We Got a New Camera

Jeff's birthday was this past Sunday, and I didn't know what to get him. Jeff has an annoying tendency of having already bought the things he wants. So on Saturday I put on my shoes and announced that I was going out to get a birthday present. "Want company?" said Jeff. "Sure," I said. And that's how he got a very special birthday present.

Sometime this summer Jeff got this idea that we should get a new camera. I have a little digital that works perfectly well, provided you don't want to take pictures indoors, or of things that move. (I also have a decent film camera, but I never use it anymore.) Jeff didn't have a camera of his own, but considering that he doesn't take pictures this didn't seem to be a problem. Seriously, even when he borrowed my camera to go visit his little nieces, he failed to take any photos. He says it's because there's too much delay on the camera. I say, psshaw. You know that line about bad craftsmen.

Anyway, sometime in the course of playing with other people's much-nicer cameras on various visits, Jeff got convinced that things like speed and versatility are important in a camera. I maintained that as childless people we didn't need a decent camera at this point, and besides we couldn't afford any of the ones I wanted. But Jeff's stubborn.

So, on the day before his birthday, we had to go to Costco, and guess what they have there?



The Canon PowerShot SD1200 IS, if you were wondering. More charmingly known as the Digital Elph.

We spent the rest of the weekend taking pictures in low light (amazing!) and trying to learn all of our new camera's features. This resulted in a lot of grainy photos of one another doing boring things.










Jeff refers to this as "getting his Axelrod on." And I know...my mustache is upside-down. Like I know anything about mustaches.

We did some outdoor pictures, too. There I am reading the manual again.


Two of us together!


With foliage


Museum of Science and Industry, Lake Michigan, Promontory Point


And Jeff, back in his natural habitat. This one's my favorite.


Between taking pictures and plugging the camera into the TV to watch slideshows (add a soundtrack, and your grainy boring photos become hip!), we were well entertained all weekend. But since it was a birthday, we also ate a lot of food.


That's Jeff's birthday cake. He's had the same birthday cake since he was about 10. It is, in my opinion, a perfect cake for a 10-year-old. I could only handle about 2 bites, but fortunately Jeff can eat a lot of cake.

We also had some finer fare--back to the grainy photos.



At this point we were enough over our initial giddiness to feel pretty stupid taking pictures of our restaurant food. So we put the camera away. But who knows? Now that he has the gear, Jeff might turn into a photographing fool. Watch out.

Summer trips: Maine/New Hampshire

I'm not from Maine. I know this is confusing to people who met me in Chicago--I lived in Maine before I moved here, and for a few years I went back there every chance I got (because Jeff still lived there). But I'm from New Hampshire. Jeff is from Maine. When you're from New Hampshire or Maine, this seems to matter. I'd say Maine looks down on NH more than NH looks down on Maine, but at least we all unite in looking down on Massachusetts. And I won't even get into the definition of being "really" from a place, since neither Jeff nor I can claim generations of ancestors in the same spot.

For now, we're effectively tourists. At least, it feels a little like that when we visit in August. Generations of vacationers have discovered that late August is the time to visit "Scenic New Hampshire" (formerly, "Live Free or Die") and "Vacationland" (formerly, part of Massachusetts. Ha!). Not so many mosquitoes, sunny days and cool nights, deep blue skies...if you have a choice, that's when to go.

That's not why we visited in late August this year. It was the only 11 days this summer that I wasn't teaching, was the real reason. Also, our friend Carrie conveniently picked one of those 11 days to get hitched, on the beautiful island of Islesboro. On the mainland, it was a foggy day, but the sun shone over Islesboro. Here is the lovely couple on ferry, coming back from the island.



As many couples do, Carrie and Rob had distributed cute photos of themselves around the reception hall. There were Carrie and Rob making a snowman, making Thanksgiving dinner, in Seattle, in Maine, in Thailand...having very few cute photos of ourselves, Jeff and I felt negligent. We were inspired to make a point of taking pictures when we go places.

The first one came out nicely (if I do say so).




