Fair day

It was a great day to go to the Fair today and we were not alone thinking this. Hua Mei was excited for a few days about going. She loves the Fair. This would be Xia Mei’s first visit. The weather was tremendous. It was a clear day with temperatures in the 50s and 60s. We left for the Fair at about 9 am so it was still a bit cool. We wore long pants and brought along jackets. Definitely not a typical August Fair day. We did the Park and Ride at the U and arrived at the Fair around 10 am. It was already pretty crowded. We immediately took the kids to the Miracle of Birth animal barn. The kids got to see some cows, sheep and horses. Xia Xia was thrilled to see the animals.

It was already packed with people so we decided to head off and commence eating. First I got us a corn dog and Hua Mei requested some mini-donuts. We then went to the Dairy Building and I got us an apple and caramel malt. Karen wanted to go to the International Bazaar and we got tamales and samosas. Karen also got to taste a couple of cheese curds. Hua Mei wanted some meat so we went to get a smoked turkey leg, which she shared with the rest of us. Hua Mei chased that down with cotton candy. We appropriately ended this sordid gluttony with some bacon on a stick at the appropriately named Big Fat Bacon. It was great. Xia Mei did a little jig after tasting it.

In between the caloric intake, we also took the kids on rides. Karen took them down the Giant Slide which is de rigueur for any trip to the Fair.

I then took a ride with Hua Mei on a carousel.

We ended up near the sky ride so we hopped into a gondola to travel across and over the Fairgrounds to go to the kiddie rides. Xia Mei took a little nap so this gave Hua Mei an opportunity to do some rides. She had a great time.

Finally we wore Hua Mei out and it was time to leave. We had spent over six hours at the Fair.

It was a fun day. None of us were hungry for dinner but Hua Mei requested popcorn, of course. So, she helped Karen make the popcorn and we called it a quiet evening staying in at home.

Farewell to the Metrodome

My friend Dave has been part of a group that splits season tickets for the Twins over the past several years (maybe 12?). The seats are right behind home plate, about ten rows up. I’ve been lucky enough to catch a few games with him every season. Last night was Dave’s last game for the season. It will probably be the last game that I go to this season too. Next season the Twins move to their new outdoor stadium that is being built across town. So, it was my last baseball game in the Metrodome. The Metrodome is a terrible place to watch baseball. It really is a football stadium that tolerates baseball games to be played. The Vikings will continue to play their games there.

The Gophers played their last game in the Dome last season. This Fall they play their games at a new outdoor stadium built on the U campus.

It will be great to have outdoor baseball again. I can’t wait.

The World According to Twitter

About:

The Wit and Wisdom of the Twittersphere captured in a hilarious, and occasionally poignant, collection of handpicked tweets-the first-ever book created exclusively using content from Twitter.com! To demonstrate the real-time nature of Twitter during a recent lecture, New York Times “Circuits” columnist David Pogue turned from his PowerPoint presentation to his Twitter page and typed “I need a cure for hiccups….RIGHT NOW! Help?” In less than 15 seconds, feedback poured in: “Have someone slowly & softly count backwards from 10-1 in Russian for you. Works every time!” “Simple. Just hold your breath until Windows 7 is released.” So in addition to his daily posts about technology, Pogue began posing questions to his “followers” that ranged from the earnest (What’s your greatest regret?) to the curious (What’s the best bumper sticker you’ve seen lately?) to the creative (Make up an ancient Chinese proverb). The responses, edited by Pogue and gathered in this irresistible book, are clever and often laugh-out loud funny. The World According to Twitter is at once a marvelous book and a grand social networking experiment in which tens of thousands of voices have come together to produce a humorous, thought-provoking record of shared human experience.

I received my copy of the book on Monday. It was autographed by David Pogue. Check out p. 196. It’s a fun book (but I’m biased).

iPhone

Before our trip to the Dells, I got an iPhone. A neighbor recently got one and was raving about it. I was thinking that my Sprint contract was probably getting close to its end so I finally decided to check. Sure enough, the contract was fulfilled in May. I thought that it would be a good time to get the iPhone before we left on the trip. The GPS would come in really handy. One of my former students works at the Apple Store so I went in to see him to figure out which iPhone and contract would best suit my needs.

