Iowa

Taking advantage of our warm 40*F temps to hang Christmas lights in our trees.

Good idea and very nice and colorful shot!

Room 233 The Iowa House Hotel, Iowa City, Iowa

Iron Range Elegist: Bob Dylan and the klezmer tradition.

America is vast. Not so vast as the universe of course, but speaking as a human from a human scale, having traversed a good five hundred miles of its bounteous bosom yesterday, I’ll stick to that tiny word which tries to do the impossible, invoking the incomprehensible in four letters that rhyme with ‘fast’.

You could easily claim that the back catalogue of the man whose elusive shadow I’ve been chasing these past four days is pretty close to vast too, although that might be a tiny bit hyperbolic. All the same, it is a pretty respectable body of work that has once again seen Dylan nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

It’s kind of ironic that – if he gets it – the composer of Masters of War will be honoured in the name of a man who caused more explosions than most of us and not all of them benign. Irony is not hard to find when you you think of the son of an oil company accountant passing himself off as a hobo in his callow youth, breaking down doors on his way through the Greenwich Village sixties scene.

But Dylan is nothing if not a chameleon and a vast (there’s that word again) osmosis-fuelled sponge. His critics and those he has just blasted in a recent Rolling Stone interview for calling him a thief of the riffs of others, just don’t get it. This kid, even this withered ancient today, was from his mother’s breast sucking down deep on the world’s rich milk. —-Continue here.

Great Article!

Check out Paparoa’s Blog !

West Des Moines, Iowa

These are the toes of little Lucy Paige…

So cute!

Backyard, Iowa – 1000th Post!

Wonderful!

Especially nice for our 1000th post. Thank you so much to all the toemailers out there!

And check out Nicole Salow’s blog, Nobody likes you when you’re 23 !

Lost Lake, Indian Peaks Wilderness, Colorado

Erica writes, “The fabulous Amy Clark – one of my graduate school friends – happened to be in Colorado last week. So on her way back to Iowa she swung by my place and we ventured into the mountains together. Happily she has a Subaru so we could cruise confidently along those windy roads.

The Lost Lake hike is a popular one in the Indian Peaks Wilderness, so we had to squeeze past lots of other cars (mainly Subarus and a few Jeeps) on the narrow dirt road leading to the trailhead.

Before we even got to the trailhead, a woman told us we wouldn’t make it to the lake as there was too much snow.

We shrugged and supposed we might as well go as far as we could.

We didn’t wear the appropriate footwear. But the snow wasn’t so bad! Though the path became a pebbly stream at one point. Ice water and snow on our toes. Our feet turned numb for awhile.”

Bet it was a great day and your toes survived too!

Check out Erica’s blog, Kinds of Honey !