We Took the Dog to Chicago

Chicago turned out not to be very accessible for canine tourists, alas.

Luna did seem to enjoy walking the city streets, other than when the noisy "L" was passing overhead. So the big kid got to do a decent amount of sightseeing just by wandering the streets around our hotel and letting Luna sniff all the fascinating urban sniffs:

And although the W Chicago tacked on an absolutely ridiculous $125 pet fee for our two-night stay (which I did figure out in advance of our reservation, but also close enough to it that I'd already reached the "throw money at the problem until it goes away" stage, meaning we decided to just eat the cost rather than rework our entire Chicago itinerary), Luna--and the rest of us!--were super comfy there:

I'm pretty sure this is her first-ever elevator ride!

It's a lousy photo AND I nearly dropped my phone out the window, but look! We could see the Sears Tower from our room!

I know it's not the Sears Tower anymore, but also it is.

It turns out, though, that Chicago's two biggest tourist parks, Millennium Park and Maggie Daley Park, aren't really parks at all, but "parks," and dogs aren't allowed.

Which, before you accuse me of not doing my research beforehand--y'all, I ALWAYS do my research. You shouldn't have to go to a park's FAQ page and dive down to point number five out of seven just to find out whether or not dogs are allowed. 

Anyway, here's us having sneaked Luna over to The Bean regardless of the rules, sitting her down for our family photo:

It was also honestly too hot for dogs there, anyway. Luna only reluctantly drinks water when she's out and about, so we always have to keep an eye on how hot she's getting. Here's her illegally getting a little shade under the Bean!

And don't think that you can just walk across the beautiful pedestrian bridge and go visit Maggie Daley park instead, because dogs aren't allowed there, either! I mean, we definitely did walk Luna across the pedestrian bridge, but we definitely weren't supposed to. We didn't go all the way into Maggie Daley park, though, and somehow we managed to stay out of tourist jail.

I probably would have been very bummed if all the rest of us haven't already been to Chicago several times and seen most of the tourist sites in the area we stayed in. And knowing ahead of time that the "parks" weren't parks actually probably would have been a good enough reason to change our reservation and rebook a hotel in a different, dog-friendlier location.

But ah, well. It's not every dog that can say that they've sniffed the Sears Tower!

Now to leave Luna and her kid back in the hotel while the rest of us go to a concert!

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We Took the Dog to Pullman National Historical Site

I didn't actually know that this national park site existed? 

I don't know how I missed it, considering that once upon a time I literally put it on my very own map of national park sites that host Junior Ranger badges, AND it's right there in my national parks passport book as one of only two national park sites in Illinois, but still. That just meant that it was a fun surprise to notice it as I was planning our itinerary from Indiana Dunes to Chicago.

And once I've noticed it, of course we're going to go!

Alas that Luna couldn't actually go inside the Pullman National Historical Site's Visitor's Center, so thank goodness for nearby coffee shops with outdoor seating. My partner and one of the kids went off with Luna for lattes, while the other kid and I took our passport books inside for some learning!

This is probably one of the most educational national park sites that I've been to, as before we walked in I knew pretty much nothing about Pullman other than their train cars existed, and now?

I have OPINIONS.

So, the Pullman cars were cute and fancy, which is the one thing that I already knew:

But the Pullman GUY?!?

Just, whoah. 

So, okay. Pullman did his thing and got lots of money. And then he was all, "Hey, it sucks how when I pay these people money I no longer have that money. And it also sucks that for some reason I'm not in charge of every aspect of their daily lives, from what their houses look like to what they watch at the movie theatre. If only there was a way to fix both of those problems simultaneously..."

To solve all his problems of not having all the money and not being a megalomaniac, Pullman built himself a company town/utopia and got a bunch of his workers to live there. For the low, low price of rent that was vastly more expensive than rent in the surrounding neighborhoods, the Pullman townspeople got to have their living spaces legislated to fit Pullman's ideals. Rather than a utopian town, he basically invented the world's first HOA with him as its benign dictator?

Which sucked enough, but then when economic hardship hit and there weren't enough train riders to keep up Pullman's preferred level of profit, he instead made up the difference by reducing his employees' wages but NOT their overpriced rent. Things then proceeded as you might well have expected:

Who knows what might have happened if there hadn't been so much internal racism within the movement, and if Grover Cleveland hadn't trumped up a reason to force the strike to end and punish the leaders, but here were the good news/bad news results:

Look for the union label, Friends!

It also appears that I'm not the only person who came away from this history with the determination that I wouldn't spit on Pullman if he were on fire:

Concrete and steel rails and lead coffins, indeed!

