Thanksgiving in Chicago

...with Amy and Jamison. Here is their apartment building in Hyde Park:

Here is Kimbark Street:

and here is Amy at her job:

We bought grandkids' Christmas presents there, for 20% off. Her coworkers call her "Noorlander!" and she was worried about me taking her picture because they will tease her. She likes the job.

We ended up having Thanksgiving dinner--with Betsy, Brett, & Ethan and Jackie, Joel, & Blythe--at A&J's friends' larger apartment a few blocks away. We were so busy that day I didn't take any photos. Amy made cider-brined turkey, homemade dressing, gravy, walnut cranberry spinach salad, pumpkin pies, key lime pie, chocolate pecan pie, and cheesecake. John made the candied yams and mashed potatoes, and did a lot of the clean up. I made the mushrooms and green beans with shallots, and the dinner rolls, and Jackie brought cheese roll and crackers and veggies with dip. I think she did great coordinating a major dinner for nine (not counting the two babies) in two apartments several blocks apart. Yeay Amy!

Hyde Park

We took a walk with Amy to the U Chicago campus, and stopped to look at the Roby House (Frank Lloyd Wright, above), and the Oriental Museum (below):


The weather was rainy and cool or sunny and cool. The leaves had mostly fallen and made a golden, red, and brown carpet over the pavement. The streets and houses are lovely and even the apartment buildings are tolerable. Short blocks, quiet streets. A & J live half a block from a little shopping center, two blocks from church, five or six blocks from Amy's job, maybe four blocks from the nearest train station and bus line. I don't know how it is in the deep of winter, but late autumn is very nice.

Playing With Dex in Nichols Park

Jamison gives Dex a drink (above, on the "No Dogs Allowed" tennis court--the best place to let dogs play off-leash, of course, since it's fenced).

Chris runs with Dex:

The Field Museum

John, Chris, and Amy at the Field Museum (above), and Amy inside (below):

A "friendly goddess," from the Egyptian exhibit.
A Tibetan demon. He was a man who was killed by robbers at the 59th minute of the 24th hour of the 365th day of the 49th year of a 50-year meditative quest for enlightenment, and, in frustration, destroyed his interrupters and drank their blood from the cups of their skulls then went on a murderous rampage. Sometimes I feel that way when I'm interrupted.

Speaking of skulls, John with the skull of Sue, the famousest T-Rex:

John, Karla, Chris, in the Pawnee lodge, after a lot of walking:

It is a beautiful museum. We especially liked the exhibit on the evolution of life on earth--it was interesting, various, logical, and integrative. I really liked the "aquarium" of cambrian (I think) marine life.

Beautiful Chicago

Chicago skyline with Lakeshore Drive from the Field Museum (above), and sunset (below):

Panning from northwest to northeast from the Field Museum, with Chris and Amy:

Amy's House (With Jamison, In Chicago)

Amy's kitchen--small but fully equipped.

John, Chris, and I visiting in a studio apartment don't help space-wise, but all she had to do was fold up the futon, and viola! Plenty of room. Amy and Sinestra, above. I really like the view from their (south facing) windows.

Handsome, clean, brave, and reverent Dex.

Sunday naps.

Update

Thanksgiving this year we will be in Chicago, with Amy and Jamison, Brett Betsy and Ethan, and Jackie Joel and Blythe. A&J are in a new place, a studio apartment which they said reminds them of Harry Potter (don't know why yet, but wouldn't it be cool if it was house elves? Maybe not, if you remember Dobby).


Rob and Nicolle have found a new apartment in the Aves, and even though Rob has a previously scheduled gig in New York (working for JetBlue makes the cross-continent commute possible), Nicolle is moving on her own this weekend. So I''m taking the truck to Salt Lake tomorrow morning and I'll bring the babies back with me in their Nissan, and then in the afternoon John will come home from his wilderness writing trip to Moab, and we will have a lot of fun. R&N's new place is only a couple of blocks from their old place, only a couple of block's from Brett and Betsy's, only a few feet from the babysitters, and across the street from a chocolate shop! And a block and a half from Smith's. So very good. I can't wait to see the apartment tomorrow.

