Pratt’s Castle, Elgin

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It’s becoming clear that my approach to travel — to finding things to see, anyway — has had two distinct phases. One is before I started using Google Maps, the other after I did, a phase that I expect to continue for the rest of my life.

Visiting Voyageur Landing (see yesterday) only counts as travel in the technical sense that we went to a place that isn’t home, or even in our neighborhood. Even so, it was a new destination and before we went, I scouted it on Google Maps.
Pratt’s Castle? I had to found out more about that, and I did.

“A man’s home may be his castle but when was the last time you actually saw a castle in a residential neighborhood?” says Historic Elgin. “Medieval history buff Harold S. Pratt built this imposing replica in 1937. His real home was nearby on Douglas Avenue.

“Pratt modeled the design on a castle he saw along the Rhine River while serving in World War I. This building was a private museum housing Pratt’s personal collection of medieval artifacts. The 50 foot tall tower is surrounded by a mini-moat and a working draw bridge.

“The castle is still in private ownership, although, [sic] Pratt’s collection is no longer here. So, please respect the privacy of those living here and stay on the bike path.”

More about the castle is here, but I haven’t found out much else about the fate of Pratt’s collection, probably because I haven’t bothered to contact the Elgin History Museum. Since we were planning to visit the nearby Voyageur Landing, I made a point of seeking out the castle as well. Google Maps at work, in other words.

First you go to Trout Park River’s Edge, which sure enough is at the river’s edge.
A trail leads both north and south from there, part of the lengthy Fox River Trail, formerly a railroad line (and the green line on the map above).
A ten-minute walk southward takes you to the castle.
Pratt's Castle, ElginStructure. It’s about as much of a castle as Mars Cheese Castle. Still, worth going (slightly) out of our way to see.

Voyageur Landing

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Two days after Christmas, it was warm enough to visit yet another forest preserve. This time of the year, any day above freezing without patches of ice counts as good enough for a walk. Snow and ice would fall a few days later.

We went to a relatively small patch of land in Kane County, hugging the west bank of the Fox River: Voyageur Landing.

Voyageur LandingDid roving Frenchmen pass this way in centuries past? Could be. In late December 2020, not many people at all were there, just us and a dogwalker and a jogger or two.
The preserve stretches to the north of the bridge that takes I-90 across the Fox.
Voyageur LandingFrom there you follow the river.
Voyageur LandingVoyageur LandingThrough the wintertime forest.
Voyageur LandingVoyageur LandingVoyageur LandingShe found a large number of places to sniff. Not so surprising even for an old dog.

Debris Under the Tree

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Another Christmas, come and gone. We opened presents in the morning that day, as usual.

Not as usual, we had a family Zoom in the afternoon. My brothers, and my nephews and their expanding families, Lilly, and Yuriko and Ann and I were all linked. A geographic diversity: Texas, New York, Washington state and Illinois. We had an enjoyable time, even if the connection was wonky occasionally.

Later in the day, our Christmas movie was The Day the Earth Stood Still. The original version, of course. I hadn’t seen it in at least 30 years, but it was as good as I remember. The movie also inspired me to look up its source story, “Farewell to the Master” by Harry Bates, originally published in Astounding in 1940. No doubt a copy of that edition is somewhere in the house in San Antonio, among my father’s sizable collection of SF. I’d never read the story before, so I found in on line. I did know about its unnerving, surprise ending, however. I heard about it from a college friend years ago.

Another New Year’s Day has gone as well, featuring ice precipitation on top of an inch of two or snow that had fallen a few days earlier. Not enough to rise to the level of an ice storm, but enough to keep us within our walls, occasionally listening to the tap-tap-tap of ice hitting the ground or roof, but mostly paying attention to electronic entertainment, or lost in a book or two, for me including American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House (Jon Meacham, 2009) that I put down this summer and which I’m finishing now, about half way through. Big things ahead: Old Hickory is going to destroy the Second Bank of the United States and go up against nullification, and win, along with a second term. He’s already set the Trail of Tears in motion.

12 Pix 20

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Back to publishing on January 3, 2021, or so. Who knows, there might be snow by then.

Twelve pictures to wrap up the year, as I have in 2016 and 2017and 2018 and 2019, though this time around I won’t bother with a rigid, one-picture-for-each-month structure. They will be roughly chronological.

Chicago
Los Angeles

Azusa, California

Schaumburg, IllinoisWest Dundee, Illinois

Schaumburg, Illinois

Baraboo, WisconsinBeverly Shores, Indiana

Carbondale, IllinoisSchaumburg, IllinoisChicago

One bad apple

Merry Christmas & Happy New Year to all.

Queen of Heaven Cemetery, Or Christmas at the Cemetery

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The Great Conjunction was up there this winter solstice evening. For us, behind all the clouds.

As December days go, Sunday was above-freezing tolerable, and unlike today, mostly clear. A good day for being outdoors for a while, which is what I did at Queen of Heaven Cemetery in Hillside, Illinois.

Queen of Heaven Cemetery Hillside

Queen of Heaven is the southernmost of a pair of large suburban Catholic cemeteries, adjacent to each other, with a major east-west thoroughfare, Roosevelt Road, separating them. To the north is Mount Carmel Cemetery, permanent home to bishops, gangsters, Boer sympathizers and many others.

Queen of Heaven is newer, post-WWII, and more understated of the two, but with its own charms.

Queen of Heaven Cemetery HillsideQueen of Heaven Cemetery HillsideIncluding a handful of stately mausoleums.
Queen of Heaven Cemetery HillsidePretty soon I began to notice the Christmas decorations. A lot of them. I was inordinately pleased by the sight. I ought to visit more cemeteries in December.

