Summer has arrived in Chicagoland, and with it comes a special exhibit at Brookfield Zoo’s – the Brick Safari! Truth be told, there are always special exhibits at Brookfield, more so in the summer when they make good use of their outdoor space. But the Brick Safari features life-size animals made out of Lego, which puts it near and dear to my geeky heart.
The seriously geeky Lego fan will not be disappointed with these figures. Not only are they life-size, but information is provided about the statues stating how many bricks were used to build each one, and how much it weighs. Animal lovers will be delighted by the information provided on each of the animals, including where to find them if any reside at Brookfield Zoo.
Some of the figures ask you to guess the weight or number of bricks; some simply tell you, along with the number of hours they took to build. The penguin parents ask you to look for their chicks who are placed further along in the exhibit. For example, the Emperor penguin took 6,900 bricks and 49 hours to build, and weighs 143 pounds; the Rockhopper penguin weighs in at a mere 55 pounds with 3,200 bricks, but took 101 hours to build.
To add to the local fun, The Morton Arboretum also has a Lego exhibit this summer… time to explore!
I’ve seen a few distinctive movies recently and thought I’d talk about a couple of them. I’ll go light on spoilers, since one of them is still in theaters.
Dragon Blade – This historical fiction piece about a Roman army invading China’s Silk Road pairs up Jackie Chan and John Cusack against a corrupt Roman leader. Obviously, a movie with Jackie Chan has some great fight scenes, including some duels and larger battles. The dialogue was about what you’d expect from an action movie… not memorable, but not too corny, and while the outcome was predictable, plot points within the movie came as a surprise.
Tag – This movie about adults playing a 30-year game of tag is rated R for a reason… there are significant portions of dialogue you do not want to explain to a child. Once you get past that, it’s a fun romp about a group of adults that set aside one month a year to sneak up on their friends – in other cities – for an extended game of tag, and the one friend they’ve never managed to tag.
Shazam! – Just out in theaters, this is a fun DC movie, now that they’ve realized they can sell something other than mopey Superman and Batman flicks. Shazam! goes beyond the goofy moments in Aquaman to entertain viewers while relaying a solid message similar to Lilo & Stitch or Mrs. Doubtfire about family being what we make of it. There are some great moments as Billy explores his powers and discovers the importance of using them wisely. My biggest question about the movie, however, was why “Shazam,” composed of a mix of Jewish, Greek, and Roman strengths, is responsible for containing the seven deadly sins from Christianity.
Professor Marston and the Wonder Women – This is a fabulous not for kids movie exploring the origins behind Wonder Woman. Professor Marston, addressing criticism of Wonder Woman, explains the psychology that the comic book is supposed to be teaching, exploring the DISC assessment with the censors who were interrogating him. The movie delves into the polyamorous relationship between Professor Marston, his wife Elizabeth, and their student and girlfriend, Olive, and the difficulties of raising a non-traditional family in the pre-World War 2 era.
Just after Christmas, I realized that there was an exhibit at the Putnam Museum titled Literary Heroines: Their Times, Their Fashions. The museum had been on my radar for the past few months; it’s just across the border in Davenport, Iowa, about a two hours drive, and neither of us had been to Iowa before. It was the next to last weekend of the exhibit, so our last chance to see it.
The Putnam website described the exhibit as “Strong and influential female protagonists spring from the pages of some of literature’s most iconic books with the Putnam’s the newest exhibit, Literary Heroines: Their Times, Their Fashions — open NOW!”
The exhibit featured “the apparel and interests of exciting and memorable characters, as they come to life through vignettes,” with a range of heroines form Hermione Granger (Harry Potter, of course), Laura Ingalls (Little House on the Prairie), and Scout (To Kill a Mockingbird). I can only imagine how hard it was to narrow the list down to these twenty titles. Every exhibit included information about the book and the heroine, along with a mannequin outfitted appropriately.
