Category: Family

Back in May, I posted this quasi-goal/”to do” list for my Spring/Summer. I thought I’d report on my lack of progress so far:

• Lose weight. This is going quite badly, thank you very much. There are a variety of reasons why this is the case, but a lot of it has to do with being busier with schoolwork (teaching, meeting with students, scholarly projects, etc.) than I thought I was going to be, and my lack of willingness to stop stuffing my face with food and drink. I have been in my own version of “training” as of late though because I’m trying to be as ready as possible for our trip to Italy and Germany.
• Oh, and as a tangent: I came across this web site on “How to Begin Running” this morning. Seems like an interesting plan to me. I have no interest in running marathons or anything like that, but being able to run a mile or two without stopping would be cool. I’ve never met anyone who jogs who is a fatty.
• Write a book about eating. What book? Jeesh, this part of my summer has pretty much faded out of the picture. Besides getting distracted by other projects, both work and life, I guess I lost interest. Part of it was that after reading about competitive eating for a while, I got kind of bored, which made me doubt my or anyone else’s interest in reading a novel about eating. Who knows, maybe I’ll come back to this one.
• Get up stupid early. Still no/yes on this one. I gave up setting the alarm at 5 am (though I might take this practice up during the school year), but I have regularly out of bed by about 6:30 am. It depends on when I go to bed. My latest thing has been to get up and get exercising, before coffee and everything. This has been something of a revelation to me since I have made it a point to start the day with a couple of cups of coffee before doing anything for– well, as long as I can remember. It turns out there is life before coffee, and the exercise thing is a lot easier for me if I “just do it” as they say.
• House cleaning/maintenance. About the same as before. I’ve been focusing lately on turning our weed garden back into an herb garden with some success.
• Italian phrases Ah, pizza? cappuccino? Rico suave? Actually, Annette and I made some progress on planning the Italian leg of our trip by booking some museums and such via the internet. I’ll probably save the Italian phrase stuff until the end of July/beginning of August though, after I am done with this pesky work stuff for a while.

As promised, here’s the second July 4 post, this one about the annual Ypsilanti July 4 parade. We watched it with Andre, Stephanie, their kids, Gerry and Stacy (or is that Staci?) on Cross Street. A good time was had by one and all. There were the usual things:

Lady Liberty….

Bands….

Fire Trucks….

(BTW, it seems to me that during the July 4 parade would be a good time to start a fire or, with all the police in the parade, a crime. Not that I would do that. I’m just saying.)

People in kilts….

Floats of the patriotic flavor….

Tractors….

Elvis…

(Oh, and Elvisfest will be in town this coming weekend, for those inclined).

Puppets in military vehicles…

You know, the usual.

But I have to say that the religious floats were a little strange this year. There are always these sorts of things in these sorts of parades (this is the kind of “free speech” the Republicans like!), but this year kind of takes the cake.

First off, there was this odd Noah’s Ark-themed float:

I don’t know about you, but when I think about July 4, I think of Noah. You know, Independence Day, etc.

Second, one of these church groups had the unfortunate theme of “I walk in Jesus name.” Now, for those of you who aren’t English geek-types, this should be “I walk in Jesus’ name–” that is, the “possessive s,” which, as any third grader can tell you, is indicated with an apostrophe. Unless you’re Albertson‘s grocery store, but even then, it’ll be the subject of a protest. Anyway, to see that grammar error about 150 times in a row was a bit much for this English professor.

Third, and most weird, was this religious float that involved African-Americans doing mime, which had the unfortunate and I assume unintended effect of a sort of reverse black face minstrel show, and a large cross with an American flag theme. Here’s a few seconds of kind of bad video (from my camera) to give you an idea of what I’m talking about here (warning: 12.5 MB). I’m not sure my video does it justice, but it was jaw-dropping distrubing, if you ask me.

This is the first of what I expect will be two posts today on July 4 (I’m sure I’ll have picts and commentary from the famous Ypsi July 4 parade later on this morning), this first post about our recent adventures at Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry. Very cool, though I have to say that the purposefully dim lighting throughout most of the museum spaces means that some of my photos here are a bit suspect.

I recall going to this museum when I was a kid about Will’s age; I believe it was part of a Cub Scout trip when I lived in Davenport, IA, one where we left early in the morning on a bus, did the museum, and then came back late in the day. Much was the same, and much was different, at least based on my fuzzy memory.

For this particular trip, I planned it all over the phone and bought us a fistful of tickets for the various special exhibits. We started with the special Leonardo da Vinci Exhibit, which was one of the things that I for one really wanted to see. It did not disappoint, though as I think about it now, it is interesting how it didn’t really involve a whole lot of “original” da Vinci stuff– just one page from his famous notebooks, and that was kind of off to the side.

Most of the exhibit was of models of things that da Vinci either invented or imagined, like this model of a parachute:

Much of the exhibit involved things that you could make work, like this thing Will is bonking:

And much of it was kind of “audience participation,” like this bridge that Will helped build:

The museum still has an enormous model train set-up; here’s just one small piece:

Then there was this train with model John Deere tractors I thought was pretty cool:

We saw an exhibit on frogs that involved a pretty neat virtual disection tool, which naturally brought back memories for Annette and me on disecting the real thing:

We saw this kind of cool Omnimax movie about ancient Greece, but that was probably a mistake because we ended up running out of time and didn’t have time to go through the coal mine (I guess that’ll be next time). We did get to see the U-505 submarine, which is indeed a real German sub (think Das Boot) captured during World War II. When I was a kid, they had this thing parked outside; but now it’s in a new and spiffy inside facility. Sadly, it was pretty dim in there and they wouldn’t let you take pictures inside the sub (there is this virtual tour of the inside available on the web). Here’s a shot of the sub looking down the bow from the observation deck above the exhibit:

And here’s one along the side where you go in for the tour:

There was a whole bunch of other stuff too, and plenty of things to justify a return trip, but I’ll leave you with this weird picture of a Side Show diorama:

This thing was inside a case, about the size of a large dining room table, and it moved around and such. I think it’s one of those exhibits from the past that someone at the museum just couldn’t throw away.

Oh yeah– the picture at the top of Will making candy, which was one of the highlights for him, was in the gift shop. We bought him a token, he was able to select his flavors, and the machine pressed the powder into little sweet-tart-type candies.