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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.

drove to chicago

We spent the weekend in Chicago. Dan's brother Matt is there all week on a business trip, and he flew out early so we could all hang out for the weekend. It was fun; we did touristy stuff all day and on Saturday night we had legitimate Mexican food (the Mexican food in Indianapolis is beyond terrible) and went to a blues bar. It felt strange to be, um, well, doing things. My brain was sort of stunned to have been removed from the world of the novel, while my body was exhausted from not sitting in a chair all day.

The Art Institute was free to Bank of America cardholders, randomly, so we went twice.


We took a boat tour of Chicago architecture.


Why doesn't San Francisco have better public art?


Before driving home on Sunday we stopped at the Chicago Diner, "Meat-free since Eighty-Three," and Dan was so happy I thought he might faint. Here he is with a vanilla-chai tofu milkshake, a vegan chocolate chip cheesecake, and a coconut lemon cake. Yes, we got three desserts. Dan's lost 25 pounds in five weeks; he took the weekend off.

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.

the end of hope

If our first week in Hope felt like a month, our last week has felt like about ten seconds. I've gotten overwhelmingly busy with Actual Work, and Dan has been juggling a bit of FunMo along with car-repair errands. (Nothing major, don't worry). But it does look like we're both going to meet the Hope Deadline (one chapter, one song), if only by the skin of our teeth.

Yauni and Dave came to visit on Sunday so we finally hit the tourist sites. We planned on meeting at Lake of the Woods, but we ran into them at Fields, natch, when we stopped to buy beach towels. We spent some time at the lake and then went to Sucker's Creek and the Othello Tunnels. Yauni showed Dave her childhood homes (although her mom's old hippie cabin in Othello is now an eco-retreat, haha) and the boys got wowed by the Tunnels. (Dan's planning a Rambo post, stay tuned.) It was such a beautiful day. Finished with pie at the Home Restaurant and a short tour of Eva's house before we had to kick them out so we could watch the Mad Men premiere.

View of the bridge from Sucker's Creek.

Even the Tunnels parking lot is epic.

It's always nostalgic coming back to Hope, but this time it's been especially intense. Partly because my parents aren't here anymore, and partly because I haven't had a proper visit in so many years. And mostly, perhaps, because I'm really shoving my face in the nostalgia, seeking it out and indulging it, as research for the novel's coming-home themes. It's been fun, but I'm looking forward to leaving and returning to 30. No matter how great my Hope memories are (and they really are great), nostalgia is still an intrinsically melancholy thing.

Yesterday on one of my many sloooow drives past my house, which my parents are renting to another family, I saw a young girl in a bathing suit darting out the front door, skipping the steps on the front porch to jump onto the lawn. I could feel the concrete porch under her summer-hardened feet, the cool arrival of the mossy grass. And I actually heard myself saying, in a defensive whine, "Hey!" That's my life, random little girl. Jeez.

look what we found at the tunnels!

Hahaha! (Sorry Kenny. We love you.)

this will be our year

We started our drive with a breakfast at the Millbrae Pancake House. Lots of family from both sides (even in the big group shot, you can tell how freakin' cute my nieces are, right?).


Wish we had some pics from our official going-away party the weekend before, which lasted until 5am, but it was too much fun for picture-taking. We should've given cameras to the people who are sick of hearing MJ at danceparties (sorry guys).

The drive was quick and dirty, with lots of "This Will be Our Year" and Genius playlists. Somewhere around the time the scenery shifted from yellow grass to green trees, Dan learned how to skip.