I haven’t drawn regularly in ages, so this year I’m going to do Inktober. Today’s prompt: Fast.
Author: vogelein (Page 7 of 19)
The return trip was a success! Everything worked out just about as perfectly as could be expected, especially when dealing with small children and a dog. Izzy joined us for the walk, and she did really well despite the odd terrain and new people. The nieces immediately took to hiking, and the first thing we did was consult a map and have them choose a trail. They picked Kaskaskia canyon, which was the longer of the two, and it ended up working out well because the second trip seemed faster and easier by comparison.
They were fearless with all the bugs and mud, which was great. We found several huge millipedes, some six or seven inches long. This one was dead, so we got a good close look at it.
The only downside to the trip was that it had rained heavily the night before, and the paths were thick with greasy grey mud. Didn’t phase the girls any, though there were a couple of times that we had to ferry them up a steep bank or over a deep stream. Even my sister-in-law, who’s not big on either mud or bugs, had a good time and was patient with all the ups and downs. I was really proud of everybody for rolling with the punches.
We stopped for a snack at the waterfall of Kaskaskia Canyon, and the girls got to get their feet wet. Izzy made short work of all the food the kids dropped.
My brother purchased a souvenir set of binoculars from the gift shop for A, and she had fun checking out the cliffs and trees.
We also made it back to Ottawa Canyon, and the approach to the waterfall was shallow enough that we even got to walk behind it.
It’s not as dramatic in the photo, but it was a beautiful little curtain of water, just enough to be exciting for the kids, but not too intimidating.
Two canyons proved exactly enough hiking for little legs, and we went from there over to the shelter for lunch and letting Izzy run around a bit. Our timing was perfect, and the girls slept in the car all the way back home. Before she fell asleep, Tom said that E. kept saying, “That was really fun.” Cool Aunt achievement unlocked.
Best part? There’s a bunch of other canyons there and at Matthiessen State Park that we can explore next year.
So last week I went out to try a new fitness center in town. It was great, actually. I enjoyed the class I took: the staff seemed nice and enthusiastic, the center clean, the circuit training fast, efficient and fun. This morning I was greeted by an email from their head trainer, one that encouraged me to spark fitness change in myself by “getting disturbed at the body I have.”
No.
I’ve lived too long being disturbed by my body. I spent my entire life, for as long as I can remember, hating my body for being too fat, too awkward, not strong enough. I cut myself down at every opportunity. I loathed myself, inside and out.
In the last four years, I found a safe space, between my husband and sports, to work through that garbage. I’ve spent hundreds of hours training, learning to move my body through space, make it do my brain’s will. I gradually came to love moving it, feeling the first initial spark of grace and competence — though for the first several years I stomped it out from frustration more often than I nurtured it — and slowly, surely, kindling it into something more. Lately, I can even say I like my body, which for me is a lifechanging statement. I like its strong curves, the beautiful cuts of tricep muscle, the shoulders that make my friends exclaim when they hug me. It’s a journey that’s been nothing less than miraculous; ask anyone who remembers me from even five years ago. Ask Paul. I am sad it took me until 42 to get to this point, but I am grateful beyond measure that I came to understand this truth before my body started giving out in major ways.
These days I have been working out not because it is work, but because I love it, I really *really* love it. I love how my brain feels solid, stable, calm after physical activity, in ways that nothing else can help. Every time I reach for a soothing food, a glass of wine to “unwind” — I hope to achieve that feeling of wholeness. But here’s the truth: none of that works for me, at least not for more than the moments in which it happens. I’ve changed my diet enough that more than one drink or a small sweet treat leaves me feeling gross and out of sorts the following day, and the only thing that cures it is more movement, more being mindful and present inside of myself, not seeking escape routes.
I find myself returning to movement because it feels right, because I have discovered the joy of motion, because strangest of strange things, I am coming to love myself. I learned to love myself because my physical journey was fueled by love and enthusiasm and positivity from Paul, from my friends, from my teammates, even from my opponents. All that love eventually wore down all that self-hate.
