gouda? more like great-ah ...

sometimes when charles and i are seeped man sandals-deep some sort of true duluth experience -- hiking trails leagues beneath city street level in the central hillside, not wearing deoderant while we dine with a lake view, thinking about recycling while parkour-ing snowbanks between luce and quinlin's -- he will often stop and say: "some people come here for vacation and we get to live here."

yesterday it was raining. i drove to cloquet to teach my final memoir-writing class of the six-week period, then sat on my couch reading a cooking magazine. i went to the grocery store for ingredients and back to chuck's, where we invented a recipe for gouda mac and cheese that included squares of chopped tomato and leaves of cilantro. he stirred the sauce until his wrist and attention span broke, then i stirred the sauce until it began to look like something lap-up-able. we listened to radiohead's complete collection. his kitchen was 120 degrees fehrenheit and smelled like the potential for soft mounds of cheese-clogged pores.

it tasted pretty good.

other things i've done during this particular vacation have included: episodes of veronica mars, a viewing of the godfather, frozen pizza, reading.

things i'd like to do when it stops raining: lay in the grass with the new michael chabon book, play H-O-R-S-E against someone 6-feet tall with the daunting wing span, eat a corndog from a vendor.

some of you live here. this is where i go on vacation. if only there was a postcard.