Saturday Visit

Yesterday, we took a trip to Pittsfield to visit our friends Liz and Anthony. Their son Kingston was born in March but he's nearly the size of Tua. The following pictures sum up the afternoon's events. Kingston was napping for most of the time and we took these in between his nap and his mid noon lunch. This afternoon we are letting Tua catch up on ZZZZs and we are catching up on housekeeping we've put off. In light of the weather, we have elected to not refer to this as spring cleaning. Kingstons shirt by the way says "give peas a chance".

Under Watch

Ten inches of wet heavy snow fell outside our house on Thursday. The novelty of snow this late into spring is matched only by the eerie feeling that comes with the flat light of a wintry 5:30 dawn. Despite the current snow depth and the pending winter storm forecast for Sunday, spring is beginning to make an appearance on the face of the days events. The nights are certainly shorter and animals we haven't seen since October are beginning to appear. On my way to the car this morning, I crossed paths with a disoriented field mouse. I imagine it was trying to find its way into the warmth of the basement.
The topic of weather is usually one reserved for surface conversation or dinner tables at which only neutral speech is allowed, or in the instances of this blog, when weather events appear with such intensity and force, the lives of those living in their path are altered. I am making an exeption to this today in particular because it is very rare that New England observes a spring in which the snowfall total exceeds the total received in the winter months. This has not happened yet, but it appears that the storm on Sunday may yeild snow measured by the foot. In Boston, it is likely to be all rain. For this reason, the Boston Marathon authority announced this moring that it will not be postponing the event (an option it had entertained as late as last evening) and that racers are to prepare for cold, wet conditions. In Vermont however, we have put away our hopes for an early spring and are sharpening our shovels for the next event.

Firsts

Tua officially laughed for the first time today. Bug claimed to have heard her laugh on Monday but after hearing her tonight, Monday's offering was cast off as a chortle. The laugh came after a period of tickling her toes and probably was prompted less by my series of blonde jokes than by my imitation of a frog.

We arrived back to a snowy New England last night at 6pm. Tua slept for the whole trip, save for the twenty minute bus ride from the terminal to the parking deck.

Field Report (monday morning)

An hours labor.
There is no soil in New England like this. This clump of sod I am holding is a microcosm of organic productivity. It's what makes agriculture work here better than anywhere else in the world.
Dormant ground, compacted by months of rain and wind, is made vaible within seconds with a fifteen tooth chisel-plow towed behind the sizable machine pictured below.

"The future is Ethanol." Danny Meeker, Bug's distant cousin lectured me for a half hour this morning about the economics of corn fuel. He represents the new generation of farmers who are jumping into the renewable energy markets, ethanol and biodiesel, like ducks to water. Most of the farmers I've spoken with this weekend are a generation older than he and some see an end in sight. Here, I wish him the best on his investments.

Today is our last full day in Illinois. Reports back home in Vermont indicate more snow than when we left. Tua is slightly under the weather but very happy in the current surroundings.

Four Dollar Corn

Tua (anne geddes take)

Bug and Tua

(Above photos courtesy of Bug's sister Cydil. She posesses the eye of an artist and the patience for photoshop.)

I have never paid as much attention to commodity prices as I probably should. My meager recollection of the last six months of market furtures as well as my knowledge of current standings is put to the test whenever I come out to central Illinois. Here, the price of corn is as viable a dinner conversation topic as familial statistics (deaths, births, marriages) or the weather. Tonight over angelfood cake and strawberry cram, there was half a dozen conversations going on at once. The home of Mr. and Mrs. Lawrence Whiteford (Bug's maternal grandparents) is normally buzzing with activity any time family are in town, but this was the busiest I had ever seen it. At the center of the room was Elisona watching her father with a new toy, a lawnmower that blew bubbles. This toy proved to be one of the saving graces of the evening, mesmerising Ellie and distracing her from the apparant intense pain of erupting molars. On one side of the room watching Ellie, was Bug gently rocking Tua back into a deep sleep. As she rocked, she was halfway in and out of a conversation with her grandmother. They appeared to be discussing something involving Tua's sleep habits, but from where I sat, I couldn't make it out. Their dialogue was drowned out by a conversation on the south wall of the living room between three individuals who were discussing the price of corn as well as the state of events, both local and global. Here is a fragment of the conversation:


"Did you here about the guy from Havana who signed the contract with Monsanto for 400 acres of seed corn and then turned around and sold his futures at 4.11$? Come to find out that his neighbor was going to plant pop corn on either side of him."

