AQUAMARINE PROMISE RING

4th full length from the popular band, produced by Stephen Street, who is known fro his work with The Smiths, Blur & The Cranberries. For fans of Jayhawk & Wilco. 2002.

After spending six years playing to a small but loyal fringe following of emo kids, the Promise Ring break hearts and stereotypes on their fourth studio album. With the help of producer Stephen Street (Smiths, Blur, Pretenders) and new label Anti- Records (Tom Waits, Merle Haggard), the Milwaukee band sets aside its furrow-browed bedroom angst and embraces whopping Technicolor melodies, elegant guitar rock passages, and an air of confidence that suggests they mean it this time. Wood/Water presents the Promise Ring at their most approachable; it's a gorgeous pastiche of hallowed left-field acts like the Flaming Lips ("Suffer Never"), Weezer ("Get on the Floor"), and a folky Beck ("Letters to the Far Reaches"). The most remarkable track is "Become One Anything One Time," which casts them as the American answer to Travis and delivers the heartbreaking affirmation: "I'm just happy you stuck around." The Promise Ring: clearly worth the wait. --Aidin Vaziri

(photo: Crosses for those who died in the Milestone Tap. A ragged tree survived the tornado)

Utica Tornado of April 20, 2004
Story by Julia Keller
First printed December 5, 6, and7 in the Chicago Tribune.
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Part 1: A wicked wind takes aim

How do you outrun the sky?
On a fateful day in April, the people of Utica bore the brunt of the awesome power of a tornado.

By Julia Keller
Tribune staff reporter
Published December 5, 2004

Ten seconds. Count it: One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. Eight. Nine. Ten. Ten seconds was roughly how long it lasted. Nobody had a stopwatch, nothing can be proven definitively, but that's the consensus. The tornado that swooped through Utica at 6:09 p.m. April 20 took some 10 seconds to do what it did. Ten seconds is barely a flicker. It's a long, deep breath. It's no time at all. It's an eternity.

If the sky could hold a grudge, it would look the way the sky looked over northern Illinois that day. Low, gray clouds stretched to the edges in a thin veneer of menace. Rain came and went, came and went, came and went.

The technical name for what gathered up there was stratiform cloud cover, but Albert Pietrycha had a better way to describe it: "murk." It was a Gothic-sounding word for a Gothic-looking sky. A sky that, in its own oblique way, was sending a message.

Pietrycha is a meteorologist in the Chicago forecast office of the National Weather Service, a tidy, buttoned-down building in Romeoville, about 25 miles southwest of Chicago. It's a setting that seems a bit too ordinary for its role, too bland for the place where the first act of a tragedy already was being recorded. Where the sky's bad intentions were just becoming visible, simmering in the low-slung clouds.

Where a short distance away, disparate elements--air, water and old sandstone blocks--soon would slam into each other like cars in a freeway pileup, ending eight lives and changing other lives forever.

The survivors would henceforth be haunted by the oldest, most vexing question of all: whether there is a destiny that shapes our fates or whether it is simply a matter of chance, of luck, of the way the wind blows.

It was a busy day for Pietrycha and his colleagues. The classic ingredients for a tornado--warm air to the south, cooler air north and a hint of wind shear--had seemed imminent most of the morning. Spring and early summer are boom times for tornadoes, the most violent storms on Earth.

What bothered Pietrycha was a warm front that loitered ominously across southern Illinois. If the front's moist, humid air moved north too quickly in the daylight hours, clashing with cooler air, the instability could create thunderstorms liable to split off into tornadoes.

But by early afternoon, it seemed that maybe, just maybe, northern Illinois would escape. If the front waited until after sunset to arrive, its impact would be negligible because the air near the ground--with no sunshine to warm it--would cool off. Nope, a relieved Pietrycha said to himself. Probably not today.

It was only a hunch. Meteorologists know a lot about tornadoes, but with all they know, they still can't say why some thunderstorms generate tornadoes and some don't. Or why tornadoes, once unleashed, do what they do and go where they go.

That's why forecasting is as much art as science. Too many warnings not followed by actual tornadoes make people skeptical and careless. Too many warnings can be as dangerous as too few. And while meteorologists can spot an approaching hurricane days in advance, the average warning time for a tornado is 11 minutes.

What she was thinking was, Gotta beat that rain.

Frowning up at a sky as flat and gray as a cookie sheet, Shelba Bimm, 65, figured she just might be able to outrun the next downpour. Worth a try, anyway.

Bimm was standing in the driveway of her house at 238 W. Church St. in Utica, population 977, just outside Starved Rock State Park.

It was precisely 5:15 p.m. She had her schedule figured down to the minute. Busy people do that. But this ornery rain--will it or won't it, and if it starts up again, how long will it last?--was irksome.

She was due in Oglesby at 6 p.m. for the weekly class she was taking for her certification as an EMT Intermediate, the next level up from EMT, a rank Bimm had held since 1980, answering the frequent summons from the Utica volunteer fire department. Folks in town were accustomed to the sight of the white-haired Bimm in the driver's seat of her black Honda CRV, yanking on the wheel with one hand and gripping her dispatch radio with the other.

