Visit from the Bowles parents

Mom and Dad visited October 17th-22nd and we had such a fabulous time! We're so glad that they took the time to come and visit us in central Illinois.

We showed Mom and Dad around campus, including (of course) several libraries. Dad is one of the most curious people I know and he had loads of questions that I couldn't always answer (though I nearly always make an attempt to B.S. some kind of response). It made me think -- maybe this is why librarianship is so right for me.

We went to an Illini football game and they beat Indiana 55-13.
The game was a lot of fun and Memorial Stadium is truly impressive.
At church on Sunday, the children in our congregation presented a special program. I direct the kids' singing (I'm the Primary music leader) and so my parents got to see all the kids that I teach each Sunday. They all did a wonderful job singing and saying their spoken parts.

Last Monday we went to Springfield, IL together to the Abraham Lincoln Museum and Presidential Library and to the Lincoln House (pictured below). This is the home where Abraham and Mary Lincoln lived from 1844-1861 (when they moved to Washington, D.C.).
We spent two days in Chicago together and we got to see Wicked, go on a Chicago Architecture Foundation walking tour, and go to the LDS temple in Chicago. It was an action-packed visit and we all nearly walked our feet off, but it was a fabulous time!

M&M in front of the Chicago Temple
Tiffany glass in the dome of the Chicago Cultural Center -- absolutely stunning!

St. Louis again

Last Saturday we went to St. Louis with our friends Heather and Devin. We went to the temple and then we went to the arch and to the Museum of Westward Expansion. The museum has a really interesting layout -- it's designed in concentric circles, beginning in the center with a statue of Thomas Jefferson and the year 1800 and then it moves out decade by decade. Wayfinding was a bit confusing at first and I felt that I was always going "backwards" since we started at the outside edges and moved towards the center. I didn't fully understand the layout until I got to the middle of the museum and saw the concentric circles unfolding around me. Then there was an "ah-hah!" moment when I saw what was going on.

By the way, I took the above picture and I call it "Arch in Autumn." When Devin saw me taking the photo he said, "You're getting the leaves in the photo!" And I told him that I wanted the leaves so that the season would be represented. But he's an engineer -- one can't really expect him to understand art. :)

Last week there was an article in the New Yorker about libraries. It starts with an anecdote about the New York Public Library, then discusses the Google Book Search project, which the University of Illinois is participating in. Google is scanning and digitizing millions of books from some of the most important libraries in the U.S. to create a digital library, accessible anywhere. Microsoft and Amazon are competing with their own projects, and there is also an Open Content Alliance that is working on a similar project, but it is a non-profit.

The article gives a brief but fascinating history of libraries, starting with the Alexandria library of Egypt and analyzes the possibility of a "universal library" -- but concludes that we will always need physical libraries, even if they turn out to be museum-like archives of very old books. See what you think -- read the article (it's short). and post any comments that you have here.

Meet Me In St. Louis

We had a great day in St. Louis yesterday; we went to the temple for a session and then went to Forest Park and to the St. Louis zoo.


There were not many people at the temple at all. We couldn't even find anyone to take our photo!

Forest Park is a huge, lovely place with all kinds of (free) attractions. This is the Jewel Box, a giant greenhouse that was built in the 1930s:

The St. Louis Zoo is touted as America's #1 zoo. I don't know how they gathered their data, but I would rate the zoo pretty highly. We had a great time riding the train, seeing Big Cat Country, and just wandering around to see the different animals.

The ostriches

The tiger

On an entirely different topic, our old dryer gave up the ghost (it emitted sparks and a burning smell when operating for the last time) and we have a new dryer. Here's the old appliance, sitting out in our front yard in classic "white trash" fashion (it's been there for a whole week now):
And here's the new dryer:
And some sad news: Dobler has been missing since Tuesday morning. We've canvassed the neighborhood with his photo plus our phone number, but it seems that no one has seen him. We're sincerely hoping that he's just on a little kitty vacation and will be back soon. So if you're the praying type, please think of Dobler.

Mike took this picture of us last Sunday.

Trip to Nauvoo

Michael and the sunstone

On Saturday Michael and I went to Nauvoo for the day. We left our house a bit before 7:00 a.m. and got home around midnight -- it was a very full day! Nauvoo is about a three and a half hour drive from Chambana, so it's just about right for a day trip. (As a side note -- we stopped at a gas station on the way there to use the restrooms. Michael was waiting for the men's room and a friendly guy started a conversation with him. "You guys on a road trip?" "Yeah, we are." "You're pretty dressed up for a road trip." "Well . . . I guess you could say it's a religious pilgrimage." Can you imagine what Mr. Friendly must have thought? Two perfectly normal-looking kids on a Saturday morning -- and they're zealots!)

We went to the beautiful Nauvoo temple for an endowment session. It's such a remarkable building. The missionaries in our branch have both served in Nauvoo and they told us that if we asked some of the temple workers to show us, we could see some ceremonial temple clothing from the 1840s. A temple worker showed us those cases plus the baptistry in the basement of the temple and the spiral staircase that goes up six floors to the tower. It was beautiful.

We saw a lot of the historic sites in Old Nauvoo:

The Wilford Woodruff home, where all eight rooms have fireplaces!

The Scovil bakery, where we got to try some fresh gingerbread cookies,

The Brigham Young home (which is much smaller than his summer home in St. George, which we visited just a couple of months ago),

The printing office, where we saw archival copies of newspapers, The Times and Seasons and The Nauvoo Neighbor, and how they were printed in the 1840s,

The brickyard, where workers would produce four million bricks in a season -- between March and October (and we got our own little Nauvoo brick),

The Lucy Mack Smith home, where Joseph Smith's mother lived for a short time after the other Mormons left Nauvoo. Her arthritis was too bad to go in a wagon to the Salt Lake Valley.

The Sarah Melissa Granger Kimball home. Sarah Melissa Granger was an intelligent and wealthy woman who started inviting other women in Nauvoo to come to her home to sew shirts for the men who were working on the temple. She started a Ladies' Society that later became the Relief Society. Later, in Salt Lake City, Sarah was the first president of the Utah Suffrage Association and was instrumental in gaining women the right to vote. This was probably my favorite site that we visited. :) I'm looking for a good biography of Sarah Granger Kimball. Does anyone know of one?

We walked down Parley Street towards the Mississippi River, the same path that the Mormons took when they were leaving their beautiful city of Nauvoo. If they looked back, they would have seen their temple on the hill.

We felt very comfortable and at home in Nauvoo -- it felt sort of like Utah-minor with all of the missionaries and Mormon tourists. It was nice. We're visiting Utah-major this coming weekend for Robert and Sarah's wedding and we can hardly wait.