Bush/McCain Compare Reagan to Nazi Appeasers!

"Some seem to believe we should negotiate with terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along ... As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: 'Lord, if only I could have talked to Hitler, all of this might have been avoided. We have an obligation to call this what it is — the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history." - George Bush Thursday May 15, 2008 to the Knesset in Israel

With those words Bush compared the Ronald Reagan to the likes of those Nazi appeasers. McCain immediately jumped into the fray saying Reagan showed "naiveté and inexperience and lack of judgment."

Although what both Bush and McCain said were accurately quoted, neither were thinking of all the negotiations Reagan did with the Soviets during the Cold War when they made their statements. They had Obama on their mind and McCain even singled him out by name. But if you look back through presidential history almost all presidents have been willing to hold talks with our enemies, all except one, the Current Occupant. Why, I have never understood.

You don't convince someone that you are serious and going to bomb them back to the Stone Age if they don't capitulate by email or phone call or speech thousands of miles away. You shake their hands, look them right in the eyes and let them know that you are serious. It worked with Reagan. In my opinion, Bush and now McCain have been the ones showing naiveté, inexperience and lack of judgment, not Obama as the media, McCain and Bush implied.

Mother-In-Law Miscellaneous

I've tried mowing the lawn with only half of my 20" deck mower. I've finally stained my Adirondack loveseat that I made over Christmas last year. I've cleaned out the garage many times and even went over to a co-worker's house to help him with a 'project' that involved relaxing chairs and icy cold bottles of beer. In short, I've done everything I can to help alleviate being locked in with my MIL over the past several weeks. But for the next seven days, I can go home and do my thing once again because last night I dropped her off at the airport for a week visit to see a brother and other relatives.

Actually, humor aside, we quickly developed a routine with her in the house. The first few days were a real trial as we got used to spending six hours a day together but we managed. She eventually learned to respect my news time and not try to tell me all about her adventures with the loaf of bread while Brian Williams was telling me about an earthquake in China and I learned to respect dripping wet underwear hanging in the shower when I'm taking one.

I'm actually going to miss her a bit this next week when it comes to Little Abbey. I've never seen Little Abbey so happy as she has been these past weeks. I know the spoiling by her grandmother helps but also the undivided attention. Diaper rashes disappeared completely and her naps became more regular and longer. She was able to stay up later and not get cranky. Now she is back to getting up early with me and going to Mrs. Z's place where she can't get undivided attention and that will probably mean more diaper rashes. It is a fact of daycare I suppose and I hate that it has to be that way. But I do know that Little Abbey will enjoy being around other kids her age and I think that is a good thing. So I have to take the good with the bad.

So today is my anniversary with Mrs. Abbey. We've been at this for four years now and can probably go another 40. We lost our baby sitter for tonight so we will probably keep it pretty low key. Perhaps we will postpone some date night out until next weekend when MIL returns for a few more weeks. Tomorrow, I'm thinking about having the guys over for a 'project' night of my own but first I have to go to the grocery store spirits aisle for a few supplies of my own.

Taking My Genealogy Obsession To the Next Level

I know what you are thinking. If I am already obsessed with genealogy and I think that it pretty clear so how could I take it to the next level? I accidentally stumbled on a way.

Several times in the past few months, I have taken trips, business and personal, that has taken me past the general vicinity of a graveyard that has some genealogical interest to me. The problem has been that I hadn't realized it until after I left the house and I didn't know the address or the information that I needed to look for at that particular place. In the case of cemeteries, I often didn't even have an address for them so finding them is very difficult. I needed a way to take this list along with me and tell me how to get to the place in question when I realize I am near. Enter the world of technology.

As I expressed in this blog entry, I wanted to purchase a Garmin Nuvi GPS navigation device and I did so before my mother-in-law arrived opting for the Garmin Nuvi 200W. It allows me to enter both addresses and coordinates to various locations and save them in a favorites folder. The drawback to this is that your favorites folder gets very cluttered and hard to search going down a highway at 70 mph and you can only give a simple description up to twenty-some characters long. Entering a list of coordinates and the twenty-some character descriptions through their menus can be very time consuming to do. Plus, their system only lets me enter known coordinates and so far, nobody that I have found has compiled a list of coordinates to cemeteries, probably because most of the people interested in such a list are already there and six feet down.

