Gorgeous sunset today, this early February day in northern Illinois. Much more so for my eyes than a mere photograph indicates. More brilliant pink was mixed in than in this unadjusted shot, for instance.
But I can play with the photographic image, something I can’t do with my eyes. This strikes me as a bit closer to what I saw.
I didn’t see this, but monochrome does bring out some textures.
Luckily I didn’t see it this way, as if a nuclear device has gone off in the distance.
So eyes are the thing. That’s (one) reason to continue to send people into space. No matter how good the mechanical images are — and some are astonishing — that isn’t the same as human eyes beholding a sight.
Icicles
After the most recent snow, temps have been close to freezing, and the sun came out. That meant the formation of icicles.
That melting dynamic won’t last long.
Don’t like the looks of that. I thought the border with Canada was closed. Anyway, we aren’t going to get away with a mild winter after all.
Ann at 18
No more minors in the house. No miners, either, but that’s a different matter.
Ann’s birthday pie, chocolate cream, with a 1 standing in for a decade, and because we didn’t have an 8, there are eight smaller candles, one per year, to go with the decade.
Ann is wearing a birthday present, one of those hoodies you wear inside to keep warm. Lilly is watching on the screen behind the pie.
They say your kids grow up fast. Nah. It’s taken a while.
Snow to Finish January
Over the last weekend of January, more snow. Another eight inches — or 10, or a foot, it’s hard to tell — on top of the 7 or so earlier in the week.
Not a blizzard like almost 10 years ago exactly. Just a steady fall for 12 hours or more, and the trucks tasked with plowing the streets were able to keep up with it. On Sunday morning, we dug out our driveway. Tiring and tiresome, but not particularly hard, and so life will resume uninterrupted on Monday.
There wasn’t a lot of wind, but there was some, and I think it knocked over the grill.
One of the three legs was weak anyway, so down went the tripod, as broken and ruined as the Delphic tripod must have been when Theodosius ordered the Temple of Apollo destroyed in AD 390. Unlike that tripod, there’s a replacement grill waiting in the garage for spring to return.
Thursday Kibble & Bits
Sunny day, but not much meltage. Bitter cold night ahead, and another half-foot of snow forecast for the weekend. Before that, we’ll get Thai takeout at Ann’s request on Friday, and a birthday pie, to make staying at home more pleasant.
Earlier this month, when we were in Naperville, we came across a small park: Central Park. Among other things, there’s a weatherworn obelisk to memorialize local soldiers from the Black Hawk War, the Mexican War, the Civil War and the Spanish-American War. It looked like new wars had been chiseled in as time passed.
Not far from that was a Civil War cannon, looking pretty new, because it was refurbished in this century.
It’s a Confederate cannon.
A prize of war, in other words, formerly shot off by the people of Naperville for “Independence Day, parades and other civic activities” in a less safety-conscious (-obsessed?) time. That’s what we could use a little more of in our time, though I suppose in some places edgy folks might mistake it for hostile gunfire, and maybe they’d be right to.
Willard Scott Jr. was this fellow, no relation to the weatherman, it seems. Among other things, this Willard Scott marched through Georgia, doing his bit to invent modern total war.
Shucks. No evidence of life in the clouds of Venus.
Google “Venus floating platform” and one of the first hits is about the Venus Atmospheric Maneuverable Platform (VAMP) at the Northrop Grumman web site. My estimation of that company just went up a notch. It’s at least thinking about flying a plane over Venus.
“The Venus Atmospheric Maneuverable Platform (VAMP) air vehicle is an aeroshell-less hypersonic entry vehicle that transitions to a semi-buoyant, maneuverable, solar-powered air vehicle for flight in Venus’ atmosphere,” NG says. “VAMP AV will be transported to Venus by a carrier/orbiter spacecraft… It is then released and enters the atmosphere, floating down toward the planet almost like a falling leaf.
“During the flight phase, the AV flies in the Venus upper- and mid-cloud layers and collects science data for transmission to Earth. VAMP AV will be capable of orbiting the planet for a long duration — up to a year.”