But on the whole, this project is harder than it looks. We got up the gumption to ask someone to take our photo at the gorgeous reception site,





but we both had smiling problems. Also, when you ask people to take your picture they inevitably put your heads in the middle--which violates the only rule I absorbed in photo class: don't put the head(s) in the middle. Sigh.

As usual we didn't get to see enough of Carrie (and our new friend--her husband Rob). We headed back down the coast, to find some cute children to play with.



I got to meet Jeff's niece Emilia, who's now 3 months old (here, with her mom, Jeff's sister Katherine)



and Jeff introduced Eliza to the famous Tony's Bismark



(then left the parents to deal with the sugar rush).

We headed back north to Five Islands, to take another couple photo--thanks, Dad!



I got some much-needed boat time


with Jenny and Reggie,

Laurel and Cheez-It (official food of family boating),

Mom,

and Dad.

(There's me.)

You know how eventually you just have to accept that there are some things you will never, ever understand about your partner? Well, here's one: Jeff prefers--actually prefers-- the kind of boating that requires manual labor.


He doesn't mind rowing (doesn't mind! rowing! insane), and likes kayaking a lot (no photos, unfortunately), but his real love is canoeing.



He got to indulge a little bit when we went along with Katherine and her family to Ogontz, which is where Katherine and Alex got married 5 years ago.

We took Eliza on her very first canoe ride. Here, the pre-boating safety session:



(for comparison: Jeff instructing our friend Emily, when we kayaked on the Chicago River a few weeks ago)



Eliza was less enthusiastic than Uncle Jeff about canoeing.


(awesome photo by Katherine, who knows even more about how to take photos than that you shouldn't put heads in the middle)

She had less mixed feelings about swimming,



especially if there was an opportunity to kick water at Uncle Jeff!

At night, when the kids were in bed, we enjoyed grownup pastimes, like cribbage and bourbon. And...



These days, the children of responsible parents aren't allowed to consume the amount of sugar in a s'more in an entire month. So we had to take care of the marshmallows ourselves.



We did a good job.

Summer trips: Ann Arbor

On Monday Jeff and I arrived back in Chicago after 10 days in Maine and New Hampshire. The trip wasn't long enough, either to spend time with everyone we wanted to see or to get our fill of New England in August. But on the other hand, being able to take the bus home from the airport, then run out for milk and bread and takeout--all within 3 blocks--was a nice consolation. Maine's tagline is "The Way Life Should Be," which I am mostly on board with, but in an ideal world public transportation and decent Mexican food would also be included.

First, a flashback to earlier in the summer, when we took a trip to Ann Arbor to visit Jen, Kris, Ben, and Eva.

From Ann Arbor

Jeff gets along well with kids.

(If you have ever seen Jeff with children, you will be chuckling at the extreme understatement.)

From Ann Arbor

From Ann Arbor

In addition to playing with children, Ann Arbor offered lots of unusual (to us) experiences, like backyard soccer.

From Ann Arbor

(Eva wanted to play too)

From Ann Arbor

And there was bocce

From Ann Arbor

and exotic plants. If you go to Ann Arbor, we recommend that you check out the Botanic Gardens.

From Ann Arbor

From Ann Arbor

They have carnivorous plants.

From Ann Arbor

One of them tried to eat Jeff's sunglasses, to the delight of all. (Mouseover!)


In addition to great gardens, Ann Arbor also has the best bagels we've had in a very long time. And, complementarily, amazing salmon. But we were not so impressed with the Wave Field.

It's nice and all. We just...thought it would be bigger.

Perhaps living in Chicago has warped our sense of proportion? ("Wish it were bigger" is not something we often say about things--whether public art or portion sizes--around here.)

East Coast vacation updates coming soon! (Really soon, maybe even this weekend. Not the kind of "soon" that means sometime in the next three months, like usual. Seriously.)

Great American Cities

Our summer started off with a visit from Mom and Dad in early June.

We showed them around our apartment


But that doesn't take very long. So we went out in the rain to see Millennium Park.

Fortunately, we have a large collection of umbrellas. Mom thought these were marvelous things. New Hampshire doesn't have much of an umbrella culture; people wear raincoats and drive cars. But umbrellas aren't the only exciting things in Chicago:

We also have public art that lets you make use of umbrellas!

And, of course, the Bean.



