22 degrees this morning, summer's passed by, garden remnants are huddled under cold frames and David's just finished the new greenhaus. Fresh organic lettuce and spinach in December will be a revelation- if what I've been reading in the Nearings' and in Eliot Coleman's year round gardening books holds true. And if I pay attention to what I'm doing.

Some new photos here of what we've been up to; busy-ness in real time precludes busy-ness online. Hoping that the lockin weather of winter will result in my paying more attention to this blog.

October here means time to "put up" the garden, canning and pickling are standard procedures. Lots of handiwork to do so, cutting,chopping, measuring, cleaning but there is a presence of mind developed meditating on the fruits of the vegetable kingdom that zeros in on zen. Grasshopper, what is the sound of one hand chopping? I took some photos to share these small beauties with my friends. The jar is filled with Tomatillo pickle, referred to locally as "ground cherries". One pal from my reading group turned down my offer of tomatillos with the following observation, "Ground cherries, no thank you! Mom pickled those when we were kids and - oh gross- they look like eyeballs in a jar!!". These are cut in quarters so the horror is averted :)

mobile blog setup

Testing new service to post on the go

Out late this afternoon in Blue River looking for signs and colors of Spring. These sandhills take my breath away with their quiet beauty and secret details, inscriptions describing the biology of place and alchemical wildness surrounding us, cryptic motifs of an austere environment not yet given over to the rioting of summer seeds and grasses.

We're in the process of adding a permanent note of springtime to Chestnut Street, going from deep winter Addams Family grey to sunflower yellow in a few thousand brushstrokes! Trees are budding and tulips popping on this perfect spring day, going out to enjoy the sun and consider how to layout the garden for this year's crops.

Taxes done, good weather, National Library Week and National Poetry Month all in one day. We live rich lives these days compared to the struggles of generations that went before us. Yet still we and our children war, destroy and live in fear of loss of wealth or status. What species is this that doesn't just get on cheerfully with life when the sun shines. A red cardinal in our feeder flinging black sunflower seeds aside while feasting sings within a joy maybe beyond most of us; and we think we know?

Spring Thaw! Now that our fingers are unfrozen there may be more blog posts :)Busy at the library with programming adventures for April ( National Library Week and National Poetry Month) and Summer Library Program- Bugs! for the kidz and Metamorphosis for t/weens. Also The Art by the Stream festival is coming in June, with much yet to do. Auction at the Central House will be held in a week and we're still working on the Youth Art display. Wow, life out in the country can be just as busy as Chicagoland, never bored, that's a fact.

More photos of our snowlocked home after the weekend's ice and snow storms. The colder the day
the blue-er the sky and relentless the light; no soft focus hazy tropical highlights here now. Everything is high contrast, clean edged and without superfluous decoration. Pure, functional forms to withstand the unrelenting cold and exacting lens of winter's magnificent eye.

So much snow we walked downtown to get groceries, rather than risk getting stuck
crossing the footbridge over Saunders creek buried fire hydrant with the creek beyond. Its not too cold today, @ 26 F and we stop to look often as the snow and wind sculpt new views and reframe old ones.

Every other or third day since 1 December 2008 we've had some snow. With @three & 1/2 feet on the ground already, this weekend we are receiving 1- 2 inches of freezing rain (last night) and from 4 -12 inches of snow today. This morning we had snow storm warnings, now we are alerted to the possibility of a blizzard! Outside my studio window flurries of flakes cascade earthward in a gyre. The beauty of this weather outweighs all trepidation, fears of cold or death recedes before the decorative beauty of snowed trees and the glittering crystalline flakes that take your breath away

Red oak leaves still cling to last summer's colors. The trees branches spread like a dancer's or supplicant's arms catch a bright layer of snow in contrast to their dark wet bark, a reminder of the earth buried below the snow pack waiting patiently for the sun and plow, a conspiracy of defiant seeds.

Sudden warming here the last couple of days, from 0 to 40 degrees! Snow is melting and flowing water falling jingles everywhere outside. So I took a walk along Saunders Creek today and shot this short video, ending with a side trip to a local welder's shop where a long curling ice wave has shed off the shear lip of tin roof and melted into a Hawaiian hang ten curl amid the remnants of Wisconsin winter snow.

