38th Indiana Fiddler's Gathering

The glow things were reasonably priced.

People were jamming until 4 a.m. by our tent but the kids slept through it like the champion sleepers they are. And then I had this great breakfast burrito. There were lots of trees around us.

We were on the Tippecanoe battlefield, which I think had something to do with Indians. I'm about to remind myself on Wikipedia.

My friend Dean, picking until 5, back at it at 9.

Kids were mainly into running with other kids, but sometimes they sat down.

And then we were tired. A graduate of Indiana University, it is my sworn duty to disparage West Lafayette and everything related to it, especially for its supposed ugliness. But I have to say, the drive there was so nice. There are gentle hills that have rivers fitted between them with names like "The Tippecanoe," and the rivers move with a purpose that almost suggests a consciousness on their part that they are rivers and that there is a power in that. The rivers where I live don't behave that way. They need to be reminded which way is downstream sometimes, like they would rather seep outward, creep up their soaked banks, or just wait until August to dry out completely.

new panda bear

First day of summer

One of Jim Harrison's handsomer poses (on the right).

So, it's the first day of my "short" 8-week summer and it felt right to start it with a Jim Harrison novel, True North. I like it for its trappings. Lots of its sentences contain the words "Lake Superior" and also many names of upper peninsula towns that I know from driving around those parts. The dim-but-sensitive narrator is always naming the fishing streams he's driving to, too, and I don't really fish until I read a book that has fishing in it so maybe this summer I will. All of the ideas this book tries to carry along with it tend to just fall out of its pockets, but I'm really enjoying the whole "I did this, and then I drove here" looseness of it all.

The book has relaxed me pretty well, actually, because it is stressful, starting a long summer vacation. You, or I, feel like it has to be planned out and ordered to find the perfect balance between things that should be done and the things that you want to do. But after sitting around reading most of the day I'm okay with the possibility that, come mid-August and school, I'll be fine if my summer is just a bunch of loose threads, pointless drives, half-hearted projects.

a lot of pictures

The chicks are gone now, off to chicken school. I was a little sad to see them go but they were not sentimental at all about it. I don' t think they even recognize me.

The Catalpa is the most useless and annoying tree ever made, but June made these shoes out of its leaves so now I have mixed feelings about it.

Finally, I think the Globe Thistle is going to bloom this year.

The Garden Typewriter is rusting.

I can't believe how far ahead everything is this summer, like four weeks it feels like. The plants are going to get bored by the end of July, wondering what to do next.

Often when you are wasting your life on the internet, you come across things other people do that you wish you could do. A prior generation would be inspired to try to do these things. Now, though, we just put links to them on our blogs or tumblrs. I don't know what it is about this woman's style that I like. The colors, mainly, I guess. But the sketchbooks on her site are the kinds of things that make me want to draw for an hour and then quit, disappointed. Her site.