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The front yard, falling. / My sneaky attempt to photograph Dan in his jeans.


We bought some sweet painted gourds and ornaments for the Masonic Christmas tree at Grandma's bazaar, which was a couple weekends ago. Several of her painting friends set up their goods throughout the house and Grandma made lunch for all the shoppers. I manned my aunt's jewelry station and judging from this photo I must've gained an instant twenty pounds that morning from candy-corn grazing.


Tim and Susan took us to see a play called The Heavens are Hung in Black, a really interesting psychological portrait of Abraham Lincoln. Abe spent a chunk of his childhood in Indiana so he's a bit of a hometown hero here (along with John Mellencamp, whose name we've heard more in the past two months than in our entire lives). Anyway, the play was excellent and the old downtown theatre was beautiful:


The "Soldiers and Sailors" monument downtown is supported by some hilariously relaxed bears.

fall and other surprises

There are many benefits to this trip that don't have anything to do with its stated purpose. Some of them have surprised us; others we expected, but had no idea how much daily joy they would bring us. So, creativity-related benefits aside, here's what we're loving...

First: FALL. Dudes. Fall is amazing. Indiana has still not apparently reached the peak of fall season, and it is already so gorgeous, we can hardly drive down the street without running straight into a tree. As Dan put it the other day, as we drove past a particularly amazing tri-colored tree leaning out from the edge of a yard to greet the street: "I've just never seen anything like that." This tree was green in parts, yellow in others, and then the leaves around the edges seemed to have been dipped in a can of red paint--and the red is not reddish, not that amber-brown dead-looking red, which is also beautiful but more familiar; this is a practically fluorescent shade of red that just doesn't exist in California. So yeah, we're loving the proper seasons. We've been pretty gay about it actually. Mulled cider, pumpkin pancakes, sitting around a fire made with wood that my uncle has been drying in the backyard for years. I'm telling you. These midwesterners are on to something.

Second, of course, is family. My grandma is the sweetest lady ever and it's pretty much impossible to eavesdrop on one of her five-minute conversations with the cat and not feel really good about the world. (That cat talks back, for real). My uncle Tim and his girlfriend Susan are like our personal tour guides, arranging road trips, showing us some tasty Thai and Indian restaurants, and on weekend nights, indulging in a game of Catan or two (yes, you heard me, two). Susan even made this insane necklace with a picture of Klaus Teuber on the pendant, to be worn by the victor. My uncle Pat has every good television series ever on DVD, not to mention two full bars in his house (yes, again, two!) plus a karaoke stage. We haven't used the karaoke stage yet but we have a dream of somehow incorporating it with Beatles Rock Band.

Third: feeling relaxed, like, all the time. It's not bad.

And now for some pictures! We drove down south a couple hours last weekend to a forgotten-by-time town called Story that had an amazing dive bar in the basement of its only hotel, the Story Inn. Several men and women were very rowdy and drunk in there, and then they left on horseback. Grandma was glad they weren't driving.

when i'm sixty-five

I have sixty-five pages written, and I'm super happy with all of them. (I would have a lot more if I included those I'm not happy with.) I'm especially happy because Dan read the whole document and gave me some sincerely positive feedback, along with a few suggestions that made it way better. YAY. I'm getting excited. It might actually get finished and it might actually not suck.

Today we ate lunch at Jenxie's, a vegan restaurant in the basement of a methodist church downtown.

Dan likes this picture.

This weekend: Chicago!!!!

cease-whine / rocky ripple

Okay, I'm done whining about all our work. I've written twenty pages of the novel in the last three days. And they're good! (I think).

Dan, though, has had an irritated throat and a slightly hoarse voice ever since he took a sip of one of those 5 Hour Energy drinks somewhere just east of Seattle. (There is absolutely no convincing him that this month-long ailment is not solely to blame on the 5 Hour Energy drink.) It's very slight and apparently not painful, but it's making it hard for him to sing, and therefore hard to complete songs, and he's understandably pretty cranky about it. Anybody have any miracle cures for persistent throat irritation? Brian?

Yesterday we went to a "festival" in Rocky Ripple. Rocky Ripple is a small neighborhood of houses clustered along a canal in the dead center of Indianapolis, just a five minute drive from my grandmother's house. But Rocky Ripple is pretty secluded, despite being inside the city; it's incorporated as a township and they even have their own mayor. It has a legacy of settlers from Appalachia and Kentucky, and is also described as "bohemian," and I've always been curious to visit. Turns out, Rocky Ripple is weird and kind of creepy and fairly awesome.

