New Year, Big News!

Matt and I have been travelling from sea to shining sea in the last month (if you consider Lake Superior a sea) visiting many friends and family members for Christmas and New Years. We went to MN for Christmas, drove back to Chicago on 12/30, and flew to WA for New Year’s Eve. We stayed in WA long enough to see our friends Devyn and Ryan get married (congratulations!) and just came home 2 days ago. It was a great break but we are so ready to settle in at home and not fly anywhere for a long time!

We have had pretty sparse internet access over the past few weeks, so one exciting item has gone unreported on our blog. We are expecting a baby! This is great news for us, and we can’t wait until approximately July 7th to welcome a new member of our family. We appreciate your prayers as we wait because the memories of Evie’s problems produce a lot of anxieties for us.

Here’s all the info that you’re surely dying to know! :P

• 
  I’m 15 weeks pregnant
• 
  I haven’t had any sickness due to pregnancy (though I caught a nasty cold on the tail end of our travels—normally I’d medicate myself with Nyquil and sleep my way through it, but since it’s not allowed I have to endure every disgusting symptom!)
• 
  We’ll have an ultrasound a month from now to tell us if we should expect a boy or a girl. We also plan to have a fetal echocardiogram at that time to give us the best image of the heart. I can’t wait to put my anxieties to rest!
• 
  My due date is July 7th

Good Times

We’ve had a full but fun weekend here in the Kennedy house. Saturday was a full day at the farmer’s market for the two of us, but Saturday night we had the pleasure to go see one of my newer favorite bluegrass groups at the Riviera: Old Crow Medicine Show.

OCMS put on a great show with high energy alternative-country that mostly classifies as bluegrass but occasionally reaches into Hank Williams kind of blues ballads. OCMS is definitely “old school” string music, but done with a bit of a punk attitude. OCMS’s self titled album is a quality piece of work; excellent musicianship that carries on the deep traditions of mountain music into the 21st century. Folk music of the American south in the 20th century was steeped in faith, populism, local culture, love of place, a sense of both outrage and resignment over the plight of the southern poor, and the metaphors of great journeys and great wanderings . Like Johnny Cash’s “Man in Black”, OCMS sings about solidarity with the disenfranchised in “I Hear them All”. While many of the great country musicians have sun g extensively about battles with drugs and alcohol, OCMS plays the contemporary version of the same battle with songs like “Methamphetamine”, “Tennessee Pusher”, and “Tell it to Me”—exploring the great struggle rural communities face against the scourge of substance abuse. The band played with unprecedented energy, speed, and skill that kept the crowd dancing throughout the evening. OCMS mostly tours the south, so their concert here in Chicago was a special event which brought out fans from all across the Midwest who raucously sang and danced to all the great music. They didn’t sing any louder than when the band played their hit song, "Wagon Wheel"—a song I can listen to over and over and not get tired of. Like some of the best country music, it’s a song about struggle that makes you want to sing loud in with a defiant hope. It makes you want to cry but also makes you want to sing out with joy.

Even though we were out late on Saturday, we decided to get up early on Sunday to head north and spend the day in Wisconsin to see some old friends and take in some brilliant fall foliage. We worshiped with our family at Anchor Covenant Church, and it was good to be among them again. We admired the brilliant colors of autumn in Lake Geneva, took a drive through the country, took a little hike in the Kettle Moraine Forrest, and then sampled some cheeses on the way home—getting home just in time to watch the Seahawks embarrass themselves on Sunday Night Football yet again.

Maps

I've always been fascinated by maps. As a kid, whenever we were on a road trip I would love to trace our route and note the things we might see along the way (I still do this now). Recently I've been following the election polls and examining the "electoral map" of the United States, noting which states turn "blue" or "red" with different public opinion polls (www.fivethirtyeight.com is my favorite site for this). Yet there are things about maps that are deceiving. For instance; on a world map North American and Europe are always at the top? As our planet floats in space is there any real objective way to say that North is up? Yes it could be a matter of aesthetics, but I think it mostly is a product of perspective. We who are wealthy and strong want to see our homes at the top of the map. You might also notice the way that taking a round globe and putting on a flat map distorts some of the preportions of the globe (is Greenland really almost as big as Africa? No, its only about 40% the land mass [see also Australia).

The subjectivity of our perspective can fundamentally alter the way we think. Hard data is not that hard to the human mind. Consider the fears we might have of terrorism, kidnappings, or freak accidents to our apathy about the mundane things that are more likely to prematurely kill us: heart disease, cancer, drunk driving, driving while texting. The odds are astronomically greater that the donuts I had for breakfast is the more likelier cause of my death than gang crossfire. But you wouldn't know it the way we talk about what scares us.

So as we consider the great threats we face in the United States of turmoil in our pocket books as well as geopolitical turmoil, it would do us well to try and get some perspective. Take a look at these maps.


This is our planet as it appears geographically. But look below as the map is altered to reflect what people suffered the greatest casualties of warfare in the 2oth century.


Its not hard to see how Africa, Asia, and the Middle East have suffered the most catastrophic war-time suffering even when you account for the devastation of Europe in WWII. Consider now what the future of global economics might hold...

This is a projection of the distribution of wealth through 2015. Notice that even though India and East Asia project to grow enormously, Europe and the U.S. still maintain a huge portion of wealth-- and Africa remains far behind.

I posit all of this to say, for us in the United States, all the fear we may experience as it relates to financial and national security might be overstated. It might be that the reality of our situation is not that we're "crashing", but that we're coming back down to earth. We've been insulated from so long from the violence and poverty of the rest of the planet that the economic and political troubles of our day feel more threatening than they really are. Don't get me wrong, I know things are tough for a lot of people-- many Americans are suffering the burdens of medical debt, unemployment/underemployment, or fear for a loved one deployed in a war zone. All I suggest is that as the world gets smaller, each of us should expand our outlook to consider not just quality of life here in America--but all over our small world.

