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Category Archives: Outdoors

Roaming Hole Gardens: A miniature golf concept

Saturday, December 29, 2012

This is an excerpt of a MakeSh!t proposal submitted for artist-designed Mini Golf at the Walker to take place in summer 2013. Fingers crossed! UPDATE 1/9/13: WE’RE IN. CONCEPT: Once (maybe twice) in lifetime, something happens that transforms a favorite pastime forever. For the sport of Mini Golf, that time is next summer at the Walker Sculpture Garden. Roaming [...]

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Freaks of nature

Wednesday, October 24, 2012

IN A RAPIDLY WARMING, PETROLEUM-SCARCE WORLD, long-haul road trips may no longer be defensible. But weighing our waste against the lure of a righteous mountain cabin just outside Yellowstone, we said Screw It and got in the van. Having only driven around it before, I worried the Park wouldn’t live up to the hype. Was it just [...]

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Itasca Masters

Tuesday, June 26, 2012

I JUST BAGGED MY THIRD AND FOURTH state parks of the summer, and we’re barely four weeks in. I don’t recall when I became a Minnesota park system groupie. Growing up, I went to exactly one Iowa State Park and that was mostly to skirt parental supervision for the day. Now I’m following some unconscious collector’s [...]

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Tucson Is for Loafers

Tuesday, May 22, 2012

GETTING AWAY FROM IT ALL comes with a peculiar burden for me. The before-you-go rigamarole I’m good with. It’s once I’m there, there’s this nagging compulsion to gain Meaningful Experience. Some see time away as a pause in life, but for me it’s the exact opposite. Vacation is the whole point: figuring things out, seeing [...]

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Now where were we

Tuesday, February 14, 2012

RECENT MORNINGS I’M UP before sunrise for international conference calls, interviewing the people behind India’s Sesame Street. I’m 11 1/2 hours behind Delhi, so their day is as good as over when we start talking. I struggle to understand it all (unfamiliar accents and Development-speak), but I grasp enough for the website I’m writing. Their [...]

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Closed for chillin’

Tuesday, December 20, 2011

MY MIND IS UNUSUALLY SERENE LATELY (hardly cause for complaint, except that I blog best under duress). I’m furnishing that surplus mental real estate with reading: most recently a 1000-page novel about proto-scientists in the age of Enlightenment (oof; thanks, Kev!), a gift subscription to the New York Review of Books (best eva, Marc!), and, [...]

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Things I didn’t expect to think about alone on the Superior Hiking Trail

Sunday, August 28, 2011

• Ways a moose could kill you • The trail’s unfortunate acronym • How I kind of wish I wasn’t getting text messages here • Idea for a cutthroat tourism jingle for Grand Marais: “I can’t, I can’t, I can’t stand Lutsen” (apologies to The Police) • People I forgot to invite to my wedding [...]

Also filed in Holidays, live musings | | Comments (2)

Misc July

Sunday, July 31, 2011

SOMEBODY WISHED ALOUD that July could be twice as long (on Facebook, of course, where summer’s progress is logged competitively, so I see the 1,000 camp-outs, festivals, and bike/bar crawls I didn’t do). It’s an appealing thought, even sweating through sixty-two 90° nights. The calendar being fixed as it is, we made July the longest [...]

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Dept. of Renewals

Friday, July 8, 2011

NEW PAINT, SHELVING, A COLOSSAL CANOPY and other environmental upgrades are remaking my world (not a monumental task, small as it is). After a decade in this house, its ubiquitous flaws—gerry-rigged fixes, unresolved projects, heinous finishes—have become almost invisible; I only realize how bad it was now that it’s better. I squeegeed the windows for [...]

Also filed in family, Johanna, Make Sh!t, wackiness | | Comments (2)

Prairie school’d

Tuesday, May 31, 2011

THERE’S A SWEET SPOT in Afton State Park—atop a bluff overlooking the St. Croix River, surrounded by blooming prairie, under a lone spreading oak—where we took up residence over Memorial Day weekend. Despite dismal weather predictions, we hiked, climbed, ID’ed plants, hid & sought, played gin-rummy and cribbage, ate ourselves stupid and generally kicked it loose [...]

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