Of course, the company is no stranger to space, having built the Lunar Module and Pioneer 10, just to name two marquee projects. These days its marquee project is the James Webb Space Telescope, which can’t get into space fast enough, as far as I’m concerned.
Recently I’ve been getting press releases that say these sorts of things:
X will teach you how to:
Reframe your life experiences as growth opportunities
Rewire your mind-set and embrace spirituality as a lifestyle
Connect to your higher self and integrate healthy lifestyle practices
Tap into universal energy and transmute pain into power
Manifest your new reality and claim your authenticity
Change the world!
***
For your upcoming stories on female disruptors, please consider Y, Founder of Z, helping visionaries reconnect to SOUL, and Live FREE to become their most successful, influential and positively impactful versions. Y teaches women to embody the energy of money and become a vibrational match so it flows consistently and predictably.
Hm. My name seems to be drifting onto all sorts of lists, at some distance from commercial real estate. Though I do like that phrase, “energy of money,” and the idea of it flowing “consistently and predictably” certainly has appeal.
Jet Transits the Moon
Space.com’s 2021 Full Moon Calendar: “This month’s full moon occurs on Thursday, Jan. 28 at 2:16 p.m. EDT (19:16 UTC), but the moon will appear full the night before and after its peak to the casual stargazer. January’s full moon is known as the Wolf Moon, though it has many other nicknames by different cultures.”
Just after 5 p.m. today, now a little before dark, I needed to go out to move groceries from one of our cars into the house. Though not subzero, the post-snow freeze felt pretty cold, maybe because I’d been inside all day.
Sure enough, the moon looked full, not far above the horizon to the east. As I stood outside my garage, I noticed a distant airplane flying (apparently) near the visible full moon. Then I saw it transit the full moon for a split second. Though looking small as a gnat, the outline of the plane was clear, backed by the pale moonlight.
I don’t remember that I’ve ever seen that before. Now I have. Right place, right time.
Snow Day, But Not Really
Heavy snow last night and into the morning. We were up at 7 a.m. or so to shovel, but soon postponed the task, since we knew we’d have to do it again in a few hours. And that’s what happened after the snow finally slacked off around noon.
We got 7.5 inches, according to the NWS, making it the first heavy snow of the season — always good when it comes this late — and the most since the unusual snowfall of November 2018.
One reason we were up at 7 was that a phone call interrupted whatever odd dream I was having at the time. Who can be calling now? I wondered.
It was a Schleswig-Holstein High robocall. The school has been holding some classes in person lately — optional, with Ann choosing to stay home. The call was to tell us about a snow day, except that unlike in the past, classes weren’t cancelled, simply moved online. Seems like I was right. Snow days are no more.
Bemis Woods
This is the funniest thing I saw over the weekend.
A recycling container belonging to the Forest Preserve District of Cook County. As soon as I saw it, I had the urge to peek inside. You’d expect three separate spaces, right? No. Everything goes into the same large space.
We were at Bemis Woods, a forest preserve in Westchester, Illinois, a western suburb just to the east of the DuPage County line and I-294.
We walked from the parking lot to the green trail, then the red trail, then the purple trail, then on the road back to the parking lot. About a mile and a half in all. The trails were a little treacherous.
The snow cover was thin, and where previous walkers had been, some of the snow had been scuffed enough to re-freeze as ice. Some parts of the trail were well covered with slippery zones, others less so.
Evidence of many other walkers, people and dogs, was easy to spot.
Still, it was a good walk through the woods at just below freezing.
We crossed Salt Creek twice. Once at a footbridge. The view from there.
Once along Wolf Road.
A good walk, but summer’s better on the whole. As it is for most things. The last time I was near Bemis — a little to the west, that time — was in August more than two years ago.
Poplar Creek, Winter ’21
So far winter hasn’t been all that harsh. No blizzards, no subzero stretches. We’ve gotten snow a few inches at a time, which has thinned out during days just above freezing. Still, I suspect an Arctic blast is coming soon. Probably after the heavy snow due tomorrow night.
