BBQ Battle and other Joy

The BBQ Battle

Unbeknownst to Hub and me, we arrived in South Bend just in time for the annual Enshrinement Festival at the lovely College Football Hall of Fame (just down the street from our house).  

Personally, I could very much care less for football or enshrinement festivals, but this particular festival promised a Barbeque Battle to test who could smoke the most delicious Kansas City Barbeque-away-from-Kansas.  They had me at barbeque.  This is a need in my soul these days—barbeque.  Apart from Grace and family and Lawrence, I think Barbeque is the thing I miss most.  

 

Needless to say, I was overjoyed as we walked downtown to smell the familiar smell of woodsmoke and meat.  Mmmm.  The barbeque wasn’t bad.  It wasn’t Kansas barbeque, but it was certainly delicious and Hub and I enjoyed ourselves immensely!  

Other notables:

We found a new favorite spot down by the River.  I’m a poor camera-woman, but you get the general idea.  It’s beautiful and peaceful. 

Evenings at the Love Castle include Hub scaling walls…

The New Normal

First: the day to day life details which seem really ordinary when you know how to do them but which pose great complications when you do not.  Hub and I agreed on Friday that everything in South Bend has taken us about twenty minutes longer than we thought it would and about thirty minutes longer than it really should.  Very simple tasks like finding the grocery store become hour long journeys through sketchy neighborhoods filled with overly friendly gentlemen and angry looking women.  

Friday was one of those days.  We bought a desk, a really cool desk, from a Restore here in SB.  But, unfortunately, this gorgeous desk couldn’t fit into the back of our car.  Because we’re new in town, this poses a rather significant problem.    In Lawrence we would call up any number of dear friends and ask to borrow a truck, but in South Bend, things are more bleak.  Instead, we went to the neighborhood Home Depot to rent a truck.  Now to get a cheap flat rate, we had to return the truck in 75 minutes or less.  Doesn’t seem like a big deal, right?  No big deal until the fearless navigator gets lost on some winding road in Mischawaka with no gas station in sight.  Though it was a little stressful, we made it and with some puppy dog eyes from the handsome hub, we still got the flat rate.  Not bad hub.  

Shortly after the truck debacle, we returned home to the prospect of dinner.  We had invited the other first year grad students from hub’s program to come over since we were all in the same lonely boat.  This doesn’t sound too hard starting off, but the afternoon’s excitement put us late starting dinner and we rushed around to get everything ready.  At 5:55, with everyone arriving at 6:00, I was turning up the oven to make sure the cheesy bread finished on time.  Funny sounds started to come from the oven (which always smells funny when we turn it on to begin with).  I was a little distrusting so I kept checking to make sure everything was all right.  My hunch was rewarded when I opened the oven door to find flames making their way up through the oven.  I let out a little screech to hub and we began to fight the fire.  In this we discovered that the fire safety that is ingrained in us as small children is wholly unhelpful when it comes to kitchen fires.  Hub dutifully manned the pan to fan smoke alarm, while I timidly tried to dump the contents of a couple of glasses of water into the oven (it’s hard to dump water, even when fire is involved).  When my lame attempts didn’t work, Hub handed me the fan-pan and took over.  He was not nearly so timid and under his dousing the fire went out and all that was left was a coating of ashes over everything in our kitchen and a horrifying smell of burning cleaner.  

Good things that came out of this: (1) we discovered that the drawer under the stove is not really a drawer, it’s a broiler.  Whoops.  New-fangled stoves are hard to handle.  (2) We also discovered that our neighbors take an eager interest in the building as they came down in force to figure out what the smell was.  It’s not the way we had planned to meet our neighbors, but it certainly worked.  (3) Hub and I learned that in dire circumstances we can actually work as a team—fires: a catalyst for marital growth…

Other happenings have been less stressful.  For instance, the farmer’s market here in SB is really glorious and cheap.  Unlike Lawrence, where you paid more for the farmer’s stamp, these folks are pretty reasonable.  Saturday I wandered through isles of peaches and apples and berries and corn, haggling with Indianans and trying not to step on small dogs.  The effort paid off and Hub and I have been eating the first fruits of sweet corn and blueberry cobbler and so forth.  

Hub is ready to head off to grad school

Farmers Market goodness

Blueberry ice cream in our A and P mugs

Barry the Basil--My latest attempt with plants

This week represents the return to more normal life for hub and I.  He is back at work now, and I am back to filling the days with whatever I can find.  The loneliness is a little more intense now as I wish I could pop home for an afternoon or grab coffee with a friend.  This too shall pass we hope and though our first church-hunting endeavor was not so successful, we hope this dry season will have an end. 

"My Kind of Town"

Chicago was more or less a whim.  

After lunch on Saturday we boarded the Southshore Train Line bound for Chicago.  Prior to this moment, Hub and I had both cherished romanticized notions about train riding fueled by Little House on the Prairie and Agathe Christie.  Unfortunately, these old fashioned train experiences are not so much the same now.  Hub described it to a friend as being “a lot like super long bus ride with more comfortable seats.”  It was fun to ride for the experience though.  