And I’m not going back to that mindset, ever. And you don’t have to, either. Move because it feels good. Find physical activities that make your body and brain happy and do them. Push yourself to find a healthy place because you love yourself and want to be better, to feel better.
Just do it: Love yourself.
Late this fall, I was helping my cousins clean out their mom’s basement, and we came across a stack of cast iron skillets. I don’t know much about them, but I do know that there are a few highly collectable brands — and the entire stack was nothing but Wagners and Griswolds. I half-jokingly asked my cousins if I could have one, and they said yes, that their mom would have wanted them to stay in the family regardless of their value.
So of course, because I’m me, I immediately went home and looked up the skillet online. According to this article on the Wagner and Griswold Society’s website, (of course there’s a society) this pan is a Fifth-Series Griswold #9 skillet, pattern 710D, with an inset heat ring and a rounded rib handle, manufactured in Erie, Pennsylvania sometime between 1905 and 1907. It is both wondrous and a little scary that there are people who know this much about cast iron — but as a fellow history nerd, I’m grateful they exist.
The skillet was in pretty darn good shape to begin with, but since you only find hundred-year-old cookware once in a blue moon, I followed the lye-bath directions on the WAGS site to electrolyze all the gunk off.
It took a couple of dips and some scrubbing, but after about two weeks the water had turned black and thick as imperial stout. After a couple rounds of scrubbing with Dr. Bronner’s and some steel wool, I had a clean, beautiful bare iron pan.
The WAGS site suggested one seasoning coat of Crisco, but I’m a sucker for Serious Eats with their photo-heavy food-sciencey articles, so I used J. Kenji Lopez-Alt’s method. The results were stunning:
Once I’d got the antique skillet back in working order, I took our Martha Stewart pan that had served us loyally for the last dozen years, and stuck it in the lye bath for a couple of weeks. Unlike the antique, we’d ridden old Martha hard and put her away wet, and she was covered in a gunky black crust that no amount of scrubbing could remove. That lye bath, though:
The gunk just sheeted off in 2-inch hunks. I was very impressed. I forgot to take a picture of Martha before we passed her on to some friends, but once that stuff was off, she looked like she’d just walked out of the store: perfectly clean, gunmetal-grey iron.
The experts say that the older skillets are a higher-quality iron, and that they were polish-ground to a fine finish — and I certainly saw the difference between the old skillet and Martha, who was rough and pebbly, even after I’d taken a steel drill-brush to hear a couple years ago. When you run your fingers over the cooking surfaces, you immediately notice the antique skillet’s superior quality. It’s lighter, too — the antique is an inch or two wider than Martha, but she’s lighter. There’s a lot of debate over whether or not this makes that much of a difference when you’re cooking, and I probably have some sunk-cost fallacy / confirmation bias going on, but I feel like the Erie definitely cooks better. Still, for me, it’s more about putting a family treasure back in action. Allez Cuisine!
Over the Holiday break, I took some time and helped Paul overhaul paulsizer.com from the creaky old custom site I’d built him nearly a decade ago. WordPress has really upped their game since those days, and with the help of a theme and some custom CSS, the site is both functional and pretty darn good-looking, just in time for some big design news.
We had an absolutely wonderful week kicking off both projects: We were generously invited to the soft opening of Zazio’s to be one of the first taste-testers of the new menu, and last night we got invited to the Kalamazoo Wings home game where they launched Paul’s mark as part of their new “Futuristic” design. The game, second in a series against the Toledo Walleye, was chippy right from the faceoff, with several fights throughout the night. Goalie Joel Martin was the star of the show, handling over forty shots on goal and only letting two in. The excitement lasted right till the final two minutes, when the Walleye pulled their goalie in an effort to catch up, but the Wings scored with a long empty-net goal from behind their defensive line. Three K-Wings goals in the third period, crowd on its feet — you really couldn’t ask for a better debut of a new jersey.
Plus, as a sweet bonus from the owners, Paul also got a customized authentic jersey of his own. It’s the same one the players wear, with the fight strap and everything. We may just make a sports fan of him, yet.
