June 18, 2013

Big week, big summer, big year…

I suppose it is worth mentioning that I turned 30 last Friday?  It’s going to be a big and wonderful and challenging year, and mostly I’ve just been busy living it already! Great things about last week:

  • A good writing week
  • Taking half a day off on Thursday, traveling to New Hampshire with my running buddies Frank and Steve, and smashing a 2-year quest (I’d say 16-year quest, but years ago I’d never have imagined running so fast) to run a sub-20 5k by going 19:18 even after I blew the first mile by going out about 20 seconds fast in 6-flat (which is, alarmingly, not much slower than I used to race a 1600 in high school).
  • Spending a few hours both Friday and Saturday working in the vacant lots on Quincy Street, which really are starting to look an awful lot like a community garden.
  • Going out to celebrate my birthday with Dan and our friend Josh (who shares my birthday and whom we caught working late on Friday with no birthday plans, typical do-gooder lawyer that he is!)
  • Birthday & Father’s Day phone calls.

Things I’m all excited about this week:

  • A good writing week (it better be!)
  • A Soo Bahk Do tournament this weekend (which my parents and Dan and Mehrdad are all coming to!!)
  • Planning my 30 hours in Rome and getting ready for the Italy adventure in general (which will be followed by Jake’s wedding…).
  • various presents that are wrapped and ready for giving!
June 16, 2013
Our neighborhood was busy being cute last night.  It was Illumination Night on Magnolia Street - think bandstand, strawberry shortcake, kettle corn, and a block’s worth of garden parties.  Our friends David and Lucy were with us, and as friends from church, running and work called out to us in succession, they, maybe rightly, got the sense that we knew everyone around here. I even met a new couple when I came up to them and said, “I didn’t know there was a Corgi in the neighborhood!” - it turns out that a Corgi and a Corgi-beagle mutt, along with the soon-to-be-parents of twins, are renting the beautiful blue house on Magnolia, and just arrived yesterday!  Heck of a welcome…  

Our neighborhood was busy being cute last night.  It was Illumination Night on Magnolia Street - think bandstand, strawberry shortcake, kettle corn, and a block’s worth of garden parties.  Our friends David and Lucy were with us, and as friends from church, running and work called out to us in succession, they, maybe rightly, got the sense that we knew everyone around here. I even met a new couple when I came up to them and said, “I didn’t know there was a Corgi in the neighborhood!” - it turns out that a Corgi and a Corgi-beagle mutt, along with the soon-to-be-parents of twins, are renting the beautiful blue house on Magnolia, and just arrived yesterday!  Heck of a welcome…  

June 11, 2013

On being seen & known around town…

Dan is always flattered when he gets a through-the-grapevine referral, but I think it reached a new level today when a stranger saw him walking to work, stopped their car and got out to tell him about a friend in need of help.  Some community outreach speaking engagement somewhere along the line has clearly proved its worth…

Home from market

with an improbably large late-season bundle of rhubarb (I was so glad! I thought it was done last week!) was certainly enough to make me think about just how big a row of rhubarb my dream garden needs. 

I am also reminded that Leyla & Julie, at whose place Boo lived in Vermont, had an epic row of it growing up their long driveway the way other people grow useless shrubbery.  Smart women. 

June 7, 2013

Into the Wild

I just finished reading this (by ear) after two of my students last term pressed it on me. (Someone else at Wfield clearly used it to cap off a course themed around the American Dream in a way that left a lasting impression on them.)  Krakauer is enjoyable, entertaining.  I liked his interweaving of his own readings of wilderness figures, of mountaineering literature, and especially of Chris McCandless’ reading and annotating of texts because I’m fascinated by how our literary culture affects how we view the world; I watched it in action the last two summers as my students simultaneously opened themselves to Western landscapes and Western writings in Wyoming. 

I also read the book thinking of a teen I met two summers ago in the Canadian Rockies who was seeking his own peace after his older brother used Into the Wild as an instruction manual in the worst possible way, leaving home after reading it and also turning up dead.  Books do funny and profound things to us sometimes.

June 3, 2013

This weekend I…

wandered through 2 open houses on the way home from church, subscribed to This Old House and e-mailed a realtor about seeing some other houses.  This is, at some level, not the behavior of someone about to relocate Anywhere in Fall 2014. 

Except… we could own this “little” pink Victorian for half of what we pay now to rent.   And do you see the woodwork, the three fire places, the leaded-glass windows and all over gorgeousness of this Queen Anne? 

