Dala horse fun!

So, it turns out that the Cultural Identity of Lindsborg, Kansas is to be Like Sweden, Only With One Main Street. On said main street, there are about a dozen Dala horses (for the uninitiated, they're beloved Swedish cultural symbols, of which we have some in our house that are little and wooden and painted and some that are printed on pajamas from Swedish pajama maker Hanna Andersson). These Lindsborg Dala horses are all painted according to a different theme, and so we had good reason to take pictures with each and every horse. This collection is but a sampling of fun Dala horse posing (caution: do not sit on the Dala horses! They are fragile and expensive!), all of which took place during the lulls in organized Santa Lucia Festival Fun. We were lucky that the day was warmish and sunny, and not really freaking cold as the weather has been basically every day since. Clearly Jesus, via the weather, was tacitly endorsing our Lindsborg pilgrimmage. Or, something like that.

We Lucia!

Yesterday I made the Nth batch of lussekatter, and today we had our home Lucia celebration. Peter was suspicious of his Starboy hat and ditched it pretty early on, but was keen to carry his wand (battery size AAA, requiring special trip to the store) and Daddy's coffee cup. Grace had the lussekatter, and I trailed along carrying the coffee carafe and turning on the CD of the Lucia music.

When I wrapped up some lussekatter for Gracie's playdate friend to take home yesterday, she was enthused (the kids put away a goodly portion right out of the oven) and Peter leaned over to tell her mother in a confidential tone, "We're a lussekatter family."

Next up, some pictures of the kids at various Dala horse locations around Lindsborg, Kansas... they were funny and creative and made for a good little project as we walked around the tiny downtown.

Lucia interrupted; it's shepherd time.

Peter's school nativity play was yesterday, and he totally rocked the shepherd costume. There was the standard Mary/Joseph/innkeeper scenario, and *lots!* of angels and *lots!* of sheep, and Peter and the two other shepherds brought new baby lambs to Jesus as gifts. (Awwww....)

Peter is loving his school, and it was great fun to see him singing enthusiastically along with his classmates, doing the motions, and generally representing the Orange Stars well in his shepherd capacity.

Starboy hat...

Aww, here's our small starboy hat factory in full swing! Peter was delighted with said hat, and had fun doing Lucia with Grace at her school. Because we were in Kansas for the actual Lucia day, and it's been hellishly cold, we haven't yet done the home/neighbor version of Lucia, but now that I'm slightly more caught up on Christmas cards and package shipping maybe we'll do it tomorrow.

In which we are heroically, aggressively Swedish.

It's Lucia Day! Or yesterday was, at any rate. Because I'd read great things about the Lucia festival in ultra-Swedish Lindsborg, Kansas, we went there on a sort of pilgrimage, and it was more fun than you might expect.

We've been doing Lucia-related things all week, mostly involving baking lussekatter, the pastry associated with Lucia. I estimate I've made around 150, with more to come for the neighbors.


We took some to Grace's class, to demonstrate Lucia attire and music and food, which required first making Peter a new Starboy hat (these things tend to get lost over time.) We assembled posterboard, glitter glue, a hot glue gun, construction paper, and eager craftspersons, and our fabulous result... will be in the next installment of the Lucia blogging.

In which we take a breath.

Tonight, Peter and I are on our own. We are batching it. (Baching? Whatever. We are living as bachelors do!) This involves making ourselves pizza not eaten by the others in our family, pizza with pesto *and* blue cheese *and* kalamata olives. It is really, really salty, which is what we like, and we are alone.

Why is that, again? Because Grace is on her first overnight, for a birthday party of one of her classmates, and Mike is somewhere between here and Chicago. So my baby, who seriously just yesterday was an actual infant, being baptized (there was reminiscing this morning with a fellow UC Divinity School Person, of whom I can now count three in Nebraska) and now she's old enough to be totally cool with being left at the house of a classmate for an overnight. I am breathing, but slowly and meditatively and with great care.

At work, one of my students responded to the news that the Rapture is 19th Century fiction and not biblical at all (which, really, you might want to check on that before formulating your whole relationship to God based on it, maybe) by sending this - wildly inflammatory email to the whole student body. And to my department, which remember is me and two other people, if you count the campus pastor. Which we do. So it wasn't an great big state secret whom he might be venting at in said inflammatory email, which reflected a tenuous grasp of the English language among other things. Faculty response has mostly been sympathetic to me and kindly towards the student (the word "immature" has come up, and "ignorant" and the like), but one of our admins was really furious with him and offended and went on a little forwarding spree to us (me, and the two guys in my department) to make sure we knew he was getting an angry/irritated response from his fellow students, the recipents of said spam. It has become a Thing, and I am tired of it already.

Peter and I are making raspberry mocha muffins tomorrow. Come by!