Chris and a mixed group of his buddies are watching Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure after the THS state football victory over Springville this afternoon. It's always been my favorite Keanu Reeves film.
I'm trying to get the motivation to tidy up my office (cleaning it is beyond me). Then I want to organize my (electronic) Blood Practice files to take on our trip to Chicago, where I hope to have some quiet time to work on the novel. I'm committed to a writing group start-up in January, where I'll be working on the Mormon werewolf story, so before that I want to have the vampire novel out to whatever reader-critics I haven't already exhausted. If you haven't met my protagonist, she is here. The writing group requirement is 2500 words/week. Yeah right. And if I can work it into my schedule, and BYU allows me to matriculate, I'll go to John's novel-writing class winter term (T Th 12-1:15, when I'm usually doing psychotherapy at the care center in Pleasant Grove). If I can be super-organized and productive this month, I'll use the werewolf novel for the class--if I'm slow I'll do what will hopefully be the final rewrite of Blood Practice. The tentative title for the werewolf thing is The Werewolf Solution, but it's sort of evolved away from that. We'll see what happens.

I am sad and anxious about Tena moving to Houston. What will I do without her support and encouragement in our biweekly PWA-S meetings (Professional Women's Alliance--South Chapter)? I know things will work out for them and they will be happy in east Texas, but I sure will miss her and her family. I will have to use Rob's partner flight benefit to go visit them. Her job headquarters is close to the Woodlands, and they might even end up living there. Wouldn't that be weird! But a house like the one where we lived would be perfect for them.

I keep trying to balance the four main jobs in my life--that is, 1) home & family, 2) psych, 3) writing, and 4) personal & health--and as usual, doing 2 1/2 of them at a time. I'm continuing with the gratitude exercise whenever I remember, which is about every other day. Today I'm grateful that my little ASUS is up and running (and thanks to B&B for helping me clean it up); for water, which really is amazing, in that we can drink it, bathe in it, wash things with it, look at it, and get rained on by it; and I'm grateful that Amy got her phones fixed. And also grateful for green pens. And Belgian chocolate. And that my Bike o' Death is working again. And for my cats. And grandbabies. OK, time to quit for the night.

Blogging

Blogs are boring in two ways--too much writing or too many pictures. The best blogs are a mix of both. This is basically my journal and my intermittent newsletter to family (and friends who are interested), which is no excuse for long posts of unexplained photos or multipage rants, either one.

We Went to the Zoo

...to see the baby elephant. Johnathan was very excited.
We also saw three baby tigers,

and the giraffe family.
It was a lot of fun. Thanks R&N for taking us.

I Must Have Been Inspired...

...it's done.

Halloween

We were too late to take pix of Ethan, who had his bath and was in his jammies by the time we got to the Aves, and J & C's costumes had started to come apart, but we were still in time for fun. Check Nicolle's blog for Johnathan He Man and Colette She Ra. As well as Capt. Kirk and the green alien girl. Fun times.

Internalized Misogyny

Talking to Amy and analyzing the interesting and multivarious personalities in the fam, and I remembered a thought experiment that my 1977 women’s studies class introduced me to—“how would you be different if you were the opposite sex?”—an interesting question (but not what I’m doing right here, although I think I might be a lot more like Dave). So my thoughts ran in a well-worn pattern: No non-gay (or otherwise non-traditionally gendered) man I’ve ever met has considered this question. Because male = normal human whereas female = other, yada yada [insert traditional second wave feminist rhetoric here—“second wave” meaning “straight white educated middle-class older”]. Why does that equation/non-equation resonate so closely with my experience? I thought to myself. Because when I was very young, I answered, I read omnivorously from Freud and Jung to Hemingway to Vonnegut to Dostoyevsky to Dickens to Mailer to Joyce, amazed at their insights into the human condition, and my “click” moment of consciousness raising was when I began to notice (at probably about 13 years old) the occasional statement such as: “women are not like us,” or “the female experience is diametrically opposite what has here been described”*, or the even more obvious and simple absence of women from the awareness of these great thinkers except when sex was concerned (an absence painfully and blatantly apparent after the moment of that "click").

