so far so good; madison deserves the cool bike-friendly reputation it has. we were able to start far out of town in a nice park and ride paved pretty trails to the center of town for a fine meal at a brewery. the sashimi and cranberry mustard were tasty enough to make all of the "yah sure", "you betcha", and "don't you know" commentary of northerners seem sincere and welcoming. normally, being the capital city of a state makes it as cool and hip as being the president of the high school chess club, but madison has a vibrant pedestrian and bike-welcoming downtown surrounding the hilltop capital building. someone even left some pro-bike pamphlets shoved under our brake cables. (although, truth be told, there's always something unnerving about agreeable propaganda.)

after madison we finally made it across the mississippi (thank god for spell-checkers) and are officially, if only mildly, WEST. we camped 600 feet above the river on some bluffs and went for a hike this morning before heading west to sioux falls, south dakota for a walk and some food. (guacamole, olive salsa, and sangria for the foodies out there.) we've been trying to coordinate driving with stella's naptimes with a decent amount of success. her carseat in the van faces the dogs and she has learned to stick out her tongue and pant at them. this is amusing in the van, but seems disconcerting to passersby in the street when they get enthusiastically panted at by a baby.


it occurred to me today that this is the first time in my life i've gone somewhere with no real definite plan about when i'm coming back. we've been planning and working our hineys (hinies? high-knees?) off for a year to make this happen but we really don't have much in the way of plans once we get there. i'm committed to 9 shifts a month in albany but other than that we don't have much that we're obligated to. we still haven't figured out exactly where we are going to stay but i don't even know if there's a good reason to stay anywhere. we got a PO box so that the IRS could waste some paper at us, but other than that we may just go ahead and keep in wander-mode for a bit; we seem to be getting the hang of it and my brain feels a lot more active for having all of the new stimuli that the last couple of months have offered.

i'd like to add a bunch more pictures but rural south dakota has about as much band width as a mosquito leg.

after 2 months of goodbye parties we are as fattened and polished with well-wishing and cookouts as any sacrificial virgin that ever got flung into a volcano and at 5 pm today we put on our asbestos panties took the plunge. as i write this we are passing the jeweled luminescent lego set of Chicago's night-time skyline after suffering through the moldy pancake that is northern indiana. with forty feet of diesel burnin' land yacht and tiff at the helm we could be the poster for "squeaky and the bandit." stella finally lost a long battle with consciousness and her cheeks are jiggling like santa's ass on a corrugated tin roof. neither tiff or i have been able to sum up our feelings very well at this point. i feel like we're half-way through a health club smoothie; it tastes a little nasty but it's probably good for us and for the price we're damn well gonna finish it. we're hoping to make it to madison wisconsin tonight and head west from there on the northern route. the last time i came this way was on a cross country honeymoon bicycle trip. now 10 years later and with fourteen thousand pounds more stuff (including 20 pounds of cheese-fed baby) i'm looking for the next thing, whatever that might be. between tiff and i, i'm sure we've had several hundred conversations with friends and family about why we're leaving and i think we've managed to come up with a different answer each time.

my turn to drive...

Movin' on up...

Bowling is a sport. If this statement seems reasonable to you, then you probably are unsurprised by the fact that RV parks are indicated on maps as "campgrounds". Living in an RV park is actually a lot like camping except for the air conditioning, refrigerator, stereo, oven, showers, laundry room, pool and high-speed internet connection. For the last few weeks Tiffany and I have both been unemployed ( Stella is still working around the clock at being a tiny little trainwreck with a pinch of tornado) and living in the trailer. We kicked off our jobless adventuring with a trip to Nashville to celebrate Dr Joe's release from prison (he was sentenced to 9 years of residency after med school for being smart enough to be a plastic surgeon). In addition to being a surgeon Joe also works part time as a rep for Bacchus, greek god of wine, women, and song. True to his style, he and his comrades took over the penthouse suite of a hotel in downtown Nashville for an evening of drinking, dancing and generalized merriment. This gave Tiffany and I a chance to recreate "The Jeffersons" in a single evening by getting ready for the party at the trailer park and heading to the hotel for some fancy high-rollin' until the sun came up.

{picture: view from the party pad}


Stella Firefly Short was born in our bathroom in Lexington one year ago. I had come home from work after a night shift as Tiff was getting out of bed and she said, "I think my water just broke but you should go ahead and get some sleep because we've got a while." This statement reinforces my belief that all pregnant women are beautiful and stark-raving mad. Obviously things went well but not without the steady calm guidance of our midwife, Linda Blue and the mellow joy of my mother. I knew that Stella would come into the world surrounded by friends and family but I didn't realize that her arrival would also blur the lines between the two. Since Stella was born, Linda has become family and Stella always puts on her best manners when she sees her. Linda is headed around the world soon, because like any superhero her path is guided by a mixture of the whimsy of fate and the needs of others. She made our weekend in Nashville possible by coming along and keeping an eye on Stella and we couldn't have done it without her.

