doctors that I can’t do everything (and hearing her response, which was uh, yeah?) was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. The fact that I admitted this to a physician before, say, my husband is a little sad, but it set me straighter.



I do things differently than most, and it’s no big whoop. Cody still hadn’t walked when he was 14 months old. Just when I was getting worried enough to consider taking him to a doctor, he got up and started running like he’d been doing it his whole life. It turns out this waiting around is hereditary; when I try to squeeze my square peg ass into a round hole, it usually doesn’t work. Why try to squeeze and be disappointed in myself when I can do my own thing on my own schedule (ie, change when it’s time as opposed to forcing change) and avoid the self-flagellation? That self-flagellation is so bad, you guys. I turn 40 this year and frankly, I need to get over myself.



OK, it’s getting close to 2008 and we have a Scrabble game to finish. I have no real resolutions except to keep doing what I’ve been doing; I have plenty of goals, but they’re little and personal and when I accomplish them, I’ll write about them.



Happy New Year, everyone, and thanks for reading.