This is jumping around chronologically a bit, but it only seems fair to start with a definition of derecho, since it’s in the title. A derecho is a system of severe thunderstorms that move straight in one direction, namely from Iowa to us, and in this case last Monday. All day it was really hot and there were a lot of warnings about intense afternoon storms, so we put away anything that seemed particularly lightweight or loose from the back yard, like smaller potted plants. Once the storm got really close, the weather radar showed a storm just about to…

I’ll start off with a photo with the theme we ended on in the last post, with a new colleague in my kitchen office enjoying the swivel chair. Liam has moved in for a month to fill the gap between his old apartment lease ending and before the new lease starts in September. It’s been great having him around! But backing up a week before our new flatmate moved in, we’ve been enjoying the yellow and purple flowers in Humboldt Park, and some very nice other plant arrangements seen out at a popup store run by Miles’s friend’s mom. Our…

It’s great to be able to spend so much time outside as we have been. The weather has been great, if pretty hot for a few days this month, and we’ve been able to spend as much time outdoors as possible. Definitely the theme as I went through the photos that we have to post! We had ordered some Adirondack chairs a few months ago, and they arrived in early July. They are extremely comfortable and really are making sitting in the back garden even more enjoyable that one could have thought possible. In the first pic below, we are…

We’re just finishing up the holiday weekend, which all felt a bit freeform this year. But I’m hugely grateful to have had 4 days off work in a row, it was very restorative! I didn’t post last week so I’ll start with some photos from then. Our animal sightings have been less about new animals and more about slightly different animal behavior. These ducks were pretty funny when we saw them by the lagoon – mom duck with the ducklings, then right around the corner this group of dude ducks hanging out! We had some restrictions ease about 2 weeks…

We had a good week around the northern hemisphere’s Summer Solstice on Saturday (nod to Colette’s blog post title this week!) Sunrise is around 5:20am this week, and sunset is around 8:30pm. We’re enjoying the nice long days, and it’s really feeling like summer here now. In the last week, we’ve spotted Cedar Waxwings at the park, seen in a page from our bird book below. They have such perfectly drawn little eye masks, we’ve been calling them The Incredibles as a reference to the superhero animated movie. We’ve seen the cedar waxwings at Humboldt Park mostly, but also in…

This was a quiet week for us, so I thought I’d focus on Miles’s road trip. He and Dylan went on a road trip from Chicago to the Outer Banks, North Carolina, as part of a family vacation that her family takes there every year. They drove there in two days, stopping overnight in Pittsburgh. It all looks pretty idyllic – but you don’t see a very dark side – Miles reported that he was only one of 3 coffee drinkers out of about 30 people on the trip! Still not sure how they resolved the coffee situation every day…

Any lead-in here is going to be in sharp contrast to our last post, where Covid-19 was still the main news and birdwatching felt like one of the only things going on. So to warm up with a quick creature report, we’ve noticed that a lot of the migratory birds seem to have moved on, and the big birds of summer, the swan boats in the Humboldt Park lagoon, are back! Chicago has held many protests over the killing of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor over the last 10 days. So much to say but I’d like to point to…

Really true when you’ve become a bird watcher! We had a 3 day weekend last weekend, the traditional holiday weekend that starts off summer. John and I both took Friday off, turning it into a very luxurious feeling 4 days off. It was quite refreshing, very glad to have taken the extra day! We started off the weekend with a bird watching scouting trip – meaning we were checking out a new bird site that we hadn’t been to before. Hegewisch Marsh (see the pin below) is on the south side, in a very industrial area. It also has a…

We often come up with a theme for the year as a new year’s activity, and this year our theme was Exploration & Discovery, which referenced how different our vacation schedules would surely be, with no more tethering to the school calendar. It’s also a nod to the two classes at Lewis & Clark that all freshmen take to think through topics historical and contemporary via the writings of big thinkers like Frederick Douglass, Karl Marx and Virginia Woolfe – a part of freshman year that we always felt made L&C a very good fit for Miles. Then in mid-March,…

I thought I’d see how it feels to not mention the week count since stay home began… pretty good so far! This week was momentous because, with Miles and Ashton here rather than away at school, we got to see year 1 of college come to a close. Here’s Miles hitting send on his final paper, with help from Nyx. Since then, he’s received some really positive feedback on the paper and has been encouraged to enter it into a competition, which is really wonderful to hear and well deserved, so he’s already been back in writing mode this weekend.…