The iPhone was great on the trip. Around lunch time I looked for a Noodles and Company using Maps and found one conveniently located near the Interstate in Eau Claire. I had an Internet connection the entire trip although most of the time it was Edge and not G3.

Since I have an iPod Touch, I already had a number of apps for the iPhone. However, the GPS and G3 makes a huge difference. My favorite apps right now are:

Paris 3D
At Bat 2009
Navigon

I can’t believe I waited so long to get one.

Tornado

Yesterday afternoon there was a tornado warning for Minneapolis. At the office I learned through Twitter that a tornado had hit in south Minneapolis. On my way home, the road I normally took was blocked off due to fallen trees. When I finally reached home all was well. We got a lot of rain though so I hurried down to the basement to see if there might have been any water entry. It was dry. I’m glad we had the drain tile installed. I turned on the local news to see what had happened and there was a live report on the damage. There were only four blocks away! No one was seriously hurt but there was a lot of uprooted trees. Some houses had tree and wind damage. I contacted a friend of mine who lived on one of the blocks hit and he said that he and his family were fine and their house was undamaged. There was a lot to clean up in the yard though. As for us, we totally dodged the bullet. There was no sign that a tornado had passed near us. Unfortunately one neighbor a couple houses down had tree damage on their car.

A weekend in the Dells

It was a really fun weekend at Kalahari Resorts in the Dells, seeing all the girls and watching them interact. In one year they’ve grown so much. There were fourteen families in total. Only three families were not able to make it. Our group were the families that travelled to Wuhan plus two families from the Guangzhou group and one family that went to Nanchang. The water park was the perfect venue for the reunion. There was lots to do and plenty of time to visit with everyone. The water park was huge. The hotel had both an indoor park:

and an outdoor park:

On Friday, it took us about four hours to get there, including lunch. The girls quickly found their own means of transportation to the room once we registered at the hotel:

and then it was off to check the water park:

Our first meeting with all the families was for dinner at a Mexican restaurant in the Dells.

Hua Mei reconnected with a friend from her orphanage in Wu Xue City.

The next day we spent almost entirely in the waterpark.

In the evening we had a pizza dinner and then there was bowling at the Amusement Center which was also connected to the hotel.

On Sunday it was time to say, “Goodbye and see you next year.” We had to leave in the morning to get Hua Mei to a birthday party in the afternoon. It was a great weekend. We were all tired but happy from a fun time. It was a fun road trip too.

China Reunion

Back in 2005 when we received Hua Mei, our travel group was quite large, about two dozen families. About half the families went to Wuhan while the other half of the group went to Guangzhou. Prior to traveling to China we had a couple of get-togethers with many of the families. So, when we finally all travelled to China, it was more like joining up with friends. Since returning from China, our group has had a reunion every summer. Even though most of us live in the same region, we only see each other once a year at the reunion to catch up. This year will be our fourth reunion. The first year we met up in Duluth.

In 2007 we all met up at a family’s home in Hastings.

In 2008 our reunion was at a family’s home on Lake Minnetonka.

This weekend we travel to a water park in Wisconsin Dells for the reunion. During our first reunion a person remarked how it was like a family reunion only better because we got to choose our relatives. That struck a strong chord with all of us. It will be a good time to catch up with everyone and see how the girls interact. We’re really looking forward to getting together again.

Take me out to the ballgame

This afternoon we had an office outing to watch the Twins play the Kansas City Royals. Since there were extra tickets, I brought Hua Mei to the game with me. This would be the first baseball game that I would take her to. Last summer her babysitter took her to a game with another child she took care of and that child’s mom. It was a fun time and Hua Mei was a hit with my co-workers. I didn’t pay a whole lot of attention to the game but Hua Mei lasted through all nine innings, wasn’t very restless, and she said she had a good time. For me it was fun to share in the ritual of a ball game with her and ply her with treats. It started with popcorn:

and a hot dog:

and a soda to wash it down:

I shared some peanuts with her:

and taught her that it was okay to throw shells and popcorn on the ground:

She liked the crunching sound of the shells under her feet. Ah, the joy of it.