For the last several years, my hiking / paddling /skiing buddy R has been trying to get me to head up north with her during the winter for a skiing weekend. I always balked, thinking the driving would be bad, or that it’d be too far, or that the cabin would be too primitive (R likes to do things like spend an entire weekend living in a snow cave). This year, badly in need of a change of scenery, I finally took her up on her offer. She invited a few other folks along, and we had a great time of it.
The Michigan DNR has several dozen rustic cabins for rent, and after some hit-and-miss with the website, we ended up with one in Cheboygan State Park, one that we hoped would have a good view of Lake Huron. Boy, did we luck out:
Despite the 15F outdoor weather, the cabin was lovely inside, with four double-bunks, big wooden tables and chairs, hooks for hanging our food to keep the mice out of our packs, and a fat cast-iron woodstove that easily warmed the entire place. The DNR stocks the firewood, and previous travellers left matches and paper scraps, so we had no trouble keeping the fire going all weekend, banking it when we left (though after the first night we did have to institute a “whoever gets up to pee has to put a log on the fire” rule). A big hand-pump was ten feet to the left of the front door, and was somehow in perfect working order despite the freezing temperatures. The privy was fifteen steps to the right of the front door, and didn’t smell at all, because of the freezing temperatures.
The following morning we got up, fixed a giant breakfast, and then went out for some snowshoeing to the coast. The path was beautiful and bright with reflected sunlight, and pine boughs laden with ice made tiny rainbows wherever you looked, clattering like tiny windchimes.
The panorama is stunning — if you look really closely you can see the Mackinac Bridge faintly in the center left, and the Nine Mile Lighthouse on the right. We couldn’t dally long, though, because the wind coming off the lake knifed right through our clothes. It was much more pleasant behind the first row of dunes.
We had to hike all our food and gear in and out, and R had the foresight to bring a kid’s snow sled along, which allowed us to bring an unholy amount of food and drink in with us. Fie upon freeze-dried food! Nothing but the best on this trip, and with six women along, we had roughly 300% more food and 500% more drink than what we actually needed.
The second day we decided to head up to Tahquamenon Falls in the UP and do some hiking around there. The falls are, if possible, even more spectacular in the wintertime. We did a short hike along the river and were astonished to see a pair of river otters sporting in a clearing, leaping on and off the ice into the black water.
The spray from the falls freezes on everything, forming icicle waterfalls and bending enormous trees over like weeping willows.
As the short day gathered into night, we had an excellent meal at the pub, and then headed back to the cabin. The following day held a bit of hiking, but was mostly a long slog home through foul weather. Though the return trip was pretty rough driving, the overall success of the trip inspired most of us to make it an annual occurrence.
Last weekend, Paul and I and hiking buddy R decided to make a short day trip out to Starved Rock State Park in Oglesby, IL. The main purpose of the trip (aside from burning off some of the Christmas cookies) was to scout the park to see if it’d be a good place to start introducing my nieces, currently ages 3 and 5, to hiking.
Since we were driving right past Chicago on a Sunday morning, we thought it’d be foolish to not stop in Chinatown and get some high-quality dim sum:
When we first arrived, we found that the flooding in Missouri had not been isolated; the Illinois river had jumped its banks and covered most of the park.
Judging by the online map, my initial thought was that the nice little loop to the west of the main lodge would be a good starter trip for the kids. It was indeed a scenic trip, past several small but beautiful canyons, and ending in the spectacular St. Louis Canyon, all bedecked with ice:
But there were about a thousand stairs to get there, far too many for little legs. Nobody wants to lug a wailing toddler up the equivalent of 20 flights of stairs. The middle section from Lovers’ Leap to Wildcat Canyon was pleasant enough, following along the Illinois river and past another beautiful waterfall, but the trek back up to the bluff trail involved another monster staircase, and by the time we got to the top we were all sure we’d made short work of all the shumai and taro puffs we’d devoured that morning.
