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.