There were missing teeth and teenagers with babies, like we were a hundred miles outside of the city. Octogenarians hobbled about everywhere, a good 25% of the population in attendance, some of them wearing obviously homemade clothes. Others wore shirts made for the occasion that said, "I'm not lost, I live here. ROCKY RIPPLE." A group of old men cooked corn in the husks in a cast-iron oven. The ex-mayor sold magnets and had Weird Al hair to match his Weird Al face. A woodworker sold rolling pins. A blacksmith sold chainmails. Twentysomething dudes played southern rock on a gazebo and sounded like they were in their sixties. This is an exaggerated comparison but I swear it reminded me of that scene in I'm Not There when Billy the Kid is hiding in that weird town and Jim James sings "Goin to Acapulco" and everyone is dressed for Halloween.



Anyway. It was one of the many moments on this trip when I've turned to Dan and said, "Don't you feel like we're in America?" and Dan has answered with a slow, awestruck nod.

in defense of indy

When we told people the main destination of our trip would be Indianapolis, we got some intensely blank stares. It was even deemed, during one reaction, "the randomest place possible." This is fair enough, especially given that neither of us are from here in any sense; my grandparents moved out here with their youngest sons in the early 70s, after my dad had married my mom and moved from SF to Canada. In response, I would explain that my Grandma is amazing and lives in a big house by herself, and my uncles are loads of fun, and it's actually a really pretty city -- but the stares persisted. Here are some pictures so you can at least know we're not living with pro-lifers in the shade of a Wal-Mart.

The house:


Our bedroom overlooks a sundrenched backyard and is the most peaceful place to wake up.


As a kid I'd wear soft-bottom slippers and my uncle Pat would pull me around this marble entryway. Nothing since has ever been quite as fun.


Here's my workstation (Dan's is in a previous post). The best part about this room is that the wi-fi doesn't reach! Very good for concentration, even when all I'm writing are market research reports.


This painting announces the entry to my work-room. (My grandma is an artist). Portrait of the Market Researcher As a Young Girl.


When I do need internet, or just feel like slouchin', I hunker down on the livingroom couch with this nifty Levenger lap-desk that Dan got me for my birthday (excellent present for nerds, btw). (And yeah I pretty much wear this outfit every day).


As for the city itself, I don't have any pictures, but it's really pretty and laid-back. The sprawl is hard to get used to (stripmallstripmallstripmall) but the thing about sprawl is it allows people to have really huge lawns. Lawns are nice. Rachel sent us this article in the NY Times about how you can buy a 4-bedroom house in Indianapolis for $250K, and I bet it'd have a huge-ass lawn.

Despite the sprawl it's still, really, a city. There's a downtown with galleries and old brick buildings and lots of bars with graffiti'd bathrooms. Broad Ripple is the hip neighborhood (although naturally it gets kinda North Beachy by night), filled with vegan restaurants and vintage clothing stores and businesses run out of homes. Dan explored it while I was away on business and now he's the Broad Ripple expert. Sometimes we take our laptops to the Monon Coffee Shop, where all the juices are freshly made in a Vita-Mix and the baristas are all these very likeable people who've probably outgrown an extreme allegiance to some subculture (straightedge, I'm guessing, and the dapper variety of scenester goths) and now throw parties for their kittens. (Honest eavesdrop). There are hipsters everywhere, and my lord they're young, but we still can't figure out where the good danceparties are. All we've found is some flyers advertising "hipsterhouse" which is the most depressing compound I've ever heard in my life. The good dancing must be happening in a secret network of BOTH-style houses (RIP BOTH!).

In leiu of dancing we've been having fun seeing Tim play his wide variety of working-musician gigs. Last night he played a solo acoustic set downtown with a numbered setlist, so the audience could shout out the number of the song they wanted (a trick he stole from the Bobcats of Vancouver), and they were seriously hollering those requests. I had to yell "Fifty-eight" nearly fifty-eight times at the top of my lungs before he played me Man Out of Time. Here he is on Friday night, singing If I Only Had a Brain with a jazz trio at a restaurant.


So, you see, it really is a nice place to be for awhile. We really miss everybody, though; the homesickness is starting to hit. Lots of love and hugs and such.