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88 Books that Shaped America at RPL

Kathryn Stresak, Dorian Gomberg, Ed Vlcek, Brad Krautwurst, and Naomi Neal are Shimer students participating in the Shimer Internship/Mentorship (SIM) Program. They regularly post updates about their internship experiences.

This post is from Brad Krautwurst, who is interning with the Richmond Public Library in Virginia.

Last month, the Library of Congress released its Books that Shaped America, a list of the 88 most influential books written by and for Americans.  It includes everything from The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care by Benjamin Spock (1946) to The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin (1963) to Beloved by Toni Morrison (1987).  It coincides with an exhibition showing off the originals of these books at the Library of Congress -- which I saw over the weekend, but unfortunately have no pictures, due to the Library's rules prohibiting photography of the exhibit.

The last few weeks, during my time staffing the computer lab, I have been working on a display, in cooperation with a coworker of mine named Ellen, showing off these books, as well as pointing patrons toward a survey duplicating the survey the Library of Congress published.  We hope, at the end of the D.C. exhibition's run, to have RPL's results to compare them with the Library of Congress'.  I have been slowly but surely categorizing the books into something more compelling than "fiction" and "nonfiction" for the purposes of the display, formatting the Library of Congress' book descriptions, and preparing a version of the list that notes the few instances where our library system just doesn't carry the book.  I'm proud to say that we have most of the list, excepting things like A Survey of the Roads of the United States of America by Christopher Colles (1789) and A Curious Hieroglyphick Bible (1788).  

I've divided the books into seven different categories: American mythos; American poetry and plays; movers and shakers; prominent American literature; science and science fiction; children's and young adult books; and the rest.  

American mythos contains famous figures in American history, such as Frederick Douglass and Thomas Paine, who have almost become mythological in their importance to American history.  American poetry and plays explains itself and contains selections from Tennessee Williams, Emily Dickinson, and Langston Hughes, among others.  Movers and shakers is a particularly interesting category for me, as it includes books that have been so influential on America so as to change the very course of public opinion: books such as Randy Shilts' And the Band Played On (1987) or How the Other Half Lives by Jacob Riis (1890).  American literature contains a vast array of works, such as Margaret Mitchell's 1936 epic Gone with the Wind and Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter.  Science and science fiction houses both Carl Sagan's Cosmos and James B. Watson's The Double Helix.  Children's and young adult contains Margaret Wise Brown's classic 1947 picture book Goodnight Moon and Jack London's The Call of the Wild.  Finally, "the rest" includes books that simply didn't fit anywhere else, such as The Education of Henry Adams and Joy of Cooking.

If I have time over the last few weeks of my internship, I plan to put together a list of further reading, books that comprehensively look at ideas explored in these books.  For now, though, the display looks great, I'm proud of it, and I hope patrons participate in the survey!  If you'd like, you can take the survey the Library of Congress offered here.

 

Me in front of the display at Richmond Public Library. Photo credit to Ellen Wolf.

Stings

Kathryn Stresak, Dorian Gomberg, Ed Vlcek, Brad Krautwurst, and Naomi Neal are Shimer students participating in the Shimer Internship/Mentorship (SIM) Program. They regularly post updates about their internship experiences.

 This post is from Ed Vlcek, who is interning with The Chicago Honey Co-op.

"Speak with contempt of none, from slave to king

  The meanest Bee hath, and will use, a sting."

- Benjamin Franklin

While reading over Ross Conrad's book Natural Beekeeping: Organic Approaches to Modern Apiculture, I was struck by the playfulness of this quote. As I rubbed my swollen abdomen, my thoughts returned to yesterday morning, when I received my first honey bee sting of the season. How silly I must have looked hopping and flailing back from the hive, smacking my belly and digging through my shirt for other bees! Wearing an untucked shirt proved a painful error. Franklin whimsically elucidates the experience of the people I couldn't tell were watching.