That's a tiny Bean in a scale model of the city at the Chicago Architecture Foundation, across the street. The Bean is officially named Cloud Gate but people only call it that if they're being ironic. I also learned from Wikipedia that it is located in the AT&T plaza, between the Chase Promenade and McCormick Tribune Plaza and Ice Rink. As far as I can tell those corporate sponsorships aren't getting much mileage. Does anyone even know they exist? I didn't.



We all knew that the Bean was great for photos, but did you know that you can also shelter from the rain underneath?


I'm guessing that most Chicagoans have never gotten close enough to the Bean to see underneath (because then people would think we were tourists). It's neat! Looking up:


We also found this lovely prairie garden behind the wonderful new Modern Wing of the Art Institute.



Eventually it cleared up, and we headed over to the Blues Festival.



Mmmm, sun. Can you tell I haven't gotten much of it this year?

The next day we went for a walk in Hyde Park to see the historic sites from the World's Columbian Exposition. Actually, there aren't many artifacts left, but there is this replica of a statue.


One of our favorite things to do in Chicago is to go to the Lincoln Park Zoo (free!) and see the monkeys.


One of the chimps figured out that he could pull a tree branch through the cage and eat the leaves.


Monkey see, monkey do...


It was clearly a novelty: most of the chimps tore off big bunches of leaves, ate a few, let the rest drop, and tore off some more. Except one, who hung out underneath and collected them. Not hard to believe that these are our closest ancestors.

A couple of weeks later Jeff and I got to be the ones experiencing a new city, when we went to St. Louis for Melissa and Chris's wedding. We love the Bean, but you've got to give St. Louis props for having its public art visible in almost every view.


The wedding was in an art gallery that used to be a police station, which made for odder things in the backgrounds of pictures. Jeff and I calculated that this was the fifteenth wedding we've attended together, and it definitely had the quirkiest photo situation of them all.

There was this holding cell:

And, at our table, the head of John the Baptist, in his platter phase.

In this representation, St. John has been lured to martyrdom by a saucy hipster librarian.

Much prettier:


Congrats, Melissa and Chris!

We spent the next day checking out St. Louis. If you didn't know, St. Louis is the original home of peanut butter, the ice-cream cone, and Tums. It also features the Anheuser-Busch brewery and a whole lot of red hats. The Cardinals were playing at home when we were there, and literally every conversation we overheard was about baseball. It made us a little nervous.

St. Louis also has a very special kind of pizza.


There's Jeff, wooing his breakfast. Jeff loves St. Louis pizza. Here's the Wikipedia description:

The definitive characteristics of St. Louis-style pizza are a super-thin yeast-less crust, the common (but not mandatory) use of Provel processed cheese, and pizzas cut into squares or rectangles instead of large pie shaped slices. Provel is a trademark for three cheeses fused to form one (provolone, swiss, and white cheddar), used instead of (or, rarely, in addition to) the mozzarella or provolone common to other styles of pizza.

I like this detail:

St. Louis style pizza is unique even when compared to the Chicago-style thin crust pizza in that it is also cut into squares and is referred to as "party cut".

Those three-bite squares do make it easy to have your own little pizza party, even when it's kind of your breakfast.

But then we had to get serious and go learn things about St. Louis, the Arch, and Westward Expansion.


We thought the best part of the Museum of Westward Expansion was the old-timey gift shop. But the Arch is really all it's cracked up to be.

Jeff isn't a very good sport about tourist photos. He blames this on having grown up in a tourist town (though what icon you'd want to pose in front of in Kennebunk, I'm not sure...cutouts of the Bushes?).

I gave up after this one.

Near the Arch is the courthouse where Dred Scott was tried (and let go--St. Louis has the good guys in that story). It's not an actual courthouse anymore, but it has an incredible collection of dioramas.

We learned that in the olden days, there was a lot of: men; drinking on the street; and telling the Native Americans what's what.




Here the Americans are acquiring Missouri and the rest of the Louisiana Purchase from the French, or Spanish. It's kind of confusing. This is the sort of stuff they neglect to teach New England kids (i.e. anything that didn't happen in New England).