So I turn to a free program on the Internet called Google Earth. Once I know the general vicinity of the graveyard in question, I track it down using satellite technology and find out the coordinates. Because I can input these coordinates into my GPS, I was now confident that I could find the cemetery but still needed a way to write down some notes that would help my locate the graves such as name, section and row. When you have over a thousand ancestors that you are tracking down and many have lived in Iowa since it was a state, it becomes hard to remember which one was where. So once again I turned to the Internet where I found a wealth of knowledge of others wanting to do the same thing but for different reasons. Soon I learned that I could create my own custom Points of Interest (POI) file where I can list up to 256 characters of information, plenty for my purposes. A few minutes of typing, a quick download onto the GPS via a USB cable and now I have my own Genealogical Global Positioning System or as I'm referring to it now, a GGPS. Yes, I have now gone to the next level.

A Local Restaurant Makes the Change To Non-Smoking

The plan on Mother's Day had been to go to the early church service here in town to beat the crowds and then go out for an early brunch at the one sit down restaurant in town that is open for breakfast on Sunday mornings. We even planned to hustle right out of church so that we even beat the early church service crowd so I had parked on the side of the street facing the way we would be headed and not to far from one of the church’s side door. But by now I suppose you know things didn't go quite as planned or I wouldn't be mentioning all of this.

Right as communion was ending, Little Abbey tripped over the kneeler and hit her head on the pew in front of her. The thud of her head hitting wood echoed throughout the church. I heard her take a deep intake of air and knew what was coming. I quickly scooped her up and started walking towards the back of the church but only made it half way before the howls of hurt started bursting forth from Little Abbey's lungs. I quickly made it to the back but this church doesn't have any place to go where I could shut off the rest of the service now saying the final prayer from Little Abbey's screams. So with little choice, I just went outside. Amazingly, Little Abbey stopped crying almost immediately upon exiting the church as the cool heavy winds tussled her hair. Both of us had left our jackets inside so we hurried to the van to wait for my wife and her mother to exit the church. We sat there buckled up ready to go talking to each other.

Church ended and octogenarians started sprinting to their cars hoping to beat the rush to the restaurant. Families with lots of kids through the children into the minivans and cars like stacks of cordwood in their haste to beat the rush. Even the lady in the wheelchair put the van lift into a higher speed in her haste. Still no wife or mother-in-law. Finally, as the parking lot was almost emptied, they came strolling down the sidewalk seemingly to catch a glimpse of the sunset still almost twelve hours away. They claimed that they had been waiting for me at the front of the church though since there is no basement, no alcoves or no rooms except for the church proper and the entrance which is open to the church proper, I don't know how they assumed I would still be in there with a screaming child. So with a heavy heart knowing we were going to have to eat McMuffins for brunch or wait in a long line at the restaurant, I set off for the latter.

The Family Restaurant used to be a good place to eat. Basic foods, good portions, and cheap prices. But two things turned me away. First, they changed owners and the new owner evidently shopped for wait staff at the wait staff outlet store where they sell all the ones with factory defects. There was the one who would always forget things off your order or perhaps your entire order all together. There was the one that would bring your food and then go into the kitchen to talk and never to reappear. I once wandered into the kitchen looking for a refill after unsuccessfully waiting for twenty minutes for one and she still didn't budge. A cook stopped cooking and got my refill. And of course there was my favorite, the chatty one that would go on for hours on end as you politely tried to eat your rapidly cooling food in-between her questions. For almost four years, this went on before it was bought out again by new, very competent people with an excellent wait staff.

The only problem was word got out and the people came back in droves, which leads me to the second reason I didn't go there. The diner itself looks like a pull behind Silverstream trailer converted into a diner with a long wing off of one end so that it makes a large 'L' shape. The original part, the non-smoking part, has about a dozen booths. The non-smoking part also has another dozen booths but they are larger booths and seat more people. Being in a town filled of vegetarians and health conscious gurus, guess which part was always to capacity while a couple solitary smokers choked on cigarettes in an entire wing to themselves. That meant us non-smokers always had to wait in-line for seats to open up and then you guiltily hurried through the meal so those still standing in line watching your every bite could sit down after you.

We pulled into the diner and the parking lot was full so I knew there was going to be a wait. But when we walked inside, there was no line and on the inner door was a sign that announced that the diner was now a no-smoking facility. I don't know if it was the new management finally realized how much money they could be making or the passing of the no-smoking law that Iowa passed and will go into effect in a month and a half that caused the restaurant to change but it had. We were immediately seated in the former smoking side that for the first time in my memory was filled almost to capacity.

