I had a lot of pent-up cooking energy after watching a few epsiodes of Taco Chronicles so I scavenged through my pantry and put togther two things that taste great on tortillas. As usual, I wasn’t working from a recipe or taking any notes. Consider these loose guidelines, not recipes. Neither of these are my invention. I’m sure you can find better versions of food like this in Mexican cookbooks.

Spicy Tomato Beans

• Some dry beans (I used pinto)
• Chopped onion
• Chopped cilantro
• Can of tomatoes
• As much chipotle in adobo as you want
• Water as necessary

Mix in a pressure cooker. Have enough liquid in there for your beans to cook comfortably. You want some broth left over. Cook. Remove the beans/tomatoes/etc from the broth. Simmer the broth until it’s about half its original volume.

Stewed Chorizo and Potatos

• Some soft, Mexican-style chorizo
• Onion
• Diced potatoes
• Reduced broth from the previous recipe

Crumble up and cook the chorizo in a frying pan. Remove the chorizo, leaving the fat. Saute the onion in the fat until it softens. Add the potatoes and the reduced broth. Simmer until the potatoes are cooked. Mix the chorizo back in and simmer for a few more minutes.

Thanks to a cheap adapter I’m now using my old Super-Multi-Coated Takumar 1:1.4/50 lens on my new camera. The lens is older than me. It may have belonged to my dad, actually. He did photo-journalism work around the time it was made. This is the lens I used throughout high school and college. It has sat, unused, since I stopped shooting 35mm.

I’m glad to have this lens back! I love its weight and hard metal edges. And the photos look good too. On my camera it’s got an effective focal length of 100mm, making it more of a short telephoto lens. I can use it to get close up shots without having to get right up next to my subject. And with a 1.4 apeture it’s great for low light or fast-moving subjects.

Hmm. What fast-moving thing do I like to take close-up photos of? Bees!

The lens’ shallow and manual focus make bee photos a bit of a challenge. But it’s a good challenge; forcing me to practice quick focusing and exposure. This is where I’m most thankful for digital photography. I can take as many blurry, underexposed bee photos as my memory card will allow.

I last went backpack camping when I was 18. And that trip was a disaster! My girlfriend and I abandoned the endeavor after 1 night of torrential rain. Spending the weekend lazing around in bed sounded much better.

Before that I’d backpacked with the Scouts, but those trips were also full of mishaps. Some fun, some less so. The Scouts and I did not get along.

But as a kid I’d spent a weekend backpacking through Arches National Park with my Dad. I remember the trip strongly and it remains one of the best childhood memories I have. It was challenging but beautiful.

Earlier this year, in the Before Times, I was planning to take my daughter to Yellowstone. Covid ended that plan, but my daughter remained enthusiastic about camping. So we planned a whole summer’s worth of camping trips. Thankfully we did this before every other Minnesotan had the same idea and booked up every camping spot in the state.

My daughter wanted to learn more about camping, so I planned each trip to introduce a new skill. Our first trip was car camping. Our second trip was car camping, but we tried to bring everything we needed in our backpacks. We went on longer and longer hikes. All with an eye towards spending two nights backpacking in George Crosby Manitou State Park.

I could have picked an easier park. Manitou is intentionally undeveloped. The trails are rugged and steep. There are few amenities. The topological map features those tightly bunched lines that lets you know your legs are in for a rough time.

But I fell in love with the park 3 years ago when I happened to hike through it with my then-wife. We didn’t know how rugged the trail we picked was. And we certainly didn’t know that it was going to dump rain on us for the last half of the hike. Like Arches, the challenge and the beauty of the park has stayed with me.

So, loaded up and ready for adventure we left the parking spot and headed to our campsite, number 5, right by the Manitou River. The Yellow Birch Trail is narrow and has a few tricky bits, but is mostly uneventful until the junction with the Misquah Trail. From this point down to the river, the Yellow Birch quickly descends a few hundred very rocky feet.

Once we reached the bottom the River trail had us jumping from rock to rock and hopping red pine roots to avoid tumbling in to the icy water below. This is much trickier when learning how to navigate with a loaded backpack throwing off your center of gravity. Hooray for my trekking poles. They were a life saver.

The campsite was gorgeous and we settled in for a night of star gazing and s’mores (for which I gathered barely enough firewood). Each campsite should have a pit latrine and a bear pole. We easily found the latrine, but never did find that bear pole. We found a suitable tree and made our own. No bears bothered us or our food.