The Europeans (that's safe) have twirly mustaches and earrings and military discipline; the Americans are ragtag and dour.

I especially liked these two.


If those people aren't respectable, I don't know what is.

What do you think they would have made of this?


There's Mom and Jenny, marvelling at Times Square. Last weekend the whole family met up in New York--the first time we've all been in one place since Jenny's wedding, nearly 3 years ago!

Unlike a certain other person mentioned in this blog post, my family are very good sports indeed about posing for tourist photos.



In addition to umbrellas, we got to use trains


and dodge traffic


and eat delicious Moroccan food


and see people sing and dance...at the same time


We also got to visit with Aunt Sally, Uncle Doug, and Cousin John, and I was able to squeeze in quick visits with my college friend Nora, as well as Alex (from high school) and his girlfriend Jina. And then, back to Chicago, in time for some urban grilling with Tom and Elizabeth on our rainy 4th of July.

(Note that Jeff is timing the steaks with his smartphone. Not exactly young men and fire...but the steaks were delicious!)

For the rest of our summer travels, we're planning on Ann Arbor sat the end of this month and Maine/New Hampshire at the end of August (wedding #16!). I'll also be spending a lot of time in Schaumburg, but I don't think that counts. Let me know if you need anything from Ikea.

I still have a blog

Well, gee, it seems to have been about 4 months since I last posted. That is a third of a year. Where has it gone? How has nothing happened that seemed worth posting about?

I will swiftly move on from that question in order to avoid slipping into existential-crisis mode, which is becoming a default state these days. Instead, I'll just try to think of some things to tell you about. I'm hoping that there will be more post-worthy things in the near future--on Sunday we're going on one of Paul's "Pocket Guide to Hell" tours about the Columbian Exposition so I'm anticipating some fun Chicago facts!

Now, here's something important:


Hello, Emilia! She was just born on the 5th, which makes her a Taurus. Tauruses are good people, in my experience (hi Mom! Laurel! Kendra! Patrick!)--you know, dependable. Emilia is also Jeff's niece, another category of good people, in my experience (hi Eliza!).

Jeff gets to go meet Emilia next weekend, because Katherine (mom/sister) conveniently has a graduation from her MSW program (cough*overachiever*cough). So you may be seeing some more photos soon (if Jeff remembers to take any this time).

Though not on the same scale as a new niece, Jeff also thinks you should watch this video.




It's like dancing, but on a bike. I'm personally kind of hard to please/easy to bore with tricks-on-bikes stuff, but this one is mesmerizing. (Except, don't watch it if you're feeling kind of woozy. There's a lot of fish-eye. Speaking as someone who knows.)

The other thing I thought I'd tell you about is our AMAZING SALSA recipe. We started making our own salsa last summer, and it's hard to imagine we ever bought it from the store. Homemade salsa is easy! Delicious! Cheap! (I'm starting to get the feeling that I'm trying to make up for lack of content in this post by using exclamation points. And capital letters, now that I think of it. Well, I'm just going to go with it, if you don't mind.) And it turns a steady diet of quesadillas into something special. We will never go back.

We make two kinds of salsa: green and red. This is what the red looks like.



The green looks pretty much the same, just green.

Here is how you make them. I'm not so good with recipes, but it's a forgiving process.

Red Salsa

1 big can tomatoes*
1/2 onion
big handful cilantro
jarred hot peppers, to taste**
1-3 T orange juice concentrate, to taste***
cumin, to taste
salt, to taste

Process tomatoes, onion, cilantro, and peppers in food processor until desired texture. Stir in other ingredients, tasting appropriately. I usually use large quantities of cumin and salt, in the end. Also sometimes I add more onion or cilantro, or peppers. Really the can of tomatoes is the only definite.

*Jeff's partial to the Muir Glen Fire Roasted, but sometimes the smokiness is a little much for me. If you're using whole tomatoes you may want to leave most of the juice in the can so the salsa doesn't get runny.

**I've been roasting my own peppers and storing them in vinegar (vinegar makes hot peppers less hot! Who knew?), but just recently learned that they SELL hot pepper in vinegar at the store. However, the ones we got (the kind of cheap Serranos that are packed with carrots) were not that flavorful, just very spicy. We're not spice fiends, so we might need to find another alternative--suggestions? The homemade ones are really delicious, but somewhat labor-intensive. And PAINFUL, if you don't wear gloves. I recommend wearing gloves.