Flippin' kitty cats, shot after one too many cups of "Tom and Jerry" holiday nog :)

Laura sent me a link a friend from grad school sent to her: video of a compelling high school art show. I'm adding a link to it here:
http://www.collierhighschool.com:80/video/artshow2007.html

Two new Flip video camcorders for the library just arrived today and of course I had to test out and surf up and over this new technology's mini learning curve. Cool device, software's somewhat limited, but it seems all decent vid editing software requires a credit card somewhere along the route, so not too surprised by that. Excellent ease of use and upload to PC. Here's my first test run using a canned vid editing template and a soundtrack I grabbed at random:

Here's a quick look at our first real snow storm of the season. This one is wrapping up with a shower of pelletized ice, slippery in the extreme but musical as it pings over and over again against bare wind rattled branches.

Finally Friday, and a three day weekend at that. Life is good!

 

Photos of some trees in our backyard, the great sweep of branches reminds me of lines of poetry, one more formal like a sonnet, the other free verse.

 

Believe it or not, here's a card catalog in use! Isn't it beautiful? I'd forgotten how noble they looked. This one is in the library of St. Norbert Abbey in Green Bay. Where better than an abbey to find a relic....

 

Josef S. Katz is showing off here modeling as part of the oriental rug pattern.

 

New day and out the door in a moment. I've been doing a lot of work on the library wiki http://boscobel.pbwiki.com trying out new widgets, etc. With all of these useful web 2.0 tools, the real problem becomes not, as it used to be, figuring out how to use the tool <>, but instead how to find the TIME to use all of the tools. Here's a chat widget that will let you text me no matter which chat client you use.Just type "hello?" in the message box below and hit the enter key. If I'm online, I'll reply!

{Update 11/9: I jsut moved the chat widget to the upper left navbar, so it won't disappear into the archives as this post ages}

She's back. Sorry for the long silence, this winter and spring whirled in a pile of major life changes. Everything old is new again! I'm just now beginning to feel like things are settling down.
Updates: Goodbye Chicago, hello Boscobel 24/7! I left the bank at the end of March and moved into this big old house for good. No more 3AM runs to catch the train to the Windy City. This is a good thing and was way overdue. Sleep deprivation and stress make you ugly inside and out :). I do miss the energy of Chicago but she's there waiting anytime for me and anyone else who wants to visit. You know who you are pals! If you're curious about Chicago, Devil In the White City is an excellent historical fiction about the city and the World's Exposition of 1893.

Busy now working as the Boscobel city librarian, making time to dig in the garden, strip floors in the house and go fishing on the weekends. Writing and painting will come again soon- takes a while to rediscover thyself.

Also have been playing online at secondlife.com, myspace.com and meez.com. This started in an effort to better understand the POV of the teens who frequent the library, but its changing my own point of view. Social networking tools present some compelling possibilites for defining new identities within the parallel universe of cyberspace. Here's our library avatar. More soon.

Happy Thanksgiving Everyone!

I took a couple of days off and we've been in Boscobel since last Tuesday,can't believe that the week is gone already. Fantastic 50 degree weather with blue skies, air crisp and fresh, traffic, crowds, cars and noise banished for this while.


We finally moved a lot of the extra stuff from my CHI apt up to the house so I can downsize to a studio in the city. Best of all, aside from the time for us to just be together at home, the real luxury at last of time to burn just mucking about the house. There's always something to be discovered, to fix, to improve, to imagine building, crafting, creating- this old house indeed is us.
David cooked Thanksgiving Dinner this year, enjoy this photo of a delicious bird that barely does it justice, gobble gobble!


...Enough words for now, the "News from Lake Wobegon" is on the radio and the leftovers and a regional nut brown ale "Fat Squirrel" from New Glarus Brewery are calling my name..:)
Almost forgot, here in the frozen (not yet!) hinterlands of Wisconsin, the northernmost hibiscus, given to us by our next door neighbors Nancy and Ben as a housewarming gift, chose to grace us with two beautiful salmon colored flowers jsut in time for Turkey Day


Happy Thanksgiving Everyone!

Was jsut fiddling with you tube to get some feedback for Lulu's brother Dan. Posted a test vid (lousy quality vid of a long time ago KW Author's Coop interview) and got it working in abt 15 minutes, so now want to see if I can embed the link here. Here goes:

If this works I'll narrate some short Boscobel clips soon!