Filed under: St Paul
I’m behind on the blog – again! I’ll do my best to catch us up and try to be better.
We had our big Christmas party the Sunday before Christmas. It was fun to get ready for it after taking last year off. We had 60-70 people stop by – so that’s always fun. I think I have a picture or two. I’ve had more if I could figure out how my brand new camera works.
A couple days after the party we went to see A Christmas Story at the Riverview Theater. Our friend Josh knew about it, went in advance to get tickets, and saved us primo places for the show. Everything was 50 cents – the tickets, the popcorn, and the drinks. We saw some neighbors there. But mostly it was fun to see a Christmas favorite in the cinema.
I hadn’t seen a movie in a theater in probably 2 years. It will probably be 2 years before I see another movie in the theater – but it was fun.
Filed under: St Paul
Here’s a short video from Lily’s Christmas pageant. She made me promise not to bring my laptop – but I was allowed to bring the FlipVideo.
Filed under: St Paul
On December 14, we all went to Kate’s recital with the Center for Irish Music. Kate started taking tin whistle this fall. I have to say if you have a kid thinking about an instrument – go with the tin whistle. They are cheap. We didn’t have to buy a book. It’s easy for her to carry her own instrument. And she can already play a couple of songs!
Aine was also invited to be in the recital as she took a singing class at the CIM too. So we have a video of both performers.
Patrick and Lily have decided that they are going to learn to play the bodhran after New Year. (The bodhran is the big round drum.)
Filed under: St Paul
On December 13 the girls and I went with Grandma to see the Best Christmas Pageant Ever at Stepping Stone. Stepping Stone is a theater where shows are done by and for kids.
The show was very cute. We had primo seats as we were early enough to be the first people in the theater. A first for us!
Filed under: St Paul
My best hour of December was getting a massage from Emmy Vadnais. Why don’t I do that more often?
Filed under: St Paul
On December 8 the girls and I went to the SPNN Open House. The fact that we went is a sign that I don’t drive enough and had completely forgotten about snowstorms. The weather was terrible. It’s about a 5 mile drive – tops. And it took 45 minutes.
But we got a fun tour of the studio and we won a tote bag. My hope is that the girls will take classes at SPNN at some point so that they can learn how to create a TV show. It’s not that I want to have a TYV show or anything. I just think it would be cool.
Filed under: Chicago
When I was a kid I loved the Museum of Science & Industry. It is great. We went the day after Thanksgiving. We were there when it opened – and we ran to the new toy department. So we had all of the great machines to ourselves. Everyone got a chance to drive the car or be the skier going down the slope.
As soon as it got busy we had to hightail it to the U Boat exhibit, which is what we came to see. Most of the adults have read The Shadow Divers, which is the best book ever even though it’s about submarines.
So we took the tour, which is very cool. The U-Boats were super powerful until the US figured out the code that the Germans were using to communicate with the U-boats. Then they became underwater death traps.
The tour of the U-boat walks you though it’s capture. Although the U-boat is huge, I think they said a city block long, it’s tiny inside. I think they said about 50 soldiers lived on the submarine – and all of them smoked. I can’t even imagine what it smelled like back them.
It was cool to kind of experience the capture. Once the U-boat was spotted it dove deeper into the water – kind of like a free fall and the men had to be silent since noise carries so much farther in the water. It was a cat and mouse chase until the Americans actually took over. Apparently they just stormed the U-boat and were then able to get the Enigma (decoder) machine and tomes of code notes. They didn’t admit to capturing the U-boat because they didn’t want the Germans to know that they had the cheat sheet to their codes. So the men on board were in a POW camp in America.
It was interesting to see the war propaganda. They didn’t just promote shopping as your patriotic duty back then – and that was good to see. They had an amazing visual that showed how many men were killed by U-boats over the years.
It’s also kind of amazing to see how they got the boat to Chicago, where it sat outside for decades and then into the Museum of Science and Industry.
We visited some other rooms in the Museum – like the Christmas trees and some Main Street setup – but the U-boat was the coolest part by far.
The Chicago museum is a little like the museum we visited in London. It’s very cool – but so busy that you can’t handle being there for very long.
Filed under: Chicago
Ok it’s been a month since I last posted. That’s terrible. I’m going to try to bring us to date quickly.
Thanksgiving… We went to Chicago for Thanksgiving. We had a convoy going. Kate made a really nice Thanksgiving dinner. It was warmer in Chicago than Minnesota so it seemed like a good break.
We have some pictures of everyone bagging up lunches to drop off to Katie’s church. They do a nice job there of coming up with projects that everyone can do to contribute to the community. Well, maybe not to the local community of Glenview – but the Greater Chicagoland anyways. Also you’re never too young to learn how to work on an assembly line!
Filed under: St Paul
So one of the things I missed most when we were in Ireland was the Roller Girl bouts. So last Saturday night we all went. We went with Anita and Uncle Billy.
The Roller Girls skate in the Roy Wilkins. It’s flat-tracked roller derby, which I think has to be a lot harder than a banked track.
Here’s the scoop on the bouts. Usually there are 2 bouts a night (well game night). Two teams play each bout. There are four 20-minute periods. The teams that skate first also skate third. There are several jams in each period. A jam is a scoring opportunity and it lasts 2 minutes or until the lead jammer calls time.
So each team has a jammer, pivots and blockers. Only the jammer can score. The object of the bout is to get your team jammer out ahead of the other team and each time the jammer laps the rest of the group, the team scores.
OK, I don’t really know the nuances – but that’s about it. You can bump and block out other skaters. The skating this time was markedly better than when we left and that blocks looked super painful.
We caught some of the match on video.
Filed under: St Paul
Sunday the girls and I went shopping with Grandpa at Rosedale. Mostly we tried to get out of Patrick’s way so that he could work on his PhD. I’ll be glad when he gets that done. (It’s not for a while.)
We had a nice dinner at some place with a revolving door – that was kind of the highlihgt for the kids.
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