Chicago

Who doesn't love Chicago. Fabulous food, fabulous people, fabulous views, fabulous architecture, fabulous art and science, fabulous shopping. We just recently made a road trip there so Rowan could discuss science at a conference and I could go out and see some at a museum.

We were lodged at the Chicago O'hare Airport Hilton. A very nice hotel, but right across the street from terminal 2 in the airport. The conference was being held at this hotel, so there we were.  I loved spending one morning looking out of the window of our 10th floor window,  drinking my coffee and imagining where all the airplanes were taking all those people as I watched the planes take off from the main runway. I also got to watch a tremendous thunderstorm pass through the airport, and close it down for over an hour. Rowan absorbed science for 2 days while I hung out with our good friends Ed and Cristen. The whole time I was there, I kept asking myself........how will we all survive without Oprah????? :o)

On to the photos.

As we traveled north by car through miles of very flat farmland in Indiana, we came across this huge wind farm just southeast of Chicago in Benton County, Indiana. There were hundreds of windmills along a roughly 10 mile stretch of corn fields. This is the largest windmill farm I have seen in Indiana. Go here for a cool video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=STZATr4Fhtg
I grew up just outside of the Altamont Pass Wind farm in northern California, still hosting the largest concentrations of wind turbines in the world. Go here to learn about that wind farm: http://www.eoearth.org/article/Altamont_Pass,_California  Here is the Indiana farm.

 It is so refreshing to see that folks around the country are coming to their senses and taking advantage of green energy like this.

Once we arrived in the greater Chicago area, we made our way around the city and out to the Chicago O'hare Airport - a city itself! One morning I was treated to a tremendous thunderstorm rolling through the airport. Watching it roll in from the 10th floor windows in our room was pretty cool. It is amazing how quickly they can close down an airport. Notice the lights of an airplane in the sky (on the left). The plane is trying to skirt the storm and squeak in for a landing before everything is shut down. I bet that was an exciting landing for the passengers!

Notice the scary funnels at the back of this cloud. I was nearly looking straight at them from the 10th floor windows. YIKES!

This photo is taken in the same spot as the first one in this series. Notice how the runways have completely disappeared. The rain was in sheets!

Auntie Em!!! Sure glad we weren't trying to fly anywhere today :o)

Believe it or not, once the storm passed, our dear friends Ed and Cristen drove from Oak Park through flooded streets to come and get me for a day of fun at the Museum of Science and Industry: http://www.msichicago.org/
I had never been there so was very excited to go and learn some new stuff. An added bonus is that I will be there with Ed. He is the most hilarious man and keeps me in constant bent over laughter no matter where we go.
When we entered the museum from the parking garage, this is the first thing we saw. Yes, it is the ass of a real giraffe. The exposed ass, muscles, organs, the whole works, with no skin on. It is one of the Bodies exhibits (see the museum website above to learn more about this exhibit) and if you have never seen this traveling Bodies show, it is a must! You can learn way more than you ever imagined about how bodies of all sorts are put together.

 You can imagine how we burst into laughter when we looked up and this is the first thing we saw. We laughed for 15 minutes. Here is Ed and his poor hysterical wife Cristen below the rumpus maximus. Ed looks like Moses, don'tcha think? Or maybe Osama Ed Laden? Santa? Maybe could be in the band ZZ Top? A Rabbi? The possibilities are endless :o) So how does one seriously pose below something like this! Just one of those moments in life you can't pass up.

After we regained our strength from our laughing fit, we made our way further into the museum. If we continue to laugh like this as we go along, we will have to crawl out of here.

They have whole airplanes in the aviation section of the museum. 

 We went on a little coal mine adventure too. They take you way down in the ground by elevator below the museum. When the doors open you are literally in a coal mine. Coal is a huge industry here in Illinois (and the region) so they really talked up the clean coal thing (yeah, right! clean coal. Hmmmm). They explained in great detail what it takes to run a coal mine and how the coal is used to benefit our lives. Here is our guide, who is also a stand up comic in his night job.

 Our guide with Ed. Another benefit of going somewhere with Ed is he is always asking questions and engaging people in interesting conversations. We stayed back at the end of the tour and learned more about our comic. He was a very funny guy.

A photo from the recycling exhibits.  Nuff said. 

The weather exhibits were just fantastic. I took this cool movie of the avalanche dynamics piece. Really cool to watch it happen.

Here is a clip of the science tornado. A horrifying reality in these parts.

We made our way over to the most incredible train set landscape I have ever seen. The exhibit took up one whole end of a huge exhibit hall. The trains ran all around and through the city of Chicago, out through the Great Plains and on to Seattle and the great Northwest. There were some amazing details that I captured in pictures and video.

The Chicago city scape

Here is a video of the train coming into the city of Chicago. This whole thing really brought me back to when I was a kid and we used to set up my brothers Lionel train set and play with it for hours on end. This of course being the ultra deluxe model of that!