I came out of it with a reading list; while I’m familiar with most of the titles, I think I’ve only read three of them. This is the list of books represented:
The Age of Innocence (Edith Wharton) Putnam Museum: Literary Heroines exhibit
The Atomic City Girls (Janet Beard)
The Color Purple (Alice Walker)
Daughters of the Dust (Julie Dash)
The Forest Lover (Susan Vreeland)
Harry Potter series (JK Rowling)
The Help (Kathryn Stockett)
Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte)
Like Water for Chocolate (Laura Esquivel)
Little House series (Laura Ingalls Wilder)
Little Women (Louisa May Alcott)
Miss Fisher Mysteries (Kerry Greenwood)
Mrs. Lincoln’s Dressmaker (Jennifer Chiaverini)
Memoirs of a Geisha (Arthur Golden)
The Nightingale (Kristin Hannah)
The Plague of Doves (Louise Erdrich)
Pride & Prejudice (Jane Austen)
Snow Flower and the Secret Fan (Lisa See)
To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Lee)
Wonder Woman comic books
The rest of the museum was entertaining, with many hands on activities for children of all ages (including those of us who are children with jobs, aka “adults”). We took the time to watch a 3-D movie about Oceans; it was one of three choices in the time we were there. And we played a bit… infrared pictures are fun.
Near the beginning of the year, I set several goals that were spread out across the year. This has been a rollercoaster of a year, with some goals postponed, some discarded, and some new ones added. The ones I had shared earlier in the year were:
Test for my Tang Soo Do black belt – tested in April, received my belt in June, and my embroidered belt (with my name and Dan number) in December.
Renew my Project Management Professional (PMP) certfication – I completed this in January and am working on my credits for the next cycle.
Add a new garden bed – I added a Garden Tower this year, and am prepping an existing area for next year’s new garden. Like renewing my PMP certification, this is a perpetual goal.
Garage door projects – this was actually two projects in one: replacing the door from the kitchen to the garage , which I had professionals do, and adding a garage door seal.
Duolingo had added Korean as a language option. Since we learn snippets of Korean at karate, I thought I’d try picking up a bit more. Oops. This fell off the list fairly quickly in January; learning a new alphabet takes a bit more time than just learning a new language, and I found I didn’t have that time to spare.
In addition to these goals, I set some new goals during the year. I had three major house projects that need to be addressed by professionals: old windows, a driveway that has settled with some significant cracks, and a shed that’s falling apart. My budget only goes so far, so I opted to replace the windows, which turned out to be a great decision as my boiler is having problems at the start of winter. I wrote a song, which was nowhere on my list of things to do. And, of course, I had the unexpected goal of finding a new job. Overall, I’m happy with the goals I set and the number of them I was able to complete.
At one point a few years ago, after re-watching The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, I mentioned to Cassandra that Dad had live in England at that time and occasionally shared stories of his experiences. This resulted in me e-mailing him to ask about the war-time bombing; his response follows.
Here are some comments on German bombing during World War II.
Where I lived in the north of England, we had no serious bombing. There were plenty of bigger targets, much closer to Germany or the French airports from which they sent their planes. One night a plane dropped a lot of fire bombs, but they all fell in the playing field of a girls’ high school about four blocks from our home. We suspect that a plane returning from a raid on Newcastle, a much bigger town to our north, wanted to get rid of its load.
London was the biggest target, and from the beginning of September 1940, an average of 200 planes a night bombed London every night for two months. Bombing continued after that but not so regularly and on a smaller scale.
Many children were evacuated to small towns and villages in the west of England, which were safe because there was no point in bombing them. A lot of these children did not see their parents for three or four years!
Since most of the bombing was at night, many people slept in bomb shelters, and also in the stations of the London Underground railway after it closed down for the night.
I moved to London five years after the war, and I lived and worked in the East End, which was the area most heavily damaged. I worked near the docks, which were an obvious target. In that area whole blocks of houses had been wiped off the map, and when they rebuilt after the war, they sometimes relocated the streets and gave them new names. Other streets of brick houses would have many gaps, with perhaps half the houses gone.
The German plan was simply to try to make London uninhabitable, but they did not succeed. It was a matter of luck what was hit and what wasn’t. The House of Commons was badly damaged, but Westminster Abbey, just across the street, was untouched. Fire bombs fell on the roof of St. Paul’s Cathedral, but the firewatchers were able to put them out before they did much damage.
