first efforts

Eat local

Tis the season for eating locally! Last night I had Bengineer over for dinner. Apart from the broiled fish I served, which was decidedly not local, here was our menu:

sliced tomatoes with goat cheese and basil

corn on the cob

roasted green beans with thyme

homemade zucchini bread

Very organic, very local. The tomatoes and goat cheese came from our local farmers' market (my own tomatoes aren't ripe yet). The basil came from my garden. And the corn, beans, and zucchini came from the thriving garden of G&J, who like nothing better than to stuff my car with fresh produce when I go down to their beautiful place for a visit.

Yum.

"Striker's dead!"

Or so say the Vintage Baseball types. Yesterday afternoon I saw the Rock Springs Ground Squirrels of Decatur, Illinois play an exhibition game here in Champaign. They play, dress, and behave according to the rules of baseball circa 1858. In rhetoric terms, you might call it Lincoln-Douglas debates baseball. Very fun. And fashionable attire -- especially the umpire!

The game looks much the same, but the differences are, well, striking:

No gloves.

Underhand pitching.

Hitters are called "strikers."

A ball can be called out even after once bounce (makes sense when there are no gloves).

No over-running of bases, even first base; you can be tagged out if you step off the bag.

The umpire may fine players or spectators 25 cents ("a day's wages") for "unseemly conduct."

You get to ring a bell when you score a run - and then everybody yells "Huzzah!" Really.

The folks in Decatur host the Stephen A. Douglas Cup Vintage Baseball Festival annually; for those of you baseball fans in central Illinois, it's on September 9th this year.

Stormy weather

Thunderstorm moving in from the West, Saturday night, Piatt County

Ah, prairie!

Back in the C-U for a few days for a student's dissertation defense and other such things. Am trying to cram in as much meeting and socializing and catching up as I can. One benefit of being homeless in your hometown is enjoying the hospitality of friends. No, non-prairie-dwellers, this is not a photo of my office in Lincoln Hall, it's the view outside of Grace and Jeff's place early this morning. Call me crazy, but I do miss the prairie. Last night's amazing dinner of grilled tuna, veggies, pumpkin pie, and (too much?) wine was also fabulous. So was seeing Buddy the Dog and the Four Cats of Atwood, including my special friend Yogi, the World's Fluffiest Orange Tabby. Tomorrow night, back in town, the Curly Haired Professors promise tasty veggie delights AND pomegranate martinis. And whippets. Who could ask for more?

Finally.

GOOD NEWS from the homefront this morning: Chief Illiniwek is gone. At long last.

The teacher becomes the student

As part of my frantic quest to take advantage of all of my various forms of health care before I leave town, today I went to the eye doctor. I was sitting in the waiting room reading Assassination Vacation (awesome) when a doctor's assistant came out to get me. She looked vaguely familiar, but I wasn't quite sure why. As she led me into the dim little exam room I looked at her name tag; nothing jogged my memory. Then she said, "Hi, I'm X," X being a nickname, not the name on her nametag. That did it. All at once a warm and also slightly sinking feeling rushed in: damn, a former student! I just want to sit here reading Sarah Vowell and waiting for my eye exam, I don't wanna be Professor Finnegan.

"Did you go to the U of I?" I asked. She grinned: "I wondered if you remembered me." Instantly it all flooded back: rhetorical criticism class about two years ago, struggling writer but very, very hard worker, very sweet girl, lots of office hours visits.

We chatted briefly about what she's been up to (working at the doctor's office, thinking about moving to Seattle), me slipping almost imperceptibly into slightly-formal-but-friendly office hours tone. It was pleasant and nice. Then suddenly the tables turned and she got to business. For the next 15 minutes she instructed me to put my chin here, rest my forehead there, put drops in my eyes, and ran me through a battery of tests designed to make me feel blind and to remind me that I was never very good at video games.

Perhaps the worst part came when I had to put the plastic stick over my eye and read the eye chart. Who designs the font for these things? Writing teacher my ass! Professor Finnegan can't even tell the difference between a frigging E and a B on an eye chart.

The eye doctor visit finally gives me a timely reason to ask this question: am I the only person who ROUTINELY types the wrong letters and numbers into the Typepad comment verification box? I can't see those damn things for the life of me.

