Top Down

Posted on October 13, 2018 by Katherine Wikoff

I took this photo of our birch tree this week on a sunny early evening as I arrived home from work.

Trees die from the top down, something I learned from the arborist years ago when our birch tree was attacked by birch borers. Most of the uppermost center branches lost their leaves, many small branches themselves started to fall, and the entire crown started looking very sparse. That’s when we began to take serious care of all our trees, and the birch tree most of all. Birches are very fragile, which is why you rarely see one as large (and old) as ours. They need plenty of water during hot, dry spells, and they need to be fortified against insect infestations regularly.

A couple more interesting birch tree facts.

First, birch trees are highly allergenic. Not only will the pollen itself make you miserable every spring (runny nose, sneezing, etc.), but it may also lead you to have allergic reactions to FOOD. This is actually a thing! So let’s assume you’re not particularly allergic to a certain food, say walnuts. A birch tree can cause you to become temporarily allergic. That is, if you eat walnuts anywhere near a birch tree during its pollen-producing phase, you might have an allergic reaction to the walnuts BECAUSE of the birch pollen. Isn’t that crazy?

Second, birch trees do an amazing job of removing contaminants from soil, especially heavy metals and petroleum products like diesel fuel or crude oil. A scientist I used to know from UWM (University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee) told me about that, and I just now looked it up online to confirm that my memory (from like 15 years ago) was accurate.

Anyway, since trees die from the top down, I guess it makes sense that their “little” deaths each autumn would occur in the same manner.

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What’s in a tagline (Part 2): Changing my blog’s identity AGAIN

Posted on October 11, 2018 by Katherine Wikoff

Welcome to KatherineWikoff.com, version 3.0. Today marks the launch of a new tagline for my blog’s “identity,” and I think I’ve FINALLY found something that fits.

Version 1.0

Starting out in 2012, I subtitled my blog “Ideas on creativity, innovation, lifelong learning, and other random stuff.” That tagline served me well for nearly five years. Well, maybe “served me well” is an overstatement. I thought I was going to be writing a lot more about those first three topics than I ever actually did. What saved it was the “random stuff” add-on at the end, which had initially been an afterthought. As my blog hit its one-year, two-year, three-year, four-year anniversaries, I came to realize that “random stuff” pretty much constituted my blog’s entire bread and butter.

Version 2.0

In January 2017 I decided it was time to address the rift between what my blog purported to be and the reality of how it had actually turned out. Changing my tagline was a big project for me, one I took seriously. I made lists of blog topics and descriptors, drafted potential taglines, edited the heck out of them, and painstakingly made my eventual way to a new tagline that I hoped captured my blog’s heart and soul.

Searching for meaning. Making connections. Noticing beauty. Discovering insights. Finding inspiration. Tending imagination. Trying to say yes.

Ugh. I hated it from the start. It was aspirational, but it definitely wasn’t me. Too sappy, too pretentious. Very embarrassing, like who did I even think I was? Yet I had nothing better, so I just left it. I didn’t have the heart (or the time!) to go through that whole exercise again.

However . . .

Version 3.0

After not paying attention to that sappy tagline for the past year and a half, I finally noticed it again yesterday when I put up the “Ha-Ha” post.

UGH!!! I think I’ve been in denial: avoiding it, ignoring it, pretending it didn’t exist. I’m even shorter on time now than I was in January 2017, but I realized I just couldn’t stand the idea of that disgusting tagline representing me online for even one more day.

So this morning I had maybe fifteen minutes before a meeting. I pulled up my WordPress dashboard and started typing a new tagline right into the little box. No lists, no rough drafts, no agonizing over my blog’s identity. (Or, God forbid, my “brand.”) I just tried to think clearly about the kinds of posts I put up and describe them as simply as possible. And quickly, racing to finish before my meeting began.

Ironic, right, how sometimes the thrown-together mess turns out to be WAY  better than the work of art so assiduously labored over? It rarely pays to think too much. Which is one very hard lesson for an academic to learn 🙂

 

Posted in Creativity, Writing, blogging | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments

A “Ha-Ha” Aha

Posted on October 10, 2018 by Katherine Wikoff

In reading a book recently, I came across a reference to something I’d never heard of before: a “ha-ha.”

This turned out to be a fun little piece of landscape trivia to learn about. A ha-ha is a feature of landscaping that allows for both the practicality of a fence or wall while maintaining the illusion of natural countryside. So one might look out across the lawn of a grand country house in England and see sheep grazing picturesquely in the meadows beyond with no worry about those sheep potentially moving out of their proper place in the vista and finding their way right up to the front door.

Basically, a ha-ha seems very similar to the moat in a zoo exhibit. It keeps animals inside their enclosure by presenting them with a wall at the bottom of a slope, yet it allows the people outside of the enclosure the pleasure of imagining that there is no barrier between them and the animals they observe. The name “ha-ha” is derived directly from the the sound of amused surprise one might make upon discovering that a beautiful landscape of natural countryside is actually a fenced-in pasture for livestock.

