Monthly Archives: December 2020

East Branch

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We haven’t been in any restaurants or theaters or concert venues since March, and our membership at the municipal indoor pool long ago lapsed. On the other hand, we’ve been to a lot of green spaces this year, now brown as fall has vanished into winter, including city parks, state parks, and one national forest, monument and park each. But especially that kind of undeveloped land specific to Illinois: the forest preserve, a localized legacy of Progressive Era activism.

I wondered how many we’ve been to this year, so I made a count. Five visits to forest preserves we’ve been to before, and 10 new ones, variously in Cook, DuPage, Kane and Lake counties. I doubt that we visited more than one or two new ones a year before 2020. Fifteen is only a small fraction of however many hundreds of preserves there might be statewide, but I’m glad we’ve taken the walks, and plan to continue doing so next year.

On Saturday afternoon, we took a walk at East Branch, a 521-acre unit of the DuPage County Forest Preserve District in Glendale Heights. Temps were in the 40s. That’s warm enough for a forest preserve walk.
East Branch forest preserve“East Branch was previously used as farmland prior to the Forest Preserve District acquiring it in the early 1970s,” the district web site says. “During the 1980s, wetlands were created along the East Branch DuPage River as mitigation for the construction of Interstate 355.”

A trail from a small parking lot off Glen Ellyn Road leads to a small lake.
East Branch forest preserveIt’s called Rush Lake. The district asserts that it’s a good place to see waterfowl, and so it was. Ducks, at least.
East Branch forest preserveThe main trail circles around the lake, though sometimes a little ways from the shore. Hoofprints in the mud along the way meant horse riding is an activity there, but we didn’t see any riders. We saw two men with fishing poles, a woman walking a dog and a man simply walking around. That was all.
East Branch forest preserveIt was about an hour until sunset. The view to the west.
East Branch forest preserveThe view to the north.
East Branch forest preserveThe dome off in the distance is St. Andrew Ukrainian Orthodox Cathedral.

Wintertime Social Zoom

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On Friday evening, I participated in another social Zoom, once again attended by old friends. Really old friends. As far back as I can go among my friends, since I doubt I’d ever be able to contact my best friend in first grade, whose name was Smith.

The recent Zoom involved two friends I met in elementary school and another in junior high, and who continued to be friends in high school: Steve, Rob and Kevin. After that, we weren’t in touch so much, with sporadic contact over that last 40 years, though Kevin went with me and two other high school friends to New Orleans in the summer of ’81.

Steve I met in 1968, Rob and Kevin in the early ’70s. As I said, taking things back as far as I can go. Only my brothers have known me longer.

Two participants were in Texas, one in New Mexico, and one in Illinois. Steve is a high school band director, Kevin a graphic artist, and Rob a retired computer programmer.
One of the things we did as a group in the mid-70s, beginning in junior high and petering out in high school, was play penny-ante poker at my house. Good fun, as I recall.

So was the Zoom call, though occasionally awkward. After all, there’s been a lot of water under the dam since we hung out.

Look Right (Or Else)

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Some years ago, I scanned one of the pictures I took in London in December 1994, a streetscape. I forget where exactly. Something inspired me to scan it in black and white, which captures the December gloom all the better.

Noir London

Not that London’s a particularly gloomy place, in December or any other time. But old movies on long-ago Saturday afternoons conditioned me to think of old London in foggy black and white, and I caught something of that in the image. Maybe not London in 1994, but 1934.

Looking at the image again, I noticed LOOK RIGHT painted on the edge of the road. Sound advice, I’m sure. When did that message start being painted to warn visitors whose first instinct is to look the wrong way?

A 1991 NYT article mentions the paintings in the context of pedestrian deaths in London, but it only says, “this city has always been tough on foreign pedestrians, who can often be observed at street corners wearing the slightly startled look of deer edging alongside a freeway. It was for them, mostly, that London officials years ago began painting reminders along curbs suggesting that pedestrians ‘look left’ or ‘look right’ before venturing into the street.”

Perhaps for the influx of U.S. soldiers during WWII. That would be my guess. Of course, the hazard is present for Britons visiting our side of the Atlantic as well. After all, Winston Churchill almost bought the farm in New York in 1931 because he failed to look the right (correct) way crossing a street.

Winter ’20

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Winter starts on December 1, as far as I’m concerned. Some past years, that day has obliged us with snow cover, or least snow flurries, such as in 2006 and 2008 and 2010.

Not this year. I had to be out early in the morning to be somewhere, but it was merely dry and below freezing.

Or maybe winter started the night about a week before Thanksgiving when I was out ’round midnight and spotted Orion riding high in the sky, trailed by the loyal Canis Major.

 

After I got home yesterday, I had a lot to do, and so didn’t spent much more time out in the early winter temps, or even thinking about them. Early in the evening, I looked up the local temperature. About as cold as I thought: 28.

Then I had a moment of idle curiosity. The Internet was made for just such moments, so I looked up what I wanted to know: how cold it was at that moment in Anchorage, Alaska: 37.

Not as cold as I thought. The kind of thing TV weather presenters occasionally yak about, though usually in January: Look, it’s colder in Illinois than Alaska! But according to the respective 10-day forecasts, it will soon be single-digits in Anchorage, but not here.

Machines Come, Machines Go

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About a month ago, our long-serving toaster oven gave up the mechanical ghost after how many years? No one could remember. Eventually, its heating element refused to heat, so we left it out for the junkmen at the same time as the standard trash, and sure enough it vanished in the night.

We replaced it in the modern way, ordering another one online. A brand I didn’t know, but since toaster ovens aren’t a major outlay, research was minimal.
toaster oven
Soon a Mueller brand device arrived and was put into service toasting wheat-based edibles. It was not a smart machine with a wifi connection to send data on our bread usage to the National Association of Wheat Growers, the Wheat Foods Council or the North American Millers’ Association, or a machine equipped with AI to encourage us to eat more toast. Just a box with a heating element and knobs to make it go.

For about a month, the new box worked without problem. Except for a squeaking from the veeblefetzer that keeps the oven door shut, every time we opened and closed it. The squeaky part is circled. The noise got worse as time went on.
toaster oven
Soon the squeak came with resistance by the part, and on the Monday before Thanksgiving, as I opened the door I heard a loud snap. The part broke and the door would no longer close, as seen in the photos above.

Inquires were made and arrangements arranged, and before long I ventured into a retail store, all masked up, to return the item at an online return point and then pick up a replacement elsewhere in the store. Hadn’t been in that particular store in a long time, since early 2020 at least. Not many other people were around.

The online retailer wouldn’t or couldn’t replace it with another Mueller, so I took a refund and bought a Black + Decker replacement. That was the brand we had before the Mueller, so I hope it will last a while. Certainly more than a month. So far so good — no suspicious veeblefetzer noises.