Shelba Bimm had been a 1st-grade teacher for 42 years. She was retired now--if that's what you want to call it, even though she was at least as busy these days as she'd ever been when running a classroom, what with her EMT work and the dollhouse business she operated out of the front room of her home. And now she and Dave Edgcomb, U

Photo: 2004, Ben and David. Age, one year
Overnight: 08 March 2006
Story: 10 March 2006
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¦ Ben & David's First Sleepover

On Wednesday, I wake up way "ahead of time" (what an idea) and listen to the Rain ringing like small bells on the roof and eaves-drop on the big White Pine Tree making love with the Wind right outside my window. I venture out early in the fresh morning and get a new hair cut and manicure. There's not much chance to talk with my sister, MJ, on the phone, I am so nervous - but not really. I'm secretly so excited that I can barely remember the simplest thing! We're having the twins overnight!

When I get back home, I baby-proof the house as always - turn off the space-heaters and remove the teakettles of water I keep there in the winter, put the telephones out of reach, and other dangerous things, too - all according to my beliefs, which I have been careful not to oppose these days.... After finishing the chores, I was talking to MJ, time was getting short (time does the most interesting things) and I suddenly remember I had not yet set up the beds, or made them, or baby-proofed the baby room!

I run upstairs and arrange the twin mattresses on the floor in the corners of the room with the dresser tightly wedged in-between to act like side-rails and also furniture at the feet for foot-boards. It looks pretty good, and I am happy. I remove all the breakable things, and put a small rug on the cold wood floor between the mattresses. I bring up all the stuffed animals and put pillows between the beds and the walls... and install the baby gate in the doorway.

Ben-Ben and Doodle arrive with Brad and Helen around 5:30 in the evening, and the first thing they always do is open the closet door and haul out the vacuum sweepers. Ben gets the red one. Doodle gets out the blue one. Brad and Helen and I talk and talk and open the baby luggage, getting out all the treasures - Ben's BrownyBunny, Doodle's MarshmallowBunny, PJ's, baby yogurt, night-time music CD, and baby Einstein DVD... (Granny is more excited than anyone else, as you know, because I bet baby yogurt is not raising your adrenalin any...)

Meanwhile I get out the applesauce (pink/mango, yellow/apple, and green/pear, yummy), Alphabet cookies (XX! Everyone wants the "Eck Eck"), the other snacks and something for dinner. I can't help noticing how foreign this feels and how delightful, since Dave's always worked late and we rarely "fix" dinner or sit down to eat together. I fill the green and blue juice cups and the purple and turquoise milk cups and set the little chairs around the children's table in the living room, and bring in the highchairs from the dining room to put them around the big kitchen table. All this is accomplished to the charming music of vroom-vrooming red and blue sweepers all around and around the house... too bad we can't plug them in yet.

After that we have to go to the door and wave goodbye to MomMom and Daddy after promising and swearing and vowing that we will call them any time, day or night, if we have any trouble we can't handle! Big hugs all around!

Our house has the absolutely essential childish wonder of wonders - The Round-A-Bout. There are two doors, so you can go round and round and round between the kitchen and dining room. When you get tired of the sweepers, the most fun thing is to have Granny chase you round and round and you can be sure that she will stop and go the other way and surprise you with a big growl and her arms out to catch you up and have a scream, a giggle and a quick snuggle.

I have to tell you, I have re-named Ben, Bouncing Ben! That night after dinner, the first thing he accomplishes is to swallow a big square ice cube whole, and I'm thinking we will both freeze to death. They had each fed themselves the green (Ben) and yellow (David) applesauce in their highchairs. Then it was "get down!" So we have spaghetti and meatballs on the run. We cannot find any more X's in the cookie jar, so Ben decides to dump them all out on the kitchen floor just to be sure. You know how cute they look when they squat down like that?

Meanwhile, Doodle is sitting contentedly on the floor with the colored shapes that fit on the colored pegs and naming each one... star, heart, triangle... and asking for new words every once in a while, and bringing a color to share with Ben - the colors he knows Ben prefers, red, red, and red. Ben likewise, rounds up all the crayons and carries them to Doodle. All except red.

They haul out some Tupperware and the bubble bottles and must have the bubble-blowing sticks out of them. Neon orange for Doodle. Neon pink for Ben. We each have a special blue plastic cuppa-cuppa that we get to put ice into, straight out of the freezer door. We get to dump it into the sink and get some more and feel how coldy it is... We do not usually put any

4th full length from the popular band, produced by Stephen Street, who is known fro his work with The Smiths, Blur & The Cranberries. For fans of Jayhawk & Wilco. 2002.

After spending six years playing to a small but loyal fringe following of emo kids, the Promise Ring break hearts and stereotypes on their fourth studio album. With the help of producer Stephen Street (Smiths, Blur, Pretenders) and new label Anti- Records (Tom Waits, Merle Haggard), the Milwaukee band sets aside its furrow-browed bedroom angst and embraces whopping Technicolor melodies, elegant guitar rock passages, and an air of confidence that suggests they mean it this time. Wood/Water presents the Promise Ring at their most approachable; it's a gorgeous pastiche of hallowed left-field acts like the Flaming Lips ("Suffer Never"), Weezer ("Get on the Floor"), and a folky Beck ("Letters to the Far Reaches"). The most remarkable track is "Become One Anything One Time," which casts them as the American answer to Travis and delivers the heartbreaking affirmation: "I'm just happy you stuck around." The Promise Ring: clearly worth the wait. --Aidin Vaziri