Taken by Cody - click here for more of his work The above was taken probably last Thursday or Friday - we were on Anna Maria Island, staying with my in-laws, and the dolphins were out in force. Vacation in FL is an interesting thing for me. I spent the better part of ten years of my youth living there; as soon as we enter FL, with its familiar topography and interstate names and exhortations to Come! To! Disney!, I get a little quiet. We moved to MN a few months before I turned 13 years old, leaving behind a house with a pool, a boat, two sets of waterskis, and my first tastes of having a posse of friends and of interesting (and interested) boys. It was a little devastating. Anyway. This time we first spent a little time with my Oma, who lives on the Atlantic Coast. We went to the beach on Saturday the 16th, at the Canaveral National Seashore and had a blast. The sun was wicked strong, the air and water were surprisingly warm, and the tide was starting to come in - perfect for boogieboarding. Next up was my dad’s place in central FL. Jim put together a massive piece of furniture for him while the kids and I were back and forth between my dad’s place and my uncle’s house - about a ten minute walk. Sadly (?), I drank too much wine with my aunt & uncle and was suffering a little the next day, but it was all good. You do some stuff with your family, you know? (and apparently what I do when I’m with this side of the family is drink wine. In quantity.) Their house is massive, but it didn’t prevent everyone staying in it from hearing us all shout at each other as we looked at old photos. We went to the Gulf side on Monday to hook up with Jim’s parent as well as his sister, her husband, and their three girls. The air was warm, the sea was gorgeous, there were dolphins everywhere, you guys saw the sand, we all got some sun, and… … then I came home and started my new job, which so far has been awesome. I live in a really cool city, y’all, and am so lucky to be doing what I’m doing. Just tired, is all - it’s taken me two days to even write this much. I’ll come back on the weekend, when I have a few more brain cells.

Home from our Florida trip yesterday; more photos to come. I start my new job today. Things feel a little crazy.

Taken by Cody.

California Poppy, 2007 I’ve been thinking about this post for days, but the… - snow, followed by - torrential rain, followed by - water in the basement, plus the - preparing to move to my future job concurrent with the - gentle extrication of myself from my current job (today was my last day at the Foodbank) plus the - co-op announcing its move with a healthy dash of - back pain E Q U A L S No blogging. I don’t have much time now, either. If I did, it’d be mostly a litany of complaints, like how I’ve been unable to Organize! My Life! due to various commitments, some more fun than others. There’d also be a large dose of politics (which I’ve avoided, for the most part, on this blog, but let’s just say we’re fired up and ready to go). Maybe some yammering about the back pain, which is chronic and boring (it’s also chronically boring) and, when it’s flaring, impossible to treat. Alas, no. There is no time. I’m going to be on a short hiatus while I take care of a few things that need doing. Maybe you’ll get some photo posts. Maybe some links to try. Here are a couple: This one’ll get you ready for a future entry Signed, sealed, delivered

Defying Gravity - taken by Cody Ah, JanuFeb. I guess you were inevitable, with your sloppy skies and sloppier grounds, your precipitation of unknown nomenclature, your salt stains, and your interminably interminable shades of gray. I’ll be glad when you’re over, JanuFeb, because that means my seeds will have been ordered, my seed potatoes will be on the way, my plans for the yard will have been sketched out - this year with bonus Jim tech support PLUS extra bonus newish friend who specializes in small fruit! - and there will be more sun, both in general and at either end of the day. Non-locals will know what I’m talking about, but the rest of you - the fog tonight was unbelievably thick. It had actually been thick all day - with the snow on the ground and the gray sky and the ground-clouds, it was what I imagine being wrapped in a marshmallow to be like - but when I got into my car this evening at 6:45 to go meet random co-op members at a bowling alley a few miles away, I thought that perhaps I was making a terrible mistake. By the time I began venturing down our (unlit) street, I knew I was making one. But I soldiered on. I got some bowling cash out of the ATM and gathered up some steely resolve. [Those who have known me for a long time understand that I’m not terribly fond of what is known as driving in conditions. That doesn’t mean I won’t do it, it just means I don’t like it. Usually conditions = really heavy rain or ice or snow, but tonight nighttime fog - fog that I can only describe as being womb-like - was added to the list.] It took me 15 minutes to feel my way to Memorial Stadium, a voyage that should have taken about 3 minutes. After hitting a wide-open spot where the fog could roll in off the prairie - which it did, completely disorienting me - I made an executive decision to eff this, for reals, and I hung a right onto campus, where, as it turns out, people walk out in front of cars during fogstorms the same way they do when it’s bright and sunny outside. [Public Service Announcement: In extreme nighttime fog, pedestrians can see cars because CARS HAVE LIGHTS. Drivers have a hard time seeing pedestrians because PEDESTRIANS GENERALLY DO NOT WEAR LIGHTS. Again: In extreme nighttime fog, people on foot can see cars, but drivers of cars can’t see people. Let’s all be careful out there.] Anyway, it took me another 20 minutes to get home; as I was navigating and negotiating and trying not to hit people, I received a phone call, which I answered (!), from a fellow board member telling me the bowling alley had been closed anyway. I scooted home, told my fog story to my family, and hit the blog for some link-updatin’ and category-creatin’. ***** I decided this morning while on the treadmill - a place I seem to do a lot of thinking about My Rock Past - the band that most represents the time I spent doing the rock thing in MN and CHGO, those 9 years (was that all?) of carousing and carrying on and writing and traveling and feeling the music travel from my ears all the way down to my feet and then back up, eventually shooting out the top of my head, it was so good - the band whose music that represents it best in terms of sound equaling feeling is… Union Carbide Productions, a band I never saw play live and never heard of until about 1992, well into my time in CHGO. An extensive biography is here, but if you want the short version summing up what they were like, Rolling Stone did a pretty good job: Union Carbide Productions were Sweden’s majestic combined answer to the Stooges, Black Flag and the early freaked-out Pink Floyd, a Next Big Thing doomed by missed opportunities and inner turmoil. Huh. That makes all kinds of sense. Anyway, UCP’s CDs were carried domestically by the indie distributor Jim and I started working at in 1993, and they were the only band everyone could agree on. Every single person who worked there dug them big. The warehouse dudes loved UCP, the kranky guys loved them, the garage rockers and the math rockers and the dance dudes and the indie princesses - everyone absolutely loved them, and for good reason - they were the Real Deal, 100%, their only CHGO show (in 1992, right around the time Cody was born) the stuff of legend. [Just heard from Jim that all of UCP’s stuff is going to be reissued as double CDs, with lots of extras and artwork and possibly videos and other etc. I’m excited and all, but when we had dinner with Ebbot 5 years ago, he was talking about basically the same thing, only in box set form. Maybe it’s really happening.] As it turns out, UCP were HUGE 2.5 hours south of Chicago in those days, too, the days when C-U had its own legendary and influential music scene and I kind of wished I could live there. I mean, here. Whatever. I’m glad I’m here/there. Anyway, a bunch of C-U music folk talked idly (to my total torment) years ago of possibly forming a Union Carbide Productions cover band called Maximum Dogbreath (a track from UCP’s stupendous opus entitled Financially Dissatisfied Philosophically Trying) but it never came to fruition. But as I trotted away on the treadmill this morning, I fantasized about a show featuring Maximum Dogbreath, a fictitious C-U supergroup made up mostly of guys who no longer play music on a regular basis and who are all over 40 years old. Hey, it’d get me out of the house.