The ceilings were a caramel color from all the smoke over the years especially to the bone white that the rest of the ceilings in the restaurant were painted. The seats had numerous burn scars on them but the smoke smell was non-existent. They had evidently done a good job cleaning it out. The excellent wait staff took our orders, brought everything out quickly and stopped by every once in awhile to see how we were doing and needed any refills without playing the twenty question game. The Family Restaurant is back to a business winning model and I for one, will probably give them my patronage a little more often because of it.

Nauvoo Revisited: Mormonism-lite

Last fall, my wife and I visited Nauvoo, Illinois where we visited the historic Joseph Smith site. We picked up some literature and since we were too late for the official tour, went on a self-led tour of the site. This past weekend with MIL in tow, we stopped by again and paid our $2 per head to go on the official tour.

Our first stop was the official visitors building where we attended a fifteen-minute showing of the history of Nauvoo and the Mormons. I must say, it was kind of Mormonism-lite. They glossed over a lot of Joseph Smith Jr's background such as the gold transcriptions from God that he based his Book of Mormon from or his shady dealings like creating a bank to pay off his debts from building a temple after Jesus, Moses, Elijas, Elias and numerous angles told him too in a series of dreams while living in Pennsylvania. In fact, the short film never even mentioned Pennsylvania at all. It was a very sanitized version.

The tour then departed and we revisited his old house, his new house called "The Mansion" and his general store that he ran. This time, we were even led into his old house and "The Mansion" but I can't say that anything exciting was learned. It was nice to hear someone talk about Joseph's life even it was the lite version. At the end of the tour when we ended up in the old meetinghouse above the general store, I decided to try and raise some hackles.

I asked for our tour guide Kevin to talk a little about Brigham Young whom up until this point, had never even been mentioned by name. He briefly told about how there was no tension between Brigham and Joseph Smith III and that they really split on good terms, Brigham going to Utah and Joseph III remaining behind. I couldn't resist and made the comment that since they were on such good terms, the church in Utah and the one now headquartered in Independence, Missouri were one and the same. Still Kevin just smiled and said that they were different but only because 100 years of being apart had gradually made them so. There was one other couple, visiting from Salt Lake City and wearing official church nametags that had been on the tour with us and I could see that they really didn't want to listen to this so I stopped at that point and let Kevin have the last word.

I looked again briefly over the books on sale about Joseph Smith but once again declined. I really would like to get a book on him but I would like to find one from an independent source and not one recommended by the keepers of the Joseph Smith historic site that is obviously sanitized heavily.

Rice Krispy Knees

As some of you may know, I suffer from an old knee injury from my high school days that required surgery and then another after re-injuring it almost eight years ago. In both surgeries, cartilage between my bones has been removed leaving my with less than what I started out with in life. My doctor back then had told me that any future in running or high impact sports was essentially over for me at that time and any lesser impact sports such as one of my greatest joys, hiking, would mostly likely be cut short later in life followed by an artificial knee joint.

Although I'm careful with how I use my knee, I have continued to do the things I love like hiking. I do suffer from occasional bouts of over doing it and end up with a knee that is stiff and slightly swollen for a few days before I can get it to return back to what constitutes as normal these days. But as the years have gone by, I have learned how to deal with these bouts and to prevent them from happening as much as possible. Sometime in late January, something different happened that made me wonder if my time for an artificial knee had come early.

The backside of my knee started hurting one day and got worse. Thinking I had simply over did something, I started dosing with Advil hoping the swelling and thus the pain would go away but it merely took the fine edge off of what still was a very sharp pain. For three or four days, it was all I could do to hobble around the house in pain and it was very hard to even sleep at night. Gradually it went away only to come back again much worse in March. When it did, I knew something was seriously wrong and I called an orthopedic specialist to make an appointment. My appointment would be almost six weeks away. I thought it was going to be a long six weeks but within two weeks, my excruciating pain went away and my knee felt as good as it had in years by the time I made the long drive to the sports medicine center.

I had to take lots of x-rays and had my leg and knee pulled and twisted every which way it could possibly be forced to bend. I was made to do one-legged squats while hands poked, prodded and felt. I was given a full workup. Finally the diagnosis came in. I am getting older. What?