Honestly, though, it came as such a relief. I had been waiting to get stung all season, and now I can proceed knowing that I do not have any severe reactions. Not that I really thought I did, but I needed evidence. And althougth I was not really afraid of getting stung, and had maybe become a little too bold and careless, a certain quantity of fear, or paranoia, has left me.

Interestingly, female bees are the only bees with stingers. Male bees do not have them, because the stinger is a modification of an organ used in laying eggs. Workers, the unfertilized females, are the only bees that typically sting, and they do so with reluctance. The sting is a last flourish of defense, and from the barbs that run along the stinger, that flourish typically ends with the bee's mutilated body slowly dying on the ground. The bee is stuck to the stung with the stinger, and by pulling itself away, or being brushed away, the bee's body is severed.

Conrad marks the bee's tendency toward non-violence at the start of the same book mentioned above:

To live its day-to-day life, the bee need only collect nectar and pollen from the flowers in bloom. These gifts from the plant kingdom, along with some water, plant resins that the bees use to make propolis, fresh air, and sunshine, are all the bees need from the world around them to survive and prosper within their colony. Thus, unless it feels threatened and is forced to defend itself or its hive, the bee is the only creature in the animal kingdom, that I am aware of, that does not kill or injure any other being as it goes through its regular life cycle. Apis mellifera damages not so much as a leaf. In fact, honey bees take what they need in such a way that the world around them is improved.

With no need to kill for food, and a stinger that typically kills the bee if used, the honey bee, in its relation to other species, is disinclined toward aggressive behavior. But, as is evidenced from the heavy gear we typically wear when beekeeping, if the bee does incline toward stinging you, it is something to be very prepared for. Morever, because the bee releases alarm pheromones when attacking, it is unusual to find yourself in a battle with just one bee. More often, it is a fleet of bees on a suicide mission.

All of this amounts to a overall environment of care - we take care not to disturb them more than we need to, and they tend to care only for their primary tasks of doing bee things, rather than worrying about a few oddly dressed mammals. It is also clear from these considerations that the frenzied fearfulness of honey bees (only 1% of humans are severly allergic) is a product of carelessness and ignorance, not some serious threat.

Within the species, as we know, the bee hive is a case of social behavior unparalled in nature, save maybe ant colonies. What exactly the relationship is between the disinclination to sting, their unique role as improvers of and spreaders of life rather than consumers of it, and the eusocial organization of the hive, is a question I am just beginning to explore. In part, I believe it has to do with the sexual divisions of labor in the hive, and the special evolutionary quirks of bee genetics. For now, I will leave you with people much more qualified to speak to this than myself -

Glenn Apiares' "Principles of Honey Bee Genetics"

Naomi's Internship, Week 7: Painting a Fence

Naomi Neal, Kathryn Stresak, Dorian Gomberg, Ed Vlcek, and Brad Krautwurst are Shimer students participating in the Shimer Internship/Mentorship (SIM) Program. They regularly post updates about their internship experiences.

This post is from Naomi Neal, who is interning at Tryon Farm and the Tryon Farm Institute in Michigan City, Indiana.

I have never read The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. In fact, I had to check with Google to make sure that I even had that title right (I didn't). Even so, growing up in the American cultural landscape, my immediate association with fence-painting is the title character's tricky evasion of the job.

Having spent the most productive part of last week working with Gary and his team on the repair and re-painting of a fence--coincidentally, the fence of the house I stay in here--I think I can understand some of the reasons why Sawyer might want to avoid such a task. Painting a fence is not exactly "hard" work in the way that building a concrete wall is hard, but it does require patience, and a lot of time. Patience, unfortunately, is not one of my strong suits. But, like a muscle or a pair of stiff new jeans, my patience becomes stronger and more comfortable with practice.

So, even if I felt myself a little tested at times--really, how was I supposed to get primer into such deep, narrow spaces between the boards?--I did grow in terms of patience through the experience, and acquired some new skills to boot. For example: using a brush to paint corners and edges before returning with a roller to cover the flat part of the surface, is called "cutting in." News to me! Of course, mastering the physical, mechanical doing of it is far more important than learning terminology, interesting though it may be to a language-hound like myself. And for me, the doing is far from perfected, but I'm happy to settle for making progress.