But then there's also the thing where he hired formerly enslaved people as porters and waiters and valets, and that was actually really great because it paid decent wages (if you weren't also paying rent in his company town...), it utilized skillsets that translated pretty well from what many of the employees had been required to do while enslaved, so it lessened the learning curve while helping them transition into a better economic position, and most importantly in my eyes, it let the employees travel, giving them access to more cultural diversity and geographic options. 

So I dunno. It's complicated.

The kid and I did all the cool stuff in the museum-- 

That's a Polish-English dictionary on the left, and an employee's logbook on the right. It was interesting to see in several exhibits how the employees negotiated cultural and language differences. 

Then we went outside to check out the historical buildings, many of which are still in the process of being restored:

Along the way, we spotted some celebrities!

As everything did on this trip, our walkabout quickly turned into a Luna photoshoot:

She's just too photogenic not to!

It was a little weird that the Pullman National Historical Site doesn't own any actual, you know, Pullman cars, but it was cool how they had the old train tracks marked off and some of them turned into green spaces:

As far as the gift shop, I dragged myself away for the low, low price of just two passport stamp sets (the 2022 set features Pullman!) and a postcard with a Eugene V. Debs quote on it for the younger kid to put up in her dorm room. You're never safe from the insidious spread of socialism!

Now, onto our next destination!

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We Took the Dog to the Beach

My partner and I are planning a big trip to meet up with our older kid in New Zealand this winter after her study-abroad program ends, so that's where our discretionary budget and disposable income are both going for the next few months. But still, I wanted to take some kind of trip this summer, because at this point, and especially with the older kid griping about how she'd missed the deadline for summer internships this year and plans to not make that mistake next year, every summer together could be our last summer all together. 

So what might my darling children want to do for a summer vacation that's possibly our last summer vacation for who knows when? Not express their gratitude that their parent wants to plan a vacation based on their preferences when nobody ever planned a vacation with her preferences in mind when she was a kid, that's for sure! Kids these days, am I right? Anyway, they mostly wanted to fight about it. The older kid really wanted a beach vacation that included her dog, but the younger kid hates beaches the most and would never willingly step onto a beach and do we not know that she is allergic to the sun and of course she does not need Vitamin D because she is "built different," etc. The younger kid wanted to go to a concert in Chicago but concerts, you may know, are not typically dog-friendly and so the older kid would like to understand how could we possibly be so cold-hearted as to so much as consider a vacation that did not include THE DOG.

Fortunately, after 15 years of this kind of crap, I can easily slash my way through these disagreements using my favorite go-to technique, fittingly entitled Please Neither of Them. In this case, Pleasing Neither of Them consisted of a couple of days at the Indiana Dunes National Park, during which the younger kid mostly hung out in the AirBnb or wandered around doing her own thing while the rest of us played at the beach with the dog, followed by a couple of days in Chicago, where the older kid and the dog mostly hung out in the hotel or walked around doing their own thing while the rest of us went to the Cavetown/Mother Mother concert.

The secret to Pleasing Neither of Them is that I personally LOVE both vacation ideas, so a Win/Lose for each of the brats is always a Win/Win for me!

On the way up north, I even got us to stop off for a long detour in Lafayette so we could check a few spots off in our Indiana Culinary Trails passports--I am grinding for that wine tumbler! 

Check out those clouds!

I'm a little mad that I ended up forgetting to order the Famous Fruit Drink from The Igloo on account of 1) the clouds were GLORIOUS that day, thanks to Hurricane Beryl remnants, 2) one of the kids is obsessed with clouds, and 3) the Igloo's parking lot had a tree blocking the "best" cloud so while my partner ordered and waited for our food I walked with the kids down the street to a better spot, thus forgetting to order the fancy juice I'd wanted to bring with us to our AirBnb. 

Ah, well, at least the kid has a dozen more beautiful cloud photos on her ipod to show for our efforts, and we did not forget the most important order, a pup cup for Luna!

We hit up a little more Lafayette local color--

--then finished up the rest of our drive to the lake. 

When my older kid and I took Luna to Indiana Dunes for the first time a few years ago, I LOVED the AirBnb we'd stayed at, so much so that I literally planned this vacation around its open dates. It's centrally located, sure, just minutes from all the beaches, includes ample parking, two bedrooms, and a complimentary bottle of wine, has a fenced-in backyard, and is comfortable and safe, but most importantly, especially to the younger kid, whose Netflix watchlist is longer than mine, it includes Netflix and Disney+, and y'all KNOW how we feel about streaming services! So the younger kid hardly acted put-upon at all during this leg of our trip, not when she could settle in to binge the entirety of Dead Boy Detectives while the rest of us hit up the Indiana Dunes National Park Visitor Center for parking passes and passport stamps and then took Luna to the beach:

She still loves it!

