Monthly Archives: December 2019

Thursday Hey Nonny-Nonny

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Not bad weather for December so far. Above freezing and sunny today and yesterday. This can’t last.

This week I noticed the first installation of solar rooftop panels on my street, though not in my part of town. A good thing to do, I suppose. But my on-the-fly, rough calculations go like this: Cost to install: x. Savings on energy each year: a small, maybe minuscule fraction of x. Tax-credit support for the project: you’ll find out after considerable paperwork and wandering through the fun house that is the tax code. So another fraction of x. Years to recoup investment: many.

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe that’s changed or was never right. Could be that Greta will come to my front door someday and personally shame me about my non-solar house. I know the cost of solar panels is way down, but that’s only one cost component, and I also know that any home improvement project costs more than published estimates, or the contractor’s estimates, or more than you think it should, or just more period.

Schaumburg Town Square here in the northwest suburbs is decked out pretty nicely with lights this year. Here are trees along the square’s square pond.

Schaumburg Town Square Christmas lights

The clocktower and its plaza are gold and silver.

Schaumburg Town Square Christmas lights

The first time, I think, I’ve seen the clocktower itself arrayed in sparkling gold.

Closer to home — at home, in fact — I recently made a clip of the dog perched in one of her favorite places, the stairs. Lights feature in this clip as well. Strange, eerie lights… either an easily explainable reflection from the dog’s tapetum lucidum inside her eyes, or the animal is sending me telepathic beams to relay one simple message, Feed me more.

On a more somber note, two deaths have come to my attention recently. Both of people hardly old.

RIP, Craig Bloomfield, PR man and commercial real estate writer, and professional acquaintance of mine. Also, roughly my age. I don’t remember the last time I spoke to him, though it’s been a number of years. I have some pleasant memories of PR lunches with him back in the early 2000s, especially at the Russian Tea Time in the Loop.

RIP, Debbie Gregg, eldest sister of a very old friend of mine. I spent a lot of time with her brother Tom in the early ’70s, and Debbie was around sometimes. She was about the same age as my eldest brother. Tom and I haven’t been in touch much as adults, and I probably haven’t seen Debbie in 30+ years, since Tom got married, but it’s still a sad thing to hear.

GeGeGe and Many Torii

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Other places that Yuriko visited during her recent stay in Japan included Mizuki Shigeru Road in Sakaiminato, Tottori Prefecture, and Fushimi Inari-taisha, a Shinto shrine in Kyoto.

Mizuki Shigeru Road sports more than 100 statues depicting characters created by Shigeru Mizuki (1922-2015), a manga artist best known for a series called GeGeGe no Kitarō. I’m not a manga aficionado, or even very interested, but his characters are so widely known in Japan that even I recognized some of them, by sight if not by name.
Most of them I don’t recognize. But they are interesting.
I understand that Mizuki drew much of his inspiration from yōkai, a broad class of monsters, spirits and demons in Japanese folklore. I believe it.
Yuriko said that she hadn’t visited Sakaiminato before (though we did go to another part of Tottori once together) and that the statues are fairly new.

I recognized another place she visited, however: Fushimi Inari-taisha, a shrine whose precincts feature many, many torii. And almost as many steps.Fushimi Inari-taisha

Fushimi Inari-taisha

Fushimi Inari-taisha

I’m pretty sure, but not absolutely sure, that I visited Fushimi a good many years ago — nearly 30 — and climbed many steps through many orange torii.

Japan ’19

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Yuriko returned recently from a couple of weeks in Japan. Besides time with family, she visited a number of interesting places in the Kansai and a little beyond, such as the Adachi Museum of Art off in Shimane Prefecture, which hugs the Sea of Japan coastline northwest of greater Osaka.

Never made it up that way myself. The museum, which features a large collection of works by Taikan Yokoyama and other artists, is also known for its garden. Looks impressive.Adachi Museum of Art

Adachi Museum of Art

I’d have to see it myself to compare it to Ritsurin Garden in Takamatsu on Shikoku — the most breathtaking Japanese garden I’ve seen. But best not to invent rankings for places like that anyway.

Also of interest: she visited not only the Tower of the Sun (Taiyō no Tō) on the former grounds of Expo ’70 in Osaka, she went inside.

That wasn’t possible when I was in Osaka, though gazing at the exterior was something I did from time to time. I’ve read that the interior only opened permanently last year after renovations to the structure, with the artwork inside refurbished too. It’s a depiction of the Tree of Life.
tower of the sun interior osakaWow. I’d like to see that as well sometime. Along with the Maishima Incineration Plant (which Y didn’t visit this time).

Neon Santa

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Most of yesterday’s snow is gone. If winter were like that all the way through around here, that would suit me. Then again, that would also probably mean Texas-like summers and the melting of the Greenland ice sheet for starters, so never mind.

Christmas lights and decorations are sprouting rapidly in our neighborhood, some modest, some modestly gaudy. No one here goes for the full Griswold, or even a half or quarter Griswold.

As for Christmas in the stores, all that sprouted weeks ago. Still, sometimes I see new things. New to me, anyway. Like a Neon Santa.

Available at a warehouse store I visit sometimes. Could have been mine for about $30, but I passed on it. I also noticed that it isn’t actually neon. In our time, it’s an LED Santa.

Thanksgiving Dinner 2019

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December didn’t arrive with a blast of snow, but instead gray skies that gave up rain from time to time, which — by Sunday just after dark — had turned into light snow. In other words, weather like we’ve had much of the time since the Halloween snow fell, followed by the Veterans Day snow.

Come to think of it, we had Palm Sunday snow this year. Seems like a year for named-day snows. But no Thanksgiving snow. Or Absence of Color Friday snow (well, maybe).

Took no pictures of 2019 Thanksgiving dinner. Will there be a time when it’s socially mandatory to take a picture of every special-event or holiday meal? Or every meal? Sounds like a small component of dark tale you’d see in Black Mirror.

This year’s meal looked pretty much like this plate — same kind of fish bought from the same place — and was just as good, with the food prepared mostly by my daughters’ skilled hands. Chocolate creme pie for dessert, also from a store, and one we’ve enjoyed before. I did all cleanup, a multi-pan, multi-dish, many-utensil effort, but worth it.