***Seriously. OJ is the magic ingredient. We learned this from a jar of Frontera salsa. Take it from Bayless. You could also use lime juice or vinegar plus sugar, which is what we used to do in our benighted pre-OJ period.


Green Salsa

1-2 pounds tomatillos
big handful of cilantro
1/2 onion
jarred peppers (raw jalapeno, serranos, etc are also fine in this recipe)
salt

Peel husks off tomatillos, and boil them until they turn dull-colored (10 min.) Drain, then put them in the food processor with everything else, and adjust flavorings as above.

The Green is my favorite; I think Jeff likes the Red. But it's nice to go back and forth, so you can appreciate each one even more.

Anyway, do it. It will change your life. Or at least your Mexican dinners. For us, that's pretty much the same thing.

Back soon, I hope!

another request for cultural assistance

My sister Jenny, who's a high-school history teacher, sent me an email this week. Her school is revising their English curriculum, and she wanted some suggestions for 20th-century female authors who are "good, readable, and interesting."

Now, as someone who used to be a high-school English teacher, and is currently a professional student of literature, you might expect me to have some opinions on this matter. Probably I would have, back when I was a high-school English teacher. But if you've asked me for book recommendations in recent years, you'll already have heard that studying literature has more or less killed off my ability to read literature like a normal person (if normal persons even read literature anymore? all the literati say they don't, the literati not considering themselves normal, because they're snobs. But I listen to their podcasts anyway.). I read a lot during the day, so when I get home I want to cook, or knit, or watch TV. Or I read a magazine, which isn't the same. Lately I've even been doing crossword puzzles!

So when people ask me "have you read any good books lately?" I get all embarrassed and muttery, and this email gave me kind of the same feeling. And after I went though a cranky round of "What kind of authors? For what group of readers? What part of the 20th century? Why specifically women? Are they supposed to address women's issues? What genre? You probably want novels, don't you? Why don't you say novels if you want novels?" and so on, I got to thinking, "Why on earth do we teach novels in school anyway?"

Then I was shocked at myself.

My high-school teacher self had some answers on hand: novels inculcate a love of reading, which is useful. And novels contain lots of good lessons that they can get across in more complex and effective ways than other forms (same argument for poetry).

But I'm currently studying novels in the 18th century, when they were considered frivolous entertainment, would never, ever have been taught in schools, and were both kind of scandalous and wildly popular. Even though they were long and boring!

I've had the experience of trying to teach a great, fun, non-boring novel with relevance to the students' lives and yada yada--and watching it become a total slog. It's a problem: just assigning something as work is enough to make it feel like work. So why ruin fiction by making kids read it (at an annoying group pace, with a quiz coming) and claiming that it's good for them? Why not allow them to read novels, as a treat? It would be easy enough to fill out the curriculum with other literary forms.

So the answer I wanted to give was, just get a lot of books and let kids pick the ones they want to read. (I had a lot of success doing this. People like the things they pick out for themselves, even when they're books.) But obviously that's not going to happen. And, you know, I'm glad I was made to read The Brothers Karamazov in high school. Besides, I'm not ready to commit to my ban-novels-from-the-curriculum position, because it seems kind of reactionary, even to me. So I did come up with a pretty standard list of books for my sister (most of those books are quite good, when they're not being taught in high schools). And then I thought, maybe I should throw this question out to people who actually read! And aren't curmudgeons.

So that's my request: books for the high-school curriculum! And you can go beyond 20th-c women writers if you want, because I'm curious. Plus, you never know, I might be back in the HS classroom one of these days. And if I am I want to have the very coolest list of books to slog through.

holidays, and a new year's request

Jeff and I are settling back into life in Chicago after our holiday trip, 10 days divided among Maine, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts. We came back on the 31st to still-living plants, an empty fridge, and a pile of parcel slips in the mailbox. (To date, we've gotten one package out of three. The south-side postal service might be called sub-par, by a polite person.)