The deer parks kept by English aristocracy also featured these ditches dug all the way around the sprawling wilderness, again so as to contain the wild creatures within the grounds. In fact, according to the Wikipedia article on ha-has, the deer parks featured one additional barrier, a fence at the top of the ha-ha wall. A deer from outside the park could easily jump in but once inside would find it impossible to get back out. Ha-ha, indeed.

That fence atop the wall turns out to be called a “pale.” Isn’t that interesting? My whole life I’ve heard the phrase “beyond the pale” to describe something egregiously beyond the bounds of decency. Just as my students do with expressions they’ve heard but have no practical knowledge of (a “doggy dog” world, a hard “road” to hoe, etc.), I constructed a meaning for “beyond the pale” that had nothing to do with what it actually referred to. My mental image involved someone encountering behavior so bad that it would cause them to “pale,” in terms of having their face turn white from the sudden loss of blood in their head and coming dangerously close to fainting due to that bad behavior they’d just been exposed to. “Beyond the pale” to me meant behavior even worse than the ordinary brand of bad behavior that might cause a person to pale. It makes sense, right?

Usually I like knowing all the behind-the-scenes info, so you’d think I’d be happy to have learned  that “beyond the pale” means “on the other side of the fence.”

Except . . . how prosaic is that? I greatly preferred my incorrect (but far more poetic and romantic) understanding of the term 🙂

Posted in architecture, Books and reading, Creativity, Learning, Life, Nature | Tagged , | 6 Comments

Some follow-up thoughts on light

Posted on October 5, 2018 by Katherine Wikoff

Probably the one thing that fascinates me most about photography is the way light makes or breaks an image. Here are three pictures taken on different days this week. I took the first photo, which I posted yesterday, a few days ago when the light of a bright, sunny day made me notice this little corner of my world in a new way.

I took the second yesterday, when the sun was in a different place in the sky. I kind of like the contrast provided by that strip of bright green, but the image has no overall coherence.

And then the third picture is one I took today, when the sun is filtered by cloud cover and a thin, misty drizzle of rain. Blah, blah, blah. BLAH!

Without the contrast provided by hard light and deep, well-defined shadows (as in the first photo), you don’t particularly notice some features at all (the pipe things sticking out from the wall), while other features (the grass, the cage) become flat and uninteresting.

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Green lawn, white building, angled shadows, caged “works” (and thoughts on blogging)

Posted on October 4, 2018 by Katherine Wikoff

Something about the bright sunlight and the white building, the slanted shadows and the lush green grass, and finally the caged meters and pipes caught my eye as I was walking down the hill to Starbucks a few days ago. Pretty ordinary and normally not worth a second look. But all those factors taken together suddenly came together as a “subject” worthy of the pause needed to pull out my phone and snap a photograph.

I’ve been away from blogging for weeks. Life happens to us all, right? Although part of me feels an obligation to reenter the blog stream with a big, significant post, the more practical side of me knows I should just slip back quietly and resume posting random stuff. So here I am.

In their early days, like 18-20 years ago, blogs were called “weblogs” or “online diaries,” descriptions that imply brief entries like daily “posts” more than substantial essays or articles.

For whatever reason, though, I always feel compelled to write more in a blog post than what’s appropriate for a “log” or “diary” entry. It’s very satisfying to write a longer piece, and over time it’s those longer posts that continue to draw visitors to my blog years after they were written. All the diary-type posts, featuring throwaway photos and little observations on my daily life, kind of disappear into the ether.

Yet those small moments of insight add up to something—I’m not sure what, but something—and therefore of value.

Which reminds me of this concluding remark from Nicholas Hitchon in the 56 Up movie trailer (which you can watch at the end of this post to gain a quick overview/summary of the phenomenal “Up” documentary series)

It’s how a person, any person, it’s how they change. It’s not an absolute, accurate picture of me. But it’s a picture of somebody.

Isn’t that what a blog amounts to, as well?

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Posted in Life, Milwaukee, Photography, Writing, blogging | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments

Down to the Bone

Posted on August 2, 2018 by Katherine Wikoff

MSOE’s Campus Center building, originally the Valentin Blatz Brewing Co. Bottle House, is getting some major restoration work done. Windows are being replaced, as is apparently much of the exterior facade.

Today I noticed that that the work seems to be going all the way down to the girders! So this is a seriously substantial “spruce up.”

By the way, those yellow bricks rounding the corner and apparently underlying the tan-colored tiles covering the rest of the building? They may be Cream City Brick, but the yellow seems just a little too saturated for Milwaukee’s famous homegrown building material. In fact, these bricks look strikingly similar to the glazed ones you can find inside the building—for example, in the women’s room just off the Todd Wehr Auditorium lobby and on an old section of wall on the mezzanine (near the V.P. of Academics’ office) that looks like it might have been the bottling plant’s original interior. The only difference seems to be that there’s no glaze on the part that wound up hidden away beneath the building’s exterior tiles.