School’s out…. again. In fact, just about everything is in some way cancelled or screwed up today in east central Illinois. It’s still snowing a little and blowing a little, but… big whoop. It’s February, so come on! Buck up! [I know, I should be thrilled that it’s a snow day (not required to go in to work today), but I feel unsettled and grouchy. Was it not enough sleep after watching the third episode of Upp Till Kamp? Is it the fact that Mattie Lonesome (one of our cats, for those not in the know), has an incredible wound of unknown origin at the base of her tail and we can’t get in to the vet until mid-afternoon so it’s a good thing she’s acting relatively Mattie-like?] When I lived in Minnesota (1981-1991 - high school, college, and then some), school/work rarely got called because of weather. 1981 was our first winter there after a childhood living in Florida -I recall missing school for an ice storm in November that year, and in January 1982 we got out early due to a 20″ snowfall and school was called the following day thanks to an additional 21″ (!). There were probably random snow days over the years, unmemorable ones. I don’t remember ever getting out of school because of the temperature. Maybe once. They pretty much always had school, and if you couldn’t get there, you couldn’t get there. Imagine my surprise last week when school was cancelled due to the cold. The wind chill was, maybe, 20 below zero F for a couple hours that morning. Which, you know, is cold, but is also manageable when properly attired. WARNING: Here’s where I turn into one of those really annoying middle-aged people who make references to things that happened “back in my day”. The rationale for these school closings, I’ve heard (and it could be bad information, obviously), is that kids who are out waiting for buses will get cold. Well, yes, they will when they’re wearing sweatpants and flipflops and a light jacket, which appears to be the cold-weather clothing of choice for many middle and high school students in this burg (vast numbers of whom take city buses to get to school). Of course, I wore no socks with my shoes well into that first Minnesota winter (I couldn’t handle socks or turtlenecks and I NEVER wore a hat and to this day I cannot handle anything made out of ragg wool), but let this be a word of warning to all you under-dressed young people out there gnashing yr teeth about the cold because you can’t catch a ride and you have to wear your tanktop and pajama pants - at some point, even with everything being called off all the time, if you don’t wear enough and you still go out, you will, for example, get frostbite and your toes will turn white and otherwise subtle shifts in temperature will upset your feet mightily as you approach 40 years old. The fashion-forward solution? Socks by SmartWool. Also, while it’s definitely true that there is no causal relationship between not wearing a hat and getting sick, making your body work hard to stay warm takes energy away from your immune system’s ability to fight things off. Just sayin’. Hats are chic, Youth of Today! Check me out: Classy, I know! I realize I shouldn’t be grumpy about a day off. But I am. The house is small, the kids are bored and their rooms are messy but I don’t feel like going there today because then it would mean that I… went there, the roads are crap, I could use another gallon of milk, a dozen eggs, and more produce in the house to feel really comfortable for some reason, I ate one bean and corn relish tortilla too many last night, the cat needs to go to the vet which = $$$ we really need to hang on to, I can’t get to the gym, it could be PMS, and I was really looking forward to having lunch with my husband today. Waaaaaaah. I’m going to post this and then step away from the machine for awhile. I’m going to get dressed, make another cup of tea, start some bread dough, teach Lilly how to make muffins, file some reading material for my new job, and stop complaining so much about the gimme I’ve been given. That, my friends, is what Ma Ingalls would do.