The doctor said that actually my knee joint looked great considering the two previous surgeries and that although there was slightly less space between the joint than in my good knee (more space is better), it was in great condition and I could expect many, many more years of use out of it. However, (the doctor's equivalent to the word 'but') I was getting older and the ends of my bones don't look as smooth as chicken bones he said. Occasionally there are chips that break away and can cause small but painful cysts that can give me the symptoms that I had described. It happens with age. As if to confirm this, he had me do another exercised which provided a symphony of snaps, crackles and pops out of BOTH my knees though my bad knee still was the loudest. He gave me a heavier duty knee brace that the one I already had and sent me on my way with a note that if the painful episode were to return that I could skip the long line and get right in to see him.

So I am getting old. It's hard to here those from a doctor who was probably almost twice as old as me but it was greatly tempered by the news that my bad knee was still a pretty good knee and that I could look forward to many more years of doing the things I love like hiking as long as I continued to protect it by not doing high impact things like running. Who likes running anyway?

Spring?

Ahh, spring is in the air. The temperatures are reaching into the mid seventies during the day and my bedroom blows in a refreshingly cool breeze in the evening. Mushrooms are popping from the wooded draws and the trashmen have picked up the pile of trash thrown out in the annual spring-cleaning rites of our burg. I moved the lawn for the first time and the biweekly farmers' market opened doors this past weekend. Spring is here in force.

So it was quite a surprise when I finally downloaded pictures off my digital camera and found the one below. Apparently, instant digital pictures don’t have much of an advantage over 35mm film when in my hands.

A Bridge Over Sleepy Waters

Evidently I missed the news bulletin but Blogger now allows you to publish a blog entry for a future date and it will automatically post it when the time comes. As a result, I have been gone for the last several days and just got back. If you noticed my lack of comments on your blogs, that is why. I'll remedy that as time permits.

Several weeks ago, we took my MIL down to a historic town along the river. There, an old metal bridge, now one of the last in the county remains in use but for pedestrians only. As a child, I remember driving across it and feeling it sway underneath our car. But now that a new concrete and I think aesthetically ugly bridge has taken over vehicle traffic and thanks to the donations of many generous people, this bridge remains as a pedestrian crossing.

Every time I am in the area, I cannot pass by without stopping and walking out to at least the middle of the bridge and watch the current pass by. I've even attended the marriage of a relative on that bridge. It always beckons me to relax, slow down and smell the roses unlike its upstream neighbor that conveys nothing more than hurry on your way.

On either side, two sleepy towns exist, once great rivalries. Vernon, now mostly succumbed to time and with not much more remaining than a few houses. Bentonsport on the other side has been restored to a tiny fraction of its previous glory and is a good way to kill a few hours during certain times of the year when everything is open for a festival. You can see a blacksmith and a potter doing their thing. The potter makes everything with Queen Anne's Lace imbedded in the pot before firing, which leaves beautiful results behind after glazing. If I ever get a million dollars, I'm going to load up on pottery from that place. There also is a general store with an antique shop and also a museum. There are several other attractions as well. But the thing that always attracts me the most is that simple metal span crossing a sleepy river.

Tricycle! Tricycle! I want to ride my Tricycle!

I took everyone's advice, some after the fact, and gave Little Abbey her tricycle this weekend after doing some assembly. With almost no encouragement, she climbed right up onto the seat and was happy as a June bug. With some encouragement, she would scoot all the way forward on the seat and was just able to reach the pedals. I'm still working on getting her to actually peddle. For now, she just straddles it and goes rolling all over the house by shuffling her feet. She is very happy. I'm waiting for a while before letting her take it outside where the concrete is much harder and more abrasive to skin. She hasn't tipped it over yet but that day is coming, it is just a matter of win.

After much procrastination, I finally uploaded pictures off my digital camera. Actually with all the video footage I took during my last business trip and recent trip to Chicago, the 1-gigabyte memory card was full and forced my hand. I will post a few of the pictures as chances arise and I can find something to say about them. Perhaps even a blurry shot of Little Abbey looking away from the camera for those dedicated fans of them.

P.S. The title was a play off the Queen song entitled Bicycle.

MORELS!

That first bite was heavenly. The next dozen were too. I started out with the bottom half of a large onion hamburger bun, grilled Angus beef, a slice a cheese, a large pile of morel mushrooms sautéed in a little butter, and topped it with the other half of the bun. Delicious.

Saturday I had to pick my brother up at the airport and run him down to the farm for the week. After his horrible accident last fall where he shattered his lower leg and ankle into well over 50 fragments, it was great to see him walking again, even if he walked like his bad leg had fallen asleep in the airplane. He was walking and that is all that matters to me. But his plane was late and we decided to stop for lunch at a tiny town along the river road of the Mississippi where the best burgers in the world could be found. By the time we got home, it was growing late so we just talked with the parents for a few minutes and I left for my home but not before they gave me a small plastic bag with a small mess or gray morels they had found on Wednesday.