Queen of Heaven Cemetery Hillside

Queen of Heaven Cemetery Hillside

Queen of Heaven Cemetery HillsideQueen of Heaven Cemetery HillsideQueen of Heaven Cemetery HillsideI also noticed that the cemetery was busy. Not urban center busy, but busy for a cemetery. Even at the largest and most picturesque cemeteries, I’m very often the only person in sight, or one of two, including groundskeepers sometimes.

On Sunday at Queen of Heaven, I saw a dozen people or more by themselves or in couples, along with three or four small knots of people. Those gatherings didn’t have the look of funerals. I got close enough to one of the groups, driving by slowly, that I could see the people gathered around a new grave, maybe a few months old. Must have been their first Christmas without the deceased, and there were there to pay their respects. Talk about life-affirming.

Rolling Knolls

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The weekend turned out to be fairly mild, with temps over 40 during the days and no rain or snow. Time to find a new forest preserve and take a walk. We went to one to the west of us, but still in Cook County: Rolling Knolls.
rolling knollsThat sounds like the name of an upscale housing development out toward the exurbs, with nary a hint of land contour. But actually the 55-acre forest preserve rolls along pretty well, with a variety of modest hills.

It used to be a standard golf course, but in 2017 the grounds were modified to accommodate frisbee golf. Or rather, disc golf. Just looking at a few sites devoted to the sport, it’s pretty clear that the disc golf writers anyway eschew any talk of frisbees, maybe regarding them as those Pluto platters that hippies used to toss around to amuse themselves.

Disc golf then. I don’t actually have an opinion on its nomenclature, so I’ll go along with writers such as this.

So we wandered into the course, passing by a couple of the holes.
Rolling KnollsThere was a scattering of people playing, usually clusters of three or four young men, though two of the groups included a young woman. We managed to stay out of the way of play, but that wasn’t hard considering how few people were around. Before too long we found a dirt road.
Rolling KnollsIt led south to a trail that winds around the edge of the preserve. Looks a little remote, but the sound of traffic in the distance was a constant.
Rolling KnollsPast the browns of the season.
Rolling KnollsRolling KnollsRolling KnollsGlad to see a flowing crick. Wasn’t sure its name.

Rolling Knolls

Later, I found out: Poplar Creek. I’ve walked its banks before.

The Evolution of Our 2020 Christmas Tree

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Decorating the Christmas tree was a multi-day process this year. I remember earlier years with younger girls around, when there was no suggestion of delay. Those days are over.

The first day, no ornamentation.
Christmas TreeThe next day, I added lights.
Christmas TreeTwo days later, Ann and I got around to hanging ornaments and tossing icicles. Note the dog under the tree. She’s been parking herself there sometimes, unlike in pervious years when she’s mostly ignored this sudden and probably inexplicable (to dogs) plant presence.
Christmas TreeEven now, the Star of Bethlehem — the last thing to go on the tree and the last to come off, because personal tradition demands it — isn’t up yet. That’s because that would mean getting the lopper out of the garage and using it to remove part of the long top of the tree. I’ll get around to that task soon.

Snow Days No Mo’

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“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.

Another One Bites the Dust

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Busy day, including an early evening errand that took me past a nearby Family Video location. What’s that? Looks dark in there. Also, there’s a fence around the building and its parking lot. With some kind of demolition equipment parked inside the fence.

I’d say that the store has bitten the dust. I hadn’t noticed, so it must have been a fairly recent occurrence. As indeed it was, along with some hundreds of other locations. But not that recent: about two months ago, according to the Journal & Topics. Guess I haven’t been paying attention.

“The entertainment business has suffered during COVID-19 and that trickled down to movie rentals, as Vale told the Journal & Topics,” the article notes. Vale was a manager with the chain.

“ ‘There aren’t any new releases right now and that plays a big role in our rentals,’ said Vale.”

New releases. That’s the thing about Family Video that I never quite took a cotton to, its walls of new releases. Three or four or a half dozen DVDs/Blu-rays each of the latest movie confection, only occasionally worth renting. In the center aisles were older titles, but even that selection was meager for someone with sometimes-eccentric tastes.

Sure, give the public what they want, etc. Who would ever thought that the Hollywood torrent would dwindle to a trickle? But as soon as the various casts and crews get their shots, the entertainment factories will be humming along again, if only to feed the on-demand beast. Too late to save the northwest suburban Family Video, though.

Forgotten Cherihews

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Too cold and rainy this weekend for walks in the woods. Too pandemicky for entertainment outside the home, or even casual shopping. So what did I do on Saturday? Another social Zoom. Summer was a good time for them, then I let it slack off, but the holidays seem like a good time to organize them again.

This one was far flung. One participant in New York, one in California, one in Tennessee and one in Illinois.
I’ve left the names on this time, since our participation has been documented already by one or more of the other participants on social media. Also, so I can quote some of the clerihews we discussed.

I’ve been acquainted with the members of this particular group since the early ’80s, when we all contributed in some capacity to the Vanderbilt student magazine of the time, Versus. It came up in conversation somehow that Geof wrote clerihews back then about people we all knew.

He did? I had no memory of them. Time flies, memory disappears. Writing cherihews would have been in character for him, though, so I’m sure it happened.

Steve Freitag,
Always the shytag,
Hid in the tunnel
To drink from a funnel.

Geof Huth
Ensconced in his booth
When asked if he cometh or goeth
Replied “boeth”

Dees Stribling,
Always dribbling,
Said it didn’t matter
That he would splatter.

They couldn’t remember one for Pete, so Geof wrote one on Facebook the next day:

Pete the Wilson
Only ate stilton.
When he ran out of cheese,
We felt a warm breeze.