Our vacation

Wow, this blog got kind of pathetic over the last few weeks. I guess I've either been too busy or too lazy to write! The most exciting thing of note to happen in the month of September was our vacation in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico with a couple of good friends. It was very refreshing to get away after a really hectic few weeks at work. We were really worried about the weather with it being storm season and all, but it would seem that Chicago ended up getting the storms we were expecting in Cabo. While we were nursing sunburns from all our time enjoying the outdoors, the North Park campus was being flooded! Luckily we came home to a dry basement.

Zaccheus' Baconfest '08

We went camping last weekend near Tomah with some friends from MN and WI. Towards the end of the trip we titled the outing "1st Annual Baconfest" since we had bacon at almost every meal. The most unholy creation was the bacon-wrapped sausage (pictured). And since we were in Wisconsin, of course Matt and I had to stop at a cheese factory on the way home. We hiked, grilled, took a dip in the lake, got a tan, and just hung out. It was really fun!

Weekend Adventures

Last night we took a road trip up to Milwaukee to catch a Steve Earle concert. Steve has a mastery of the entire spectrum of Americana music: country, folk, rock, blues, and bluegrass-- so when I found out that this was going to be just a solo acoustic show, I was a little disappointed thinking that the scope of material would be narrowed to the folkier songs in his catalog. I was gladly proven wrong. Steve Earle played over 2 hours and drew heavily from his extensive songbook. The first half was heavily "folky", just Steve and his guitar. Yet Steve does incredible guitar work that filled the Pabst theater with the bright and gritty sounds of his Martin guitar; Steve's vocals were equally powerful--not any thing less than the best he sounds on records. The second half of the show was Steve and the guitar paired with a DJ who spun some loops and samples for some more of the "rockier" stuff. I was skeptical when I first saw what was happening, but again I was suprised with the quality of the exectution. Some of Steve Earle's best songs are written as duets where his gravely voice contrasts with the pretty vocals of an alto singer. On this night they were beautifully supplied by Steve's opening act and wife, Allison Moorer. Steve writes some pretty heavy stuff-- blues and country inspired by his own battle with addiction, tales of the struggle of southern life, and fierce political convictions. Steve can sing a haunting ballad of lost love that'll make a cowboy weep in his beer. But it wasn't all doom and gloom. American Mountain music has deep roots in celtic music, and Steve is one of the greatest American musicians to tap the sounds of Ireland. It doesn't get better than "The Galway Girl", one of the funnest numbers of the entire concert.




We had a great time. The trip was well worth it, including a stop at the famous "Mars Cheese Castle" for some local Wisconsin delicacies.

We also saw a fantastic vanity plate on the way up I-94:
That's what I said when I saw it.

The night before we went out with a couple friends to see "The Dark Knight" which is about as cool as everyone says it is. Lots of action, a great performance by Heath Ledger as the joker, and great shots of Chicago. Did you know that Batman and Joker have also put together a helpful PSA for the summer.

See more funny videos at Funny or Die

Land of 10K Lakes

I'm not much of a writer lately, but here's a random assortment of pictures from our trip to MN:

There's nobody more obnoxious than a returning vacationist.

It was a long winter in many ways. Thats why Nicole and I were tickled at the offer by my parents to accompany them on a short cruise to celebrate both my graduation and our fifth anniversary. It was the first real vacation we've taken in years.

Just hours after graduation we hopped on a flight to Seattle so we could celebrate H and J's great wedding. Though we arrived a few minutes late, it was a pleasure to be there and celebrate with an intimate group of people--wonderful friends who have remained close throughout the years. On Monday we got on another plane and flew to Long Beach and boarded the "Monarch of the Seas" in San Pedro. Cruising ended up being a lot of fun. We explored the ship, watched two comedians, had fantastic food, watched the ocean, saw dolphins, tourtises, sea lions, and marine fowl, played a few casino games, listened to music, shopped, and just relaxed. Our first port was in San Diego were we spent the day with a good friend just hanging out (and having delicious tacos). Our second port was supposed to be Catalina Island, but bad weather forced us to cancel and instead we spent a day at sea. Our final port was Ensenada. It was Nicole's first trip to Mexico, and she seemed to be immediately enamored. Some people only like Mexico for its resort areas, never venturing outside the Americanized confines of resorts and beaches. Ensenada is different, more authentically Mexican--and we like that. Nicole and I enjoy Mexican food and art, as well as we encountering different cultures... so Ensenada was a highlight for us. Neither of us had yet picked out an anniversary gift for each other, so when we found an incredible piece of authentic Mexican art we decided to get it...
We returned to Los Angeles the next day and flew back to Seattle. That night we went to a wedding shower for another old friend, then we made our way down to Cascades Camp to spend a couple days with a couple of our favorite people in one of our favorite places.

It was a week packed full of activity, but for as much as we did in just 8 days, it was a very relaxing experience overall. Flying and traveling was a breeze for once! It was a little silly that we left better weather in Chicago and Seattle for overcast skies in Southern California, but that's okay. It was a great way to kick off the summer.

Weekend in MN

We had a lot of fun in Minnesota on the weekend with hockey, family, and friends! We got to see Roseau win at the game we attended on Thursday night, but then they lost in their second game.
Here's some pictures from our trip...
























Does anyone know how to make captions for photos?

As you can see in the first photo, Brett was super excited to pose for a group picture with the Gustafson/Kennedy family. The second is of me, Mom, and my aunt Iris who was our fabulous host. The last 2 are part of an extensive photoshoot involving Adrienne and I in our unplanned matching outfits. In one I'm trying not to pee my pants and in the other she's throwing her back out.