“A major winter storm swept through the Mid-Atlantic on its way to the Northeast, bringing heavy snow, freezing rain and dangerous driving conditions,” I noted in the NYT this evening.
Not a particle of snow hereabouts, but I’m sure our turn will come eventually. That made me wonder: are snow days now things of the past? Even when kids are back in school in person again, say next winter, a heavy blizzard would mean they have to stay home, but they can still go to school remotely, as they do now. I suspect most kids don’t realize this yet. There will be weeping and gnashing of teeth when they do.
Not that it matters in this household any more. Next year in college, if Ann feels like a snow day, she’ll cut classes. But she and her sister might be in the last generation, in this country at least, to remember getting out of school for inclement weather.
The concept was mostly hypothetical to me as a student. During my entire K-12 run in Texas I only got two that I remember. As a parent, I’ve experienced a good many more than that.
Winter starts on December 1, as far as I’m concerned. Some past years, that day has obliged us with snow cover, or least snow flurries, such as in 2006 and 2008 and 2010.
Not this year. I had to be out early in the morning to be somewhere, but it was merely dry and below freezing.
Or maybe winter started the night about a week before Thanksgiving when I was out ’round midnight and spotted Orion riding high in the sky, trailed by the loyal Canis Major.
After I got home yesterday, I had a lot to do, and so didn’t spent much more time out in the early winter temps, or even thinking about them. Early in the evening, I looked up the local temperature. About as cold as I thought: 28.
Then I had a moment of idle curiosity. The Internet was made for just such moments, so I looked up what I wanted to know: how cold it was at that moment in Anchorage, Alaska: 37.
Not as cold as I thought. The kind of thing TV weather presenters occasionally yak about, though usually in January: Look, it’s colder in Illinois than Alaska! But according to the respective 10-day forecasts, it will soon be single-digits in Anchorage, but not here.
Clear and cool lately, with daytime temps in the 50s. Not bad for late November. So far, no snow yet except for a dusting we had a few days before Halloween. It didn’t last. Next time, it probably will.
Pleasant Thanksgiving at home. Nothing made from scratch this year except the gravy, but the boxed macaroni and stuffing you can get at Trader Joe’s isn’t bad at all. And what’s a Thanksgiving dinner without olives, I tell my family. They aren’t persuaded.
Took a walk last weekend at Fabbrini Park in Hoffman Estates.
The geese were still around, mucking up the place.
The weather over the weekend was brilliant, a cluster of warm, mostly clear days, an echo of this year’s golden summer. Today too, but it will end tomorrow evening with storms and cold air behind them.
Here in northern Illinois, summer 2020 offered mostly warm, mostly clear days that stretched into months, with just enough rain to keep the intense green of a wet spring still green as the summer wore on.
Such a fine summer, if you were lucky enough to enjoy it, came as if to soothe over the nervous energy and dread the near future emanating from the wider world, though I’m fairly sure the weather takes no interest in our concerns. Birds don’t either, but somehow they were singing just a little more cheerfully over the weekend. What’s up with that, eh?
Two weekends ago, temps were cooler but not bad. Certainly high enough for a walk in a new forest preserve. New to us, and actually two adjoining forest preserves: Half Day FP and Captain Daniel Wright Woods FP. The preserves are in Lake County. We started at the Half Day parking lot near a small lake, walked to the small lake in Captain Daniel Wright Woods, and came back the way we came.
Except for seeing a sign along the trail, we wouldn’t have known where one forest preserve began and the other ended, which was more-or-less at the Des Plaines River. First we had to cross that river.
I can’t see a name like that and not look it up later. Captain Daniel Wright, a veteran of the War of 1812, later became noted as the first white settler in Lake County.
Find-A-Gave has more. “Capt. Wright was active as a farmer and a cooper,” the site says. “He built his cabin when he was in his mid-fifties and in spite of the hardships associated with pioneer life, he lived to be ninety-five years old and is buried in the Vernon Cemetery in Half Day. A stone memorial was erected in his memory on his old farm on the east side of Milwaukee Avenue.”
Something else to look for next time I come this way.
After a cold second half of October, temps have trended warmer in early November. So much so that I had lunch on our deck today, and expect to tomorrow as well. It can’t last. But it’s nice to sit out there and forget about the national hubbub — which I can’t do during my working hours, as paying attention to it as part of my job.
