Chicago!

No, I'm not referring to the musical, but the city! By the way, this is Mike using Melissa's Blogger log-in name. Here's the story. Last Saturday (May 31) Melissa flew back to Illinois from Idaho, and I drove up to Chicago to pick her up. Since her flight was scheduled to arrive at 2:00pm, we decided it would be fun to spend the afternoon and evening in Chicago, so we did.

The first thing we did was check out the Art Institute of Chicago ( http://www.artic.edu/aic/), something we've been talking about doing for a long time. Below are some of the major works of art we had the great privilege of seeing at the Art Institute. They are, from top to bottom, The Bedroom by Vincent Van Gogh, American Gothic by Grant Wood, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte - 1884 by Georges Seurat, Haystacks by Claude Monet, Nighthawks by Edward Hopper, and Sky Above Clouds IV by Georgia O'Keefe








After our visit to the Art Institute, we starting walking around downtown Chicago. It was the perfect day for a walk downtown. It was sunny, the sky was blue, and the temperature was around the mid-to-high 70s. We wandered around Millennium Park and found this really cool amphitheater where the Chicago Gospel Music Festival was happening.


Also in Millennium Park was this really cool bean-shaped sculpture. In the photo at the top of the post, you can see how the sculpture reflects the Chicago skyline.

On our way to Maggiano's Little Italy, where we ate dinner, we passed by lots of interesting buildings and monuments. The most intriguing was the WGN building, which had random pieces of brick and stone stuck in the brick of the building. Included with the random chunks of building material were inscriptions about where those bricks and stones were (supposedly) from. Melissa and I became pretty doubtful about the authenticity of origins of the bricks and stones when we saw a piece that was supposed to be from the LDS Temple in Salt Lake City and another from the Taj Mahal. There were also stones that were supposedly from the Great Wall of China and the old city hall of Aachen, Germany, among many, many others. We didn't have our camera with us that day, so we don't have any pictures of the odd building. We'll have to take some pictures the next time we're in Chicago.

After dinner, we walked down to Navy Pier to check it out. The view of the city skyline from the lake front was spectacular. We estimated that we walked about 3 miles in downtown Chicago that day, and we only saw a small fraction of the city. It's a good thing we plan to take a few more trips to the big city in the coming months. We'll keep you posted on what we see.

Cache Valley Visit

Mike and I traveled to Cache Valley for my brother Nick's graduation and for some fabulous family time. Mike was there from May 20-26 and I stayed until May 31. Here are some of the highlights.

We attended Preston High School graduation in the PHS gymnasium:


It was pretty hot and stuffy in the gym, but the ceremony was short and sweet. We loved being there, as you can tell from our grins.

We got to celebrate my birthday at home in Fairview with my family and grandparents (and Mom's Boston cream cake):
(Yes, there really are 26 candles on that cake. And I blew them all out in one breath. Whew!)

I finished up the last slice -- right off the platter. And it was delicious.
Cache Valley is one of the most beautiful places in the world -- but the moment captured above was a rare moment of sunshine. During the 10 days that I spent in Cache Valley, there were only two days that it didn't rain -- truly unusual for that climate, but a very welcome rain for the farmers there.

Despite the rain, after Mike went back to work in Champaign, Illinois, Mom and I spent three days camping in Maple Grove up the Oneida Narrows (north of Preston, Idaho).

We had a great time camping out with Mom's friends, Joyce and Jan. We also had visits at camp from my aunt Roxane and cousin Emily and Emily's two little boys, Kaden and Dalton. The boys (ages 2 and 4) had the BEST time throwing rocks into the lake and exploring the "happy houses" (camp trailers). Dad and Nick and Garth (Jan's husband) also joined us for dinner one night. It rained, the wind blew, and it was pretty cool while we were camping, but it was still a fantastic trip. We rode bikes, read, watched movies at night in Joyce's trailer, and talked and talked and talked around the fire.

It was hard for me to leave home to come back to Champaign-Urbana. Hopefully we can visit again soon. Thanks, family, for hosting us and being so kind!

Visit from the Terrys

We were lucky enough to spend four days with Garth, Sheri and Nick this past week. They flew down from Fairbanks, Alaska and stopped to visit us in Champaign before heading to Albuquerque for Bob Terry's graduation from University of New Mexico.

While the Terrys were here we got to do lots of fun things:

• Hiking in Allerton Park to see the Sun Singer (photos above)
  
• A tour of the University of Illinois campus, including the libraries (of course)
• Visits to the public libraries in town (Urbana Free and Champaign Public)
• A trip to Springfield to see the Abraham Lincoln Museum and Presidential Library and the State Capitol

We also spent lots of time eating and chatting and it was, all in all, a pretty successful family visit. Tuesday we leave for Cache Valley for more family time!