When we got to Chicago, it was pouring rain.  Something that delighted me more than it probably should have as we have not had rain in quite a while.  We stood under shelter determining which would be more fun: wetness or holing up somewhere.  Before we could decide, the rain stopped and we began to wander.  We wandered around the magnificent mile and the loop before finding a riverwalk where there were less tourists and more pretty sites.  Midway through our walk we found the Chicago River Museum, who knew such a thing even existed?  Such opportunities cannot be passed up and so we explored our way through this low-budget museum explaining the history of the Chicago River.  It was actually awesome.  For instance: did you know they reversed the flow and changed the mouth of the Chicago River?  Or that at one point in the 19^th century, the river was so polluted it caught on fire and burned for over 24 hours?  Or that Chicago itself was sort of a gamble as it was mostly wetlands at the start?  Or that there are four types of lifting bridges to let traffic down the Chicago River?  Not bad for a tiny museum.  To top it off we ambled down through the bowels of one of these bridges to see massive cogs and pullies.  Very cool. 

And what is a trip to Chicago without a slice of deep dish pizza?  We hadn’t been to Giordano’s yet, and so we set forth to try their massively cheesy pizza.  It was massively cheesy; and also massively delicious.  Well worth the wait and the walk.   The one disappointing factor of this trip was that upon further research we found out that deep-dish Chicago style pizza is actually fairly recent phenomenon with no story to speak of behind its birth.  We had fantasized that there must have been some very Italian Mafia-esc reason behind filling a pizza with schtuff.  Not so.  Some man, decided it would be a good idea and it took off.  Or so says the internet.   

We left tired and with a carefully honed list of what looks worthwhile in Chicago.  We can’t wait to explore some more!

museum of modern art at the Chicago Art Institute 

when going to the lake, be sure to take your boogie board

Last night found us watching the sun set over Lake Michigan and a hazy outline of Chicago.  

It was the most pleasant of days—we climbed into the car, cranked up the oldies (Sweet Caroline), and drove through rural Indiana until we came to the Indiana Dunes Lakeshore Park.  At first it didn’t seem too impressive (though I was completely beside myself thinking about running on sand dunes), but after talking with a 90-year-old local who drew us a map of the park and sent us to his favorite beach things, seemed to be looking up.  

 

We climbed out of the car and began a steep climb up the back of a dune through a wooded area—still no sight of the lake or the sandy beaches we’d been promised.  Then all of the sudden, the trees fell away and we found ourselves standing at the top of a dune looking out across Lake Michigan.  It was breathtaking and we were giddy.  We ran down the dune, threw our beach towels out, and crashed into the waves.  Yes folks, big lakes have waves too it seems.  

For dinner we, again, followed the advice of locals to a hole-in-the-wall tavern where the kind owner informed us that we looked about sixteen and we definitely couldn’t be married.  Despite her skepticism, she made us delicious burgers which we ate in a cute little gazebo. 

How does one finish out such a day, except to head back to the beach, lay out one's towel, and read as the sun sets over the lake.  It was unbelievably beautiful and words/pictures can't do it justice.  You will all just have to come and see for yourselves.

Coming home we have found a liberal coating of sand over everything we own but it is completely worth it.  We agreed that if all days could be like that, Indiana might not seem so bad.   

Beginnings

Hello all,

Days one and two have passed uneventfully in the St. Joseph River Valley—a name we learned refers to South Bend and the surrounding area.  Somehow I find this far more sexy than “South Bend”, but perhaps this is my latent prejudice against SB talking.  Sunday our cheerful moving crew pulled out bright and early leaving the hub and I to fend for ourselves during a long scorching Sunday. 

The first thing we learned about South Bend is that they roll up the streets on Sundays and you will be hard pressed to find even a coffee shop open for business.  This, we assume, is due to our second finding: Mass occurs often and everywhere on Sundays.  Accordingly, we walked half a block to St. Patrick’s Cathedral where we pretended to be good Catholics until Hub tried to take communion and we were pointed to a spot in the Book of Mass assuring us that though we were welcome to join in the service, we were not welcome to partake of the Eucharist.  Oh well.  It’s back to Protestant land for us next week. 

A small sampling of how the elite lived.  Not bad SB, not bad. 

Today found us in pursuit of internet and wi-fi, something our apartment is sorely lacking.  We ventured forth into the city and bought coffee at a bookstore near ND.  Next we decided to play the part of tourists as we discovered the rich history of South Bend and its multi-millionaires.  At some point in the future I will share some of this heritage with you, but for now suffice to say that we agreed to sum up our findings with the phrase “there’s always someone cooler than Indiana.”  We finished the afternoon off with ice cream from some locals down the street.  It was perhaps the sketchiest experience of my life—the ice cream dealer had to move his groceries out of the case so he could scoop our ice cream without gloves and without cleaning the scooper—but it was also one of the most beautiful moments.    Hipsters everywhere are proud of Hub and me. 

This concludes the joyful narrative of our first hours as Benders (the official name I’ve decided to give us during our time here).  Still to come—adventures of stealing furniture for our apartment, adventures of finding work with an English degree, adventures with Studebakers, and “did that noise just come from inside our apartment???”

--Love from A and P