So here is a detail in the landscape that is just hysterical. Cristen pointed out these things to me as she is a native Chicagoan and has been here a bazillion times. Notice the bear and it's cub scaring the poop out of this family. The family running away and the child right in front of the mother bear raising it's hands in fear. This little scene was in the rocky mountains. Hilarious!

 Here is a lumber mill in the rocky mountains. Notice the trailers and cabins in the foreground. Clothes hanging to dry on the clothesline and everything.

 And the train finally gets to Seattle.

The wacky science magic throughout the museum is so great. Here Cristen is causing the falling bubbles to fall down her arm and miss the child. This is all projected on a screen and somehow a person can control where the bubbles go by moving their body through them. Crazy!

 We came upon a whole section of the museum on the circus (many traveling circuses have come from these parts).  Silly, I know. But we had to. Cristen and I had such a laugh looking at ourselves in the crazy mirrors that turn your body into crazy shapes, that we almost had to be rescued by medics. We laughed so hard we cried and sprained our bellies. It was FABULOUS!

 There is an entire submarine in the museum. It is a U-505 German sub from WWII captured by the Americans. Go here for the details on the history: http://www.msichicago.org/whats-here/exhibits/u-505/

It is an amazing story.

 Here are the guys who were on the American ship USS Chatelain who captured the German sub. Too cute!

 The Apollo 8 command module. Launched Dec. 21, 1968, Splashdown Dec. 27, 1968.

I remember watching this happen on TV when I was a kid.

Inside the Imax theatre where we saw a chilling movie on storm chasers chasing tornado's around the Midwest. Uplifting (pun intended!) :o)

 The Chicago skyline. I love this city.

Ed & Cristen's house in Oak Park (a burb of Chicago just west of downtown) is in the district famous for it's large concentration of Frank Lloyd Wright homes/buildings. Wright's studio is here and we toured it a few years ago. There are also many homes in the neighborhood designed by him. A worthwhile trip if you enjoy architecture.

Ed & Cristen's castle.

Ed & Rowan in their front yard.

This plaque is laid in the cement walkway as you enter the path up to Ed's house. Yes, it is true. Be prepared to laugh your ass off if you go through the front door.

 Believe it or not, I have known this man since the late 1980's. We used to travel the same trade show circuit as sales reps back in our past lifetime. The most fun I had in my life mainly because of running into this man who made me laugh constantly as I traveled. How we ended up living a short drive from each other later in our lives is simply fate. :o)

The perfect storm post is next...........and it is a doozie!

July Up-Date

Hot Summer Nights - or - Hell and High Water!

OK, so for those of you who are lucky to live where there is a sea breeze or river breeze or lake breeze, you have no idea how lucky you are. For nearly the entire month of July we have been in broil mode in the mid-west. I would give my right eye for a sea breeze right now.
We thought it would never stop raining in June (record amounts that month with record flooding as well) and so when the sun came out in July we were all happy that summer had arrived. However, 3 weeks of temperatures between 90-116 (yes, 116 with the heat index!) is leading us to believe we just might be in the middle of the rapture and we get the Hell part!

Serious heat and humidity, to biblical proportions, has been upon us with nearly no rain. The only things loving it are our tomatoes, basil, mosquitoes and other bugs in the garden, and our cat Lulu who is a heat-seeking missile. The farmers we buy our eggs from said their chickens have stopped laying eggs because it has been so hot. The corn and soy bean crops are starting to be affected also. Luckily our reservoirs are full because of all of the rain in June so we will hopefully make it through the summer without any water shortages. But hey, it's not global warming, right? Yeah, sure.

We were able to start getting some paint on the house in early July before the temperatures and humidity got out of control. Once the early morning temps were starting out over 80 with 90% humidity, we decided to hang up the painting until September. Ugh! Sitting on the porch, fan going, with a mojito or gin and tonic sounds like how we will want to spend the rest of summer :o)

Here are some photos to show you what we've been up to:

Early July when it was still cool enough to sit outside to eat. Here I am with our friend Paula from California, Sally and Alex from next door.

Another dinner party with our friends the Finches (not the birds but our friends Jeff and Candace), and that's our architect Kris (on the left) and his partner Bob. We can already tell we are going to get hours and hours of fun out of our new front porch.

Some of the yummy food we create for our porch dinners. Here we have crab cakes, grilled shrimp, couscous, steamed spinach and fennel salad.

Here are a few photos of what the house is starting to look like with some paint on it. We chose this nice subtle yellow. Sort of like us........subtle. Yeah, right!!! :o)

Jenni finishing up some of the prep on the front of the house.

As the new porch is coming to completion, we can see that we will spend lots of time out here. It's warm, cozy and yet spacious.

Our cats are in heaven on the new porch. Lulu absolutely loves to lay under the ficus tree on the wall ledge. She often will lay there all day acting like the little Cleopatra that she is..

