Tag Archives: weather

{01 November 2009}


san francisco at dawn

one of the things i like best about the part of califonia i’ve moved to is the variety in flora: on the hillside surrounding my apartment, the following plants are growing: palm trees, deciduous trees: cherry, live oak, eucalyptus among others, coniferous trees: redwoods and others, ferns, bamboo, blackberry bushes, wild grasses, cactus, agave, and ivy. what do all those plants have in common? basically, nothing, except that they all live in my front yard. its kind of an amazing climate.

the other thing about northern california is that the colors of the seasons are all mixed up. growing up in the Idaho rocky mountains, the seasons work thus: summer is green, fall is golden, winter is brown, and spring is…mostly more brown. the same general rule applies to Chicago. but here, everything works backwards: there is so little rain in the summer that everything turns golden brown by july, and stays that way until the rains start in october or november. then suddenly everything turns green, and the morning fogs cease and the skies are deep dark blue, and the world continues to green throughout the winter. spring brings flashes of color as the early flowers bloom. i remember being so surprised by this pattern when i came to northern california for college. being away for eight years, most of which i spent in chicago (or idaho) i’d forgotten how upside down the color palettes are here.

mind you, i’m not complaining. it’s november first, and i woke up to sunlight from my south-facing windows at 7am. by 8am it was warm enough to have the front door open, an zeke went out and slept in the sun on the porch. B and i spent the morning hiking in the hills above MV. recent rains have caused the ferns to spring out of the ground in force, whole hillsides of lime-green fronds unfurling in the shade. the trees that do respond to the changes in light are throwing down their leaves, crunchy, a smell of rotting leaves that evoked some memory from childhood.

but golden gate park shows no sign of impending winter:


too beautiful out for ghouls: halloween game of frisbee in golden gate park

I awoke last night to the sound of thunder…

{15 September 2009}


photo credit: fgfathome

okay so a couple of nights ago this thunderstorm woke me up around 4am and freaked me the fuck out.

4am, sitting up through a thunderstorm, afraid of my hillside going up in wildfire. realizing i am NOT emergency prepared. if i had to leave…put on pants, grab laptop-phone-purse-keys. how would i get the cat? could i shove him into his carrier or would he sense my fear and run and hide? // do my smoke alarms even work? i haven’t tested them. i haven’t gotten renter’s insurance yet. // am radio is talking about afghanistan, that’s a good sign, right? power still on. no emergency sirens. // first drops of rain since i moved here almost three months ago. bang of thunder that shakes the house and sets off car alarms down the hill.

now, admittedly i have a tendency to be easily disoriented/frightened when i’m really groggy, but it was also a HUGE FUCKING STORM. i’ve lived in the bay area a total of five years now (4 college, .7 post-college, .3 since i moved here this past june) and have only witnessed two thunderstorms. they just don’t happen. so i layed awake for more than an hour listening to the storm and fretting about how dry the hillside i live on is (later that night the first drops of rain fell…i’d been here almost three months, and no rain. how does anything green stay alive? ). Gene sent me the link to this photo later in the week and wow. okay, see? it WAS a huge scary storm.

the best thing about waking to a thunderstorm is burrowing deeper into the arms of a lover. waking alone, it underscores the loneliness sharply.

sunday sept 14, 5:35am: will the rain stop?

{15 September 2008}

i woke up this morning at 5am for the chicago half marathon to the tap tap tap of rain. checked the radar map to see if the rain would end before the race got started at 7:30. every time i zoomed the map out further, the storm cloud (that’s the leftovers of hurricane ike you’re looking at in green and yellow) got bigger. maybe only because it was 5am, it was funny enough to me to take a screen cap.

the rain did not, in fact, stop, and we ran the entire half marathon in the pouring rain. more than 7 inches of rain fell on chicago over the weekend.

i finished with a time of 1:53’47”, which is not my fastest time yet, but given the conditions it was my best time compared to other runners.* too bad, then, that i mostly only race against the clock. that is the good and bad thing about an inclusive sport like running. there will always be someone faster than you and someone slower than you, but the clock isn’t subjective. it doesn’t account for rain, or blistered toes, or a bad night’s sleep.

