FLASHBACK: Two years ago today, we were in London, checking out Buckingham Palace, riding the Eye, and gazing upon Big Ben. That was such a wonderful trip!
A couple of days ago I saw a photo of Big Ben used in an Internet meme in association with that ridiculous case of the 14-year-old in Texas being arrested for building a clock and taking it to school. Inexplicably, Ahmed Mohamed's knowledge and creativity resulted in him being hauled away from the school in handcuffs (wearing his NASA t-shirt, by the way). What a fantastic way to encourage a young man to build and invent ... not!
BOOK IT!: Imagine the kids' delight a couple of days ago when an envelope showed up in our mailbox containing coupons for free Personal Pan Pizzas (R) from Pizza Hut for them! There's a catch, though: They have to read books. Talk about a painless 'catch'!
The coupons are compliments of the BOOK IT! program. The program started in 1984, and I first heard about it when Rick and Ken (now nearly 30 and 28) got the coupons from their kindergarten teachers way back when.
On the BOOK IT! web site (www.bookitprogram.com), you can set reading goals, track reading, monitor progress, and more. Currently, there are 14 million students in 630,000 classrooms in 6,300 locations enrolled in the program.
The materials we received from BOOK IT! even included a link to download some free books on Kindle! (www.amazon.com/PIZZAHUTBOOKIT). Sweet!
BEATLES BABY: We started our morning by listening to a live in-studio performance by Caspar Babypants (rocker Chris Ballew of the Presidents of the United States of America). He's just released a second album of Beatles' covers, and though Caspar is supposedly music for kids, I suspect people of all ages would love his poppy tunes!
WE'VE GOT ISSUES: The kids started back to school this week, albeit a super duper alternative school. They'll be there for two hours on two days a week (a total of four hours). Annabelle has two art classes, CJ has drama, and they both are enrolled in a social issues class (examining world problems).
For the first trimester, the social issues class will be focused on the topic of hunger, both locally and around the globe. I was a big fan of these three goals, listed on the white board during the first day of class. ...
For homework, they had to choose a quote (from a list provided) and write a couple of sentences about it. CJ chose a quote by Mother Teresa, "I alone cannot change the world, but I can cast a stone across the waters to create many ripples." In response, CJ wrote, "Although it is difficult for one person to change the world, they could certainly inspire others to do so. Inspiring others to do great things for the world is a very good thing to do. I hope to be able to inspire others in the future."
Annabelle chose: "The future depends on what we do in the present," a quote from Mahatma Gandhi. In response, she wrote, "The future won't write itself, so we need to do everything we can to shape it. Children like us today are the best to do this, because we will live to see what has come of our efforts. I would like to try and make an effort to stop hunger, starting here in Seattle."
RANDOM: Annabelle spends hours every day drawing. I post a tiny fraction of her work in the blog. Here's one from a couple days ago - Cthulhu apparently plotting to blow up the Earth. How nice. :)
In case you're wondering, Cthulhu is a fictional cosmic entity created by writer H. P. Lovecraft and first introduced in the short story "The Call of Cthulhu" first published in a pulp magazine back in 1928.
ROSY: Between this weekend and this morning, we spent an inordinate amount of time in the kitchen. Before dawn's early light, I was pondering the scene below.
How to turn thin slices of apple and some puff pastry into pretty little roses? ... You see, we'd received an email last night, after dinner, asking for donations to a teacher's breakfast just 15 hours later. What to do, what to do? I somehow remembered a video we'd watched months prior about making little pastry roses using apples. I figured that would be great - an apple for the teacher and all - and the video made it look so easy! ...
I cored the apples and sliced them super thin (I thought). I cooked them for four minutes in water and lemon juice in the microwave (to soften them for rolling). I rolled my (store bought, she admits with embarrassment) puff pastry out, and cut it into 9-by-2 inch strips, and brushed those with apricot preserves (I think it is to not only add flavor, but to act as 'glue' for the slices). I carefully laid out the apple slices on the puff pastry, folded the puff pastry up over the bottom edges, sealed the sides and started rolling the strip up. Snap, crackle, pop! My apple slices started busting up like crazy. NOT good. And now it was about 6:45, I had to have these things baked and in my car by 8. And I had no Plan B. What to do? What to do? I decided the best bet was to re-slice the slices, basically trying to cut them half as thick as they presently were. And even then, I only used the thinnest of the thin slices. Happily, that seemed to do the trick. I was able to roll the roll (redundant, I know), seal the edge, stick it in a greased muffin tin and hope for the best when I stuck them in the oven.
I had visions of them unfurling or somehow otherwise exploding. Happily, they actually looked better - more rose like - with each passing minute in the oven. Hooray!