At this point we only had a few hours of daylight left, so we hiked back to the parking lot and drove out to the easternmost set of trails: Ottawa Canyon, Kaskaskia Canyon, and Illinois Canyon. We were not disappointed:
Now this was more like it. Far away from the bustle of the main lodge, with the cold and distance keeping most of the other hikers at bay, we had the place pretty much to ourselves. Here we got to take our time fording the little creeks and admiring the myriad ice structures:
The creek ice amazed us with its odd geometry. Spikes, needles, planes, odd rhomboid holes the size of a silver dollar.
But the neatest structures weren’t the chandeliers of icicles or the beautiful fractal shelf ice, it was these wonderfully weird ice spheres:
We saw them in several places in the park: perfectly smooth, usually perfectly clear, formed by water dripping down from the heights above. They looked like carpets of huge frog eggs.
The waterfall in Ottawa Canyon is enormous, and we only had to compete with one other person for its full attention, so we spent a lot of time there. I’m grateful to have friends and a husband who think dorking around taking pictures of ice in a canyon in 30F weather constitutes fun.
The best part about this section is that there are no stairs at all, and the hike back to Ottawa Canyon is maybe only half to three-quarters of a mile, and there’s interesting stuff to look at and climb on the whole way.
These sandstone cliffs look oddly like the sea caves we saw at Pictured Rocks this summer. I wonder if this whole area was submerged by the river at one point.
After leaving Ottawa Canyon, we had just enough time left to check out Kaskaskia Canyon, and it was equally good. A short hike brought us to this gorgeous place:
Again, no stairs, no obstacles, just a shallow stream and plenty of logs to jump over. The nieces are gonna love it here.
Darkness was encroaching fast, so we didn’t make it to Illinois Canyon. Ah well, all the more reason for us to come back.
This was a really fantastic trip. We started from Kalamazoo at 7am, dallied in Chicago for a delicious breakfast, spent a full five hours hiking around, ate dinner in Joliet and still made it home by 11pm. If you’re in the mood for a great outdoors roadtrip this winter, wait for a break in the weather and give Starved Rock a try. I can’t wait to bring the nieces back here in the springtime and see the whole place turning green.
Way back in April, I had the opportunity to visit South Carolina, and since it was my first roadtrip to the South, I decided to make the most of it. After getting business out of the way in Columbia, I drove north to Durham, NC to visit my dear old buddy Virus and his wife Andrea. For two days they escorted me through all the best that Raleigh-Durham has to offer: the Duke botanical gardens:
The local ballpark (alas, no game!):
The Durham bull (strong like bull!):
I had a fantastic time, and I loved every minute in Durham. The restaurants are amazing, and there’s so much going on; I can see why folks love the area so much.
After my stay with Matthew and Andrea, I started the next leg of my journey and picked up my buddy Sumana, who had taken the train down from New York City to join me in some hiking at Great Smoky Mountains National Park.
I tried AirBNB for the first time and was very pleased with the accommodations: the cabin where we stayed had a porch that overlooked a wide, ferny creek, and I got to spend the post-hiking evenings reclining in a slat-backed rocking chair, reading comic books and listening to the water rushing over moss-covered rocks. Heaven.
We hiked two trails up different sides of Mount LeConte, Alum Cave (which was due to close for repairs the following day, so we lucked out!) and Rainbow Falls, both of which were spectacular and left me craving more. I’m hoping to return here one day to hike the mountain again and stay overnight at the LeConte Lodge, which sounds like an absolute perfect vacation for me. Plus, llamas.
After dropping Sumana back in Asheville with a friend for lunch, I headed home, narrowly missing a distillery tour in Bardstown. Ah well, all the more reason to return soon! I made up for the loss by picking up some fantastic bourbon at the less-than-picturesque Liquor Barn, then treated myself to an excellent Cajun meal in Lexington before driving the final leg home, Art Bell keeping me awake all the way.
I used to hate long drives, but this turned out to be a really fun time, and I think I’ll do more in the future.