this week is peak marathon mileage**, then we start the taper down to marathon day, october 12. think good thoughts for marathon day weather, friends. these races in the rain or other non-ideal conditions are good practice, good for strengthening the moral fiber and all that, but when you’ve been working, daily, toward a goal for nine months, you just want it to go well. this year some of my marathon energy has been diverted to helping two women (who have, over the past 6 months, become my very dear friends) train for their first marathon. which means that i not only want a good day for myself, but for M and H especially. the law of averages means that if you run enough marathons, there will be some good ones and some bad ones. but when it’s your first, well, it’s hard when it doesn’t go as expected. trust me.

that’s another one of those cliche-because-it’s-true life lessons about running distance events like a marathon. you can spend weeks and months preparing for it, but it all comes down to one single day and there are a million factors that are out of your control. you can train and train, and on the day of the event, wake up sick, or roll an ankle, or there could be a freak heat wave in chicago october, or any of a million other things. running is about taking what the day gives you, and adapting. adapting yourself, but also adapting your expectations. you can’t work this hard and plan for failure. likewise, you can’t possibly prepare for all of the things that could go wrong. so instead, you have to make the body, and the spirit, flexible.

*120th of 1215 in my division (women 30-34), put me narrowly in the top 10%
**which is only 37 miles, practically nothing in the world of distance running, but still plenty for me.

{01 May 2008}

in the context of my own small cosmos, two important things happened last week.

1) spring arrived in chicago. there was that day, that one day when finally the trees went from being black tree skeletons silhouetted against the spring-blue sky to fuzzy green canopies shading out the sky. i wore flip flops to work. flip flops! i dearly love to be barefoot, i take my shoes off every moment i can (under my desk, as soon as i walk into an apartment), and it makes me terribly happy to be able to walk around nearly barefoot in the summers. the fields where we play ultimate turned from mud puddles to emerald green grass seemingly overnight. i am sprouting heirloom tomato, bell pepper, basil and cilantro seeds in my windowsil (the danger of frost not yet being past). summer in chicago makes life good.

2) the other item of note is that i passed my 5th kyu exam in aikido on april 19. i started my aikido training in january of 07, so this represents a big milestone. the way rank work in my dojo, you begin training unranked, then move through the kyu (grades) 5th, 4th, and so on up through 1st kyu. after 1st kyu you test for shodan (first blackbelt), and then most up through the grades of yudansha (blackbelt). most aikido schools don’t use colored belts other than white and black, but it’s the same general notion.

the format of the test, for those not familiar with it, is that each of the students taking a particular test (this time there were three of us testing for 5th kyu) is called up on to the mat. the rest of the school sits in seiza along the edge of the mat, the test committee (made up of the yudansha) sits at one end, sensei sits at the other end. from there we are asked to demonstrate any of a series of techniques. for those that require a partner then another student volunteers. there’s a lot of ritual and a lot of formality. the pressure can be really intense. i remember leaving the first test that i attended (would be a year ago, last april i guess) sort of open-mouthed, thinking, i have to do that?

anyway, i’m copying another passage here that i wrote into my training log. beware a lot of waxing poetic and circular thinking.

april 19. 5th kyu exam.
first, the important news: i passed! this was not a total surprise, i was fairly confident that i was going to pass, but regardless it’s a relief to actually get there and have that validation. i arrived at the dojo early enough to watch & take ukeumi for the kids’ test, which was ridiculously cute. kind of amazing to think that a 6-year old can think that rondori (multiple attackers) is the most fun game ever, when to us adults (well, at least to me) it’s positively terrifying. here’s a rondori clip for you non-aikido folks. note the awesome 80’s hairstyles.

now on to my test. what i was most pleased with myself was the amount of focus i felt out there on the mat. i had a moment or two of blind panic right at the beginning, but after that i felt very calm and focused. i was aware of my uke, aware of Glen calling the test requirements, and aware of Sensei (being called first i ended up in the right-most position on the mat closest to where Sensei was seated, which, as he pointed out, meant i got extra special attention). aside from those three people i was pretty much oblivious to the rest of the room, which was good. i didn’t get tangled up thinking about who was watching me or what i must look like, or if i had screwed up that last technique or forgotten to do something, etc. i didn’t even look over once to see how the other two guys testing with me were doing. (which also means that i never had to cheat and look over at one of them to figure out what a technique was).