In the meantime, temps around freezing mean we can take walks in forest preserves. Not long ago we took the dog out to the Poplar Creek Forest Preserve (formally the Arthur L. Janura Forest Preserve). It’s close by here in the northwest suburbs, but we hadn’t been in a good while.
Off the main path is a path to Bode Lake.
Looks frozen over, but I bet the ice is pretty thin, so no walking on the lake unless you’re a small creature. No ice fishing either. If that’s the price of a mild winter, I don’t mind.
Downtown Naperville
Naperville counts as an edge city, in as much as I understand the term. At about 148,000 people, it could stand alone as a small city — third largest in Illinois, as it happens — and it has a mixed economy: the usual large employers such as the local schools and a hospital, but also Nokia, BP, BMO Harris and North Central College.
For a suburb, Naperville has a remarkably robust downtown core, including retail, office space, and public buildings. After we walked near the river on Saturday, we wandered over to Naperville’s downtown, which isn’t far from the riverwalk.
One reason that downtown has been able to grow, I’ve read, is that long ago the village made sure that the area has a lot of free parking. Want people to drive to your relatively dense town, stop and spend money? Provide free parking. Is that sustainable? I don’t know. Maybe it won’t really be until we all drive electric cars. But for now that brings people in, and encourages them to linger. No worries about feeding the meter.
So simple, so hard for towns who see parking as a revenue stream to understand. I’ll bet whatever revenue Naperville would have gotten from parking fees is vastly outpaced by property tax and sales tax revenue generated by its robust downtown.
Of course, it probably isn’t that simple. Except I have a hunch that it is.
Robust, but not everything’s good, as you’d expect. These are hard times.
There was (to me) a surprising amount of public art downtown, the legacy of a recent public art initiative. For instance, there’s an alley off S. Main St., “Rubin’s Way,” that sports long, twin murals.
One seems to depict idealized modern Naperville.
The other an idealized past Naperville.
“The mural is part of the nonprofit Naperville Century Walk public art initiative and depicts a crowd watching a parade go by. One of the artists, Diosdado ‘Dodie’ Mondero, told the Naperville Sun in 2012 the work is ‘Normal Rockwell-inspired,’ ” the Chicago Tribune reports. Yep.
“At the time of its installation [beginning in 2011], businesses paid $1,000 or more to have their business name on a sign included in the mural, the Sun story said. The cost was $1,000 for a full adult figure, $600 for an adult head and $3,000 for families or groups to be in the scene.”
There’s a petition, with nearly 50,000 signatures now, to add more people of color to the modern wing of the mural.
Not far away, also off Main St., is a mural honoring the Masons, including George Washington and Joseph Naper (1798–1862), founder of Naperville.
Seems Naper was a mason, too. And much else besides — a real 19th-century CV, to quote Wiki: “early Illinois pioneer, ship captain, shipbuilder, businessman, surveyor, state militia officer, soldier, politician, and city planner.”
“Chartered October 2, 1849, Euclid Lodge No. 65 A. F. & A. M. has had a presence throughout downtown Naperville for 170 years, noted Paul Felstrup for the Freemasons during the recent celebration that began with a re-dedication of the Century Walk Masonic Mural ‘Faith, Hope & Charity,’ ” says a site called Pos!tively Naperville.
“Back in 2011, the mural was designed and painted by Naperville artist Marianne Lisson-Kuhn. Formerly gracing the wall at Main and Jefferson outside of Russell’s Dry Cleaners, the mural was relocated to the exterior wall near the intersection of Main Street at Jackson Avenue.”
Also on Main St.
A plaque next it says in part:
HEARTLAND HARVEST 1997
Honoring the soybean, oat, wheat, corn and butterfly-filled landscapes that once dominated the area, this Italian glass tile mosaic pays homage to the historic contributions of Naperville’s family farms…
A block to the east on S. Washington St. is an unusual plaque. Developers don’t get much memorializing, but there is one to Norman Rubin (1929-2010).
It’s at the entrance to a building called Washington Place, a small retail development of Rubin’s that currently includes Athleta, Banana Republic and Ulta as tenants. Just one of a number of local developments for him, since he was instrumental in making downtown Naperville what it is. Him and free parking.