Sunday after church, I brought the girls and we drove down to the farm for a family meal and of course, mushroom hunting. Within perhaps two seconds of stepping into the wooded draw, the shouts of found mushrooms were being heard so I knew it was going to be a good year. Mrs. Abbey won the prize, which is nothing more than honor, of finding the first morel. I was pushing Little Abbey in her all terrain strollers through the woods over sticks, logs, and such so I was greatly handicapped. None-the-less, I was still able to find a small mess around a dead elm tree before we exited and drove over to another draw that we hunt.

There, for the first time in perhaps fifteen years, we didn't find any morels under the large silver maple at the head of the draw. We never understood why they grew there in the first place but it was sad not to find them. Down the draw aways with Little Abbey being pushed around by Grandpa, I found a prime elm that was newly dead and the bark hadn't even started to peel off. At the base, I found morels and lots of them. A mushroom machine! As far as mushroom machines go, it was on the light end of the spectrum but I still found around twenty or so morels scattered out here and there.

On around the corner, I headed for my other favorite spot there. It is a gradual north facing slope down by the creek populated with knee high buck brush that for another unexplained reason to me, always seems to produce big lunkers of morel mushrooms. There aren't any trees in this area, dead elm or otherwise in this area. There are two more spots along the draw that are exactly like this in my eyes, north facing, no trees, knee high buck brush and they don't produce morels. Only this one does. I stepped just a couple steps into the buck brush and saw a morel, then another, and another, and so on. I walked the entire twenty feet stopping repeatedly to pick another specimen and then turned around and walked back.

Being partially green colorblind, finding morels is harder for me than others and I often miss a few. So it was no shock when I quickly found another half dozen, including one that would take the family prize, again just honor, for finding the biggest one, a yellow morel topping the charts at a mere five inches tall. I've found some before that were around 12 inches tall so they do get much bigger but this is still early in the season for yellows, and in a few days, I'm sure there will be larger ones being found everywhere.

Twenty minutes later, I had my bag completely full of mushrooms. It is a mesh bag that is tailored for morel mushrooms to allow the 100 spores per centimeter in a morel, fall out onto the ground as the air gently dries the mushroom and ensure that future years will produce large crops. Whenever I see an elm tree still not dying from the elm disease that afflicts most of the United States, I always swirl my bag through the air around the base a few times making sure it gets a good dose of morel spores. Hopefully when the Dutch elm disease takes over in a few years, the spores will feed on the release of toxins from the roots of the dying tree and produce a Mushroom Machine!

We still had several places left to go but my brother was already pushing his leg to the max and our bags were full so we went home. After the loot was cleaned and divided, we ended up taking around three pounds of packed mushrooms home with us. That should be enough to last us for the rest of the week if we eat on them every evening. I sautéed the first handful in some butter and would have added garlic if we hadn't been out. They topped our hamburgers as I mentioned at the beginning of this post and were delicious. At last, morel season is here!

Little Abbey At 23 Months

Little Abbey is a couple days past 23 months. By tradition, it is the last time she will be so many months of age when asked how old. For the next year, she will simply be two, perhaps two and a half if we stretch it. I suspect the reason is mostly due to the poor math skills of adults and how long it would take us to figure how old a child is if they were 57 months old. It is way easier to just say almost 5 years old. Everyone knows how old almost five is.

The past couple weeks have been great for Little Abbey. Grandma from the Philippines has been spoiling her rotten and it shows. When at the daycare, she got diapers rashes now and then. Nothing that was bad but it always seemed like we had to be on top of it to prevent them from getting to the painful stage, which is no fun. With my MIL, she hasn't had one rash. So I suspect with a house full of other children, Little Abbey doesn't get changed quite so often. I don't really blame Mrs. Z but just know that it is the fact of life that when you have seven kids, each one doesn't get as much attention as one child by itself. I'm hoping that by the end of my MIL's stay, Little Abbey will be well on her way to being potty trained. She is showing signs by letting us know immediately AFTER she has done something and even tells us what she has done. We are working on trying to get to the next stage where she lets us know BEFORE.

Every month seems to be so much different from the last as far as personality and character goes. I don't know how to describe it other than she is just so full of personality now, that what she was like at six months seems like a shell devoid of most life. Yet back then, comparing six months to four months was the same way. I find myself quite enthralled with this progression and marvel at the miracle of human life and how we develop. Although I have experienced it with my own childhood, this is the first time I have witnessed it.