there were definitely things i got corrected on, but they were the things i knew i was weak in (inexperienced in suburi, strikes that weren’t sharp/aggressive/martial enough, the occasional extra step that leads to sloppy technique, the proper form for mae ukemi (forward breakfalls), the fact that i nearly always do ushiro kaiten ukemi (backward rolls) on the same shoulder). but i felt like i took notes pretty well and didn’t get flustered or distracted. i was able to take and (hopefully) apply the correction and move on to the next step. i think i even parsed the japanese pretty well, though the tester usually followed the japanese call with some or all of it in english.

the test felt really long. we were out on the mat for more than 40 minutes, by my best estimate. i remember sweat just rolling down the sides of my face flushed red, feeling tired but thank god for my endurance training because i was able to reach down and push through that tired and keep going and keep my focus. if one thing stands out in my memory of watching other tests in the past it is seeing the student testing get physically and mentally exhausted and then just start to check out, lose focus, speed, precision. the endurance training i think really helps with that.

my friend marci kept promising me the value of passing my first rank exam would be that i’d feel more confident. she’s right, but i realize that the confidence doesn’t come from passing the test and knowing that i hold a rank as much as it comes from the mastery of skill that i had to go through in the past month of intense training.

i’m at a new place in my training, now. i feel on the verge of making connections that i didn’t have before. the question is whether i will go forward with it or lose that momentum? aikido has been a big cloud sort of blocking out the sun for the past few weeks, stealing my focus from other parts of my life (which i’ve given over willingly because i wanted this goal). there will be times in the future where tech, or marathon training, or other things will block out the sun and distract me from aikido.

and if i’m going to be serious about this, how many other things will i need to sacrifice to make room for this thing that has muscled its way into my life? i’m lucky that i’ve made some friendships in the dojo in the past few months, because aikido can be really hard to talk about but i often feel like i’m full of thoughts/ideas/questions that i need to process with another person. the nature of training and fighting and conflict. and why i’m doing this in the first place, come to think of it. it’s a martial art. it’s not dance, it’s not tai chi. we don’t learn the kata (forms) to perform them beautifully. we learn them because they are effective. the samuri, whose sword work is one of the sources for aikido’s largely open-hand techniques, used real blades. sharp, killing blades. i feel strongly that one has to examine the root of something in order to understand its fundamental purpose and nature. (e.g., guns were designed to kill living things. that’s what they were made for. any attempt to decorate them, make them into art, distracts from, but does not alter, their fundamental nature as killing machines. if we are going to worship and admire and fetishize them, we should acknowledge that we are fetishizing their killing nature, not just the pearl handle or the flawless steel construction.) so at the root of what i’m doing is the word martial. but aikido is also roughly translated as the Art of Peace (among other things). talk about a contradiction in terms. how do i process this paradox? aikido turns the form inside out, it repurposes the attacking/fighting/killing movements into the art of dealing with conflict in an effective manner with concern for the well-being of the attacker. the founder of aikido, Morihei Ueshiba (O-Sensei), wrote that “to control aggression without inflicting injury is the Art of Peace.” that is the nature of aikido. it is fighting repurposed into training. but to what end do we train? see how i go in circles on this?

while i don’t want to get hurt (if we’re being honest here, i’m pretty afraid of getting hurt, which seems logical of course but i don’t think everyone i train with shares that fear), i am tough enough to take a few bumps and bruises, and i realize there is risk in anything worth doing. but aside from not wanting to get hurt, i’m not interesting in fighting, in physically besting my partner on the mat, in risking hurting someone else. and if i just wanted to be sure i could fight off a mugger, i’d take a couple of self-defense seminars, learn how to kick a guy in the balls, and go on my merry way. but aikido is something different. it is the path, not the end, that has the value. it turns out that having a goal like a kyu exam was important, not because of what i achieved at the testing date but what i achieved in the weeks of training leading up to that goal.

but honestly, do i have the guts, the belly-fire for this? how do i reconcile my own desire for pacifism with the reality of conflict (physical/spiritual/emotional/political) in the world? how will i grow as a person from studying this? will my belief in peaceful negotiation be strengthened as it is challenged or revealed as naive fallacy?

the dirty dozen, american dream edition: food, sports and the internet

{20 February 2008}

okay, i’m taking a page out of lau’s blog and attempting the dirty dozen to make up for my distinct lack of blogging:

1. be mine. i have to say that i’ve never been on the kate spade bandwagon. i’m not on the purses-that-cost-more-than-their-raw-materials bandwagon, really. but, luxury handbag issues aside*, my attention was drawn to the kate spade website on valentine’s day which has a darn cute collection of e-cards one can send to their valentine. what the connection is between handbags and e-valentines? i couldn’t say. but they are cute.