This trip, she discovered the additional joy of chasing seagulls--they just keep coming back for more!--and with three of us to take turns running her to exhaustion, there was also plenty of time for everyone else to do their lovely beach lounging:

Don't you love her doggy life jacket? It's a Ruffwear Float Coat, size medium. 

Below is the face of a dog who woke up from a nap to find themselves buried to the neck in sand! Somehow we got ourselves the world's most patient dog...

Both days at the beach, Luna was so exhausted that she kept trying to lie down during the long walk back to the car, and then she slept like a rock all evening while the rest of us ate take-out pizza and binged Netflix. I feel like I have taken most of my interior design ideas from the AirBnbs I've visited--that's how I learned about the joys of a ridiculously giant couch!--and from this one, I've sort of come away with the idea that wouldn't it be nice to have a TV in the family room. It was so cozy to all hang out on the couch and watch TV together in this AirBnb. But we also don't have anywhere in the family room at home to PUT a TV, if I'm being honest, nor anything to watch on it other than YouTube and library DVDs, sooo...

It WAS super cozy, though!

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I Read the English Heritage Book of Glastonbury Because the Spirit of a Medieval Monk Told Me To

English Heritage Book of Glastonbury by Philip Rahtz
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I wish I had read this book before I went to England, not after, because not a single person bothered to tell me about poor Richard Whiting, the final abbot of Glastonbury Abbey. During the Dissolution he was dragged across town and then up Glastonbury Tor and hanged, and THEN he was quartered and his head was mounted over the gateway of the Abbey!

Apparently people thought he'd hidden treasure in the Abbey? But the thing is that later they literally DID find a ton of treasure in the walls, but poor elderly Abbot Whiting probably didn't have anything to do with it.

Fun facts like these kept me fascinated by this history of Glastonbury, and I enjoyed reading the history through the lens of the texts and archaeological evidence that vividly illustrate it. I really liked the Lady Chapel when I visited, for instance, and it was cool to read that this spot is also the location of St. Joseph's Well, which is likely pre-Normanic and possibly the very first thing ever built on this site. 

Lady Chapel crypt, but the part with St. Joseph's Well is out of frame because I didn't know it was important, damnit.

I wish I'd known that when I was standing next to it--I would have taken a photograph! It's a bummer that the on-site resources didn't tell me all this interesting info, so thank goodness for archaeologists who write books for English Heritage!

The literal illustrations are also excellent, and now I get to pine for my own print of the works of Judith Dobie, who apparently has the coolest-ever job of creating illustrations of historical England. I wish *I* knew how to watercolor Neolithic long barrows! 

Embed from Getty Images

My teenager, who's very into Arthurian legends, really wants Dobie's print of the exhumation of Arthur and Guinevere from this book--you can actually see in the illustration both the monk who picks up Guinevere's golden hair only to watch it disintegrate in his hands (doh!) AND the monk who finds the lead cross that super conveniently is inscribed something along the lines of "Here Lies the Definitely Very Real Not Fake King Arthur."

Even though Rahtz is very much NOT a fan of the Arthurian legends like these that surround the place, which is a bummer because I think the legends are the most fun and that's why I went to visit Glastonbury myself, he still devotes time to mentioning them and other woo theories, including some woo theories that I hadn't heard about! I know about King Arthur and ley lines and Joseph of Arimathea, etc., but I did not know that in the early 1900s a wealthy artist also decided that the entire Zodiac was recreated in the topology around Glastonbury. What Rahtz says about her is probably my favorite quote in the entire book:

When Mrs. Maltwood died, she left a considerable sum of money to further the understanding of her ideas. The Trust which administers this has taken the liberal view that understanding of the Zodiac will be achieved only by a wider understanding of the archaeology of Somerset; to this end many grants have been made to archaeologists in the area (including the present author), for which we must be thankful.

Lol!

This is rivaled by my second-favorite anecdote, that of the director of excavation in the early 1900s (what was with the early 1900s and its woo?!?), F. Bligh Bond, who decided that archaeology probably wasn't as good of a way to get at the truth as sacred geometry and automatic writing guided by spirits would be. I mean, of course! He effed up a BUNCH of stuff before the Church of England finally got wind of his shenanigans and fired him. Rahtz sums up his biography this way:

In 1926 he went to America, where he lectured on Glastonbury, and on his psychic techniques concerning the 'Company of Avalon.' He returned to England in 1936, and died, very much alone, in North Wales in 1945.