Another big part of last week was my search for clay. As of this moment, I've started construction of my cob oven (for details, you'll just have to wait for next week's post!) but last week it seemed like less and less of a sure thing with every passing day. One of the main ingredients in cob, the adobe-like mixture which I'll use to form the body of the oven, is river clay. All the online instructional guides to which I'm referring suggest that this is a particularly abundant material, and waste zero time explaining to readers just where such clay might be found. So I asked around. And, as is unfortunately somewhat characteristic of problem-solving at Tryon, everyone with whom I spoke had a totally reasonable, helpful answer--and all of them conflicted with one another. Is there clay in the typically-sandy local soil? Maybe. At one river, a few miles north. No, just across the street. No, not at all. Everywhere you look.

So I decided to buy clay from a landscape supply company, though that was no walk in the park, either--it's not one of the more routinely-stocked items around here. But I've found some, and the oven project is underway, so all the frantic searching finally came to fruition.

In conclusion, please enjoy this photo of a frog that hopped out of my watering can last Wednesday. It had bright yellow hind legs (might have been a Hyla versicolor) but was seemingly somewhat shy about them, since it wouldn't let me get them in the picture:

Wax and a tiny swarm

Kathryn Stresak, Dorian Gomberg, Ed Vlcek, Brad Krautwurst, and Naomi Neal are Shimer students participating in the Shimer Internship/Mentorship (SIM) Program. They regularly post updates about their internship experiences.

This post is from Ed Vlcek, who is interning with The Chicago Honey Co-op.

Today I have pictures and video! I even caught a queen bee on camera! This may not seem altogether too exciting, but believe me, it was a very lucky day.

The last week or so has been busy. We have been preparing to go to market, which means, among other things, harvesting and extracting honey. To explain this in detail I need more photos, so I will save it for a later post. For now, I want to talk about wax.

Wax is a substance secreted from the bees' abdomens in sheets that they then use to build the honeycomb. You can imagine it as bee sweat. The Wikipedia article on Beeswax has the scientific details, if you are interested.

Throughout the beekeeping year there are all sorts of ways in which wax is used and reused: the bees ovbiously build their houses out of it; we use it to mend small holes in bee cages and other such-like fixes; and we melt it all down to make candles and body products like lip balm and lotion.

The melting process usually involves a pan of some variety, a thermometer, and electricity - but no longer! We are now using one of these wonderfully simple contraptions, a solar powered wax melter:

All it is a wooden box with a glass lid, a metal sheet with a lip, a screen, a basin for catching wax, and two legs to get a good angle. And the magical power of the sun teams up with gravity to do the work! The stuff piled up inside is old comb and foundation made from wax. It's quite mesmerizing, and because it melts so quickly and dries so quickly, you can be around the wax in several states within just a few minutes. This is what it looks like in liquid action, with the "slumgum", a residue made of bee c0coons and other goopy stuff, holding back at the top -

 

Besides melting wax, which is a pretty easy thing to do, we worked on equalizing a few hives today. There are a couple of hives at the site in Back-of-the-Yards that somehow lost their queen, so to make good use of the population, we decided to combine those with some really healthy hives. This was slow, bee-disturbing work, so we cooked fairly well out in the hot weather. But it all got done. Taking apart hives gave me a good opportunity to take some video of the bottom board covered in bees -

 

When a hive goes queenless, often times workers with start laying, but because they are unfertilized, they can only lay drone (male) bees. So, when we inspected these queenless hives, we checked the pattern of developing larvae to make sure that they were all drones. Curiously, a few weren't. We hypothesized that it was probably from the former queen, and thought little of it, although we did start to check for queens more carefully.

So at the end of the day, we were packing it all up, and I was wheelbarrowing into the field to gather up all our supplies. To my surprise, there was a tower of bees hugging a small plant, in a tiny swarm!

