Monthly Archives: March 2014

Dirt + Water = Mud

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Garbage goes out on Sunday evening. Or to be exact, I take it out. Last night was cold but the suburban sky was clear, with about as many stars as you can see in a metro area of 9M people or so. At about 10 p.m., Orion lorded over the southwestern sky, ready to leave us for the warm months. Always good to see him, but also good to see him leaving.

Here on Earth — interesting that we call our home planet Dirt — not nearly enough people document Mud Season. It might not be worth a whole coffee table book, but maybe a chapter in Scenes From the Butt-End of Winter.

March10.14 240This is a recent view in Elk Grove Village, Ill., near the enclosure where the village — or maybe it’s the Cook County Forest Preserve District — keeps a small herd of elk. So in fact there’s an elk grove in Elk Grove. (Unlike, say, Country Club Hills, Ill., where there is no country club and are no hills.)

March10.14 241The elk were off in the distance and not worth photographing — the herd is barely visible in the above shot — so I concentrated on icy slush.

March Snows

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Snow, melt, snow — repeat. Bitter winter doesn’t quite want to give up, so the tug-of-war with spring is on. The dog’s enjoying the mud. The rest of us, not so much.

March snow isn’t that strange this far north. Here’s a picture I took on March 3, 2002, in Westmont, Ill. Lilly, 4, was making the most of the snow.

Lilly3.3.02That was a winter that didn’t want to give up, either. Even in May — when we were planning to go to Montreal — it was still uncomfortably cool most of the time, until just before we left. I have a feeling we’re going to get another one of those miserable springs again this year.

A Ride on the Paternoster

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Here’s a term I’d never heard before: paternoster elevator. Or, as Wiki defines it, in part: “a chain of open compartments (each usually designed for two persons) that move slowly in a loop up and down inside a building without stopping.” The site has a helpful illustration.

The term was new to me, not the thing itself, because Yuriko and I rode one in Prague almost 20 years ago. We were astonished to find such a contraption. I never knew it had a special name, but I didn’t forget it.

This YouTube posting gives something of the sense of riding one, and since it was filmed in Prague, that might have been the very one we rode on. Here’s one in Copenhagen that I would have ridden if I’d known about it. I’m astonished that they’re still around even now.

As usual, I came to the term in a roundabout way. After proposing a coffee table book about dirty ice mounds, I remembered another one I came up with years ago, Great Elevators of Europe. For fun, I Googled that term, and the video about the paternoster came up.

March Mounds

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Old Man Winter sees that our snow cover is melting, and mutters, “That’ll never do.” So we got a fresh coat overnight.

Recently I had an idea for a coffee table book, or maybe a coffee table anti-book. One featuring mounds of dirty snow. March10.14 237March10.14 244March10.14 238

Of course, these are just snapshots. A pro photographer and some good equipment could take some really arresting images of piles of suburban snow at the butt-end of winter.

A Thousand Words About Pho

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Found a new place for pho not long ago, not far from where we live. Once upon a time, the only place we knew for pho, besides Vietnam itself, was Argyle Street on the North Side of Chicago. But good food tends to spread.

Why go on about it in words when this image will speak for me?

March 2014 phoAh, muy delicioso.

St. John UCC Cemetery, Palatine

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The snow was still pretty deep this weekend — but starting to melt — at St. John United Church of Christ in Palatine, Ill., when I dropped by for a look at the churchyard cemetery. So I didn’t do a lot of wandering around or taking notes about individual stones. Still, it’s a pretty little graveyard, winter or summer.

St John UCC March 14March10.14 223I’d been there before, but not for the better part of a decade, despite how often I pass nearby. Some of the older stones are in German. Fittingly, since much of this part of Cook County was originally settled by German famers.

The church is the third building on the site, dating from 1885.

March10.14 230According the church web site: “August 21 [1885] the church was destroyed by fire after the steeple was struck by lightning. September 14, the cornerstone for the new church identical to the old was laid. The bell in today’s belfry holds the original bell cast in 1885… The new church was built by [contractor] Christian Brinkman for $2,700.

“The pipe organ was built by Emil Witzmann around 1885. It has a balanced mechanical stop-action and is registered in the Organ Historical Society Registry. The center aisle lights were originally candle lights. The fourth Sunday in Advent of the same year, a new church (our present building) was dedicated.”

March10.14 232There are other little suburban cemeteries and churches I need to make a point of visiting this year, ones that aren’t that far away. Since they’re so close, I get lackadaisical about making the time to drop by.

NC Early ’81

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The demographics of this visual gag is a bell curve based on age. The bulge of peak understanding would be roughly between age 45 and 55. For my part, I laughed right away. It also reminded me of the early ’80s.

My spring break trips during the period weren’t particularly decadent. Downright wholesome, sometimes. I’m glad I wrote this down. I barely remember most of it.