Here’s an article about the House of Tomorrow at Indiana Dunes NP, which we saw last month. A good short read, except for one thing: no date on it, which is a pet peeve of mine. It’s obviously not that old, since it refers to the recent designation of the national park, but you shouldn’t have to rely on internal evidence to date an article.
When I posted about Pounds Hollow Recreation Area a while ago, I forgot to include the short falling leaves video. Here it is.
We’re past peak here in northern Illinois, but some of the trees are still ablaze, and some still wilted yellow-green. Sitting out on the deck was pleasant enough today, except when a leaf-blower kicked to life noisily not far away. Will future generations ponder that leaf blowers were ever a thing? Hope so. As far as leaves go, let ’em stay where they fall on your lawn. They’re nutrition for next year’s grass.
In Shawneetown, Illinois, the new town that is, you can see a memorial erected about 10 years ago. The wave of such memorials, I believe, will continue into the 21st century. It’s a tribute to the original group of black families who moved from Shawneetown on the river to Shawneetown three miles inland, where they would start life anew, after the devastation caused by the 1937 flood.
It includes a map of the nearby neighborhood and all the names of the black residents who lived there. The other side has a more general black history of Shawneetown, noting that a segregation-era school stood on the site of the memorial, presumably for the black neighborhood’s children, but it doesn’t say that. The school closed in the 1950s.
Near the memorial is a rectangular gazebo. Without corners. Or is it really a gazebo? When Ann and I saw the abandoned Texaco station in Old Shawneetown, I asked her if she’d ever heard the Texaco jingle. I hadn’t thought about it in years, but the point of jungles is to bury themselves deep, so it’s coded in my synapses somewhere.
Most Americans my age would know what I meant, but considering that Men Who Wear Texaco Stars are long gone, I didn’t expect her to know. She didn’t.
Later, I showed it to her on YouTube, where it’s a standalone video (and also the grist for truly stupid local TV news).
That made me a little curious myself. When did that jingle first air? As it turns out, 1962, as a snappier tune compared with, for example, what the singing Men With Texaco Stars did for Milton Berle 10 years earlier. The jingle was also incorporated into later Texaco songs, such as this one sung by Ethel Merman.
As jingles go, “You Can Trust Your Car” is memorable indeed. The story of the copywriter (and composer) who came up with it, one Roy Eaton, is even more remarkable. Aside from being a talented concert pianist, he was the first black creative at a major ad agency, joining Young & Rubicam in 1955 and later working for many years at Benton & Bowles, before founding his own company. He’s still alive at 90.
So memorable that it was the basis for an anachronism in a 1977 episode of M*A*S*H (see the trivia section at the bottom of the page).
The Ricki Lee Jones song “Last Chance Texaco” (1979) includes an example of a reference — to the jingle — that was perfectly understandable when the work was new, and perfectly mystifying to later generations.
Your last chance To trust the man with the star You’ve found the last chance Texaco
A return to gloriously warm days, at least for now, after a cold snap early in the month. Yesterday and today I took breakfast and lunch on the deck. Also, when I could get away from work, I just sat around out there and let my skin manufacture vitamin D.
Back to posting on October 18 or so. No lengthy trips for this fall break; such is the circumstance of the times. I have some sweet memories of October trips of the past, such as last year in Virginia or Philadelphia in 2016 or, going back a lot further, Hida-Takayama in 1991 or New England in 1989.
Watch one thing on YouTube out of idle curiosity, such as a “10” list — the 10 Greatest European Elevators of All Time, for example — and the bots will offer you heaps of other eccentric, vaguely related videos. Such as 10 Shocking Secrets from Leave It To Beaver, which appeared as a suggestion not long ago. (I won’t link to it, but it is real, unlike my first example.)
How many shocking secrets from Leave It To Beaver do I need to know? One would be more than enough, I think. What’s shocking is that anyone would care to know more.
RIP, Eddie Van Halen. Not that I ever bought any of his records or was even much of a fan. Still, occasionally Van Halen was just the thing. A nostalgic portal back to 1978 in this case, and I’m surprised the drummer didn’t explode in that video. Certainly Van Halen the man had hair in his heyday. Also, he named his son Wolfgang. Makes me smile.