I did some more reading up on Bond because he sounds so weird, but nowhere else have I seen the fact that he died "very much alone." Like... Rahtz, you got a bone to pick with this guy? He's already dead--you don't have to keep punching him!

The book ends with some excellent suggestions for further readings and a thorough bibliography, both of which I've picked through. I'm especially interested in the "Myth and Legend" sources that Rahtz gamely includes despite his abhorrence, and the Bond book entitled The Gate of Remembrance: A True Story of Psychic Archaeology. I want to see for myself what bonkers stuff he wrote via his spirit monk!

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The Bookshelf Quilt Begins (with the Help of the Ginger Prince)

It has begun!

I usually only feel the lightning-quick passage of time at night when I'm trying to fall asleep, and I suddenly remember that both of my daughters will be going away to college in [insert exact number of days] and did I make enough of my time with them on this day that has just passed, surely not, I am wasting our precious time together and hey, I bet I will be SOOOOO sad when I drop them off, why don't I imagine what that will be like for a while, etc.

So yeah, that's a fun and easy way to fall asleep!

But helpfully, those intrusive thoughts took a quick little pass through my mind the other morning and I was suddenly struck with the thought of how MUCH MORE AWFUL it would be if I didn't even have the quilt I'd promised my daughter to give her when I dropped her off... and just like that, it was time to start the bookshelf quilt!

I'd also been psyching myself out by thinking that I'd probably have to figure out Foundation Paper Piecing to do cool bookshelf blocks, but to begin with I monkeyed around and pieced together some strips of scrap fabric to a neutral grey that I thought might make a good bookshelf background. I made a 10.5"x10.5" block that way, and liked it so much that I made another one. I put them next to each other, showed the kid, she freaking loved it, and all of a sudden the quilt became a LOT simpler!

Now the plan is to make the whole bookshelf from these simple bookshelf blocks, pretty much entirely from scraps and stash. I've already put in some sentimental fabrics, old Trashion/Refashion Show garments and scraps from multiple curtains, bits of novelty prints that the kids adored when they were small, etc., and on the whole it's just looking really cool so far. 

So obviously, when I had one whole shelf's worth of blocks, I had to set them up on a sunny bit of floor and photograph them together!

And then this guy showed up:

And then, to be honest, I just got really distracted taking cute photos of him in the sun:

He's just so beautiful, with his eyes that match his fur that matches the floor in the sun!

But you can kind of see the quilt blocks, right? They're the things under his cute little fluffity paws!

That orange batik stripe in the photo below used to be part of the curtains that hung in my bedroom when we brought his girl home for the first time. It's still some of the prettiest fabric that I've ever bought:

Aww, look! Now he's tearing them up, the little rascal! I put that grey strip in the middle of the block in the photo below to throw off the eye. I think it'll make it harder to pick out the repeat in the finished quilt:

Okay, he finally started getting bored/annoyed with me continually trying to get him to put his face in the sun:

And there you go--one whole shelf is done!

As I was laying these out, I realized that I could also make blocks that looked like stacks of books almost as easily, so I'll put some of those in there, too. I'd also like to have some blocks that have books leaning against each other, but I can't yet work out how to do those.

Could the answer be Foundation Paper Piecing, lol?

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I Read Caroline, Or, If Pa Ingalls Has No Haters In This World Then It's Time To Write My Obituary

Throwback to that time in 2014 that I slept in their backyard and then sat on their graves!

Caroline: Little House, Revisited by Sarah Miller
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Laura, Rose, their extended family and friends, and all their writings is one of my Special Interests, and I will never not be down to read anything concerning any of them. I am fascinated by the bits of fact that mix with their fiction, the bits of fiction that mix with their non-fiction, the hints at juicy family drama, and how palpably trauma informed their writings, their behaviors, and their relationships.

Also, I am Pa’s biggest hater, and I will happily see him trashed anytime!

I don’t necessarily love Caroline Ingalls, either--she messed up Laura nearly as badly as Pa did--but I see, perhaps because I, too, am a woman who had a childhood and has children, how her own childhood trauma informed her own behaviors and relationships, and I can’t make myself blame and shame her like I can Pa. Seriously, fuck you, Pa.

To that end, I kind of liked that Caroline was high-key annoying in this book. I firmly believe that she literally was an annoying person! Reading Laura’s fiction and non-fiction, I VERY much get the vibe that Caroline could have been exactly as introspective and contemplative as she was in this novel. To be fair, she was constantly left alone with multiple small children in a shack out in the middle of nowhere with no amenities and a ridiculous burden of menial labor--it reads totally real that she had nothing better to do with her mind than chew over her thoughts and feelings and hold up a mental microscope to her every bodily function. RIP, Caroline--you would have loved LiveJournal!