{picture: the late night impromptu dance floor}

dizzy land and the purple martins

ahh sweet simplicity. while tiff and stella have been in disneyland, i've realized that moving from a house to a trailer was an idea in the right direction, but too hesitant of a step. if we are truly going to simplify our lives then we are going to have to eliminate all traces of materialism from our living situation. so in that spirit, i bring you pictures of our new home- the big rock.
we been living next to the big rock for two and a half weeks now and are enjoying the lack of clutter. when it rains we bathe and what we catch in the river is what we eat, sometimes catfish or bass, sometimes a full can of beer or a package of hot dogs. here, tiffany is showing ryan and leslie our new table that we pushed over this afternoon. we've been trying shop locally and we only give stella toy rocks from within 10 feet of where we live and only if they're in season.
stella has responded amazingly to this change. tiffany and i have always been believers in an organic approach to sustainable parenting and letting stella discover the joys of foraging for crawdads has been as fullfilling as it has been tasty. here you see her crawling into her bed wearing pajamas that we wove from an old tarp and some bunjee cords that washed up in our living room.


the thing we're coming to realize is how little we really need. here's a picture of stella sharing the family cup with ryan, showing that she considers him a part of our family. we were too busy living in the moment to take pictures as our two families settled in to our rocks for the evening, watched the sun set, and passed the family cup of fresh local-made fair trade river water.

(i don't know if i've been listening to too much bluegrass or reading to many children's books, but i've had this in my head for days; a tribute to my bouncy dog)

in for a penny,
in for a pound
my dog jumps up...
but she don't come down

whats up with a pup that gets down and falls up?

three white paws
and one that's brown
cuz she's three parts rabbit
and one part hound

whats up with a pup that gets down and falls up?

i can't walk her around
if she don't touch the ground
i can't reach her to spank her
without a leash or an anchor

whats up with a pup that gets down and falls up?

for anybody that's actually tuning into this for an account of our family adventure in the trailer, tiff and stella are in disneyland and nala and i are in the trailer in winchester so adventure is fairly minimal right now. the rain has reactivated sasha rottenweiler's skunk smell so i'm loving the electric fan. aromatherapy it ain't.

whiskey, tobacco, horse-racing and caves...kentucky has every kind of way of getting lost. the surest way to lose your footing in the bluegrass though, is by admiring the scenery so much you wander off the trail and into a bit of adventure. look up or down, there's curiosities enough to kill a trailer's worth of cats. we've been living at gainesway farm thanks to our association with the king of trees, and his fiefdom is a wonder.
We made it to Bee Rock (clearly named to instill a patient mindset) for some two-trailer, three-baby camping and playing in the river. The psychiatrist and i saw a baby deer swim a rapid to escape a hound dog. The king of trees and i tried to paddle a tandem kayak with our hands instead of walking back for the forgotten paddles, ending up shipwrecked in knee deep mud and weeds. The hairless chimps all chased each other around the picnic table and tried to eat rocks.
I woke up in the trailer early in the morning of my birthday to full nose fog of skunk: the vents on the trailer managing to serve as some sort of concentrating device for the olfactory insult. a can full of skunk is a tough place to live. poor Sasha Rottenweiler was the most wounded by the skunks opinion; vigorously scrubbed with a bottle of coconut shampoo, she now smells like some kind of tropical fart.
some thoughts on living in the trailer
1) sleeping with fresh air every night is awesome. skunks and diaper pails are the enemy.
2) tidiness is vital.
3)the "swiffer" is pretty handy but when i think of saying "i just swiffered my trailer", i blush.
4) we like getting the feel of new places.

photo: cool overgrown cemetery on gainesway farm.

wolf whiskers

If moon worshippers are lunatics, then tiffany and I are in for a second degree moonburn and a trip to the luny bin. Our idolatry of the battered satellite comes not by choice, but by admitting the obvious and inescapable truth that we are addicted to moonbeams. After having met, married, conceived and birthed a child under full moons we have given up and decided to accept our lunar tendencies. For the suntanned nocturnal folks out, keep your eyes on all that waxing and waning going on up there, it might be important. I say a moonth is a better measure of time than a month and it's worth setting your watch back a moonbeam or two. Solar power may be the answer to our oil depency, but if we're ever going to cure our addiction to normalcy, Obama's gonna need to throw a few dollars at lunar power. This waxing moon will be Stella's 13th and will be her lunar birthday (mine too) and the end of her first year finds us living in a trailer and bouncing around between campgrounds and guest bedrooms.


Cheers to Ryan, Leslie, and Crazy C who paid to come camp with us at the horse park. They left the prettiest horse farm in kentucky to come camp next to the basketball court with us and for this we are firmly convinced of their friendship. The horse park initially seemed like a good choice due to its proximity to Spindletop; living in a trailer park and swimming at the country club fulfilled a kentucky-bred dream of mine, but in retrospect the outdoor mall scene left a little to be desired.
Currently we are cozily ensconced at my parents place in Indiana. Last night we watched the firefly disco in their front field and this morning we had eggs that were laid yesterday, homemade biscuits, and jam made from strawberries picked last week.