May 22, 2013

DIY Farmshare

Dan and I loved having a farmshare the last 3 summers.  This summer, I felt like one or both of us would be away so many weeks, it hardly made sense to get a share and then have to give much of it away, or risk wasting some of it.  This summer, we’re trying something else - taking $30 cash per week and spending it at market (or, failing that, at a local wholesale produce shop, which, how haven’t I been shopping at it every week for the last 15 months?).  This way we can still feel committed to local agriculture without being locked into the share.  And an extra bonus that I’m particularly excited about: using some of our ‘farmshare’ money for treats like local organic dairy & eggs & honey & fruit. 

Week 1’s haul: Lots of arugula, a chive plant for the garden, milk, eggs, kale, and bok choy.    It’s early yet, which means that the veggies are expensive and variety is limited, but already there was that farmshare-effect of the local harvest driving our cooking.  “What’s for dinner?”  “Looks like we’re having bok choy and tofu!”

May 21, 2013
Angie and Nick probably spared themselves a lot of the usual graduation talk about “Oh my god, when did they get so big?” by getting married after their Sophomore year.  Whether or not they surprised anyone by getting so tall, so accomplished, or so graduated, it’s nice to share life milestones with our siblings, as much for the excuse to hang out together as anything else.  These two move to Arizona at the end of the summer so that Angie can start grad school in speech therapy, but we’re already looking forward to the next reunion.

Angie and Nick probably spared themselves a lot of the usual graduation talk about “Oh my god, when did they get so big?” by getting married after their Sophomore year.  Whether or not they surprised anyone by getting so tall, so accomplished, or so graduated, it’s nice to share life milestones with our siblings, as much for the excuse to hang out together as anything else.  These two move to Arizona at the end of the summer so that Angie can start grad school in speech therapy, but we’re already looking forward to the next reunion.

May 16, 2013
Dan took some bruised portraits of me because he’s the best.  As are these bruises.  Yesterday you could count three knuckles in the one on my arm.

Dan took some bruised portraits of me because he’s the best.  As are these bruises.  Yesterday you could count three knuckles in the one on my arm.

May 12, 2013
Noticed on my walk home from church that this came on the market.  I would say, “Don’t tempt me, Springfield,” but, since this is Forest Park, I can just say, “Meh. The one down the street is blue and has three fireplaces.”

Noticed on my walk home from church that this came on the market.  I would say, “Don’t tempt me, Springfield,” but, since this is Forest Park, I can just say, “Meh. The one down the street is blue and has three fireplaces.”

Was great to have Beckett back with me for my ‘long’ run this week (though we called it short at 6 because I’m still being a bit careful of those healing feet).  For the record, this is the best pair of dog boots ever, ever, ever.  If you’ve messed around with leather-soled ones or ones that fall off, you know what I’m talking about.

Was great to have Beckett back with me for my ‘long’ run this week (though we called it short at 6 because I’m still being a bit careful of those healing feet).  For the record, this is the best pair of dog boots ever, ever, ever.  If you’ve messed around with leather-soled ones or ones that fall off, you know what I’m talking about.

May 11, 2013

Would it be ill-mannered of me to dig up my landlord’s hostas to make more room for my dahlias?  what if I just moved them next to the telephone pole so all the neighborhood dogs could come pee on them?

May 10, 2013

This week’s 60-minutes bit on counter-insurgency policing in Springfield gives me feelings.


In part it trades on the “OMG, military tactics on domestic streets” feeling you get when you learn the name for the police tactic.  But, after a quick paranoia-check about the gangs and the “military tactics,” the 60 Minutes piece mostly dwells on the cuddly aspects of the program — police officers frequenting my favorite pastry shop, or making awkward attempts to follow up a night-time SWAT style drug bust with the use of the “charm offensive” on the neighbors (“Hey, I like your rosary!  I’ve got one in my pocket!”).  Or walking the walking school-bus to school.  (Is that a moving story about cops and parents doing something awesome, or a story about a city where school kids need a bodyguard of “burly troopers” to get them to the school yard in one piece?)

Before I watched this, I was commuting at an odd hour and caught a local African American radio show host (I wish I could figure out who I was listening to and look him up again!) discussing the piece, and the tactics, expressing concern about the police efforts, which he feels are often focusing on women, asking women to be police informants, and therefore possibly endangering them.  It also criticized 60 Minutes for failing to blur the faces of people shown being friendly towards the police. 

Overall I’m hearing mixed reactions about whether we just made the national news for having a model program in Springfield or for being the most dangerous city in New England.  Go us?