LOEX Conference

Librarianship is full of acronyms: OPAC, MARC, ALA, ACRL, and more. I just got back from the LOEX conference -- LOEX used to stand for Library Orientation Exchange. Now it's basically a conference for instruction librarians. I had a really great time at LOEX -- I went with four other people from University of Illinois. I met a lot of cool librarians and did a poster session:

My poster was about the online video tutorials that I've been working on: http://www.library.uiuc.edu/learn/ondemand/index.html.

Although the conference was fabulous, I was happy to get home yesterday. And I got some great news when I got home -- starting this summer semester, I'm a resident of Illinois for the purposes of tuition assessment. Yay!

The earth moved . . .

Yesterday morning at 4:36 we had a 5.2 earthquake in Illinois. I woke up to find the whole house shaking and was certain that a tornado was rocking the house. I peered through the blinds and saw that there was no wind and no greenish cast to the sky and was completely mystified. I shook Michael awake (he slept through the earthquake) and said, "Did you feel that?" Of course he didn't. He was asleep. I didn't realize that what happened was actually an earthquake until our alarm went off at 6:30 and the newscast mentioned the major quake that happened in southern Illinois. There was another quake (4.6) at 10:14. At that time, I was reading in the reference room on the 2nd floor of the library. The windows shook a bit and then I felt a slight tremor come up through the floor, and that was it.

Let me tell you what I was reading when the earth moved: Eclipse, the third book in the Twilight Series by Stephenie Meyer. I read all three books in the series this week and, unfortunately, neglected everything else going on in my life for several days. These young adult novels are completely captivating -- the fourth and final book will be released August 2nd and I can hardly wait. So, the books are about vampires, werewolves, and high-school romance. Yep, that's the recipe for addiction.

New Orleans

I spent the past week in New Orleans at the Conference on College Composition and Communication. Wendy and Erin (two librarians from Utah State University) and I did a panel presentation on information literacy instruction in the composition/writing classroom. The presentation went really well, but that wasn't the best part of the trip. My favorite part of New Orleans is the food.

I ate beignets at Cafe du Monde, fried catfish at a little diner, and had two outstanding and enormous dinners: one at Nola (one of Emeril's restaurants) and one at August (contemporary French). Nola and August are the two fanciest restaurants in which this small-town Idaho girl has ever eaten. At Nola we had an amazing four-course meal: an unreal cheese plate, rare tuna, steak, asparagus, (and more) with a banana pudding layer cake for dessert. I could barely walk back to the hotel. The cheese plate was, perhaps, the best part: french bread, goat cheese, apple slices, honey, grapes, and walnuts. Simple ingredients, but when put all together I had a moment like the one on Ratatouille where Remy (the rat) tastes different foods together, the background fades out, and swirls of color circle around his head. The combination of tastes was almost overwhelming. August was equally amazing, but I couldn't handle four whole courses two nights in a row. The highlight of the dining experience at August was an appetizer of gnocchi with blue crab and truffles. It was delicious.

Here are a few of the sights in warm and tropical New Orleans:


They have lilacs in New Orleans in the first week of April! It's a beautiful and exciting city. Things are still being rebuilt -- Erin and I walked all over the French Quarter and saw construction and repairs happening everywhere we looked. I'd love to go there again -- and this time I'd take Michael with me. :)

The Producers

For those of you who don't know me well, let me explain: I love musicals. I grew up watching The Sound of Music, Camelot, Fiddler on the Roof, and Cinderella (the Rodgers and Hammerstein version, not Disney). Some of my best childhood memories are times that I went to high school musicals at PHS with my mom. As a preteen and a teenager I lived to be on-stage and I was in The Sound of Music, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Annie, The Music Man, and The King and I (among others) in community and high school theatre productions. Mike is learning to appreciate the wide variety of show tunes that I sing to him in the shower, in the car, and in the kitchen. We've seen quite a few musicals together, both live and on film, and he's really coming around. Last night, however, his budding enthusiasm for the genre may have been dampered as we saw a so-so touring production of a not-very-interesting musical, The Producers. (See here for a plot synopsis.) Wikipedia explains the popularity of the musical (of which there are two film versions) like this: "The humor of the show is accessible to a wide range of audiences, and draws on ridiculous accents, caricatures of homosexuals and Nazis, and many show business in-jokes." That pretty much says it all. Basically, this musical appeals to the lowest-common-denominator humor-wise and made both Michael and me roll our eyes repeatedly. I'll avoid total snobbery and admit that we both laughed several times, as well, so the show was not a total bust.

We saw the show at the Assembly Hall on campus, where the Fighting Illini play basketball. They do a lot of shows (both concerts and plays) there as well, but it's not a totally successful musical venue. Basketball court acoustics are not so good. The Assembly Hall is a pretty cool building, though. I always think it looks like a giant UFO.