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.

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.”

Ice, Ice, Ice

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Here’s an arresting picture: a false-colored image the Great Lakes from space, taken on February 19 by a satellite called Aqua, which studies the Earth’s hydrosphere. Worth every bit of the tax money it took to put it into space, and then some.

The notes for the image say that “according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory (GLERL), ice cover on North America’s Great Lakes peaked at 88.42% on February 12-13 – a percentage not recorded since 1994. The ice extent has surpassed 80% just five times in four decades. The average maximum ice extent since 1973 is just over 50%.

“On the day this image was captured, according to NOAA GLERL, the ice concentration covering the great lakes were as follows: Superior, 91.76%; Michigan, 60.35%, Huron 94.63%, Erie, 92.79%, Ontario 20.78% and Lake Saint Claire, 98.78%, making for a total ice concentration of 80.29%.

“The extreme freezing of the lakes is an unusual sight for residents, and has brought tourists flocking to certain locations, such as the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore, where Lake Superior’s thick ice has thousands trekking about 1 mile across the lake to visit spectacular frozen ice caves.”

I’d read elsewhere about the ice caves on Lake Superior. If driving up to northern Wisconsin weren’t such an ordeal in February, it’d be worth going that far to see.

The thought of something as mighty as Lake Superior freezing over boggles the mind. Even in warmer months, at 3 quadrillion gallons that lake is awe-inspiring.

March Enters Like a Dirty Snowball

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March arrived with more snow. Only three or four new inches, enough to whiten up the ugly grey mounts near the streets, but not enough to impede anyone’s forward motion. I thought about taking a picture from my back door, but what’s the point? It still looks exactly like this.

If it still looks like that around April 1, or especially May 1, we’d do well to worry that another Year Without a Summer is in the offing. But no really large volcanoes anywhere have blown recently, so it doesn’t seem likely.

Lilly got another one of these in the mail on Saturday.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

I don’t want to put them on my car bumper, so they go on the refrigerator.

Desk Debris

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The other day, an old friend mentioned a paperweight she has on her desk, one that she acquired when we worked together in Nashville in the mid-80s. I didn’t remember the item, but it did inspire me to take a look at some of the debris on my desk even now.

Desk Debris

The largest item is a plastic durian. A contributing editor at a magazine I once worked for, a woman who lived in Singapore for a while, gave it to me. I think because it came up in conversation that I knew what a durian was. The dog chewed on the stem not long ago, but I got it away from her.

The medallion is a Vanderbilt souvenir. Not sure when I got it, but it wasn’t when I attended school there. It’s a sturdy bronze object, weighing 9 oz., with Cornelius Vanderbilt on the obverse. Made by Medallic Art Co. of New York, according to the rim of the medallion. Maybe the company was once HQ’d in New York, but according to the web site, it’s now a division of Northwest Territorial Mint, which is headquartered in Federal Way, Washington, and has no facilities in New York.

I got the Maple Leaf bouncy ball at a store in Canmore, Alberta, in 2006. It was just after Canada Day, and Canada-themed items were at a discount.

The green item is a glass egg I bought at the Bergstrom-Mahler Museum in Neenah, Wisconsin, last year. A pretty piece of glass, but also inexpensive and hard to break.

The Horde

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Subzero again, at least overnight. Seems like the Polar Vortex is back. Which sounds like an enemy of Dick Tracy.

In case you ever wonder just who that’s been over the years, there’s this list. (What would we do without Wiki?) But I don’t plan to look at it very closely. Dick Tracy is something that could vanish in its entirety, and the world would be exactly the same without it.

Now this is an interesting story. Millions in buried treasure. How often does that happen? Just about never. Less likely than winning a multistate lottery.

But every now and then, there’s word of a horde of one kind or another. The psychology’s fascinating. Who buried a fortune in gold in cans on a stray piece of land in rural California and, more importantly, why didn’t they come back for them?

The Almondmilk Carton

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Sunny day today, but that just means that a little snow melts on top of the snow mounds near the streets, then refreezes on the streets, forming hazardous ice sheets. I saw one wide sheet today at the corner of a large street and a side street. Right-turning cars onto the side street risk skidding out of control on the turn – and maybe into a car waiting to make a turn onto the large street.

We’ve gone through a half-gallon (1.89l) of almond milk in a couple of days. A little expensive, but it’s tasty stuff, and probably healthful. But it’s not enough to market it as merely healthful. The container, which is exactly like a milk carton, goes to considerable length to assure buyers of its virtues as a food. It also assures us of its ritual purity.

Or at least the modern equivalent. It is:

FREE OF [caps in the original] dairy, soy, lactose, cholesterol, peanuts, casein, gluten, eggs, saturated fat, and MSG.

All Natural with added Vitamins & Minerals [caps again – though English is not, last time I checked, German].

Made from REAL Almonds.

Vegan.

Made in a Peanut Free Facility [I really want to add a hyphen].

and

This Almondmilk [sic] is made from Almonds that were not genetically modified.

That last one piqued my interest. By golly, I’ll sleep better tonight knowing that no Frankenalmonds have crept into my diet. I checked a little further, and found that the almonds used to make my almond milk are from California.

From there, I looked up the Almond Board of California. A handy Almond Board pdf tells me that there are no fewer than 30 varieties of almonds raised in California, 10 of which account for 70 percent of production.

Always nice to learn something new. The pdf also says, “All California Almonds are developed using traditional methods; genetically modified almond varieties are not planted or available in California.”

The carton, then, was making a virtue of necessity. Strictly speaking, though, “traditional methods” must involve breeding almonds for desirable characteristics over a good many years. A kind of genetic modification, in other words, just as agriculture has done for centuries. Just not the boogeyman kind from modern labs.