If it turns out these bricks and the ones used for interior walls actually are the same material, it’s interesting that the same item should have been been employed both decoratively and functionally. I mean, why spend extra money on something no one will ever see (until 70 years later, during extensive maintenance 🙂 )? Unless maybe the original builder got a great price for buying in bulk!

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Milwaukee’s Water Street ladybugs and large veins at City Hall

Posted on August 1, 2018 by Katherine Wikoff

Yesterday morning I walked over to a foundation’s office to hand-deliver a grant proposal for the daytime homeless sanctuary I volunteer with, Repairers of the Breach. (Website HERE; Facebook page HERE. Check them out if you’re interested in finding a very worthy cause to support via donation or volunteering 🙂 )

On the way back I paused on the second-floor landing of the Chase Tower to take a picture of the giant ladybugs crawling down the building across the street to text to my daughters. (Sorry about all the reflections; I was indoors and the lights behind me showed up pretty prominently on the glass of the window I took the photo through. You can even make out the guy sitting on the bench next to me who was talking on his phone. He’s right there behind/above/around the lowest ladybug.)

When my daughters were young and I’d pick them up from my brother and sister-in-law’s house in Bay View after work, it was a highlight of their evening, especially in the early darkness of winter months, to spot the red glow of these ladybugs as we drove up Water Street into downtown on our way home. Now that my brother and sister-in-law have moved, we never seem to drive that far south on Water Street at night. I thought my girls might get a kick out of seeing that their old touchstone is still here. You can find’ more background on this unique sculpture HERE in a WUWM story from March 2017.

Then, speaking of stone, as I was walking past City Hall, where they’re currently doing the latest installment of the never-ending construction/restoration this beautiful-but-high-maintenance building requires, I noticed what appeared to be repairs to cracks in the granite base. Oh no, I thought, now the building is starting to fracture. Took me a minute to realize, duh!, that these are natural veins in the rock itself.

I love rocks and took a year of geology in college. But I am so separated from “earth” during the ordinary course of my days that, sadly, I don’t always recognize what I’m seeing. As a result my “aha” moment there on the sidewalk was a bemused cross between chagrin and delight. But mostly delight 🙂

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Cool things for the kitchen

Posted on July 29, 2018 by Katherine Wikoff

I just happened to notice these new products (I think they’re new, anyway) when I was at the grocery store this afternoon. I have to give Reynolds credit; they’ve solved some irritating problems that have annoyed me for years.

Have you even baked something on foil to keep your pan clean . . . and then had the food stick to the foil when you tried to lift it off? And then the foil ripped, leaving you with a mess on the pan anyway? And foil stuck to your food? Well, apparently that never needs to happen again.

And don’t you hate it when you’re trying to rip off a sheet of plastic wrap and the cutting edge doesn’t really work, so the plastic kind of rips raggedly and then folds in on itself? And then you have to peel it all apart and lay the clingy mess open so you have a usable sheet of plastic to wrap around your food or to cover the bowl? Never needs to happen again.

Finally, and this doesn’t really solve a big problem, but it’s still a pretty handy solution that can save time and at least a little bit of hassle.

Not to turn my blog into a commercial for these products or anything, but I was decently impressed so thought I’d share 🙂

 

Posted in Creativity, Food, Life | Tagged , , , | 4 Comments

Casting a long shadow

Posted on July 27, 2018 by Katherine Wikoff

The sculptures in this case are located in the “marble quarrying” section of the Grohmann Museum’s second floor. I’m not sure why this caught my eye today, because I walk past here all the time. Maybe it’s just a little quieter at the moment. Anyway, the extra long shadow seemed kind of compelling to me, and even a little dramatic.

And here’s a more balanced view. You can see that the shadow on the opposite side of the case isn’t nearly as impressive. Somehow seeing only the one, and looking at it from an angle that isolates it a bit, causes me to assign that shadow significance, making it appear far more important to the gallery space than it actually is. I know that’s silly, but I do notice shadows and how they sometimes seem even more interesting than the things that cast them. (Hmm, now I’m thinking about Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave.” This does not mean I’m an unenlightened prisoner, I hope!)

Also, today I noticed for the first time that the bronze sculptures in that case are set on bases of green marble. How appropriate 🙂

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An old friend I can rely upon

Posted on July 26, 2018 by Katherine Wikoff

As you can see, my old umbrella is completely held together by safety pins and paper clips. Every single junction of stretcher and rib has broken at one time or another, which I’ve always managed to repair with whatever little doodad connectors I could lay my hands on quickly.

Although I’ve bought many other, much nicer umbrellas over the years, they’ve all broken in ways that couldn’t be so easily fixed. Which is why, twenty years later, I’m still carrying around this raggedy contraption. It’s usually the only one in working order when the forecast calls for rain.

It’s imperfect, but then again, “perfect” never seems to stick around for long.

Posted in Life | Tagged , , , | 10 Comments