We have officially phased into spelling words in our house, as Little Abbey understands more than we would sometimes like. She loves baths so much that a mere mention of the words makes all her clothes come off and she streaks off to the bathroom. At that time you have two choices, give her a bath or undergo a huge temper tantrum. Same way with the words "lets go" meaning we are going somewhere. If you aren't ready within thirty seconds after saying those words, another tantrum ensues because you were two slow. Bear is another word.

Bear is a small bear shaped blanket with a stuff bear head at the appropriate spot made out of this really silky thread material to simulate actual bear fur. My mom made it as a present for her and she has become attached to it. I've trained Little Abbey that she must leave it at home whenever we go somewhere but at home she more than likely has it close by. At night, she has to have it to go to bed. Just a few nights ago, Bear had to be washed and due to other things, hadn't yet been tossed in the dryer by the time Little Abbey was in bed. I told my wife that she is just going to have to cry it out tonight and perhaps wean herself from bear but after ten minutes of listening to her scream and sob the name Bear over and over, I gave in. I grabbed bear out of the washing machine still damp but not wringing wet and gave it to her. Within minutes she was asleep and I went in and removed it from her bed. As Geri said on her blog not to long ago, you have to pick and choose your battles.

Little Abbey really loves her plastic push scooters that she has in our house and regularly rolls around on them. So when I got to thinking about her upcoming 2nd birthday, I knew exactly what I wanted to get her. I bought a retro Roadmaster dual decked red metal tricycle. It came last week in a box and has been sitting unopened in the great room. I'm going through the internal battle now of should I put it together and give it to her early or wait for one more month. She is still too young to grasp what a birthday means and this is probably the last year for that. So giving it to her early probably won't mean a thing to her and allow her to ride it in the nice spring weather before it gets too hot. But yet part of me, a very small part, thinks I should wait. I've waited a week already simply because I haven't had the time and this weekend is not looking good for time either. I don't know what will happen when I do get an hour to spare.

What Passes For a Zoo in Chicago?

Although the skies were clear on Saturday, the temperatures were chilly. When I walked out to the vehicle to restock the ice chest with ice, it was a balmy 34 degrees with a stiff breeze. Later as we sat in our vehicle with the heater on waiting for the ten o'clock opening of the Brookfield Zoo, I wasn't so sure it was a good idea. In our group was my MIL, a Filipina straight from the island and much warmer temperatures. We dug around and found a couple blankets that we keep in there, dusted them off and decided to give the zoo a try.

We had already paid $8 to park our vehicle and it cost me another $33 to get the three adults into the zoo and Little Abbey got in free. As zoos go, this one kind of disappointed me. About a third of the exhibits were closed to visitors and it seemed as if half of the remaining inhabitants had mysterious disappeared because both their outdoor and indoor cages were empty, many being cleaned. It seemed like we mostly walked from one empty cage to another. We were able to locate one lion and one tiger, two of Little Abbey's favorite animals but I think she was too scared of seeing them in real life to issue her standard growl when she sees a picture of one.

Another gripe that I had about our day at the zoo was the cost of food. It was outrageously high! So high, that having a five-dollar bill in your pocket felt just like a penny in a grocery store. Fortunately, we had smuggled quite a bit of snacks in Little Abbey's stroller so we munched on those and ate after we left the park. My final gripe is that you weren't allowed to take strollers into most buildings that were handicap accessible. So we had to unload the stroller every time we went into the building and of course, the exit to the exhibit was on the other side of the building so dad had to walk around every single time to fetch the stroller to proceed onto the next exhibit. In all, I probably tripled the miles of my wife and her mother just fetching the stroller.

As we were walking out, my wife and MIL went inside a store to check out high priced baubles, a lady approached me to fill out a survey, which I did with great satisfaction. I even wrote on the back. I had been under the impression that Brookfield Zoo was one of the tops in the nation but it had nothing on our humble little zoo here in Iowa and paled compared to the one we saw in Omaha Nebraska during the middle of winter after my wife got her greencard. If I had to do it over again, I would have saved my money and gone to the free Lincoln Park Zoo.

P.S. The weather warmed up considerably by late morning and it was a beautiful day to visit the zoo had we been able to find one.

