(no subject)

Sadly, I still haven't managed to post much about my trip to the Keweenau Peninsula in May of last year. It was a really great trip, and it felt so good to be away from everything but my car and my dog for a while. I'm going to do something like it again this year if I can.

I drove north from Kenosha after work and kept going until it got too dark, and I got too tired. I stopped in a farm field near Pound, Wisconsin, and not too far from a marker at the 'half way north' point: the 45th parallel, 3107.47 miles from the equator, and from the north pole. (I have a picture of that too, of course.)

The next morning, I drove on, arriving at the base of the Keweenau Peninsula, just west of L'anse. There I found the Bishop Baraga shrine that I'd read about in Roadside America.

Bishop Baraga was a priest and missionary who travelled all around Lake Superior, through both modern United States and Canada, by foot on snowshoes. He established five major missions around the lake, and became fluent in native languages, writing a dictionary that is still in use.

Here's a close up of the statue that is the shrine's center point.



I've got to say; to me, he looks like he's ready to start some shit with a vampire. I like it.

Though officially, this is The Shrine of the Snowshoe Priest, I refer to this site as "The Shrine of the Spider-priest". To see why (and for a cute picture of my dog), look behind the cut. Those pictures aren't quite as nice as the one above (they're kind of snap-shotty), but you can at least get context for the statue from them.

( These pictures aren't quite as nice as the one above, but you can at least get context for the statue from them. )

(no subject)

The drain cleaning service that our handyman sent over to resolve the backing-up of waster water into our basement came by with a big chrome machine that looked like it came from 1940 to clean out the pipes. I commented on how neat the machine looked and he told me that, though it was built in '95, it follows basically the same design that's been used for probably fifty years.

That bit of conversation lead to me spending about forty-five minutes talking to him about manufacturing in Chicago, the basements and secret places of the old buildings in that city that he's worked in, how Chicago managed to maintain its place in society while rust belt cities like Detroit, Gary, and Pittsburgh fell, and about abandoned buildings that I'd been to and what they were like, and the history of the raising of street levels in Chicago that made first-floors into basements and how he'd stood on what used to be a sidewalk seventy years ago that was now below street level.

It was awesome!

And he cut through all the roots that were blocking the drain too, so our basement will stop flooding when we wash clothes!

And for bonus points, as we talked about how roots grow into pipes and what that means for their integrity, he made a comment about how trees are 'living things, struggling for life like everything else'.

This was all just conversation that I totally did not expect from someone who looked younger than me and, well, kind of mainstream. Maybe I don't give the general population enough credit. He was so interesting to talk to that I'd actually kind of like to see him again. Maybe go exploring or something. Maybe I should have asked him.

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I put in for time off for the New York trip. I think it will be fun.

This weekend will consist of Moira and I going to visit anarchist_nomad while he's in country on Saturday (which happens to be the date of our anniversary! Whee!) and, on Sunday, a bicycle trip around downtown Chicago for me. At least, that's the plan as of now. Anybody want to go with?