And of course, there was a queen after all, and we had shaken her out onto the ground without even knowing it! So we took some emergency measures and caught the queen!

 

It was a great day at the apiary, and the breeze finally came around as the clouds rolled in. Hopefully we'll get some rain this weekend.

 

So What Is This?

Naomi Neal, Kathryn Stresak, Dorian Gomberg, Ed Vlcek, and Brad Krautwurst are Shimer students participating in the Shimer Internship/Mentorship (SIM) Program. They regularly post updates about their internship experiences.

This post is from Kathryn Stresak, who is interning at Growing Power in Chicago, Illinois.

    Last week Taste of Chicago happened in Grant Park. Basically a “Taste” event brings in restaurants from all over to city to one location in booths for people to sample the different foods of the city. Taste of Chicago features over 700 vendors and is the biggest “Taste” event in the world. What this means for me is a lot of curious passersby. The funny thing about having a routine is the circumstantial events that happen repetitiously during the day. In the case of working in an urban garden, I get a lot of the same questions. It’s truly fascinating to me, because there is clearly something in the setup of the garden and my work habits that trigger specific curiosities for people, to the point where the wording is almost always exactly the same.

     During the Taste of Chicago, these questions multiplied tenfold. I was tempted to make an informational flier that went through all the questions one might ask, chronologically, of course. One of the funniest questions I get is, “So, what is this?” I know they mean why is there a vegetable garden in a place usually reserved for flowers. Obviously there has to be some intentional reason to grow food in a public park. Everyone always seems very satisfied with the response that we harvest the plants and sell them at farmers’ markets. In some way knowing that the garden serves a purpose quiets their confusion.

    Though it does lead into the next question: “So, do people steal food?” I’m never sure how to answer this question. On the one hand, yes I am sure some people come in after dark on occasion and take a few sprigs of mint or a bunch of collards, but I don’t honestly know if I consider this stealing. People always use the word steal. After reading so many thoughts in Social Sciences 2 and 3 on the formation of private property and the system of commodities, I think our farm at Grant does a fine job of blurring the established lines. People are a little unsure of how to take a plot of food growing out in the open without any of the usual signifiers of private property. Placing edible plants, as opposed to ornamental plants, in a public space is almost seen as a faux pas, a goof-up in the structure.  Though I can tell none of the people who ask the question would take anything themselves, they are puzzled how something like the Grant Park garden works in system where there are usually multiple steps before the buyer sees the vegetable.

    I like seeing urban farming change the way people view food. When people see how their food is grown and who is doing the farming, of course there is a change in the meaning of food. We have a greater appreciation for what it takes to bring food to the table and hopefully a greater appreciation for healthier, fresher food as well. This direct engagement with the community is something that seems unique to urban farming. 

Transferring to Shimer College

As a student at Shimer College, I frequently find myself examining my past and trying to either justify the present or make changes for the future. I arrived at Shimer College after trying several other academic institutions, career paths, and life opportunities. The quick synopsis is: one semester at a private women's college, a summer of community college, half a year as an au pair in England, another year of community college, two years at a large state college, and another year at community college (this time online). I worked a variety of jobs: veterinary technician, waitress, bartender, cell phone sales, receptionist, and nanny. Pretty much if you named it, I’ve done it. During a rainy winter in Rhode Island, I felt incompleteness in my life. I was definitely surviving, but I struggled in a variety of ways. The hole in my life was never filled by enrolling in college, but by participating in learning experiences. I was happiest when reading, debating, and listening.  I decided that I deserved a comprehensive education and began searching for Bachelors programs in the Chicago area.

I had pretty disappointing results; for some reason or another I was unable to find an institution, program, and financial aid package that met my needs as a transfer student. Just a few months before the start of Fall semester I discovered Shimer College. My decision to come here was initially hasty and poorly planned out, but quickly became not only the most influential but the best choice I had ever made.  Nearly a year later, I’m confident that I am finally working towards the education that I owe myself.