They Tried Charging For Parking But the Entertainment Was Free

We pulled out of the parking garage a little before five o'clock to head to the hotel and I was worried about getting caught in rush hour. Instead, we made excellent time and were barely two miles away from our hotel when we pulled off of the interstate onto the major road that runs by Midway airport. Gridlock. It had taken us just minutes to cover the previous 15 miles but took an hour and a half to cover the last two miles. I won't bore you with those details.

I checked into the hotel and had to have a lengthy discussion with them. They advertised free parking but wanted to charge me $10/night for the privilege. I had to show them the advertisement, which I'm glad I brought with me, to receive $10 off my bill. At that point, I was tempted to just throw away the advertisement but didn't and was thankful again the next morning when my bill was slipped under the door with the $10 fee added back on. I probably wouldn't have cared except that the reason I chose them over three other nearby exactly priced hotels was because they were the only one of the four that advertised free parking.

After getting the room keys, we decided to just walk across the parking lot to eat at a TGI Fridays. Normally I eat as the Romans when in Rome but the traffic was still bumper to bumper ruling out driving and threatening rain ruled out walking. Just as we got back to our vehicle to grab our bags and head up to the room, we heard a loud bang right behind us.

A cherry red Grand Prix had just slammed into the back of a cherry red Chevy Blazer. (At least they didn't have to worry about the other's paint on each other's bumpers.) The Grand Prix now had a radiator pushed back about a third of the way to the passenger compartment and the Blazer, well lets just say that from where I was standing 40 feet away, didn't even appear to have a scratch. The Grand Prix guy got out, staggered around a bit looking at the damage while bleeding superficially from a cut in his forehead where he slammed the windshield and then sat back in his car. The Blazer guy then got out, looked at the damage, put on a jacket and stood there. Neither even glanced at the other nor said a word.

Traffic kept on rolling past and just as I started to feel guilty about not going over to help out which would have meant climbing a ten foot tall iron spike fence or running half a block away to the entrance and running back again, I heard the sirens coming. In about 2 minutes tops from the sound of the collision, two police cars, a fire truck and an ambulance were there. In my neck of the woods, that kind of saving power takes a good forty minutes to arrive. At that point, we went up to our room, which as luck would have it, was overlooking the scene of the accident. It would take two hours before everything was cleaned up and back to normal.

I really don't have a point to this story other than to fill you in on our entertainment for the night. I guess if I was to pull out some nugget of wisdom, I would say don't buy a Grand Prix because it was pretty much totaled in what was probably a less than 25 mph collision. But then the engineer in me would probably say that it did what it was supposed to do, i.e. crumpling, to protect the occupant who escaped with minor bleeding. So just take it as a story to fill you in on our entertainment for the night.

Millennium Park: Take Two

Friday was a good time to leave for parts unknown. A storm was hurtling towards us and for the most part, we stayed out ahead of it all the way to Chicago. First on our agenda was another visit to Millennium Park for myself and a first visit for my MIL. I had scouted out parking and had found a convenient parking garage directly underneath the park. My Garmin 200W GPS system led me right to it and we parked the car just after twelve noon.

My wife wanted to eat a picnic lunch that we had brought with us in the car but I suggested taking it to eat in the park above ground. So we loaded up our backpack and stroller and headed up, only to have it start pouring rain the second we stepped out the door. However it only lasted for a brief 30 seconds or so and then was gone for the rest of the day.

We immediately got kicked out of the seating in the Jay Pritzker Pavilion as we were eating our lunch so we had to move a few feet away to a wooden bench which evidently satisfied the security guard who mosied on away. Evidently they hadn't read the rules of the park posted on their website that state, "While in the park, please respect the rights of others by allowing free and open access to all areas of the park at all times."

Our seating in the other "free and open access area" happened to be by those trees in another "free and open access area" that were still locked up in some sort of maximum-security prison. Evidently they are serving life in the slammer. I wanted to offer them a bite of my sandwich but those security cameras were blinking their red eyes at me and I didn't want to end up in the joint too.


After lunch, we walked across the BP Bridge and down to the inland seashore on Lake Michigan. There we turned our attention and feet north to the highlight of my wife's day and the dreaded scourge of mine called Navy Pier. It is basically a condensed amusement part/tourist trap/shopping mall built on a pier made of concrete. It was crowded. We walked around a bit taking in the commotion and eventually bought an overpriced ticket for Little Abbey to ride the Merry-go-Round. She protested as we tried to put her on the thing and then threw and even bigger fit when we tried to take her off 30 seconds later at the end of the ride. Now every time she seems a Merry-go-Round, which has been surprisingly often, she points longingly towards it as we go by.