"What did he do?"

"Why. he called up Monsanto and asked if there was any way they would release him from his obligation and well they said no, it was in the fine print and he'd have to find some way to come up with the corn."

"Oh, my."

"There sure is a lot of legalise in that fine print."

"Yep. Did you see what oil didn't drop more than 4 cents even after Iran released those British?"

"Well, I knew it wasn't going to drop too much. It never drops too much before Easter, what with all the driving and all. They say travel is up 38 percent this year."

"How'd you make out with that dent in the shed?"

The voices on the couch rose and fell with great intensity throughout the evening. But that particular conversation was not the most interesting. At one end of the dinner table sat the majority of the women. In stark contrast to the men on the couch, whose verbal sport resembled a very fine game of table tennis, the conversation at the table was Wimbleton. The topic was the impending arrival of a new cousin, and all things pertaining to this event were bantered about faster than I could keep up with.
I was at the other end of the dinner table. I had neither the IQ for the topic at the couch, nor the emotion for the one at the table so I sat with the expecting dad. I gave him some small crumbs of wisdom that I've managed to scrape together from my three months in the game. It's not much so far but its growing and I find that my experience as a father is a commodity that I'll gladly share with anyone who cares to ask.
And if you're wondering about the title of this post, let me give you an assignment. Look up the price of corn a year and a half ago. Now look up the price of October 07 corn. When you've done that, google the term "Ethanol" and "renewable energy". Spend some time on these topics and after about three weeks, you too might be qualified to sit in on a conversation in Illinois or Iowa and hold your own.

Illini Wit

With the Patriarch.
With GrandMotherVan.
Tua is rocked to sleep with a Swedish nursury ryhme, courtesy of great-grandmother Whiteford.

Cookies for Breakfast
Flight Fancy


Observances

1. Getting to an airpport three hours early is very helpful when travelling with children.

2.Tua and airline flight policy get along amicably. She didn't set off any alarms in security and the TSA even said she was good looking.

3. Tua will not rest until she reaches a destination.

4. Albany airport has the best parking fares around. Five bucks a day, every day.

4. Detroit Metro airport looks like a great place to kill time in. (It appears to be run too efficiently, though. In the five minutes we were there, I saw no one waiting.)

5. Sitting in a seat over a turboprop when travelling with an infant will do two things. It will drown out any cry made by the infant and it also generates enough vibration to put the infant to sleep. In our case, Tua was too fascinated by the turbulence to be affected by anything else. No cries or shreiks, just an occasional look of terror as the plane would rise or drop suddenly.

6. Arriving at Bloomington (illinois) airport is like walking into a roomful of people you think you know and having all of them look at you as if they have seen you before. It is the only airport in the world in which this seems to happen.

7. The current weather in Illinois (weather, I might point out which is driving the locals to tears) is far more pleasant than the weather we left in Vermont.

8. Tua loves it here.

Canopied

Tua is shown here with a new gift from her cousin Pascal. He's got about six months on her and has moved on to bigger and better things. According to Bug, I wasn't here at the time, Tua sat under this jig for a good three hours amusing herself (and her mother)....
Tomorrow is Wednesday and we leave for the Land of Lincoln. There, Tua will meet the balance of her family including her cousin Ellie, whom even Bug and I have yet to meet. A few months back, I wrote of my train 'fix' that I was planning to fill with fourteen hours between Albany and Chicago on the Lakeshore Express. As it turns out, we are not taking the train. The Travelocity gnomes somehow whittled down the price of a return ticket between here and there to just about the same price as yesterday's soup. The train will have to wait. Maybe by the time I do get to ride the rails again, the trains in the US will be on par with the ones in Europe. If that is the case and we can go by the record set today on the Paris-Strasbourg line, the elapsed time between Rutland, Vermont and Bloomington, Illinois will be just over three hours.