Air attacks on London declined when the Germans invaded Russia and were also heavily involved in fighting in North Africa. But in June, 1944, just after the allied invasion in the north of France, a new kind of attack came. The Germans launched flying bombs (the V1), which were pilotless and had jet engines set to fly just the distance to reach the london area and then turn off and fall to the ground. Over the next few months they sent several thousand of them, and there was no telling where they would land. My older brother was a member of an anti-aircraft battery stationed on the south-east coast, whose job was to try to shoot them down before they crossed the coast.
Three months later they began sending asupersonic rockets (the V2), which flew in a very high arch and arrived without warning. Again, since the aiming could only be approximate, the target was London. Their range was about 200 miles. They sent about 1,300 in the seven months from then until March 1945, when we were able to eliminate the last launching sites.
About a year before Dad’s retirement, I was working in the library computer lab, and my boss wanted as many staff members as possible to have web pages on the library’s website. The best way to encourage this was to start at the top, with the Director of Libraries. Of course, most of the staff weren’t familiar with HTML (this pre-dated CSS and WYSIWYG editors), so she tasked me with pestering Dad for content and creating his web page.
I probably have a copy of it on a floppy disk somewhere, accessible with a USB floppy drive, but it was easier to find using The Wayback Machine, a digital archive of the World Wide Web.
It’s very classically Dad… he mentions some hobbies, but not all (he played squash in Portland, and racquetball most of the time we lived in Miami), and neglects to mention that his sabbatical year included two small children, who were likely a bit disruptive to his research. And it was written 20 years ago, before he retired to Guatemala and began taking cruises to various parts of the world, along with playing Scrabble and bridge regularly.
From left to right: my grandfather, Charles (1914); my father, Frank (2000-something); my grandmother, Frances (1917). My father’s shirt reads “This was a white shirt til I sat in the smoking section.” (I bought him that t-shirt.)
So here’s what Dad had to say about himself:
It’s a long way from London to Miami, especially if you go by way of Ohio, Illinois, Pennsylvania and Oregon, and take more than twenty years doing it.
I was born and grew up in Darlington, in the north of England, a town whose main claim to fame is that it is the birthplace of railroads. It lies on the the main line between London and Edinburgh, so collecting the names and numbers of the magnificent steam locomotives as they roared by was almost a required occupation for the youth of the town.
Some years later, armed with a degree in English Language and Literature from the University of Durham, I enrolled in the School of Librarianship and Archives at the University of London. Because of its location, the School not only had on its faculty some of the finest teachers of library science, but it also enjoyed a constant stream of distinguished foreign visitors. One of these was the Dean of the School of Library Science at the University of Illinois. His glowing portrait of the state of librarianship in the United States clearly impressed me. After working in small college libraries in London for several years, I accepted an invitation to become a reference librarian at the Public Library of Akron, Ohio. Three years later I moved to the University of Illinois.
The University of Illinois Library was a wonderful place in which to expand one’s horizons. It was (and still is) the third largest academic library in the United States. Even in the early sixties, when I was there, it possessed more than four million volumes. Vast numbers of scholars with international reputations were to be found there, attracted by the quality of the University and of its Library. I worked closely with many of them, for it was my responsibility to try to obtain by interlibrary loan those works so esoteric as not to be held by that huge library.
During this period, the Dean of the Library School persuaded me to undertake a project left unfinished by one of his retiring faculty members, the preparation of a book surveying British government publications. It sounded like a straightforward proposition so, ignoring the danger signs (the work was far from complete, and the retiring faculty member had already spent fifteen years on it), I agreed. The problem with a project of this kind is that one tends to suffer from what I would call the “Babes in the Wood” syndrome – there are always more flowers to pick, so you keep going deeper and deeper into the forest. Before long, a bibliography originally conceived of as an appendix to the work blossomed into a separate book, that was ready for publication before its parent. It was to be fifteen years, including one year of sabbatical leave, before the H.W. Wilson Company was able to publish the Guide to British Government Publications.