Anyone learning about Shimer will ultimately hear about our community. It is definitely an “intentional community” and this is something that caused me to be very apprehensive. I lived off campus, worked an hour away from the school, and spent weekends with my friends from home. I was in Chicago to get a degree and had no time to hang out with a bunch of kids fresh out of high school. Within days I quickly learned that this approach was not going to work for me; it became nonsensical to participate in the Shimer classroom but refuse to be an integral part of the community. My fears of being too old or not relatable became trivial and I threw myself into the Shimer community without a glance backwards.

Since arriving in Chicago nearly a year ago, my life is radically different. Like a typical Shimer student I’m not rounding out a year with more answers; rather, I have more questions. My interests have diversified, my comprehension has improved, and best of all I’m a part of a community that inspires me. The curriculum here is excellent, but the education here is so much more than reading books. It’s about disagreeing with your best friend so badly you want to shout but saving it for after class, or discovering that someone you barely know is equally obsessed with Dorothy Parker.

I’ve tried nearly every type of academic institution and failed academically, personally, or both. For me, Shimer College is the first time that I’m not scared to fail, because I know I’ve got a whole community to back me up. Whether you are a prospective student or just an innocent bystander to the college process, I urge you to think about the communities we create versus the communities we happen to fall into. What are the advantages? Disadvantages? And where do you see yourself fitting best?

Look forward to more posts from me about my experiences as a transfer student, on-campus living, and the Shimer College Assembly.

Naomi's Internship, Week 6: Mixing Concrete, Making Plans

Naomi Neal, Kathryn Stresak, Dorian Gomberg, Ed Vlcek, and Brad Krautwurst are Shimer students participating in the Shimer Internship/Mentorship (SIM) Program. They regularly post updates about their internship experiences.

This post is from Naomi Neal, who is interning at Tryon Farm and the Tryon Farm Institute in Michigan City, Indiana.

Last week, I resumed my regular schedule and my work at the pool construction site. The pool--or "swimming pond," I should say, since for local regulations' sake that's what we're calling it now--is set to materialize in the hollowed-out shell of a dairy shed which dates back to the Farm's previous life as a dairy farm; last week we took down one of the few remaining shed walls and the last section of roof.

 

Using the Kubota (tractor) to knock down the wall and roof.

 After all this destruction, a lot of clean-up became necessary, of course, which occupied the better part of Wednesday. My busted rib makes heavy lifting somewhat problematic, but I'm learning to favor the other side of my body and ask for help when I need it. Later in the week, we strengthened the walls which are to stay by pouring them full of concrete. I'm getting a lot of experience in this medium, which turns out to be surprisingly simple to use.

So, no wonder that when it came time to meet with Ed Noonan and TFI President Scott about my ideas for undertaking a solo design and construction project to cap off my internship experience, concrete and block popped up again and again on my list of ideas. Scott and Ed gently reminded me that cinder-block wouldn't make aesthetic sense just anywhere around the farm, but we found a way to incorporate my new skill set into a project which will hopefully benefit the Farm not just aesthetically, but also as a means of bringing the community together. Starting as soon as the materials can be gathered, I will be constructing an outdoor "cob oven" for Tryon, near the community garden. I hope that my efforts will result in summer evening- and winter night- gatherings  for residents and guests of the Farm to enjoy fresh bread, hot coffee, and one another's company. More on oven-building to come!

On top of working with jack-of-all-trades Gary and his team--on the pool construction or on the fence at my hosts' house, this week--I've also been continuing my work for TFI, as well as meeting with Eve and Sarah Noonan about marketing ideas and about organizing an archive of past marketing ideas and successes for Tryon. There's a lot to be done, and only so much time left to do it--my internship ends in less than a month. In addition to the more practical skills of pouring concrete and laying block, I'm also getting some on-the-spot lessons in prioritizing my workload.

Microfilms and History

Kathryn Stresak, Dorian Gomberg, Ed Vlcek, Brad Krautwurst, and Naomi Neal are Shimer students participating in the Shimer Internship/Mentorship (SIM) Program. They regularly post updates about their internship experiences.