Rabid fox news!

Not even Fox News! But fox news. I find this disturbing, and hilarious, and altogether odd, so I must share:

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-ODD-Fox-Attack.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Cute happy election Peter

Our hand-lettered election sign

We liveblog the election...

Because you know you wanted to hear our thoughts! We are ecstatic, frankly. Grace is cheering and whooping at every new Obama call - Ohio was a big moment. The shots of Grant Park are a bit hit here. Every little bit of the electoral map is a new moment of excitement. Peter has actually prayed for the, um, demise of John McCain, and while we don't endorse that theologically problematic impulse, we can kind of understand the misunderstanding that underlies it.

One election ago, Peter was a baby. Two elections ago, I was pregnant with Grace. It is a strange way to measure time.

Election Day

Gracie and I voted this morning at her school - our polling place opens at 8:00, and it's here school, and school starts at 8:40, so I took her with me at 7:30 and we waited in line so I could vote before work. It felt big, and historic, and exciting. Fellow voters directed us to the proper line (two precincts vote there) and we directed our neighbor into our line when he arrived, and the mood was cheerful and calm. Grace was glad to be there, excited for election day, and keen on having a bagel and hot cocoa for breakfast while we waited.

I voted, it went smoothly, we walked around waiting for school to start, we had lots of discussion about the League of Women Voters guide I'd brought... it is an exciting and hopeful day and we'll spend the evening glued to the various screens in our house looking at election returns.

Fun fall colors

We wandered around the neighborhood today taking pictures of pretty leaves and other natural objects of interest. This included a bird's nest and pretty red berries. Grace was oddly camera-shy but Peter hammed it up.

Pumpkins, duly carved.

We're slightly short on Halloween decorations around here - a few got misplaced in the move, although not, thank goodness, the huge Jack o' Lantern trivet and the little matching beaded coasters. So it was important that we choose and carve our pumpkins this weekend. We shopped, we dragged home, we did artistic consultations and roughed in the images before wielding any knives.



And the results were pleasingly cute! The white one is mine, the orange ones each belong to a kid. We had fun carving and were too lazy to toast the seeds, but the next time we make pumpkin pie we'll do some.

We are chic gallery-hoppers, yes we are!

I wish I'd had a way to take pictures. We (the usual crew, plus Nana and Papa) went out to dinner last night in the fun, interesting section of town (oh, spare me, we do too). The wait for a table was looooooong, so Papa and I took the kids wandering around, and honest to God, we had so much fun in a random art gallery that we came back again after we had eaten.

What was on display was mostly sculpture, and there was this odd piece that involved (allegedly) 50 little clay figures, each about four inches high, in varying skin-type tones. They were set up in little dioramas all over the gallery, so we quickly made a game of finding, and counting, each one. There was the little guy who had been impaled by a nail, whose (presumably confused) companions were gathered around; there were the several groups of figures using string to scale the walls and perch in unlikely places, like on Exit signs. A bunch of them were perched on a teeny DVD player, watching a video about their own creation. There was even (or so Grace and I were told by our Native Informants) one peeing into the sink in the men's room. A whole group of them were crawling out of a (presumably custom-made) hole in the wall, which just fascinated the kids. They were glued in place, which we discovered when Peter pried one loose from the floor, but no harm done.

The rest of the sculpture was - you know, interesting and artsy and creative and really, really expensive, so the whole experience had an undertone of low-grade terror for me lest one of my offspring should destroy priceless (to me) art. I'm not sure my homeowner's policy covers that. There was one small sculpture of a post-apocalyptic house, all raw concrete and grim rebar, that was called something like "Little House on Fanny Mae Street" and we laughed and laughed. Or at least the adults did.

It was fun, at any rate, and we nibbled a bit at the gallery opening snacks, and admired even the non-person sculptures. We stopped for a few minutes at the local CD/record/headshop, and I had to explain all the vinyl to Grace - "Mommy, what's a record?" made me feel really old. Finally we walked back to the cars past the random thrift store, various high-end modern furniture/art/whatever places, the street musician singing a favorite song I hadn't heard in a while, the artfully tatooed hipsters, and the van of Obama fans (a whole subset of our evening: watching them make t-shirts featuring Obama with special spray fabric paint. They were really reticent about talking with us, even about Obama, despite their *van painted with Obama stuff* all of which made me think they might have been a little... artifically happy.) A more interesting Omaha than we usually experience!

Mommy runs, the umpteenth.

Today was the day of my 10K, or 6.2 miles for those of you unaccustomed to metric conversions. It involved getting up at 5:00, driving to a college campus parking lot, following other runner-looking people to the start line, and a lot of waiting around until actual race time, or 7:00. Mercifully, Mike shepherded the kids to the finish line just in time to meet me, so they didn't have to leave the house until about 7:15 - nothing like a couple hours of dead time early in the morning in the cold *and* dark to piss off your littles - I was glad they got to sleep in instead.