I was so happy when I took them out, and then said a little prayer and held my breath when extracting them from the muffin tin. Fortunately, they held their shape.
By then, it was 7:55, and we had to be in the car with them in five minutes. I asked Annabelle to whip us up a little sign to go with the tray. I love her happy apple!
When we handed them off to the school secretary she smiled and marveled how they were still warm. That wasn't by design - it was right down to the wire, like an episode of "Chopped" or something! HAWK-Y: Saturday and Sunder were all about prepping for a big opening game for the 2015 National Football League season for the Seahawks. Early Sunday morning, before the 10 o'clock kick off, CJ and Annabelle tackled a fruity art project. We printed out a pattern of the Seahawks' logo and put it on a big cutting board, measuring about 2-by-1.5 feet. Then the kids used raisins covered in white yogurt, green grapes, blueberries and some sliced kiwi to fill in the pattern with the right colors in the right spots to bring the logo to life. I thought they did a great job!
One of our other colorful projects were deviled eggs in Seahawks' blue and green. We hard-boiled eggs, peeled them and then dropped them in water dyed with blue food coloring. After about an hour we cut them in half and that produced the cool ring-around-the egg effect. We made an avocado flavored mash to fill them with. They were a hit!
We made a whole lot of other food, but it wasn't as photogenic.You know, you can only make so many things green and blue. ...
WALK AND WRITE: During this morning's 1-hour stroll 'round Magnolia, we spent a fair amount of the times talking about the kids' current writing project - a story for "The Empire Writes Back" program through The Museum of Flight. CJ's working on a back story about the Cantina band. Annabelle's involves a certain wookiee we all know and love. Annabelle is opting to illustrate her story, which ups the amount of work, of course. But projects like this are great, because they force us how to learn new tricks in Photoshop and Illustrator, such as how to create a cartoony comet in a starry night sky. They're inching ever closer to their final drafts. We'll share them once they're done. HALFWAY THERE: The International Space Station flew over our house about quarter to six this morning, and I couldn't help but think about how NASA astronaut Scott Kelly and Roscosmos cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko are at the halfway point of their historic ISS residency. They've been up there for six months, and will continue to live up there for another six, making them the first humans to live off planet for a continuous year. You can send a 'best wishes' message to Kelly and Kornienko by following this White House link: https://www.whitehouse.gov/webform/send-well-wishes-250-miles-above-earth
IT CAME IN LIKE A WRECKING BALL: Monday was a day we'd been looking forward to for months - every since we bought tickets to see the Foo Fighters play the Moda Center (former Rose Garden) in Portland, Oregon.
We drove down I-5 Monday morning, excited about what the day held in store.
Along the way, we had to stop at a store, because the kids had left their toothbrushes in Seattle. We chose the Target in Kelso, WA, because it's right off Interstate 5. It would be a quick and easy stop.
We parked in the lot out front and approached the building from the south. Like many (most? all?) Target stores, this one has big, red concrete balls out front. Ever since the kids have been old enough to walk, they've always belly bumped or patted or leap-frogged these balls on the way into the store. I've seen other kids do it, too. Something about the big red balls just says, 'Touch me!"
Annabelle's big enough now to actually leapfrog the balls. She approached the first one, planted her hands atop it, and then basically stuck, letting out a shriek.
"It's wet paint! Wet paint!" she wailed, holding red palms up as evidence. Her attention immediately turned to her brand new silver sparkly sweater and its now partially red-sleeves, and her new black pants, now sporting red polka dots.
We dashed into the store and into the bathrooms right inside the entrance. We were able to get the paint off the pants, but the sweater? Not so much. :/
I was Very Not Pleased because that was the only sweater/jacket she had with her - we were just spending one night in Portland, and I wasn't happy that the wet paint wasn't properly marked. Granted, there *was* caution tape across part of the front entrance of the store, and there was equipment and a person working on a man-lift piece of equipment, but it looked like he was working on something on the upper facade. There certainly was no one obviously painting, and no sign warning us, approaching from the south - or anyone coming from the north, or anyone coming out of the store - that there was wet paint. I thought that was, well negligent, and we shared those thoughts with the store management. To their credit, the manager spent five minutes touring a teary-eyed Annabelle around the children's clothing department, helping her pick out a replacement sweater.
By the time we exited the store, the big red wet balls were entirely surrounded by caution tape.
Better late than never. ...
SUGARY STOP:The Target trauma out of the way, we continued our journey toward Portland. Fortunately, we made good time, and had a chance to stop by the Voodoo Doughnut store on Third in downtown Portland.
There was a line out the door into the light rain, of course, but the kids thought it worth the 10 minute or so wait.