30 miles to water and Bambi

When I first moved to C-U I used to joke that by bicycle it was "five minutes to corn" in every direction. Yesterday it was thirty miles to water and Bambi for Ben and me when we did a late afternoon hike at Kickapoo State Park.

Old home week at Timpone's

Was every single Illinois humanities scholar at Timpone's last night? So it seemed. Here an anthropologist, there an English professor, here a prof, there a prof, everywhere a prof prof. It is hiring season and we were all out in full force, recruiting our little butts off. I was there helping (read: getting a free meal) with an art history candidate. Debbie was doing the same thing with somebody in anthro. Halfway through our meal, after a flood people stopped at our table to say hi to one or another of us, Jordana exclaimed, "I've seen more people I know tonight than I see in a month on campus."

Tis the season, and Timpone's is apparently the place to be. And the almond toffee cheesecake? Fabulous. I just might have it again tonight when we feed Candidate #2.

Water-challenged

Last week a couple of textbook reps stopped by my office to talk about the freshman course; one of them was a new guy I hadn't met before. In an effort to connect with me, he commented first on the music I was playing, then on the iconography of my office. "Are you from the North?" he asked, looking around at the stuff on my walls. "I see lots of lakes and stuff on your posters." As I followed his gaze around the room, I realized that my office is filled with images of water. A poster-sized photographic print of a placid lake in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area. A 1920s-era tourist poster featuring Minnesota's Highway 61 along Lake Superior. Even the Alfred Stieglitz print of New York on a rainy day, that has water too.

Lots of people in this town are from other places, and we all bring our own geographic biases with us when we move to the prairie. Some of my colleagues miss the excitement of big cities, others oceanside sunsets or trees and mountains. I miss the water. I am from Minnesota, Land of 11,482 Lakes Ten Acres or Larger, where I grew up three miles from the Mississippi River and spent every childhood vacation "up north" at "the lake." I keep these images of water around me because we don't have any around here. Champaign-Urbana is, shall we say, water-challenged.

Now, I know that there is water in East Central Illinois (I've even seen some of it) but believe me, there is none anywhere near where I live. When I complain about the lack of water here, locals sometimes protest and offer counter-examples. We have the The Boneyard! they will say. And Crystal Lake! Let me assert this once and for all: The Boneyard, a drainage ditch that stretches across part of north campus does not, I repeat, not count. Neither does Crystal Lake in Urbana or any other body of water in this town dug by a backhoe and filled with a giant hose. These so-called rivers and lakes might be wet, but they are not rivers and lakes, my friends. Trust me; I know the difference.

 

Retro, in a good way

Last night my friend Jordana and I met for dinner at the Jolly Roger in Urbana. The Jolly Roger is, well, a unique place. First of all, it features a pirate theme. The walls are covered with giant swordfish, ships, and pirate heads. The door to the women's bathroom says "Wenches." The woodwork is dark, the vinyl on the booths is blood red, and the safest thing on the menu for a vegetarian is pizza. It's the kind of place where the house salad is iceberg lettuce with thousand island dressing and the waitresses (not servers) call you "hon."

Most cities or towns have restaurants or bars like this, locally beloved places that have been around forever, maybe even run by the same family. Such businesses are weirdly and wonderfully frozen in time. In the "real" Twin Cities, one example would definitely be Nye's Polonaise Room in Minneapolis, where the claim to fame is polka, not pirates.

Places like the Jolly Roger are important because they remind people here that we do not live in Chicago, and that this is okay. Since I moved here in 1999, the other twin cities (especially downtown Champaign) has exploded with new bars and restaurants. This is really great, because it makes for a variety of fun places to hang out. But at the same time, lately it feels like the developers are going too far. Some of these new places insist on a kind of constructed "Chicago-ness" that I find irritating. The decor screams urban, the lighting is coy, the drinks are overpriced. After eating at one of these new places last fall, I said to my companions, "Why do I feel right now like I need to drive two and a half hours to get home ?" In other words, sometimes the coolness is just too forced.

Ahoy, maties! We aren't Chicago. And that's okay.