At the race, there's a marathon, a half-marathon, and a 10K all held at the same time, so the participants ranged from the moderately fit (me, for instance) to the people who are lean and knobby and high-energy (the marathoners) and the people in between, who were really fit but less keyed up about the whole thing. Best overheard dialogue: "It's important not to start too fast!" Yeah, no kidding! Also, the wit who yelled just before the race started, when the main organizer got her teeny little race pistol out, "She's got a gun! She's got a gun!" And then there's the guy who wheedled a female aquaintence into telling him her usual pace, and then said confidently, "I'm better than that." Nice!

It was chilly, so while I'm standing there waiting for the race to start, I notice a woman whose teeth are actually chattering (she had not, like many people, put armholes in a plastic bag and put it on for additional warmth, a technique I had not seen before outside of wilderness or homelessness situations.) I actually sidled up to her and said, "You're shivering, and I'm just going to stand next to you to share some body heat." Instead of saying "Yeah, right, freakish stranger," she was touched (it was genuinely pretty cold in shorts and a tank top) and we chatted for a while about faculty politics (she turned out also to be a professor), running skirts (I am enthusiastic; she was unsure) and the various local half marathons and marathons (word is that Lincoln has a really good one, but it's early in the year, so it requires lots of indoor treadmill training.) She slowed down a bit at mile five and we ran for about half a mile together until she wanted to go faster and I wanted to walk so I could resume normal breathing. So that was fun.

The race itself was great for about the first three miles, good for the next two, and really tough for the final mile plus. I should have taken a walk break a little earlier, so as to feel better at the end, but it was still good. My adjusted time (the "run time," which is from where my shoes crossed the chip-activating start line to the end, vs. the "gun time," which from the official start of the race until I crossed the finish line) was just over 61 minutes, or about a 9:50/mile pace, which sounds modest until you realize I'm Not Really An Athlete and am New At This. I was really, really pleased. Anonymous friendly professor runner told me that anybody who can do a 10K can do a marathon, it just takes the time to train, and while I'm not that ambitious yet I'm eyeing the half next September.

Next weekend: Gracie and I are doing the Race for the Cure; she's doing the kid run, I'm doing the 5K, pink will be worn, fun will be had, and pictures will be taken; flattering pre-race pics may even make the blog cut. (Of me, not Grace - she always looks adorable.)

Really, really cool raptors.

We went today to a hawk festival, which coincides with the fall migration pattern for raptors. Since reading the book My Side of the Mountain and the two following books in the series, Grace has been very interested in raptors, especially perigrine falcons. So we heard about the hawk festival and decided to go, and it was today, and it was fabulous. A few crafts and snacks, but clearly the big cool thing was birds of prey. First was a barn owl, and then Grace got to see her first perigrine in the flesh, and we saw a huge red-tailed hawk that had been caught and banded. The guy in charge of the banding brought it over to the festival and then released it and it was big and dangerous-looking and pissed off at him and it flew away in about two wingbeats.






Peter had a really good time too, and it was funny to be around all these big predators in light of the conversation he and I had on Friday, which included this matter-of-fact claim:

Peter: Mom, you know what? Kids are made of meat.

Me: Um, yeah, I guess so. I guess that's a good way to put it.

Peter: But not adults. Only kids.

Me: No, kids and adults are made of the same stuff.

Peter, patient and authoritative: No, kids are made of meat, and grown ups are not, and I know this. Because I am an everything expert! Do you know what that is? That is someone who is an expert in everything. And kids are made of meat!

David Foster Wallace

So David Foster Wallace died this weekend, a suicide. I am grieving, which sounds ridiculous since I had no actual personal relationship with him, but it's true. I started reading his essays in college - the fantastic A Supposedly Fun Think I'll Never Do Again is so delicious and witty and sardonic that I've been rereading it for years. His description of solipsism as "not exactly the cheery crackling hearth of psycho-philosohpical orientations" (I'm probably paraphrasing a bit) makes me laugh. His essay on David Lynch gave me new and powerful insight into films I'd seen and loved and been mystified by. I have never again been to a state or county fair without thinking of his hysterical description of the evangelical Christian booth at the Indiana State Fair. I was just musing this weekend over his description of a boxing match he saw during that visit.

His short stories are disturbing and strange and beautifully titled. The novel Infinite Jest took me months to finish (and I am first and foremost a dedicated reader) but has remained in my consciousness for years.

