Tornado Country

The vast majority of people I know who grew up in the Midwest have strong memories of a shared childhood fear: tornadoes.  It wasn't until I'd left Minnesota that I discovered that other children did not have tornado drills in their schools, where they were asked to duck and cover under the desks or beneath the coat racks in the hallways.  Several classrooms in my high school were in an area of the school that was intended to be temporary, but ended up sticking around for several decades.  An amusing memory from high school includes a teacher announcing that although the official recommendation upon a tornado warning was that we duck under the desks, if we happened to see her running for the [solid, concrete] bathrooms we should feel free to follow.  In Minnesota, every child learns that if you are out driving in a tornado warning (or in sight of a funnel cloud, though I have never actually experienced this) you should get out of the car and lie in a ditch. 

I can't find the post offhand, but I think we've written here previously about the strange New Jersey use of sirens to signify snow days rather than tornado warnings.  In Minnesota (and Wisconsin) a piercing outdoor siren undeniably signals that it is time to drop everything, grab your pets and a radio, and run for the basement.  You may be stuck there for an hour or more, and you will spend much of the time contemplating whether you should huddle under the most structurally sound portion of the house and whether it would be safe to sneak upstairs and try [fruitlessly] to catch a glimpse of a funnel cloud.  This was a several times per summer ritual.  I remember once when my friends and I were out for a walk in the rain and the sirens went off.  We were several blocks from home, and instead of running for it we knocked on the door of an almost-stranger and asked to cower in their basement.  This seemed semi-normal at the time.  Because we grew up with a shared fear of tornadoes, and so did those people, and so did their children.

Supposedly they do have tornadoes out here in the East.  One weekend last summer my sister and her family were visiting us.  We had just enjoyed dinner in a restaurant, and Becky volunteered to take our overtired nephews outside to burn off a little energy while Jen and Sean and I finished up.  A bit later I followed them outside, and noticed a vaguely familiar green tinge to the sky.  On a whim, I glanced at my smartphone and actually bothered to check the "severe weather alert."  It said "tornado warning."  Becky and Jen and I shared a moment of muted panic.  There were no sirens announcing it; New Jerseyians were carrying on as if nothing was happening.  But you can't take years of Midwestern training out of us.  We rushed to a nearby supermarket and waited out the warning.  Sean, the non-Midwesterner among us, was a bit bewildered about what all the fuss was about.  Because he did not grow up with the constant specter of tornadoes hanging over his head.

There have been awful tornadoes in several parts of the country recently.  The worst hit places are far from either of our childhood homes.  But this weekend there was a tornado that touched down not far from my parents' home.  The pictures bring back strong childhood memories of that intense tornado fear.  I am thankful to live in a part of the world where this fear can be muted, and I am thinking of all the people in the South and Missouri and Minnesota who have lost loved ones or are dealing with damaged property.

Inequality

Well, I'm not the Wisconsin girl, so I will leave any lengthy commentary on that to her. But suffice it to say that this was a sad week in cheesehead land. "Where free unions and collective bargaining are forbidden, freedom is lost." -Ronald Reagan

This is what class war looks like. It's all about priorities, but I especially don't see why children/education/the future should suffer to provide tax breaks to billionaires. Eat the Future, in the words of Paul Krugman. Helping children, even poor children (maybe even especially poor children), improves our country in the long run.

You all know by now that I love nifty county-by-county maps. Today Becky found a new one for me. I don't love this one as much as some of the others and I'm honestly not entirely clear on what message the creators of it were trying to send, but it does show some interesting national trends. I grew up in what The Atlantic defines as Industrial Metropolises; Becky grew up in an Emptying Nest. I can't see the map well enough to figure out if our current county is an Industrial Metropolis or a Monied Burb, though I'm quite certain that our town would be defined as a Monied Burb. We have strong interest in moving to a Campus and Careers (or y'know, more Monied Burbs) county. I'm particularly intrigued by their definition of large areas of the upper Midwest as Emptying Nests. We've always heard about the Midwestern brain drain, although Brookings tells me that according to 2000 census data, in fact the Midwest has large numbers of young educated workers while the Northeast has large numbers of aging educated workers in addition to young educated workers.

And that's probably enough demographic nerdiness for you for one Friday evening. Happy Weekend!

Fun with Census Maps

Hello friends. I could come here today and moan and complain about the buckets of money that we are pouring into my eleven year old car. I was actually going to do that. But I did a lot of private moaning and complaining, to Becky, to my coworkers, to my family. And now I'm moving through the stages of grief into reluctant acceptance.

So instead I will share with you a fabulous New York Times creation that Becky found for me to play with. You might remember my fascination with interactive maps. This one is pretty cool, huh? I love how populated New York is, and therefore how clear the neighborhood distinctions are. By either income or race, there is such an obvious line where Harlem meets the Upper East and Upper West Sides. By pretty much any measure Manhattan below 110th street is so very unusual; it is richer, more educated, whiter, rent is higher, and an absolutely insane percentage of elementary kids go to private schools. The whole crazy I-95 corridor from Boston to DC has these peculiarities to some degree too. The map of percentage of people without high school diplomas has a swath of color across the southern United States, even more than I would have expected. Check it out! And then come back and tell me what exciting things you learn! I need something to distract me from my poor decrepit car and its health care bills....