March 4, 1981

Carolina Beach State Park. After dark, we cooked and ate dinner. The campstove was working, compared with the disappointment of the previous night, because we read the directions this time. We were alone in the park, which was a little spooky there under the big pines, but it wasn’t that cold, so on the whole we figured it would be good to sleep outside in our sleeping bags. Unless it rained.

Shortly after crawling into our bags for the night, which were warm and comfortable, we felt a few drops. Then a few more. Then some bigger ones. Then boom! and a flash of lightning. So much for warm and comfortable, or at least dry. We retreated to the car and didn’t come out until morning. Neal had the driver’s side of the front, I had the passenger’s side, with my head up against one of the sleeping bags next to the window, and Stuart had the back seat, which wasn’t much bigger, considering the everything stowed back there.

Naturally, it was hard to sleep. Instead we talked about this and that, including stories about other trips we’d taken, or other times when things hadn’t gone according to plan. I told them about how three years ago exactly, Ellen had shattered Nancy’s glass-top table [or rather, Nancy’s mother’s table] by trying to bound across it during a party we were all attending. Eventually we did sleep, though I can’t call it restful.

The next morning [March 5] the campground was completely soaked. We left in short order. We a found a series of covered tables at Hugh MacRae County Park in Sea Breeze (New Hanover County) and stopped for an hour there to make breakfast. I also put together the kite we’d bought on Bodie Is. The sun was out and temperatures were rising, so we went to Wrightsville Beach for a while.

Neal and Stuart threw a Frisbee around while I flew the kite. It took a while to get it airborne, but the wind was up (and temps in the 60s, so pleasant), and I got it flying very high over the ocean. To keep it stable, though, I kept having to give it more and more line. When I tried to bring the kite in, the thing got unstable and looped until I gave it more line again. Eventually the kite broke in mid-air and I crashed it onto the beach. Should have crashed it into the water, which would have been more dramatic. While it flew I enjoyed its motions against the partly cloudy sky, wind blowing and waves making their back-and-forth sound.

Toward noon, dark clouds returned, and we headed back to Durham mostly on US 421 by way of historic Wilmington and later Spivey’s Corner, which I’d only ever heard of because of Johnny Carson. For lunch we paused at a roadside table in Clinton to eat hot dogs and so forth, and an old farm dog befriended us for our food. We gave him an extra weenie.

One Hundred Seventy-Eight Years & Counting

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That time of year again. Remember the Alamo.

Historical fiction, but high quality. Col. Travis drawing a line in the dirt might be a memorable image, but I doubt that it was anything more than a 19th-century popularizer of the Alamo making things up.

The Day of the Trivet

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More snow last night. Getting a little tiresome, eh? Most of the nation is probably getting tired of the Winter of ’14 and its polar vortices and cancelled flights and icy Southland.

But spring is nigh. I know that because in the mail today I got the first circular of the season advertising better lawns through chemistry. Maxi-Green Lawn Service, or something, promising a lawn as green and monocultured and uninteresting as the surface of a billiard table. It’s a little hard to imagine any kind of lawn under those feet of snow, but I know it’s down there. As usual this year, I’m going to promote biodiversity in my lawn and survival of the fittest for the flora.

Here’s a word you don’t see all that much: trivet. I’m thinking of it because I also got a MoMA catalog in the mail today, as always full of artful bric-a-brac that I don’t order. In includes the Bakus Trivet, by Brazilian designer Tati Guimarães.

“An ideal way to collect and repurpose corks from special occasions,” the catalog says. “This stainless-steel frame becomes a trivet when you add bottle corks atop the 36 bent spikes. (Corks not included.) Made in Spain… $48  MEMBERS  $43.20”

Some cork-collecting friends of mine in college could have used one of these trivets, provided it wasn’t that expensive. They collected corks for some years, and wrote on each cork who was with them when the bottle was opened, and when. As I participated in wine drinking with these lads, my name too ended up on some of the corks, which were kept in a wooden box.

These days it would take a long time for me to accumulate 36 wine-bottle corks. And we don’t need any more trivets, since we have two cast-iron objects that serve that purpose. Still, it seems like a clever little item.

Somebody’s Lying

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At 5:12 on Tuesday (my answering machine tells me), we got our first robocall of the election season. Since it’s an off-year election, the volume probably won’t be as high as in ’12, nor as entertainingly daft.

Still, I’m recording it here. The candidate is in the Republican primary. Regardless of who wins that primary in the Eighth Congressional District of Illinois, incumbent Rep. Tammy Duckworth, a Democrat, is odds-on favorite to win the general election.

Anyway, the call went as follows: “This is Hugo Z. Hackenbush, and I’d like a few seconds of your time to set the record straight. Over the last few weeks, my opponent for Congress has smeared my good name, and has lied about my residency in Illinois.

“The truth is, I was born and raised in the Eighth District, and the only time I left was to serve my country in the United States Marine Corps, which included five tours in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“It’s clear that my opponent’s attack on me and the military aren’t just wrong, they’re unpatriotic. Please send a message for freedom, and vote for me, Hugo Z. Hackenbush on March 18. Thanks for your time.”