His later writing, including Consider the Lobster is just as sharp and penetrating - his essay on John McCain is brilliant and he depicts McCain's courage as vividly as his scary neocon politics. A short story in the New Yorker made me cry a year or two back. He wrote an essay on dictionaries and language use that so perfectly described the feeling of wanting one's guests to go home but being unable to put it into the right words that it made my skin crawl. His description of how language was used and analyzed in his childhood made me want to be the kind of parent who inspires love of words in her kids.

He didn't ever seem like a healthy person, or a happy person, or a person you'd want taking care of your cat. But he seemed like he'd be great to get a drink or twelve with, he seemed brilliant and vicious and funny and genuinely dedicated to his students. I have enjoyed his writing for years, and I am sorry he is dead. I wish we had another fifty years of his writing to look forward to. I never knew him at all, but I will miss him greatly.

Wishing Wendy Doniger had said *this* at my graduation...

http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/wendy_doniger/2008/09/all_beliefs_welcome_unless_the.html

Predictably, that portion of the population that a. loves Sarah Palin and b. takes the Bible literally is accusing Wendy of arguing that Sarah Palin is somehow biologically not a woman.

In which Peter outs us at preschool.

Mike reports that two of Peter's preschool teachers had the following conversation with him, apropos of nothing, during art today:

Peter: You know why my mommy and daddy aren't voting for John McCain?

Teacher, amused: Why, Peter?

Peter: Because he tells lies.


We're raising 'em right here on the homestead...

In which we (try to) catch butterflies.

This weekend we went to a cool event at a local nature center (not affiliated with either of the nature centers we've been to before, but sited like they are along the Missouri River.) The idea was that we could take advantage of the Monarch butterfly migration to catch and tag some butterflies for Important Scientific Study. Unfortunately, the weather was cool and rainy, so the butterflies were few and far between. We did catch one, but it had already been tagged, so that was a bit disappointing. But we got a net and some take-home tags (teeny stickers that you put on the outside/underside of the wings) and we'll try again when things warm up a bit. Still, we had a great time.





The great joy of the whole thing was that the same nature center has a Raptor Celebration or something where they hold a hawk/raptor event with live raptors and you get to climb up their really tall tower to try to spy raptors migrating south. Since Grace is currently obsessed with perigrine falcons, we're going to put it on our calendar.

In which we hike.

Today we went to the other instance of the nature preserve that we recently joined. The kids have developed an instant love for the Missouri River, so we hiked about three miles and got to splash around a bit in the water. The visitor center had little slips of paper on which people could note their various animal sightings, and we ended up with a good list: some snails, a few frogs, various birds (the visitor center woman thought turkey vulture, which is actually prettier on the wing than the name suggests), two deer, and a huge black rat snake. This was Mike's first snake sighting in a number of years, and the biggest snake that the kids have seen in the wild, so it was an Event which required Hand-Holding and Reassurance and Deep Breathing. For Mike, not the kids, who were intrigued but not especially worried.

The ankle surgeon full-employment run...

Yes, it was mud run day! The "trail" turned out to be through a vineyard, which was as lumpy and uneven a surface as anybody could have wished, and the mud pit was - a huge pit of mud. It was great. Next year, we'll have to go in costume - we saw any number of bridesmaids dresses sacrificed to the cause, plus a dizzying array of other clever costumes - hula girls, a quartet dressed as Wizard of Oz characters (Dorothy, the Tin Man, the Lion, and Glenda the Good Witch, in another now-destroyed ballgown.) There was Elvis, a guy in a vintage 70's tuxedo and wig, someone in a toga and laurels, and a whole family in matching rainbow clown wigs. It was amazing.

The actual running was kind of odd - we started off very slowly, because funneling several hundred people between the rows of grapes in a vineyard takes a while. From there on out, it was nothing but hills (the vineyard was planted on a slope) and then the mud pit and then another huge hill. My time was shockingly good, so good that Mike and I concluded that they must have miscalculated the distance of the course. The only down side to the day was that while Grace was well enough to come, she wasn't well enough after a few days with a fever to run the kids' one-mile. She took it well and was excited to plan her costume for next year.






Afterwards we all showered off under some handy fire hoses, complete with fire truck and fire fighters to assist, and then I changed into dry clothes and we wandered around for a few minutes before heading to Perkin's for breakfast. Apparently the sight of a still-dirty, oddly damp, casually dressed person with filthy shoes is still an oddity at Perkin's among the after-church crowd, but I resisted the urge to explain that I'd been running, and usually I go into public with clean clothes on.

Editing to add: per the post-race email, the run was 2.5 miles, not 5K (which is 3.1 miles.) No wonder I seemed so speedy! Still, it was great fun, and Grace and I each got a cool stainless steel water bottle, which I'd just been debating about buying but couldn't decide if the no-brand Target ones were worth $10, which is not even to consider the fancier Sigg ones that are $20. I'd so much rather have a useful item than an ill-fitting race shirt!