On the second day we left our heavy packs at camp and took a day hike along the Superior Hiking Trail, another place I fell in love with on an earlier trip to the North Shore. I’ve hiked very little of it and wanted to take this opportunity to see more. The SHT in this area is just as steep and rocky as the park trails, so we did not go far. But we got some amazing views along the Horseshoe Ridge.

A small mishap with the water filter meant I had to boil extra water the 2nd night, which led to us running out of fuel the 2nd morning. But I was still able to make coffee, and we had enough food to start the day. An inconvenience so minor it does not deserve the name. Instead I hope it will add to our memories of the trip. We packed everything back up and began the climb out of the river valley, stopping at the scenic overlook by camping site 6.

Climbing out was no easier than hiking in. As happy as I was to give my legs a rest, I was sad to leave the park behind. We will be back!

All photos

No camping this time, just an afternoon spent hiking. We walked the 5.5 mile Hiking Club trail, with a couple of small detours. William O’Brien is a great park for an afternoon walk, picnic or trip to the river. There are some hills, but the trails are mostly wide and flat.

This was my first time using trekking poles and I’m a convert. Even on the mostly gentle trails of William O’Brien the poles were a great assist. In a couple of weeks we’re hiking the more rugged trails of Crosby Manitou and I’ll be carrying a loaded pack. I’ll be doubly greatful for the poles then, I’m sure.

All photos

I really like the ideas behind Good Sudoku but so far the execution is not great. Weird bugs prevent the tutorials from working, or lead to unsolveable puzzles. And the app absolutely devours the battery of my new phone. Hopefully a few updates will fix these things.

I have visited Savanna Portage State Park 3 times in the past year, twice in summer and once in winter. Every time I am surprised that the park is not more crowded. It’s a perfect fit for my type of outdoorsiness. It might just be a hidden gem.

Though you can reach the park from the Twin Cities in under 3 hours it still feels very remote. Unlike Lake Carlos, there are no towns of significant size nearby. McGregor, the closest town, is a 15 mile drive and has a population of 391 (but it does feature a bait shop/liquor store for visiting fishers). The Big Sandy lake resorts aren’t far away geographically, but they feel a world away. The park is silent and cell phone reception is almost non-existent.

Most summer visitors to Savanna Portage are probably there for the lakes. The park contains 4 and I think all of them are limited to low-horsepower motors. So you won’t see roaring pontoon party boats or water skiing here. Instead the lakes are mostly used by fishers, canoe and kayakers.

In winter the lakes still get a lot of use from fishers and snowmobilers. In my one winter visit there weren’t many snowmobilers around, possibly because the lakes weren’t safe. But I’ve heard they can be quite noisy.

While I love canoeing and fishing I prefer the park’s extensive hiking options. The Continental Divide trail is a must, and I’ve hiked or skied through most of the park’s other trails. They offer a nice mix of easy walking and moderate exertion. The Remote Lake Solitude Area bordering the park offers miles and miles of more hiking.

I have always stayed at the Garni Guesthouse so I have no experience of the main campground on Lake Shumway. But on my walks through it it seemed nice. Not as tightly packed as other lakeside campgrounds I’ve seen. The park also offers a bunch of hike-in and one canoe-in camping sites. I’ve seen some of them on my hikes and they look great if you want a more remote experience.

Thanks to all the lakes and bogs the bugs here are atrocious. I always prepare with both DEET and Picaridin and yet I always end up with a whole gang of bug bites. Next time I visit I’m bringing my own mosquito tent. Though I’m not sure how I’ll hike in it.

The first of a bunch of state park visits I have scheduled in 2020. I love the MN State Park system in general, but I love it even more in this time of pandemic and cancelled summer vacations.

My daughter picked Lake Carlos, possibly just because she liked the name. Neither of us knew anything about it. Her main goals were to fish and eat s’mores. My main goals were to hike and canoe.

You can do all of those things at Lake Carlos! So, in that respect our trip was a success.

But!

I don’t know if our visit was representative (it’s a weird year, y’all) but Lake Carlos seems to be a bit of a party park. Lots of folks there brought water vehicles: jet skis, pontoon boats, motor boats fast and slow. The lake was noisy and filled with wakes. And the camping spots were mostly occupied by huge trailers and large groups. The people there still abided (mostly) the quiet time rule, but it was a louder park than I’ve been to in the past.