This post is from Brad Krautwurst, who is interning with the Richmond Public Library in Virginia.

After a great mini-vacation consisting of taking a few Megabuses to New York City for the weekend with my boyfriend, I am back in Richmond feeling refreshed and inspired.  Most of that inspriation comes from the New York Public Library, which was fantastic and beautiful.  If you are ever in New York, make sure to stop by.

Anyway, one of my duties at the library is to answer Cyberlibrarian questions.  These are questions from people all over the continent, if not the world (so far I've had one from Canada, one from Seattle, and one from California) about historical events, asking for digital images of microfilms.

Microfilms are microreproductions of documents, in this case about 1/25 of the original size put on a reel of film for storage and reading.  So far all I have worked with has been newspapers, but I know we have other documents.  The newspapers have been fascinating enough, though.  

One of the first things I was able to do with the microfilm, just to be trained on it and gain familarity with its usage, was to see what the front page of the Richmond Times Dispatch, the local newspaper here, was on the day of my birth.  I admit that it is not very well captured and rather dark, but you can see how I've gotten better with the microfilms comparing these with the next ones I will show you.

A rather badly captured front page of the Richmond Times Dispatch from July 22, 1990.

Usually, as I've said, I've had to find obituaries, which always causes a weird mixture of intrigue and sadness for me, because on the one hand, I obviously have never met any of these people and it's intriguing from a distance, looking at the obituaries as a historical artifact.  On the other hand, though, they always list the survivors, and I can't help but realize that on the days these obituaries were printed, those survivors were no doubt deep in grief.  It's rather sobering.

On a brighter note, I've found a few articles that I thought might be of interest to people reading this blog and, with permission, have included them, though again, they are rather badly transmitted, so they will perhaps be of historical interest more than they will actually be read:

 

An article about books from 1988.

 Finally, here is an ad from, again, 1988, for several movies that I found telling, in terms of movie theater tickets' costs ballooning since then.

Look at the prices!

 

Naomi's Internship, Week 5: Mini-Week

Naomi Neal, Kathryn Stresak, Dorian Gomberg, Ed Vlcek, and Brad Krautwurst are Shimer students participating in the Shimer Internship/Mentorship (SIM) Program. They regularly post updates about their internship experiences.

This post is from Naomi Neal, who is interning at Tryon Farm and the Tryon Farm Institute in Michigan City, Indiana.

As the title suggests, last week was a short one for me, and this will, accordingly, be a short post. I worked at the pool construction site on Tuesday after a hectic visa-application-frenzied Monday, and then the week unraveled from there. On Wednesday my roommate extraordinaire and fellow Shimer blogger Alex Rosenberg came down to visit and celebrate Independence Day with me; we visited the nearby beach town of New Buffalo, Michigan and grilled up a vegan feast at sunset in my beautiful borrowed backyard. On Thursday I worked on TFI-related online projects from Chicago, and then on Friday embarked on a weekend trip to meet my significant other's family for the first time.

Phew. I'm exhausted just thinking about it all.

Because I didn't do all that much that was new or substantial in terms of my internship-as-such last week, I'd like to briefly explore something tangential: solitude. One of the biggest but hardest-to-talk-about aspects of my life here at Tryon is the fact that I spend the majority of my day alone or performing solitary jobs. In Letters to a Young Poet, which we read in my German tutorial this past spring, Rilke extols the strengthening and enlightening virtues of solitude, but even before stumbling through the German prose of his argument, I've always had an affinity for aloneness. I believe that it was growing up an only child that made me this way, just as it nurtured the bibliophilia that brought me to Shimer. I embarked on this internship expecting isolation, and welcoming it.

And I can see, or at least, I think I can see, some of my newfound solitude's positive influence on me already. I'm reading for pleasure more than I have since before I started college, and the literature and the lonesomeness combined have drawn out my preternaturally frail introspective abilities: I know myself better than usual, these days. 