The obit cited above is at a site called u discovermusic. It’s run by a record company, so I suspect ulterior commercial motives, but even so it’s pretty interesting. Like this list: quite a compilation.
Frost this morning. I know that because I needed to be somewhere at about 8 am, so went out to my car to leave, and a thin frost coating covered all of the glass. Easy to scrape off, but a reminder of tougher ice to come. Oh, boy. Or is that oh, joy?
Warmish days are ahead, though, at least for a short spell. Such is October. Yesterday afternoon was cool, but still good for a short walk near Plum Grove Reservoir.
The reservoir is near Harper College in northwest suburban Palatine. A 44-acre park surrounds it, making for a pleasant place to walk, as long as the temps are high enough.
Visitor parking near the park is allowed in part of Harper College’s vast lot. Here’s the view of the reservoir from the outer edge of the lot.
Turn the other way, and you see an expanse of asphalt.
Harper College, in full William Rainey Harper College, is a community college here in the northwest suburbs, opened in 1967. Sure enough, its layout owes more than a little to that of a mid-century mall: an island of buildings surrounded by a sea of parking.
For a few weeks now, we’ve enjoyed a Mediterranean-like climate here in northern Illinois, at least the warm and dry summers. Sometimes hot, but usually just warm, and usually dry, though we’ve had occasional showers.
We’ve had more at-home meals al fresco this year than any time I can remember. It can’t last. But at least it will for the next week or so. Till then, it’s a mild balm for the worldwide pervasive melancholy, if you happen to be around here.
“A line of severe storms slammed through downtown Chicago and surrounding areas Monday, downing trees and power lines, which sparked fires in the city, officials said,” CNN reported last night. That, and there was some riotous looting too.
“More than a million homes and businesses in the Midwest are without power, including a third of all of customers in Iowa,” CNN continued. “The wind was so strong when the storm passed through Perry, Iowa, it blew pieces of boards from other buildings into the walls of a house.”
So we lucked out. As I mentioned, the winds were fairly tame in my tiny corner of the world. After such wind and rain as we had had passed yesterday, I went out in the yard to pick up items that moved around a little, such as one of the deck chairs. The sun had returned and I noticed the rain-speckled hibiscus picking up the light.Today we opened up a box that has been sitting in our laundry room for a good many years, tucked under a few other boxes. I call it a laundry room, but being home to the washer and dryer is only one of its functions. Crap we don’t want to put partly out in the elements — in the garage, that is — goes there.
On Saturday, since this is a Summer of Nowhere, I spent a fair number of hours in the garage, till the trash bin was mostly full and garage crap had been rearranged somewhat.
Back to the box. Among many other things, it contained five Zhu-Zhu Pets. Mechanical hamsters, since I’m not sure they rise to the level of robot hamsters.
Ann marveled at them. Her 17-year-old self reflected on how important they were to her seven-year-old self. She got her first one for that birthday. Like most toys, they were important until they weren’t. What amazed me was that the batteries have held out on all of them. They all still move around and make various preprogramed noises.
That’s about 20 seconds of randomly selected Zhu-Zhu Pet sounds, squeaks and whirs coming directly from 2010 to you in 2020.
That’s the local siren that goes off during severe weather, with wind and cicadas in the background, sounding at about 3:45 this afternoon. I don’t actually know its official meaning, but my interpretation is, watch out for tornadoes, bub. So I did, at least through the north-facing windows of my home office, with occasional peeks southward.
We got a fair amount of rain and some lightning for the rest of the afternoon, though I’ve seen worse. As of early evening, we’ve been visited by no tornadoes or even damaging winds. In fact, by 6 the sun was out again. Just another passing summer storm, though we haven’t seen many this year.
Years ago I knew an Englishman, a Mancunian if I remember right, who was living temporarily in Nashville. One of the things that impressed him about America — frightened him, sometimes — was the violent thunderstorms, he said.
That gave me pause. It was hard to imagine not having much experience with that kind of weather. Guess the UK doesn’t get quite as many thunderstorms as North America, especially in the north part of the country, though of course sometimes the British Isles do get thumped by winds (such as in 1987, the reason we couldn’t visit Kew Gardens the next year). Massive thunderstorms were definitely a part of growing up in South Texas, especially come spring, and living in both Tennessee and Illinois.