2. things you shouldn’t buy on the internet: Hairsoreal. i swear that this was one of those sidebar ads on facebook the other day. i couldn’t have made this product up if i’d tried. it’s a hair-replacement product that, as near as i can tell, is a can of little tiny hair-shaped fibers, that you shake over your head like you were seasoning your bald patch with hair-shaped pepper. the fibers magically stick to one another and poof! there goes the bald spot. did anyone else go to the children’s science museum when you were a kid and get to play with the magnetic iron filings? i imagine it’s sort of like that. the thing i don’t get, tho, is why men worry so much about baldness. seriously. everyone’s bald! a receding hairline is like the last thing i’d notice on a guy, and it sure wouldn’t be the deciding factor as to whether i’d go out with him or think he’s attractive. balding heads areabout as common as having brown hair, or freckles. weird, the things we worry about.

3. things you maybe should buy on the internet: the under-the-sink urban-enviro-friendly compost system. this seems strange to me, because it doesn’t use enzymes and worms to heat up and chew thru the garbage, but somehow magically heats (via electricity) the garbage into dirt. that sort of sounds…too easy. but there’s a weird part of me that really really wants to try composting, but i also don’t want to make my roommate and neighbors hate me.

4. things you should do on the internet: play scrabulous with me before Big Bad Hasbro shuts them down.

5. winter. the ugliest winter in recent memory plods along in chicago. there has been some sort of snow on the ground continuously since christmas. the temp keeps dipping down into the single digits, which sends the windchill plummeting to 20 or 30 below. the locks on my car doors freeze. i think of myself as a very good, practical winter driver, and yet my car has gotten stuck on patches of ice three times in the past week. it’s also making marathon training (see item 8) particularly challenging. also, if the speed at which i am misplacing/losing mittens and hats continues to accelerate the way it has steadily since christmas, i’m going to die of frostbite long before spring arrives.

6. ultimate snow frisbee is the best sport ever. well, actually, i’d trade it for regular ultimate on a sunny summer day if i had a choice, but it has been a way to make winter bearable, at least for a couple of hours on saturday mornings. no one can run, cut, or handle the frisbee worth a damn, but dive rolls are awesome.

7. indoor ultimate frisbee. this is a historic moment, this new, ultimate-frisbee-playing self, because it’s really the first time i’ve enjoyed and excelled at playing any team sport. anyway, after six months of a pickup game, i got brave and signed up for an indoor winter league. i got totally skooled on my first day, but by the end of the season my playing has improved considerably.

8. stockholm marathon. continuing with the sports-themed news items, the stockholm marathon is breathing down my neck. picking a marathon is sort of like doing airport math. when i schedule a flight, i think to myself, “hmm, mid morning sound good.” and then i book a 10am flight, neglecting, as always, to do the airport math: to get awake, out the door, take public transit to the airport, and check in luggage requires that i am awake a minimum of 4 hours before the flight departs, which means that a reasonable-sounding 10am flight turns into a 6am wake up call. so, marathon math is sort of the same thing. may 31 sounds like a nice time of year to run a marathon, right? except that one neglects to count backwards by 4 or 5 months and realize that means runs in the double digits before the end of february. it’s really really hard to run more than an hour on a treadmill without going kookoo with boredom.

9. marathon pied piper: i’m actually feeling like something of a marathon pied piper. without really meaning to, i find myself suddenly in the position of leading a small group from my dojo in training for this fall’s chicago marathon. i’m the only one who has run a marathon before (and i’ve only done one, mind you), but somehow this makes me the expert. yikes. actually, tho, it’s weird but good. i mean, leading and organizing people and projects is what i do for a living, but i’ve really only ever applied those skills to making theatre happen before. but leading people on non-work-related pursuits (that they are equally if not more passionate about): this…sort of suits me. huh.

10. enough with the sports, let’s talk about food: C sent me the link to this food blog called 101 cookbooks, and it is now my new favorite place for recipes. mostly if not entirely veggie. gets a little out there with the hippy ingredients (where DOES one buy agave nectar?), but usually there are substitutions indicated for those of us still slumming it at the Jewel from time to time.