Poor Laurel had to go surfing on St. Maarten's on Christmas so couldn't make it to our party, and Julia could only come for a couple of days. Still, we managed to squeeze in our family ornament-shopping tradition on Christmas Eve. The shop we were trying to buy ornaments in closed early, so we made our choices quickly, then went and had a beer.


After that calm moment I drove back up to Maine to join Jeff's family for a Christmas Eve/Hanukkah dinner, followed by a present-wrapping extravaganza that might have been frenzied except that there was a power outage. Wrapping by the light of the menorah had the effect of slowing things down. So it was late when we got to bed, but Santa got his job done anyway.

Eliza got her three requests: a dollhouse, a cash register, and some books. In return she (mostly) tolerated an orgy of picture-taking, but did insist on personally vetting some of the images.


Uncle Jeff decided it was time to introduce Eliza to Hungry Hungry Hippo, even though the box said she wasn't old enough.


Maybe she isn't, quite. Or maybe she just figured out that it's much more efficient to get the marbles with your hands.

Another fun toy of the morning was Nancy's new Flip--an amazingly easy-to-use camcorder. Jeff was immediately enthralled.


And put it to work, filming the star of the day. (No, it wasn't Santa...)


After all the presents were opened and the brunch consumed Jeff and I drove down to NH for my family's Christmas.

We'd teamed up with Jenny, Reggie, and Jules to get Dad some fancy pots. (New Englanders, have you been to the Calphalon outlet in Kittery? It's an amazing, wonderful place.) We put them all in a big, big box.

Then we sneakily suggested that we all open one present early.


Once Dad had opened up his new, shiny cookware, we dispatched him to the kitchen to make the Christmas dinner. The rest of us proceeded to enjoy another early-opened present: a cocktail book we'd gotten for Jenny and Reggie, but which was plenty of fun for the rest of us too.


After a few fancy drinks and a scrumptious dinner, we moved on to the rest of the presents.

Mom gave us cookie jars filled with very delicious "Ellen Cookies"


And Dad had made us each a beautiful cutting board out of pieces of wood left over from various boats.


The cookies have all been eaten, but I haven't been able to actually use the board for cutting. It's too lovely.

I got Mom some materials for making cheese.


Other than Ellen Cookies, Mom doesn't cook much, but because cheesemaking is more like science than cooking, it seemed likely that she'd enjoy it.


See, science.


There's the bacteria...


And the final product! We made a quick, soft cheese to start with, and it was totally delicious. I believe mozzarella is coming up next. By the time I go back next she'll probably be doing fancy things with mold.

After Christmas Mom and Dad headed up to 5 Islands for a few days, and I got to spend a night with them (and Mom's cheese).


In the morning there was snow--so quiet and pretty.

Then it was time to cram all our new gifts into our insufficient suitcases and make our way back to Chicago, just in time to start the new year.


Waiting for us was the above, my Christmas present for Jeff (too heavy to truck back and forth!). 2009 is bidding fair to be the Year of Beef Stew chez nous.

Speaking of the New Year...

I remembered recently that a couple of years ago Jeff and I had made year-end playlists of the songs we'd been listening to in that year. And then I realized that we couldn't possibly do that this year: I won't tell you just how many songs I could come up with for 2008, but I'll admit that they can be counted on one hand. While this may be a symptom of us getting old and out of it, it also has to do with the fact that there was an election this year and our ipods got filled up with Rachel Maddow and Countdown (for Jeff--too shouty for me!), on top of Radiolab and The Bugle and all our usual podcast favorites. But to the extent that there was time for music, we sucked at paying attention.

So, with-it friends, we need your help! You know that there comment function, the one none of you ever use? How about trying it out in order to let us know what music was awesome this past year? Or, if you're with us in being off the music wagon, tell us about whatever you've been listening to that doesn't involve pundits. We would be so, so grateful--and you would start the new year with Good Music Karma. Who doesn't need some of that, in These Tough Economic Times?

As I anxiously await your suggestions (come on, somebody comment, or I'll be embarrassed) I wish you a new year full of cheese, and cocktails, and hippos, and everything that makes you happy. Here's to the best of all possible 2009s!