Fergus (a.k.a. Meatloaf) also enjoys basking in the shade on the ledge. I think we will make a rug out of him when he dies. :o)

Our vegetable garden is out of control. We have never had so many tomatoes, this large, in the 10 years we have lived here. There are many jars of pasta sauce in our future.

We have set up our two rain barrels that are helping us with the watering of the garden. We get an extra 110 gallons of free water storage from rain with these two beauties. You can see the special downspout we had made that can switch the gutter drainage from the barrels to the french drain system that goes underground to the back yard. We highly recommend doing this in your yard if you have the rain to support it. We water all or our potted plants and herbs and vegetables during the summer months with this system.

We are thankful every day for what we have, and especially during late summer when the sweet corn comes to market. We buy 12 to 24 ears every weekend from the farmers market starting about mid July. We bring it home, eat some off of the cob and cut the rest fresh off of the cob and send it right to the freezer. It provides us with the sweet taste of summer all winter. We usually put up about 20 pounds of corn for the winter.

There is still a bit more adventure from July to share. Stay tuned for my next post and news from our trip to The Windy City: Chicago. A whirlwind of science, technology and weather to share with you. Hold on to your hats!

D.C. and Pride - Part 2

June 9-12, 2011

The Parade

Attending a Gay Pride Festival anywhere in the world, whether you are gay or not, is always an extremely colorful, uplifting and emotional experience (your emotions could be anywhere between joy and disgust depending on who you are and how you accept others that are different from you). Go here for the history of the parade: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pride_parade

I (we) have had the opportunity to be a part of these celebrations from San Francisco, to England. I was a participant in three SF Pride parades in California during the 90's as a member of the California AIDS Ride Cycling Team (we cycled from SF to LA to raise money in support of AIDS services in the SF & LA gay communities). When we made plans to come to DC on this trip, we didn't even realize we were going to be here for the DC Pride festivities, so we had extra fun attending the parade while we were here.

We began our Saturday Pride event at Arvydas' house in the Dupont Circle neighborhood, where we met up with old and new friends to have a rum and coke before heading out on foot to get to the parade. It was really cool that our group this day represented so many other parts of the world. Our group of friends represented Lithuania, Russia, Slovenia, Puerto Rico, England and Colombia. Sally and I were the only Americans and english was definitely the second language. We had a blast twisting languages around all day.

A photo as we set off from Arvydas' house towards the parade route.

Sally and Vladamir (Vlad), our extremely cute Slovenian friend.

Vlad & Sal became instant best friends.

Me and our dear old friend Arvydas. We have known each other since he first arrived at UC Berkeley from Lithuania, nearly 20 years ago.

How cute is this photo of Rowan and Vlad!! They are having too much fun!

Naturally, if you are at a gay pride celebration, you will have many wonderful drag queens, transvestites, transexuals, etc............so, here we are! :o)

The beauty is, no matter who you are, the event gives you the freedom to express yourself.

Even if you are someone's grandfather or an investment banker, a teacher or construction worker and love to dress up in women's clothes in your spare time. :o)

The history of the movement is always well represented. Here is a representation of how far the community has come since the NY Stonewall Riots in 1969 started the whole movement.

Contrary to what most of the press reports, the community STRONGLY supports safe sex and condom use and we take this very seriously. When standing on the sidelines of these events, one is constantly showered with condoms and safe sex information being thrown from parade participants. This is the result of the devastating AIDS pandemic that has killed so many of our friends and family over the past 30 years.

This parade is the first one I have ever attended where the religious community has been such a focal point of the event. Every single denomination was represented in the DC event. I was extremely emotional as I watched all of them walk by us. I thought I would never see this expression of acceptance from so many of them in my lifetime.

Here is a group from the local Baptist church. I was born and raised a Baptist and thought I would never see them represented at an event like this! :o)

It was amazing to see clergy from every denomination represented.

Here are the United Methodists.

United Church of Christ

This was a very big day for the Human Rights Campaign (HRC). The right to marriage vote in New York just passed before the parade giving same sex couples the right to marry in the state. There are now 7 states in the US that allow same sex unions. They keep working hard at it.....one state at a time.

PFLAG (Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays) is always one of my favorite groups to whoop it up for in the parade. This is a great photo of a mom and her son(s).

And........here we are in line for a beer at a club on the parade route. I really do need to do something with 'my girls', dontcha think? :o)

As the sun started to get low in the west sky, I looked up from the patio where we were sitting at the club and noticed this great photo op, so I took it.

We ended the evening with a fabulous meal at Annies Steak House on 17th St.. Annies is the oldest gay community restaurant in DC. Go here to read the wonderful history about the place: http://www.metroweekly.com/feature/?ak=2012

We recommend a meal there if you ever visit the neighborhood.

CHEERS!

Oh, dear..........it's a Jenni sandwich :o)

Our time in DC was fabulous. Hopefully, we will still be calling that big house on Pennsylvania Avenue the 'Black House' when next we visit. :o)

Back to home improvement in the next post.