11. animal, miracle, vegetable: have been reading kingsolver’s book about her family’s year of farming and eating locally and…it has definitely gotten under my skin a bit when it comes to produce shopping. i look longingly at the four-dollar half pint of raspberries and think, those won’t taste like anything, they’ve been shipped halfway around the world. and that’s absurd to spend such money for something that won’t even taste good anyway. i reach for the winter fruits: apples, grapefruit, and think that summer raspberries will taste that much better for the waiting. still, its not like i’ve seen a grapefruit tree hanging around outside in chicago, either. how does one reconcile the luxury of a varied diet with the economic, political, environmental, social arguments for eating locally-produced food? i mean, what would canadians living far north in the tundra do to eat locally? live off reindeer meat for 6sixmonths at a time and risk scurvy? no, they thank their lucky stars that they can truck in grapefruit from florida, of course. it’s tricky, and thanks to this book and others, i’m more aware of the issue, but no more resolved. for about five months of the year, my CSA provides nearly all the fruits and vegetables i need, and they *are* local and organic. it’s just the other half of the year that i’m not sure what to do. what i do know is, the hyde park produce market had ripe avocados on sale for $.50 each today. and i bought one and i felt guilty about it and still it tasted SOOOOO good on my sandwich. thank you, honduras, for sending me your avocados.

12. 101 in 1001: go completely veggie for a month: check, done. i conducted this experiment for the month of january. the play-by-play is linked, but the upshot is: i can get along just fine without meat in terms of what i crave to eat. leaning how to be veggie in a non-veggie world will take a little more practice (particularly with regard to when other people cook for me), but it’s not an insurmountable challenge. the insurmountable challenge is that i think my body needs more protein than i’m capable of giving it from vegetable sources when i’m running/training heavily. while there are a lot of good reasons for being veggie that i can get behind, the primary reason that motivates me is that i think the disconnect between animals and food in our modern world is unnatural and it leads to unhealthful foods, unsound environmental practices, and unspeakable animal cruelty. (i mean, did you read the about last week’s beef recall? the nation’s school cafeterias are feeding our kids beef from cows that were too sick to even stand up. it’s horrific.) so all this brings me to the conclusion that the right path for me, i think, is to continue to be veggie when eating out, and on the occasion that i’m feeling really short on protein, i can cook a piece of chicken or turkey at home. then as a consumer i can at least make some decisions about the source of the meat, buying organic, buying locally. the same goes for eggs and dairy, too, when it comes to buying but…i don’t think i have the willpower to be vegan everywhere that i can’t be assured of the organic status of the ingredients.

13 [baker’s dozen]. the american dream: oh internets: what does the phrase “american dream” mean to you? i ask because, until this week, i’d never really thought much about it, aside from a vaguely negative connotation and association with the idea of manifest destiny. anyway, Next Theatre is producing a show called the American Dream Songbook, and as part of the lobby display, C asked the artistic associates and friends of the theatre to send in photos that represented our notion of the american dream. i couldn’t really figure out where to start for a while. i dug through old photos, and came across a series of self-portraits that A and i took the day we left for chicago. we posed in front of the Uhaul truck, one hand shading our faces, head tipped up, starting into the future like brave explorers. they were goofy photos, but i remember insisting that we take them, because we were setting off on this grand adventure, this next step in our lives, and i wanted to be able to look back and remember how we felt on that day. so i dug up that picture and sent it in with the following caption: “aug, 2003: looking into our bright shiny future the day we left idaho to move to chicago. a few years later, he broke my heart. but i still live in chicago.” some of my friends who saw it thought the caption was tragic, others thought it was hilariously funny. i realized later it was kind of both. it was weird to put up a photo of myself and A, especially in a public theatre lobby where friends of his might very well see it. but, i decided, that *was* my iconic american dream photo. the point (and this is the point of the show at Next as well) is that the american dream is elusive. it always falls short. life doesn’t turn out the way we think it will, but what we find instead sometime surprises us, and it is the hope that sustains us and gets us to surprising endings.

fast forward five years from that day in front of the Uhaul, and now we’re all grown up: A is a parent and a successful actor, he’s teaching classes at the school where, five years ago, we came to chicago so he could study. as far as theatre goes, i’m living the dream: i’m working full time in my field, no day job. i don’t have money to burn, but i can’t complain; i can pay my rent, i never worry about scraping by till the next paycheck or the next gig. i have a lovely apartment, great friends, a good life. but A and i, as a unit, didn’t survive. we found all those things we came to chicago to find, but in the pursuit, we lost the only thing that we brought with us to chicago: the us. and to be honest, i don’t know that we could have gotten to the places we are now together.

so, we end with an essay assignment, comment box: what does the phrase “american dream” evoke in you? go!