Throughout the book, I really enjoyed the small call-outs to the overall Ingalls history that a less-avid fan would breeze past: Carrie is always portrayed as smaller and frailer than the other children, and detailing all the miseries of a covered wagon journey full of privation and hardship during Caroline’s pregnancy with her goes a long way towards explaining why. Oh, and there’s also the time everyone got malaria when she was a baby and she nearly died of neglect and starvation!

Speaking of that road trip from Hell, I get why Miller would write Caroline as perceiving herself to have the agency to postpone that trip, because otherwise it’s just too depressing for words, but… I think the reality was really just too depressing for words! I do not think for a second that Charles would have postponed that trip for any reason, because he was a selfish pig and he wanted what he wanted exactly when he wanted it. I have read nothing about Pa, in Laura’s rose-colored fiction or in her more reality-based memoir or in what little we can find about him in other historical documents, that has painted him in anything but the most selfish and unflattering light. I loved all the small moments of resentment of Charles that Miller let Caroline feel, and it’s just too bad that I have also read nothing about Caroline that has ever painted her as anything but completely in control of her deportment at all times, because I would have loved to see her, all hopped up on pregnancy hormones, rip Charles to shreds just one time. I mean, for Christ’s sake, he bought window glass instead of food! He bought a big-ass plow instead of the land to use it on! The actual timeline of the sale of the Big Woods house and the Ingalls' various wanderings is unclear, but early on it was very clear that Gustafson was going to cut and run out on the mortgage. Charles moved himself, his pregnant wife, and two small children across the country IN A WAGON and had no Plan B! Like, it’s the 1800s--what if Gustafson had simply died?!? 

I can’t even with this guy.

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I Read Lies Across America Because I Love It When Other People Are Wrong

This log cabin is a lie!

Lies Across America: What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong by James W. Loewen
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I love little nitpicky bits of information, and I love tiny moments in history, so although I never really found my groove with this book, I did love learning all its little nitpicky bits of information and discussions of tiny moments in history.

I read the 1999 version of the book, not the updated 2019 version, so there is some outdated terminology that I hope has since been corrected, and I know for sure that there’s been positive progress in the depiction of some of these historical figures and events, as well. I was loaded for bear when I visited the Levi and Catharine Coffin State Historical Site recently, ready to fight for Catharine’s due representation, only to happily find that it’s already there! Most of my tour of the house was actually about Catharine’s work, since she was the one most often home with the freedom seekers, and the docent was well-prepared to be peppered with all of my Catharine Coffin questions.

The Wikipedia page for the Lincoln Birthplace National Historical Site, at least, also now also indicates the “symbolic nature” of the log cabin inside that weird mansion-like mausoleum they’ve got on their premises--

--and relates a short version of the shell game-like history of its logs that Loewen goes into more detail about, but I remember that when we went there as a family I still thought after reading the info and viewing the exhibit that it was an authentic cabin--not Lincoln’s cabin, but someone’s proper cabin!--so Loewen’s criticisms were still valid then.

I was interested to read Loewen’s retelling of one of my other Special Interests in History, that time in 1924 when the Ku Klux Klan took over nearly every political office in Indiana from school board up through the governor’s seat. Loewen’s 1999 version lacked some of the nuance of the story that we know now (shout-out to The Ku Klux Klan in the Heartland!), but I wonder if his synopsis is the first time that the tale had been told via mass publication? I don’t know if I really agree with his assessment that there ought to be some historical markers about the period, because it’s not really a place-based event--unless we want to put a marker at each of the Indiana Welcome Centers?--but I do wish that it was part of everyone’s general education, and especially part of Indiana history books. There are a few more important things kids can learn about in the fourth grade other than the Constitution Elm!

Parts of the book had some weirdly overt assertions of opinion that I’m not used to in a history text, and I also didn’t love most of Loewen’s first-person hijinks--he really did not need to write a passy-assy honest-to-god letter to the Jeffrey Amherst Bookshop omg how embarrassing. But hey, it’s closed now, so Loewen won!

After reading the book and looking at the pages that I’d marked, it’s clear that I was most interested, by far, in the lies that have been told me about the places I’ve lived, like Arkansas and Indiana, and the places I’ve visited. Combine that with the fact that this book took me a really long time to slog through, so much so that I only managed to finally finish it during a 54-hour power outage when I felt like I absolutely had to do SOMETHING productive sans electricity, and I think that what I really want is a Lies Across America travel guide! I want glossy photos, specific locations for each marker, and related interesting amenities, quirky things to see, and ideally even nearby sites with accurate information. Bonus points for corny on-theme buffet restaurants!

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