CJ opted for a bacon maple bar, while Annabelle went for a devil's food with coconut ring.
Christian and I split a ridiculously large apple fritter that was ridiculously good.
Noontime, I spent an hour at a doctor's office while Christian and the kids checked out a local game store. Afterward, we went to the place we were staying the night, McMenamin's White Eagle Cafe and Rock 'n' Roll Hotel.
It's a great old place in Portland, just a mile north of the Rose Quarter, where we'd be seeing the Foo Fighters later that night.
The cool old building is famous for its tales of resident ghosts, Shanghai tunnels and a long history of live music since it opened in 1905.
The first floor of the building is a restaurant and pub. Upstairs are 11 small guestrooms (two of which we reserved on Monday), with a couple of communal bathrooms.
Like all McMenamins' places, there was unique artwork everywhere.
The rooms upstairs are named after tunes of the Holy Modal Rounders, the house band at White Eagle in years gone by. Our rooms were John the Revelator and Summer of '65.
I loved the custom tile in the shower ...
and the greenery clinging to the building was beautiful.
We also appreciated someone's towel-folding skills. Annabelle and I thought they looked like little penguins peeking out.
At about 6 p.m., we started our mile-long walk to the Rose Quarter.
Once there, it was fun to show the kids the outside of the old Memorial Coliseum, where Christian and I each saw many, many concerts in our youth. In addition to dozens of other acts, I told the kids I saw Queen and Van Halen there multiple times.
CJ happened to be wearing a Queen t-shirt last night. We kept walking and made our way over the Moda Center. We found a "Rip City" sign missing its second 'i". The kids were happy to literally fill in.
SHOWTIME: We made our way into the concert venue at about 7 p.m. We snagged a table on the third/top level concourse and watched some Monday Night Football while Gary Clark Jr., the opening act, played loudly. At about 8, we made our way into the bowl.
We were in the "cheap" seats - row J of the top level, in section 323. The photo above shows how far we were from the stage. The show started around 8:20, and it was basically melt-your-face-off rock-n-roll from first note to last. https://youtu.be/tVdlWx0WbVk
We were enjoying everything about it until about 9:30, when a 'gentleman' who had apparently enjoyed a little too much ended up projectile vomiting. Unfortunately, he was about two rows behind us, and there was no one in the seats behind Christian, CJ and Annabelle, and they were ground zero for the spew. Ugh. We hastily vacated the seats, running down to the concourse. I grabbed the first red-vested Moda Center attendant I found and told her my family had been puked on, they were in the bathroom cleaning up, and we needed somewhere else to watch the show from. She assured me she would help and sprang into action. Almost instantly, a supervisor showed up, told us he'd get new shirts for everyone and they'd find us seats. Our clean up efforts continued, which included me having to take Annabelle into the restroom and wash her hair in the sink. Shudder. It was nasty, seriously. Before long, the supervisor showed up with decade-old (but brand new) Portland Trailblazers t-shirts for everyone, and he introduced us to another worker, Jeff, who was in charge of escorting us to our new seats. Jeff instructed us to follow him and off we went. First, down a couple of flights of stairs and then to a door that was, uh oh, locked. So we went another way to a door that led us to the sidewalk outside the arena. I refused to go through that door, figuring we'd never get back in! We wound around some more and I muttered aloud that I felt like I was living the scene in Spinal Tap where the band is lost in the bowels of a concert venue and they can't find the stage. Eventually, Jeff led us to a door where a couple of people were exiting. That ended up being practically back stage. We got to stand there and check it out for a few minutes, before winding around some more. Jeff then took us to the floor of the venue, and let us hang out there and take a couple of photos for a couple of minutes.
It was cool to get to see Dave Grohl and his rock 'n' roll throne up close. (The throne necessary due to the fact that he horribly terribly fractured his leg falling off a stage a couple of months ago.)
Eventually Jeff had us on the go again, and had us walk all the way across the floor, out to the other side of the venue. We walked, and wound, walked and wound and eventually Jeff handed us off to another usher who showed us our new (and vastly improved!) seats, on the main level, just up off the floor, with fancy tables and everything. (In fact, in the arena photo I led with, you can see where we eventually 'landed' - the long, empty white rows of tables.)
Why we took the down, down, down, across and around, around, around route to them, I'll never know, but it could have been worse. We thoroughly enjoyed the remainder of the show, which included the Foo Fighters doing a number of Queen and Van Halen cover tunes, a bit ironic, since I was telling the kids just a couple of hours earlier about seeing Queen and Van Halen when I was their age.
There is more I could and should write, but we're all hosed after a wild Monday, and I'm calling it a night.