Meanwhile, I spent five years at Penn State as the Library’s Assistant Director for Public Services. It was an exciting time of seemingly unlimited budgets and rapid expansion. Then, in 1969, I began a ten-year stay as Director of the Library at Portland State University in Oregon, a young urban institution. There, one learned lessons of a different kind: how to maintain the development of a library in an environment of frequent budget cuts and hiring freezes. And so, in 1979, to Miami, to a University about to embark on a dynamic thrust to higher quality, and to a library facing the need to cope with the age of computerized services. Both the University and the international community of Miami provide an invigorating environment.
Librarians, of course, don’t spend all of their time among their books. I like to spend much of my leisure time outdoors and in remote places. While in Illinois, I was advisor to a group of Explorer Scouts who – with improbable logic, considering their location among the corn fields – became interested in mountaineering. Thus, began a series of summer camping trips to the Rockies and beyond. The group’s first forays were mainly arduous hikes, but they gradually became more technical, planning climbs in the Tetons and, in the Cascades, assaults on Mt. Rainier and Mt. Shuksan.
My years at Penn State afforded proximity to rock climbing in the Shawangunks of New York State, while in Portland one was on the very doorstep of the Cascades. There, with Mt. Hood and other peaks on the skyline, one did not have to make long-range plans for climbing expeditions. A quick check on Friday’s weekend weather report was sufficient to make people reach for their ice axes and crampons. In addition to Mt. Hood, which was a mere ninety-minute drive, Mt. St. Helens was a perennial favorite until it suddenly became an active volcano in 1980.
More sedate hobbies include collecting books, especially the works of a group of minor turn of the century English authors. And I collect and study the postal history of mail carried across the Atlantic by 19th century steamships. With all of these activities, spare time is a commodity that I don’t have to worry about.
As much as I enjoy a fine whiskey, it’s not my go to drink. Good whiskey should be sipped, in small quantities, and sometimes with dessert. Bad whiskey should be ignored. Life’s just too short for lousy drinks.
Despite the title, I’m not particular about whether my martinis are shaken or stirred. I own a martini shaker, but for expediency (which happens when you make your drink after you’re done cooking and have to worry about defending your food from the kitten), I rarely use it, so stirred is my default. I always make martinis on the rocks. In fact, I rarely use ice cubes for anything else; I don’t like diluting juices.
And I always make martinis with gin. I don’t particularly like vodka (though Whiskey Acres does have delightful sipping vodka), and have never seen the appeal of vodka martinis. What has changed in recent years is the variety of gins I’m trying in my martinis. It started a few years ago when my ex-husband discovered a North Shore Distillery gin. That has an amazingly distinctive flavor, and is probably sippable on its own if you’re so inclined.
Now I make an effort to try different gins, rather than making the same martini every time. Two Brothers, a local brewing company, recently expanded their selection to include spirits, so I’ve tried theirs. I have some regrets about not picking up a Journeyman Distillery gin while I was in Michigan, but I should be able to pick it up at Binny’s. Some days, I pick my gin based on the bottle design; on others, I take the time to put on my glasses and read the descriptions. The current bottle is from Vikre Distillery in Minnesota; the Boreal Cedar Gin is described as “… infused with the smoky aroma of cedar wood, citrusy wild sumac, and a trace of black currant.” It was actually a tough choice between their cedar, juniper, and spruce gins, and I may have to try the others at some point.
I’ve always loved Halloween. As a kid, it was a great excuse to hit up your neighbors and the next few blocks of people you didn’t actually know for what you hoped was good candy. Or at least candy you could eat with braces.
As an adult, it took on new meaning. Pagans believe that the veil is thinnest between the worlds of the living and the dead this time of year, so Halloween, or Samhain, is a time when we can look to our dead relatives and friends for guidance. We put out food offerings – carved pumpkins now, hollowed out turnips originally (Gods know I don’t want to eat the turnips, I’m all for carving them) – in return for their help and advice.