But, contrary to my expectations, I wouldn't say that I've become especially productive in my hours of isolation--that, of course, is the compensation for my renewed passion for fiction. And when I do get lonely, like last Tuesday afternoon when I had nothing but hours to kill and I was tired of reading after two hundred pages, there's not much I can do about it. Not to mention the ribs I bruised last week while cooking dinner, a simple result of clumsiness--in my most hypochondriac moments of pain, there's no one here to talk me down.

So, while I'm getting better at being alone and even rejoicing in my progress, a part of me realizes that I shouldn't try to get too used to it. This summer, I've been paying close attention to the "work" aspect of Arendt's vita activa, but I must also keep in mind that an active life is a balanced life.

Heat Wave

Naomi Neal, Kathryn Stresak, Dorian Gomberg, Ed Vlcek, and Brad Krautwurst are Shimer students participating in the Shimer Internship/Mentorship (SIM) Program. They regularly post updates about their internship experiences.

This post is from Kathryn Stresak, who is interning at Growing Power in Chicago, Illinois.

Have you all noticed how hot it is? Don't pull that "I don't live where you live" card! It's hot everywhere and it's hard for me not to notice. I am in the thick of it every day (except Mondays). I have always been able to handle heat relatively well. Luckily, some blood in me flows for that Vitamin D. This summer, though, has pushed my tolerance to its brink. Most days I have been out at Grant Park from 7 am to 5 pm, learning to deal with nature's temper. So in this blog I thought I would list some tribulations and triumphs of a good ol' fashioned, air-conditioning-free summer:

Tribulations:

1. Bring a water bottle full of cold water. Think it will stay cold until 9 am. Sadly drink your warm, metallic water at 9 am.

2. Bring a water bottle frozen the night before. Believe confidently this time your water will be cold until 9 am. Leave water bottle in a sunny area. Sadly drink your warm, metallic water at 9 am.

3. Bring a water bottle frozen the night before. Leave water bottle under a shady tree. Triumphantly drink your cold, refreshing water at 9 am. Leave top open. Return confidently to your water bottle at 10 am. Walk away in defeat upon discovering an empty water bottle and a soaked backpack.

4. Liberally apply sunscreen before leaving the house. Forget to bring sunscreen to the farm. Be forced to accept that it is 101 degrees outside and yes, those funky farmer's arms will be red by the end of the day.

5. Wear shorts. Get annoyingly bitten by black flies. Drop a box of harvested flowers in the mud. 

Triumphs:

1. Bring a giant sun hat. Stay cool and shaded all day. Get compliments on snazzy hat. Pretend you're a movie star "getting away from it all."  

2. Bring coffee thermos full of ice water. Trimphantly fill your ice-filled thermos with water  for the third time at 3 pm. 

3. Embrace the funky farmer's tan. Acknowledge it as a conversation starter at parties. "So I noticed your arms are incredibly tan yet your back is starkly white..."

4. Walk to the restroom. Run into Whole Foods workers passing out free popsicles. Happily bite into popsicle as people shout "Yeah, Growing Power! Keep up the good work!" as you walk away.

5. Remember as you stand, dizzy from the sun, that you are holding a water hose. Spray yourself with that water like crazy.

So there you go. Perhaps it is not the most universal list of stay-cool tips and trips but they are some of the most memorable for me this summer. I am beginning to fully understand how difficult it is to grow food while enduring the whims of the weather. There have been several days where I have started the day over-heated, then been soaked by a downpour, followed by a lovely wave of humidity. I find myself using the critical thinking skills I've gained at Shimer all the time. Whether it be how to keep cool during the hottest time of the year, building trellis systems for beans, teaching youth corps kids how to work farmer's markets or talking to city park district members about the space we share, I always have to keep my wits about me. Though I may be painting this endurance of the weather in a cynical light, I actually really like it. It's really important to know what the world is actually like without all the structures and conveniences we've built up to avoid the difficult things. 

I also have a nice article showcasing the Grant Park farm and my super cool boss Lauralyn. You should read it! It has pretty pictures!