And the park isn’t helped by its location; sandwiched between two state highways there’s a lot of road noise.

The hiking there is pretty, a mix of rolling prairie and forest. No big hills or challenges await. You could easily hike the whole park in a day.

Canoing was made more challenging by the wakes and such, but the lake itself is very pretty. Just expect a lot of traffic.

Fishing was a hit. Neither of us know how to fish, but the hordes of fish by the docks did not care. Want to eat a lot of sunnies? You can do that here. We did not because neither of us wanted to gut a fish.

Like frogs? Lake Carlos has an abundance! That photo is of the largest we spotted, a palm-sized Northern Leopard Frog (I think?). But we saw a ton of much smaller frogs. The smallest were about as big as a nickel. Some were up to a half-dollar in size. So many frogs!

Have money that you want to donate but aren’t sure where? I can’t answer the question for you, but here are the places that I’ve donated. This is Minneapolis focused and vaguely organized.

Northside

• Northside Funders
• Rebuild Fade Factory

Minneapolis’ Northside is chronically overlooked (racism) and was hit by many of the arsons. Much of the focus has been on Lake Street and Powderhorn, but Northside needs donations too.

The Fade Factory fundraiser has pointers to a lot of other good places to donate.

Lake Street

• Migizi
• We Love Lake Street
• Dreamland Faces
• Midtown Global Market Mend
• Restore Midori’s Floating World Cafe

These are all Lake Street (or Lake Street adjacent) fundraisers. All worthy of support.

Food

• Second Harvest Heartland
• The Food Group

Food access was a problem before the murder of George Floyd and it will continue to be a problem. These are both good resources. There are also folks on Twitter organizing Costco runs and you can donate via Venmo. https://twitter.com/librarianrover is a good one to follow for those kind of donations.

Media

• Unicorn Riot
• Sahan Journal
• MinnPost
• Star Tribune

Media. I relied on it because the story here was so chaotic. Unicorn Riot provided live streams of the protests. Sahah Journal covered the events from the immigrant perspective. MinnPost is a long-standing independent media source. And the Strib….well, their print coverage was not helpful in keeping up with the nitty gritty of the arson attacks, but their reporters were doing a bang up job on Twitter. And since I couldn’t pay the reporters directly, I gave the Strib money.

I have not yet donated to https://minnesotareformer.com/ because I just learned about it today. But I can see it getting a donation soon.

Photography was one of my hobbies in high school. Long before digital cameras, so we developed our own film and made our own prints. In college I worked in a darkroom for a few years, but didn’t take many photos my self.

In 2000, as blogging began, I jumped in to digital photography and shared photo sets on my original site. Flickr started a few years later and I’ve been a member ever since. But for years nearly all of my photos, like most peoples’ photos, have been cell phone shots.

Cell phone cameras are amazing and get better all the time, but I wanted to get deeper in to the hobby. After spending some time on Wirecutter I decided on their mirrorless choice, the Olympus OM-D E-M10 Mark III (who the hell came up with this name?).

After a day of playing with the camera, I’m loving it. Digital has come so far since my early-2000s cameras. The automatic modes are great, though I’m mostly sticking to manual since that was how I learned to shoot on film. But the word ‘manual’ is disingenuous. The camera still does so much. Auto-focus, auto-display of the expected exposure, automatic display of the camera’s pitch & yaw. It’s not like my grandfather’s Bessa 66 where everything is manual. (note: I love that camera but I think I’ve managed to take exactly 1 good photo with it over the years).

I’m still learning the new camera, and still remembering how to compose as shot so that it’s not terrible. But I’ve managed to get a few shots I like.

I was out of town for most of the last week. As the Minneapolis protests turned (yet again) to a push for substative change to the MPD I was driving to Maryland. I followed the City Council members on Twitter as they began to lay out their plan for dismantiling MPD. I was driving home yesterday as they announced their veto-proof majority in Powderhorn Park.

I am entirely in favor their plan and I’m excited to see what comes.

But…Today I noticed that I was also scared. What if my family is unsafe? What if my house value drops?

This is systematic racism in practice. This is the fear that white people have constructed for hundreds of years. The fear that if we don’t have oppression then the ‘other’ will ‘get us’! The fear that if we don’t keep them out (via deed covenants, redlining and racist loan administration) then we’ll be less valuable.

This is the system I need to dismantle. You might need to too. Our fantastic City Council can’t help us recognize and dismantle the fear that’s built in to our identities.