The U-Pick Strawberry Experience

Last Saturday Becky and I did something we have been talking about doing for several years, but have never actually gotten around to doing together... strawberry picking! We almost missed it again this year because Becky had just returned from a work trip and we were tired, but I happened to go ahead and call the farm anyways and learned it was the last weekend of the season. So off we went into rural suburban New Jersey. This was our second experience sort of expecting to head off into nowhere for farmy goodness and ending up in a housing development. But there were strawberries!

Interesting difference in nomenclature: in NJ apparently this picking yourself phenomenon is known as PYO:

And here is photo-proof that we each picked some:




















Since we drove almost an hour each way to get there, we both figured we needed to stay long enough to make it worthwhile.... so we picked $20 worth of strawberries. Therefore we needed to brainstorm (and furiously google) all kinds of delicious things to do with fresh strawberries. We made strawberry shortcake, french toast (with homemade bread) with strawberries, and Becky ate them as salad dressing. We also have a freezerful of frozen berries, tops on and topless. It amounted to a very delicious weekend! Enjoy some pictures:





Please excuse my issues learning to format!

Yup, Still Alive

The last couple of weeks have been crazy busy.

First there was crazy prepping for our Midwestern Adventure.

Then Amanda came to visit.

Then we flew to WI and went to my mom's graduation. Check it out--my mom's all grown up! (She's the second from the right in that picture).

Then we hung out in FDL for a couple days. One day included a bike ride. The last time either Carrie or I rode a bike was a long time ago. The pain lasted for several days.

Then we drove to Minnesota. On the way there, we encountered more pro-life billboards than I've seen in the last 5 years. Twas a bit odd.

Then we embarked on crazy wedding planning, which included
2 brides
2 mothers of brides
1 reception food/wine tasting
4 florists
4 cake tastings
2 rehearsal dinner venues scoped out (yes, more food)
1 meeting with minister
1 hotel scoped out
1 invitation planned
6 bridal shop visits (separately)

and probably some other stuff I'm forgetting...in addition to 1 awesome engagement photo shoot. We've only gotten to see one picture so far, but I'm very excited for the rest!

It was possibly the most exhausting vacation ever, but I'm glad we got so much done. And after spending the last week stuffing my face with every food I could imagine, it's almost a relief to not have eaten until I felt sick today. Except for secretly there's a new carton of ice cream in the freezer and I want to eat the whole thing right now. Trying to save it for tomorrow...

Fall Festivities, Jersey Style

While we had a lovely time in Vermont two weeks ago, there was one important step that we missed: the buying of a pumpkin. Since this is one of Carrie's favorite fall activities, pumpkin purchases must occur in some sort of autumn-ish environment; a grocery store pumpkin is unacceptable.

Therefore, we went on a trek to less-urban New Jersey today in search of a pumpkin patch and other fall goodness. Sadly, I have still not come across anything outside the FDL area that remotely mirrors the awesomeness of The Little Farmer (if anyone from FDL is reading this, please send me a pumpkin cream cheese muffin!), but that has not stopped my quest for the closest imitation I can find. We set out today for two places (DePiero's Country Farm and Demarest Farms) that promised pumpkins, apples, hayrides, and a bakery.

Here are the things I would expect/hope for in such an establishment:

• Pumpkin patch (check)
  
• Apple orchard (check)
  
• Hayride (check)
  
• Fall baked goods (check)
  
• Caramel apples (sort of...see below)
  
• Corn maze (sort of)
  

Things that I am indifferent toward but was not surprised by:

• Refreshment stand/brat fry
• Petting zoo
• Face painting

Things that I would NOT expect to see but encountered today:

• European import grocery store
• Salad bar
  
• Butcher shop
• Seafood counter
  
• Potato pancakes (right next to the cider donuts!)
  
• Children's amusement park (including a dragon roller coaster)
  

I also was wholly unprepared for the crowds we encountered. New Jersey is just waaay too densely populated for its own good. The bakery at DePiero's had a "take-a-number" system in order to buy cider donuts; the trickiest part was getting through the crowd of people to get to the number dispenser on the counter. And an interesting observation: DePiero's had probably the whitest crowd of people I have ever seen anywhere in New Jersey, both customers and employees. While the area immediately around there is quite affluent and predominantly white, it's still only about a half-hour drive from the city, so the lack of racial/ethnic diversity surprised me a bit.

Back to food...I have discovered by observation here and in Vermont that caramel apples are not nearly so popular here as in Wisconsin, which I think is very, very sad. One of the places we went today had them, but they were A. in a cooler and B. wrapped in cellophane. Hell no. Caramel apples need to be stabbed in front of you and dipped in a vat of creamy, warm caramel, then rolled in delicious toppings and eaten as soon as possible. At worst they should be eaten when after the caramel reaches room temperature. But definitely not cold, and there definitely should be no cellophane wrapper involved. The northeast seems to be much more interested in candy apples, but I can't for the life of me figure out why someone would prefer a hard sugar coating over creamy caramel.

Sadly, there are no pictures from today's outing because I realized after we were already out and about that the camera was out of batteries. And that's really a shame because I would have liked a picture of us walking over the Garden State Parkway to get to a farmstand to contrast with the pictures of walking over Quechee Gorge in Vermont. Oh well.

Man, I want a caramel apple...