*did i blog about the time that my darling cat actually threw up into my purse? when i’m not home for too many hours he sleeps or does whatever it is that cats do all day but neglects to eat, so i get home and he’s starving and wolfs his food down and then sometimes yarfs it right back up. so one night he gulped some food, then sat down on his customary position of the footstool next to my desk. i had dropped my purse under the desk against the footstool. i left the room, and while i was gone, without even getting off the stool, the cat leaned over the side and PUKED INTO MY PURSE. what is it, a kitty barf bag? anyway, suffice to say that running the $25 canvas bag through a hot washing machine was no big deal. i laughed at the grossness of it all, and zeke looked mildly embarrassed. had i been carrying a $500 kate spade leather handbag, the cat-barf episode would have been a lot less funny.

sunday morning rant

{17 February 2008}

what with the SAD, and all the rain and dark clouds this morning (it could still be night time for all the natural light that’s coming in my window), getting out of bed was a herculean task this morning. the effort started with the radio, the gentle tones of NPR pulling me toward consciousness and the outside world. then my laptop (still in bed), emails from a few (early-rising) family and acquaintances further tugged my brain toward wakefulness and functionality. skimmed some blogs. checked my scrabulous stats. the cat slept on my feet. turned on the bedside lamp. eventually, in order to get up and stay up, it took turning on all the lights in the apartment, warm, incandescent glow* to fight off the sluggishness brought on by the darkness outside.

really, the drip drip drip of the 40 degree rainstorm is a good thing, it might eat away at the parking lot glaciers that are making owning and operating a car a ritual pain in the ass. this cold rain is the ugly process by which we move into spring.

for now, on to orange juice and yoga, then my to-do list. this is actually why my life is usually so over-scheduled. i *think* that empty days on the calendar will be wonderful, freeing, blissful, but instead i find them crippling. intertia takes over. i move slower, get less done.

can you tell i’m done with winter?

i should really really think about living in california. (florida’s not an option).

*you will have to pry incandescent lights out of my cold dead hands before i switch to fluorescents. i would sooner give up my car than give up incandescent bulbs. (and what with everyone pitching their fluorescent light bulbs into the garbage and contributing to the mercury contamination in our food chain – talk to me about switching bulbs once you’ve set up a functional recycling or exchange program). when it seems that incandescent is going out of style, i will horde cases of them into my old age.

come here/go away to wrap up 2007

{31 December 2007}

so there were a lot of half-finished posts that fell by the wayside, and treading water backwards is not worth the effort. so we’ll summarized the busy past couple of weeks with an installment of come here/go away and then move on to thoughts of 2008.

come here: dr. atomic. H and i caught this at the lyric the week before christmas. i have almost no experience with opera, so the whole process was impressive – the grandiose opera house, the scale on which everything is done. however, sitting still for a three hour anything is not really my specialty, and i found myself getting antsy during the first act (okay, i get it: it’s the night before you test the first a-bomb and you don’t know if you’ve invented something that will ignited the atmosphere and kill us all. an intriguing question but not really three hours’ worth of plot, and i’ve seen the same material treated much better by the excellent Carson Kreitzer). that is, until i reminded myself that plot isn’t the point of opera. the audience is meant to sit back, listen to the music, look at the big pretty stage pictures and just be. as a sometimes-play-goer, full-time-play-maker, i’m used to being very actively engaged in a production. it took me a while to realize that i needed to actually disengage a bit in order to fully appreciate the experience, but once i did, it was lovely. still, it’s sad that my total lack of musical talent/education means that there were probably many levels on which i failed to fully appreciate the work. it did look pretty, tho.

go away: aimee mann holiday spectacular. it pains me to have to give aimee mann a “go away” because i totally dig her, and her band sounded really great live. a “holiday spectacular” however, is not a concert. there was too much standup riffing with guests who are probably people i’d know if i had cable or ever watched tv but who really weren’t that funny, and guest spots for off-beat musician friends who were quirky but totally NOT AIMEE MANN. also: aimee mann fans are OLD. and suburban. when did aimee mann stop being hip? maybe i was just feeling curmudgeonly that night. still, the ticket was free, courtesy of my roommate who works at the concert house, so i should really shut up and stop complaining now.