None to soon, we walked back to Millennium Park and to Crown Fountain where we kicked back and watched all the teenyboppers on tour make asses of themselves in the water. Little Abbey joined another fellow her age in the water and spent some time splashing it around but at least she had the sense to keep herself dry, which the teenyboppers didn't. I'm guessing they had a cool rest of the day as the temps, although pleasant in dry clothing, would definitely have felt chilly in wet multiplied by a strong wind that pushed through the Windy City on that day. As the evening began to wane, we walked back to the parking garage under the park, wandered around until we found where we were supposed to pay before returning to our car as so many signs admonished us but never told us where, and headed off to our hotel somewhere out by Midway airport. That part of the journey shall be told on a different day.

My Linksys Phone Support Nightmare

About two weeks ago, before MIL arrived, I reset our home computer to have a guest account so that I don't have to hide or otherwise disturb all my financial records that I keep here and there from prying eyes. The trouble with that is that for some odd reason, the guest account couldn't access the internet no matter what I tried, and I tried everything short of reinstalling the operating system. So late one evening after many hours of frustration, I opted for plan B. I took my wife's wireless laptop and copied all her personal information (not nearly as much as our desktop) off and put it safely on our desktop. I then checked to see if the internet was working, it was, and started up for bed. That is when my wife asked if I had installed the webcam onto it.

My MIL wants to be able to communicate back home to her son and his family and a webcam was mandatory. I went downstairs and unhooked the webcam from the tangle of wires and hooked it up to the laptop. No dice. I needed the original software that I had used once probably four or five years ago and never since. I spent the next twenty minutes looking for it without any luck. Finally as I was heading back upstairs, I saw our old 3.5 floppy diskette box on a shelf and decided to look in there even though I knew a CD couldn't be in there. It was. Software installed, I still couldn't get the webcam to work immediately and only after punching various combinations of keys on the keyboard did it finally pop up properly. I sprinted off to bed before anything else became mandatory.

The next evening, I asked my MIL how everyone back home was doing and was told that the internet on that computer wasn't working. Huh? I checked and sure enough it wasn't. For two nights after work, I tried everything again. I unhooked the router, rehooked it up, bypassed it and prayed. Nothing worked. Finally I tried help support for the wireless router. I got some woman from India who after having me delete all my settings, gave up and told me that I needed to be put on hold for a senior tech support person. Three hours later, still listening to elevator music, I hung up and went to bed. Yesterday afternoon, I tried again and once again, got some woman from India. After an hour of explaining things over and over to try and bridge the language barrier, she told me my laptop was broken and I needed to fix that before she could help. No amount of persuasion that it wasn't the fault of my laptop could persuade her. She eventually just hung up. I dialed again.

This time I got a man, also from India who after another hour tried to tell me that my internet provider was the culprit. All this time I had been able to still access the internet on my desktop that was hardwired to the internet so I knew it wasn't the culprit. But when I tried to access the internet to prove my point, it wasn't working. The man said that I needed to call them after I got it fixed and was about to hang up when I told him to hang on a minute. I bypassed the router and lo and behold, my internet was still working on the desktop computer. The man from India was unremorseful that he had almost just ditched me on a phony excuse and just proceeded to have me repeat various things. After a couple hours with him, he finally told me that my wireless switch was turned off. Huh?

What was a wireless switch and how do I turn it on? He told me it was a physical switch on the outside of the computer and that I had to toggle it. I inspected the outside of the laptop and for the life of me couldn't find any switch other than the power. The man told me to call him when I got the wireless switch turned on and hung up. I suspected another dump because they couldn't figure it out but was powerless to stop them because I had no idea what a wireless switch was. I tried to search the computer help menu but didn't find anything telling me where the switch was. At my wits end, I located an 800 number on the back of the laptop and called it. Almost immediately I spoke with an American who told me to hit the function key followed by F2. My wireless switch was now back on and he said I should see a light showing me that. A little LED light had indeed lit up with some sort of Egyptian looking symbol above it so I took him for his word that he was correct. 30 seconds later, I was surfing the internet again.

This whole experience has just disturbed me. I have a Linksys wireless router no doubt made in China and people in India can't figure out how to fix it so they make up excuses that it is someone else's fault and hang up. If I ever have one more problem with that piece of junk, I'm going to buy one made in America even if it was in some twelve year old's garage, just as long as he gives me his number and doesn't route me to India.