Southwest Allen County Schools are running on a 2-hour delay.

Today I woke up and all of the snow was gone, removed by a late night wind carrying us into the high 40's and leaving only a few colonies of old snow around the herb garden and in other inexplicably persistent patches around the yard. But tonight it is supposed to snow again, so the breeze has been heavy all day I assume to bring in another front that will take us back down to the 30's. There is no name that I know for this weather. There must be a poem somewhere that serves to name it, but I don't remember reading it.

Trying to decide whether to try reading the introduction to a book of Rilke's selected. It reads well so far, but is about 43 pages long and I don't know if I have time for that. The roman numeral "l" is fifty, I now know, because the introduction ends on page xliii.

Gosh but I love Mill on the Floss. Most of the time the narrator's voice stays well on the side of sympathy toward the characters, so tender, really--not mocking or condescending at all, even while it nudges occasionally. One of my favorite parts so far is how she lingers on one of Tom's rough boyhood friends who has just thrown away a jackknife that had been given to him as a gift by Tom, thrown it away as a symbol of defiance and independence but the symbol goes unnoticed by Tom and the narrator lingers to present the friend's sad consideration of the knife in the dust until he decides to pocket it again.

There is something very modern about this scene. If it were a film, it would come across as a very modern disruption of the narrative to pull away from Tom and consider things from the perspective of this scorned kid. If Dickens were writing his, I would know that he'd be back in the narrative in the last 50 pages and so it would all be a part of an overall logic, but I don't think that is happening here.

winter break video diaries

O, winter break, thank you for clearing the mental table a bit. We had all snow for 11 or 12 days or so up in Michigan and I can't remember the last time we had it so good. A couple of igloos, new skates for me, and it always seemed to snow at just the right time. This video documents one of those times--the annual new year's chili cook off held on my wife's family's side of the lake, the lake where we met back when we were silly kids.

If you have older kids, you ski back to "the old sugar camp"; if the kids are younger, you drive to a nearby clearing and walk it in. And then you eat chili and talk to the lake people you see twice a year in July and December which now seems to happen faster and faster. Later, you maybe take an ill-advised night-time snowmobile ride. And they always have this cool old sleigh pulled by some olde horses and that is what is in this video.

I wonder where this goes.

Having trouble with the chopsticks here. I probably had the right and left mixed up hahah. It is nice to not go down the business corridors in "developing" neighborhoods in your town for awhile because when you go back to them, you often find that new ethnic restaurants have moved in since you last looked. That doesn't happen if you watch too closely. This one is Burmese, I know, because the sign on the door was written in what looked like a series of zeroes and sixes. And the food was great primarily because it was so strange compared to the bread and cheese diet I normally live on at home but also because the proprietors of these restaurants rarely seem to understand how to attach prices to the things they make. Two of us ate too much and drank too much sweetened coffee and were only punished $12.60 for it. We also had to listen to and watch a 4th generation vhs of Burmese karaoke, but even that is character building.

from http://unsolvedmysteries.tumblr.com/

Things my friend Mike made

My friend Mike can do anything, like this kitchen. After a couple of inconclusive conversations in which Cath and I try to express our "vision" he just comes over and makes stuff and we end up thinking "damn, our vision was good."

This here is what he started with. Not the best "before" photo because it doesn't show the awful stuff Mike had to rip out before he could put in the new range hood and that cool white paneling, but you get the gist of it.

And then there's this, too, the kinds of shelves I've gone to sleep thinking about since I was twelve. Could a Kindle ever give you the feeling you get when you sit down and look at something like this--your books, some of your things, just there for you, if and when you need them?

Deciding what books to put where was not easy. Not all of them made the cut and got left in other corners. Those that did I decided to arrange by color, though it came out kind of random.

Goodbye, bricks and boards. Unfortunately, now I have no excuse not to finish the couch project that supplied me with those long plywood planks. I need a new biscuit joiner, though. Maybe that's my excuse.

Prettiest Bay

Just uploaded some pictures from Thanksgiving finally. Here's Mom and me crossing the street in Petoskey on our way to some lazy shopping in the more "authentic" of the two bookstores in town. It is hard for me to imagine a bay prettier than Little Traverse, the one in the distance down there, all year long, too. If a bay can't show me four seasons then forget it.

Favorite Music, 2009, Part Two

5. Bibio--Ambivalence Avenue

Just something to play in the background and not think about too hard. Silence is good for that, too, but this record can take the edge off of silence when you need it to.

4. Washed Out--Life of Leisure

Just an ep, like 16 minutes long, but that just means you get to put it on repeat and hear your favorite songs more frequently. This is the 80s like you remember it, songs that sound like what was playing in the car when I was in high school, driving to a friend's house where I was hoping a girl I liked would be there or maybe driving home from dropping her off at her house later.