And it’s a time to let go – of our weaknesses, our bad habits, of the losses from the past year that linger over us. If some losses are too fresh – a friend who recently passed away (this year, unfortunately), an accident the week before Halloween (last year, for me) – those can hold for the next year. Death, however unfortunate, is a natural part of our life cycle.
This is a time of rebirth for Pagans, as we recognize the losses from the past year and look forward to what may come. That next year is unknown, no matter what your plans, the year will probably surprise you. Celebrate these changes. A year ago, I couldn’t have guessed where I am now, yet I am happy with how things have changed.
Jack o’Lanterns
Tonight, I will have a giant spider web strung up across my doorway with treats attached, with a giant spider looking on. I will light the jack o’lanterns I carved, and walk from door to door with my daughter as she asks strangers for candy. And I will release things that need to be let go, and hold onto some losses that aren’t quite ready to leave yet.
The 2018-2019 Broadway season has begun at the Paramount Theatre in Aurora with Legally Blonde: the Musical. While I’ve never seen the movie, I had some general knowledge of the plot before we went to the show last weekend. Not knowing the specifics, I was fairly entertained by the show, even with the bits that I felt were obviously predictable from the beginning.
Elle, in addition to being a flighty blonde, is upbeat and starts with the absolution conviction that she can follow her ex-boyfriend to Harvard Law School and succeed, despite her total lack of interest in law or serious studies. She is assisted by her sorority sisters throughout, both in real life and versions of them in her head (singing as a Greek chorus), and by friends she makes once she arrives at Harvard.
She goes head-to-head with her ex-boyfriend, his new girlfriend, and one of her law professors, none of whom believe she has a chance of graduating, much less landing one of the four internships offered by the professor. The only people on her side are Emmett, the professor’s assistant, and Paulette, a beautician she meets when she considers going brunette to convince people she’s serious about law school.
This show was a delightful start to the season. I’m looking forward to see their interpretation of The Wizard of Oz in November.
I have found at my new job, working in a smaller office space, that I walk less than I used to. Given that I have a desk job, I already don’t move enough during the day. I was occasionally walking before lunch at my old job, but needed some extra push to get there at my new job.
On a Pokemon Go hunt with a few critters around me.
Enter Pokémon Go, which I installed when it first came out, then ignored for about two years. I recently re-installed it on my new(-er… just under two years) phone, and logged in. I initially installed it for parenting reasons… checking to see if it was appropriate for my daughter to play. I think I reached level 3 before giving up; I had a new house and things to do here (unpack, assemble furniture, repeat as needed), as well as a job and karate. When I upgraded my phone a couple months later, I didn’t bother re-installing it. Until now.
I walked at lunch a couple days, but found I needed a bit more of a stretch, and something to make it more interesting, since I was walking the same loop each time. By installing Pokémon Go, I’m encouraging myself to walk farther – the nearest in game stops and gyms are close to a mile away. On the other hand, I can’t really walk that far at lunch and still have time to eat… so I do that walk on mornings when I have a bit of free time before work (due to my shorter commute). When I only have time for a shorter walk, the old loop still works for hunting Pokémon, I just have to be careful not to run out of pokéballs, which you need to catch the critters. You can pick up more of those at gyms, stops, and in gifts from your friends. In each of those cases, the selection of items is random. The random selection at stops and gyms also includes gifts that you can send to friends. Every gift exchange increases your friendship levels; increased levels have in-game benefits.
A gift from Chicago!
The critters you encountered appear to be randomized too, some days you encounter more of one type than the other. Of course, being Pokémon, the goal is to collect them all, but some are harder to find than others… including some that are country-specific, so you pick them up when you travel or you trade with friends. Anyways, it’s an entertaining addition to outside walks, though it doesn’t work on a treadmill unless you have an Apple watch.
The seriously geeky Lego fan will not be disappointed with these figures. Not only are they life-size, but information is provided about the statues stating how many bricks were used to build each one, and how much it weighs. Animal lovers will be delighted by the information provided on each of the animals, including where to find them if any reside at Brookfield Zoo.
Now I make an effort to try different gins, rather than making the same martini every time. 
