in brief

the T key on my laptop does not appear to be working correctly, so i will need to do extra proofreading.

i have a week and a half to catch up on here, but i want to write about what just happened ten minutes ago, while it's still fresh.

we had dinner with andrew and xan at lulu's in evanston, hen walked around and ended up at kaffiene, a little NU coffee hangout.

drove home in the relative cold, and parked in the garage. di got out of the car first and walked to the house while i parked and closed the garage. walking up the yard, i saw di quickly come back around the house towards me, going "shhh! shit!" quietly. as a came towards her, she told me a coyote had just run past our front gate. i went out front, and there he was, just south of our house, standing in the splay of the streetlight at foster and darrow. di and i ducked down and sat on our front steps as he came trotting back north on our street, towards us, right in front of our house, and towards the park along the channel. our street, for once, had frozen completely still. no cars at either end of the block, no one in their front yards, no kids yelling.

the coyote was pale, with long fine legs. his appeared to be larger than other coyotes i've seen, but definitely had the slightly feline demeanor which (to my mind) separates them from wolves.

di and i decided to follow the coyote towards the park, a long greenway on both sides of the channel running miles between the north branch of the chicago river, north through lincolnwood, skokie, evanston, and into wilmette, where it joins lake michigan right near the bahai temple. the park, this greenway, passes about a block and a half north of our house. we walked towards the community gardens, and found the coyote in the middle of a large field, known to us as home to dozens of playful rabbits. crouching and pacing back and forth, the coyote was looking for a rabbit, crossing the field back and forth. he saw us, studied us, and went back to pacing as cold rain started pelting us, standing quietly on the gravel path. a couple times he passed under the park's dirty yellow streetlights. we watched him for ten minutes in the park.

as he headed east towards greenbay road, we decided to go home.