3. Animal Collective--MPP
I kind of think of this album as the death of Animal Collective now, and not because it made them kind of popular but because or yeah maybe that is the reason. I just know I play the live versions of these songs more than this record. But still, they're just all alone out there, doing the things they do. I wish that I went up to play soccer with them before the show in Detroit when I had the chance. I was concerned about getting a good spot near the stage, tho.

2. Dirty Projectors--Bitte Orca
This one is so cool and intense I have to set it down and walk away for a few weeks at a time, but it's one of the few from this year that I can see myself still really liking in the future, like in 2099.

1. Grizzly Bear--Veckatimest
Pretty bandwagonesque safe move here, but this is a no-brainer, as they say. At least for me it is. Didn't much care for it the first couple of times because it doesn't have any obvious "Knife"-like songs that stand out. They win "Band I'd most like to be in" for 2009.

0. Deer Hunter--Microcastles
Last year's #1 is still just so awesome and I play it so much that I have to put it on the list here, too.

Favorite Music, 2009, Part One

So, this is really for me, I guess, but in case you're interested. Really strange list this year for some reason. To end some of the suspense for them, here are the honorable mentions: Camera Obscura, Bill Callahan, Mountain Man, Washed Out, Atlas Sound, Yo La Tengo, Neon Indian.

10. Wavves

We were supposed to be bored of this dude months ago, but you can't deny the fun. If you had half an hour, you could have written most of these songs, but you don't have it.

9. Black Moth Super Rainbow, Dandelion Gum

This didn't come out in 2009, but I have played it 4,000 times this year and I still can't tell if it sucks or not, which says something. Not sure what. Makes me think of snow.

Sometimes sounds like Boards of Canada and sometimes sounds like this.


8. Au Revoir Simone--Still Night, Still Light

Three sylphs dancing behind their synthesizers like they are at a Belle & Sebastian show. David Lynch tweeted about them.This is the wussiest entry on the list this year.












7. The XX--XX

It is just so good--clean and simple and I love the way the dude's voice sounds along with the girl's voice. I think they're real young, this group, so I don't know how they learned about The Cure.

6. Real Estate

Most recent pick up, and I first tried it just because Pitchfork said it was decent. And they were right. It is either lo-fi or just poorly recorded or maybe that is the same thing. A little more "jangly" than most of my music usually. Or maybe that's not true. Maybe they fit in the Ola Podrida, Band of Horses kind of sound.

5. Avey Tare and Kria Brekken--the re-reversed version of Pullhair Rubeye.

So they recorded an amazing album and then reversed it, making it a bad one, and released it that way, and then people re-reversed it and it is good again. I strum the songs on guitar and it doesn't sound that good but it doesn't have to now does it.

2009 Petoskey Stone Race and Dog

A great quote in last week's New Yorker, in an article about the painter Luc Tuymans, who describes how he creates his work: "It's like I don't know what I'm doing but I know how to do it."

Peter Schjeldahl, the article's author, notes that "uncertain ends, confident means is about as good a general definition of creativity as I know."

I love how great definitions of this kind of head-space, or whatever you call it, can both "nail it" and still feel great distances away from handing it to us.

Wing Haven

What an insanely nice fall weekend. Leaf raking is only fun for about 15 minutes, so after an hour of it we tried out a new nature preserve we'd never visited. It had a pretty lake with one of those docks that sits just barely above the water and has a rotten plank you have to step over. Those are the best.

Smokey, balking at the top of the stairs. She sat there for a long dog-minute, thinking "no way can my old bones handle that," but she did okay.

This is the side of my face that does not have a scary growth attached to it. The other side has this weird eye-lid thing going on, even though I have given it plenty of time to fix itself. That strategy has not worked very well for me this past year. It occurs to me that "scary growths" are things you are supposed to have "checked out" by "doctors." Maybe that should happen soon.

Haunted birthday

The skeletons threw a haunted birthday party this year.

There were games.

And some music.

And then they started burning stuff and dancing weird. We had to cast some "go back to the grave" spells and stuff to make them leave. Same thing happens every year.

The last leaves left at Chain O' Lakes State Park! Time for a hike!

But the kids, they want to go home. They forget they want to go home, and they want to go home again.

"See, we're right . . about . . lost. Yes, we're lost." Bad Eagle Scout.

What a picture. Just won the Veolia Environment Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2009 award, according to the Beeb.

crawdadicide

Up north last weekend the kids came across this: crawdadicide. Not often you see this many crawdads killed at once. The seagulls might be organizing, hunting in packs. Keep your eyes up.

I'm already ready for this.