I’ve been doing a lot of internal work lately, and in the process came across this Tim Ferris podcast where he interviews Brené Brown, author of Daring Greatly. I’ve heard the “Man in the Arena” quote many times, enough that it feels hackneyed and overwrought by now. But Brown’s reaction to it, during a tough place in her own career, was really arresting to me, so I thought I’d share:
“For me, daring greatly — that quote from Theodore Roosevelt, I even got teary-eyed when you were reading it. It was a life-changer for me. It was right after the TEDX Houston talk had gone viral […] and as you can imagine, all these online stories had online comments. And my husband and my therapist were like, “Don’t read the comments.” And so I read all the comments one day. […]
“We all have the shame triggers[…] that you could overhear someone saying about you that would be so painful and so hurtful that you don’t know if you could survive it. Most of us have those things. And so for me up until that point, those things really dictated my life. I was like, “Look, I’m going to engineer this career to kinda be small and safe. I’m going to play right under the radar because I’m not willing to put myself out there and be criticized. But the problem with staying small is that it’s always served up with resentment and pissed-offed-ness. Because we’re not using our gifts, we’re not in our power, and there’s always a price for that.
“And so to me, when I read that quote — when I looked at the comments, they were like, ‘Of course she embraces imperfection, what choice would you have if you look like her,’ ‘I feel sorry for her husband and kids,’ ‘More botox, less research,’ and ‘You need to shake loose ten pounds before you can talk about being worthy.’ Just like, really hurtful, shitty stuff. And then like thirty minutes after reading all that I came upon that quote from Theodore Roosevelt. And in that moment, what I realized was, ‘You know what? I do want to live a brave life. I do want to live in the arena.’ And if you’re going to live in the arena, the only guarantee is you will get your ass kicked.
“The second thing is that daring greatly is being vulnerable, so when you ask yourself, “Did I dare greatly today?” The big question I ask is that, ‘When I had the opportunity, did I choose courage over comfort?’ […]
“One of the things that really turned my life upside down […] in my research […] was the difference between healthy striving for excellence, and perfectionism. I’ve always been perfectionistic about my stuff, and what I learned in my research was that perfectionism is very outwardly defined. It’s dictated by ‘What will people think?’ and healthy striving is internally motivated.
“Perfectionism is a defense mechanism, classically. which says that ‘If I live perfect, love perfect, work perfect and accomplish perfectly, I can reduce or minimize shame, blame, criticism and judgement’. And so we carry this thing around thinking it’s protecting us, but what it’s really doing is keeping us from being seen. So when I ask myself personally, ‘Have I dared greatly today?’ sometimes for me the question was, ‘Was I enough?’ or ‘Am I trying to get everything perfect so that I can somehow think I’m mitigating criticism and judgement?'”
You can hear the entire interview here.
A whole ten years in the making, SPQR Blues is finally being collected in graphic-novel format — as long as we can all help fund Carol Burrell’s Kickstarter, that is!
If you haven’t already read the comic (get started here!), here’s a bit about the story:
SPQR Blues is set in ancient Rome in the years leading up to the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. I (aka Klio) began the webcomic ten years ago as part of relearning to draw after recovering from repetitive stress and nerve injury.
Ordinary guys need epics too: Rather than the more typical Roman epic about gladiators and orgies and imperial assassinations (not that there’s anything wrong with that), it’s about the lives of ordinary people in the city of Herculaneum, Pompeii’s less famous neighbour–though there are the occasional murders, mysteries, banquets, and battles. Many of the characters are based on people who really lived in the town. Our hero Marcus Antonius Felix, the self-described descendent of a slave of the much more famous Marcus Antonius, arrives jobless, homeless, and missing his clothing, but carrying a lot of secrets. The first job he gets (after putting on some clothes) is as bodyguard for a wealthy teenage girl in danger, Petronia Iusta.
Subsequently: intrigue, murders, flashbacks, goddesses, star-crossed lovers, ursine intervention, more misplacement of clothing, heroic accountants, gambling, slave-dealing, swords, sandals, earthquakes, seven emperors, and a jug of wine.
On top of being a fantastic artist, writer, and editor, Carol’s an all-round super person. Please take a second and have a look at her comic, and if you’re able, make a pledge!
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