Which was as far as I had gotten until now. Pain—so how am I human then?—and profound alienation from the Enlightenment culture and the canon and so forth that I loved, that I was steeped, soaked, and buried in, because dang, when Freud talks about defenses against anxiety, I get it, gut-deep, and when Melville talks about the whale coming up from fathoms below the boat, and even when Hemingway looks with male eyes at his lover’s pregnant belly and then out at the hills like white elephants, I get that as well, even at 13 or 14, because I am human too. It was my feminine protest—that great phrase Freud invented meaning (to him) resentment at not having a penis, but which really means envy of all the advantages and power in this culture associated with being male.

But all these years I never really took it to the next level. It felt like simply too much injustice to deal with—I wanted to point at the sexism and keep pointing until it was finally, adequately, acknowledged. Or I took these men’s unconscious subjectivity and bias too seriously, at face value, and couldn’t move beyond it.

Here is my recent 51-year-old emotional insight: In reality, these great thinkers were describing the human (inclusive) condition, under varying circumstances (and “male” was not always the most important one), and therefore their insights were/are applicable to me, because, although female, I am human too. Their sexist blind spots are regrettable, but totally and completely understandable, given the era(s) in which they lived. I don’t have to be wounded by them anymore. I’m not being betrayed. Their sexism--that is, their belief that men were human and women were "other"--is not much different than Joyce being Irish or Tolstoy Russian, and I can look at it, acknowledge it, and move on. I don’t have to believe it anymore.

That's the weird thing that I didn't know, and just barely realized. I believed it for too long.

*not that these are actual quotes, but similar ones wouldn't be hard to find

THS Acappella Choir

Beautiful Christopher in his first tux:

And a brief excerpt (Offenbach's "Neighbor's Chorus"):


Grandma and Grandpa came, and Grandma Gene. We had banana splits afterwards.

Red Red Rose (More Choir)

You can hear the high tenor (Chris' part) throughout this section, especially at the end.

John's Fall Harvest

Look what John has done this fall--peaches, tomato juice, white grape juice, purple grape juice, pear jam, and apple juice. He's used up all the quart jars and sent us scrambling for more. Now he's making applesauce and preserving it in pint jars because we have tons of pints and we only use that much applesauce at a time (this way it won't go moldy in the fridge). He says there's one more batch of tomato juice and he's done for the season.

Apple Rain!

So we went down to the Farm to pick apples and make juice. Usually that is a multi-day effort (well, they had been picking for a few days before), but this time, because of the hard frost which froze all the twigs and leaves, the apples were dropping (like apples!), and Kendrick got up in the trees and shook the fruit down onto tarps and it was much speedier than picking them all off the branches by hand. And then we made juice that same afternoon. We weren't there for the whole effort, but we got 20 gallons and John was able to pack it all into the freezer except for one batch to bottle and a gallon to drink straight.

Apple Juice!

Betsy and Ethan are ready to work at the orchard--and get busy with John picking up the fallen apples.
J.Lynn picks up the fruit that Kendrick shook out of the tree:
We're done! Grandpa carts the equipment back down the lane to the barnyard:
The Lane:
Bryce and Shane wash apples while Cindy rinses out the 5-gallon jugs:
J.Lynn, Kelly, Pesi, and Grandpa run the apple press:
Trent and Tana jug the juice. Yum!
And one gratuitous picture of Ethan.

Rainbow

I was going to write a post on health care reform, but rainbows are easier.

Dave Came to Visit

Here John and Dave eat Smores from our new fire pit (above), and Mike visits with Dave, Nicolle, and Ethan:
Roasting marshmallows:
Brett drinks coke:
Marshmallows are serious business:


Colette makes a new friend:
Backyard camping:

I really like the firepit. It is lightweight, cute, and $59 at Lowe's. But dang, we've got to finish that one little corner of the garden (or at least get the buckets full of rocks out of sight).