She shared her popcorn with the people around us and ate about 3/4 of the bag. After a little while she asked if she could have some cotton candy. Being the enabling dad as well as wanting her to partake in the entire experience, I of course obliged.

Finally it was my turn for a treat and I got a root beer float which Hua Mei did share a little with me.

It was a fun afternoon and we stayed for the whole game. The Twins lost 5-4 but it was a good game. The proudest moment for me was the seventh inning stretch. Hua Mei stood on her seat and sang along,

“… and let’s root, root, root for the CARDINALS, if they don’t win it’s a shame …”

I’m a very proud dad.

Paved paradise

Back in the mid 90s I took a trip with Karen to St Louis where we met up with my mom, dad and older sister. We were there to see some Cardinal games and so my parents could visit with old friends. One morning in the hotel, Karen noticed a photo of a house in the Metro section of the Post-Dispatch. In the caption it listed the address as 1420 Bobolink Place. She turned to us and asked, “Didn’t you used to live on Bobolink Place when you lived in St. Louis?” It was a photo of our old house. There was a story that the houses on the street were going to be torn down, to be replaced by a parking lot expansion for the adjacent shopping mall. So much for my childhood home. Here is what it looks like from Google Maps street view:

A couple of years ago my dad was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and so we sold the family house in Lakewood, NJ and moved him out to Minneapolis. My parents had built the house in the mid 60s and I remember the time they spent with the architect and builder during the design and construction process. It was a ranch style house with a contemporary design. When we put the house for sale, we had a couple of interested parties. Lakewood has a very large Hasidic Jewish population and a Yeshiva University. It is a very tight knit community and the value of the house was pretty much dictated to us. We sold the house to a Jewish family and we knew that the house would be torn down and replaced with a much larger one. My sister Emily took a trip with her family to the Jersey Shore this week and passed through Lakewood to see what has replaced our old house. Here’s what it looks like:

It’s true. You can’t go home again.

Time to kill in Buffalo

On Thursday we left the conference at noon to head home. We had a few hours to kill so we decided to take in a couple of sights in Buffalo. First stop was for lunch and that meant heading to the Anchor Bar, the home of the original Buffalo chicken wings.

Of course we had to get chicken wings.

They were much better than anything I’ve had before. Typical fare are dripping in Tabasco sauce and are usually overly vinegary. These actually had flavor besides just spice.

In addition we ordered roast beef on weck, another Buffalo tradition. It is a roast beef sandwich on a Kummelweck roll. The Kummelweck is basically a Kaiser roll with coarse salt and caraway seeds. It was served with a dill pickle spear and horseradish on the side. It was great.

After lunch we drove to nearby Delaware Avenue, also known as Millionaires’ Row. There are quite a few mansions remaining from the heyday of Buffalo when it was the home of the captains of industry in the U.S. The Erie Canal originated in Buffalo and so it connected the Great Lakes trade to New York City. In addition, the Falls provided plentiful and inexpensive hydroelectric power. We passed the Theodore Roosevelt Inaugural National Historic Site.

It is the house of Ansley Wilcox, a friend of Roosevelt. In 1901 when McKinley was assassinated at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, Roosevelt travelled to Buffalo and stayed at Wilcox’s house where he was sworn in. The museum had a really interesting tour and there were exhibits about the Exposition, Theodore Roosevelt, and his inauguration. I kind of felt like Sarah Vowell.

We’d killed a few hours in Buffalo and headed off to the airport to return home. Buffalo is also home to some Frank Lloyd Wright and Louis Sullivan buildings. I guess I’ll take those in when I pass through again.