An Inauspicious Start

Last week, I realized that Early Spring had quite suddenly become Mid-Spring, and that I have a good amount of garden cleanup to tackle. I spontaneously decided to cut down some weed trees along the back fence one morning before work.

The itching started a couple days later.

Wait — there’s not any poison ivy back there… right? The poison ivy lives in the front garden by the dying dogwood tree, and over by the office window, but not along the back fence!

Well, I double-checked. Looks like it does now.

I wasn’t expecting it, so I wasn’t watching for it. I had seen the tiny sprigs and thought it was a volunteer raspberry bush, and cut it back along with the weed trees. Since the branches were small ones, I’d picked them up with the piles of twigs and carried them across the yard to toss in the garbage.

The first itchy spot cropped up on the inside of my left forearm, where I’d pushed up the sleeve of my sweatshirt.

Right then, I should have showered and scrubbed all over with Tecnu. But I didn’t.

And it spread.

I am so sensitive to urushiol.

It’s a week later, and I’m still finding new blisters and itchy spots. Anywhere my soiled fingernails touched: neck, waist, and places that don’t ever see sunshine.

At this point, Benadryl antihistamine pills and Clobetasone prescription steroid cream are pretty much all I need. That and patience.

Solar Eclipse 2024

Our school district decided to give the kids the day off for the solar eclipse on April 9, trading it for some other previously-scheduled teacher workday. I was glad for that, since the timing of totality in Northwest Ohio would have put the the big event happening near the end of his bus ride home from school.

I work from home, and Aaron works nights, and the path of totality was such that we could get a minute or so of Total Eclipse action right in our back yard, so there was no need for us to fight traffic and crowds.

I didn’t even need to dig out the eclipse glasses I saved from the partial eclipse in 2017, since Connor’s school sent home a few pairs with each student. Funny… that eclipse happened on Connor’s last day of pre-Kindergarten, and the idea of watching the next eclipse with a 12-year-old Connor in 6th grade was just mind-boggling.

But here we are.

The darkness that falls during a solar eclipse is so fascinatingly still. The weird lighting before and after totality reminds me of summer thunderstorms, in a way. Totality, though — seeing the sun’s corona shine through the black of night at 3:15 in the afternoon was amazing. I absolutely understand why some people become eclipse-chasers after experiencing totality in person.

My iPhone 12, of course, wasn’t equipped to photograph the eclipse in any sort of meaningful way… but that didn’t stop me from making the attempt. It’s just my knee-jerk reaction to these kinds of experiences in nature — I want to document it so I remember it forever, even if the documentation is a blurry, blown-out similitude of what I saw with my own eyes.

The solar eclipse was amazing. A+ would watch again.

Chicago 2024: Part One

We went on our first city vacation as a family this year, and we managed to get Connor sold on the idea of city vacations being a thing in the future.

For Connor’s first foray into the world of freeform roll-your-own city vacationing, we spent three nights in Chicago. Aaron and I hadn’t been to Chicago since our first visit some 14 years ago, and that was a couple years before Connor came on the scene. This time around, our only real agenda items were 1.) taking a hop-on, hop-off bus tour, 2.) eating at Ann Sather’s again, and 3.) trying Italian beef, all of which we successfully crossed off the list.

The gallery above features highlights from our arrival on Sunday, including deep dish Chicago pizza at Giordano’s; and our initial explorations on Monday, including our Big Bus Tour, a trip up the Willis (Sears) Tower, lunch at Luke’s Italian Beef, a brief (cold and windy) stop at Navy Pier, an afternoon shopping excursion, warming up inside the Apple Store, dinner at Shang Noodle, and dessert at Ghirardelli.