come here: sweeney todd. i’m pretty emphatically not into musical theatre and so i didn’t know sweeny todd particularly well. the sondheim purists i saw the movie with objected to some of the changes (songs deleted/rearranged, mr. todd’s part transposed from a baritone to a tenor for the tender vocal cords of johnny depp), but i totally dug it. the production design was so excellent, tim burton just keeps getting better.

come here: christmas with the family. it snowed and snowed and snowed, and provided for skiing and snowshoeing in the meadow, and there was a cute baby (my brother’s wife’s sister’s baby, which we decided still makes him my nephew, for simplicity’s sake). i cooked christmas dinner (turkey, cranberry sauce, stuffing, sweet potatoes, salad, and chocolate chip oatmeal cookies – everything from scratch) without any major disasters (with the help of a rotating cadre of sous chefs, it must be noted, some of them more helpful than others).

go away: food poisoning i got from the denver airport. for two days, i wasn’t sure what my own name was. on the upside, by the time i recovered, i’d lost those pesky holiday pounds and started the whole eating-well-in-the-new-year with a fast. food poisoning and breakups are the most effective weight-loss tools i know.

come here: visits with old friends. had the nicest visit with A’s parents when i was in boise last week, the odd circumstances of our relationship notwithstanding. i hadn’t heard news of any of his siblings in more than a year, so catching up with the doings of the family was nice, and they are such gracious, lovely people that we navigated around the obvious social land mines without trouble. why do i bother to keep up with my former in-laws? i’m honestly not sure. i don’t do it out of a desire to maintain any sort of connection between me and my ex. if anything, it’s because in the past year i’ve learned to appreciate the myriad of forms that interpersonal relationships can inhabit, the blurred distinction between family and friends. there’s no substitute for having good people in my life, and cutting people off out of a sense of injured pride brings a hollow sort of satisfaction.

when i got back home a number of college friends passed through the windy city, including the lovely wabes and entourage, also p & j, and db. (ha! nicknames and initials for everyone!). catching up was good.

come here: good jobs & engagements & baby news. lots of friends with news this holiday season. it’s all happening to the right people and i couldn’t be happier for all of them.

go away: cold cold cold! as i write this, the windchill is -6. this is the cold when homeless people freeze and poor people can’t heat drafty apartments. it’s no good. also, where do the wild bunny rabbits of chicago go when it gets this cold? wikipedia informed us that rabbits don’t really hibernate but they sort of hibernate, but it didn’t really answer the question, where do they go in the winter?

come here: chicago smoking ban! hooray! as of jan 1, the smoking ban finally goes into effect for bars. i intend to invest more time holding up a barstool at my local now that i can do it without stinking like an ashtray. i should be more sympathetic to the smokers shivering in their boots out in front of the bar, trying to hold a cigarette in mitten-clad fingers, but i’m really not. now’s the time to quit! then you have more money for the other vices! our own cold turkey wonder woman inspires many.

come here: the ginger people’s ginger chews. my tongue is on fire and i’ve eaten about half the bag while writing this. mmm, ginger candy.

my street, 10:15am

{16 December 2007}

possibly the only thing more magical than a heavy blanketing snow fall late at night is waking up to 8″ of deep fluffy snow under blue skies and shimmering sunlight.

it was *perfect* snow frisbee conditions, but unfortunately arrived a day too late for this week’s game. still, i went running along the lake, and it was supremely beautiful.

my street, 1:15am

{}

this kind of snow – 6″ deep, powdery fluffy, relentless – it delights me in a way that makes me laugh out loud like a little kid. i have knee-high wellingtons that let me stomp through the drifts, shuffling, because they are too big (i bought them, the smallest men’s size i could find, at a k-mart one night after experiencing my first buffalo blizzard). the blanket of snow muffles the sounds of the city, softens all the sharp corners, hides the dirt. everything is clean, draped in graceful white curves, the little architectural details on old buildings and iron fences highlighted.

(also, coming home from work at 1am, i won the parking lottery my first trip round the block — so that probably helped my outlook. that, and the fact that as i approached the house, i could see our christmas tree twinkling in the window, and knew the radiators would be clanking away, a sleepy cat waiting to greet me, and i have the time to sleep late tomorrow.) home is good.