An action-packed 4th

Mike and I decided to go all-out this Independence Day to celebrate the 4th of July. We started our day with a 5K race -- in the pictures above you can see us at the Assembly Hall at the beginning of the race. We walked the course in 42 minutes.

We felt pretty festive for the 4th of July, but not compared to the patriotic decorators of this lawn:
There's a bear in red, white, and blue and a Statue of Liberty, and a ton of red/white/blue bunting all crowded in to one little front yard. Nation -- we need more of this brand of patriotism.

After the race, we watched the big Champaign County parade.

There were three or four high school marching bands

Lots of floats (this one is for Urbana's 175th birthday)

A bunch of old guys in funny hats driving antique tractors

And more!

In the afternoon, we made some apple pie and vanilla ice cream to share with our friends, the Whipples, then we went with the Whipples to the big fireworks show in town. It was a really fun holiday!

Kailey Whipple, Melissa & Michael

P.S. As we were riding our bikes to the festivities on Friday morning we saw this yard ornamentation. There are birdhouses for Dick Butkus and Jim Grabowski and a gravestone that says: "Yo Chief Illiniwek 1926-2007." Chief Illiniwek was the long-time mascot of the University of Illinois. He was retired in 2007 at the request (demand?) of the NCAA.


You can read more about Chief Illiniwek and/or watch his last dance:

Taste of CU, summer school, and bangs

Many of you know that food is a major source of entertainment for Mike and me. Luckily for us, the Champaign City Park district sponsors a yearly festival that fits our main interest. We attended Taste of CU last night, and for twenty bucks we tried some of the best food Chambana has to offer and rode our bikes home with very full stomachs. We had:

• pad thai and basil chicken,
• a reuben sandwich,
• humus,
• baklava,
• pizza,
• a meatball sandwich,
• kettle corn,
• peach pie,
• and ice cream!

(Don't worry -- these were mostly just "tastes" and not full servings. But still . . . we ate a lot.) Everything we tried was very delicious and it was in a really fun atmosphere -- a downtown park with two music tents and lots of art booths. We had beautiful weather -- as I mentioned, we were able to ride our bikes to and from the festival.

We've been riding our bikes to and from school/work most days for the past two weeks. $4 gas is a big motivator! I'm taking two classes this summer, and they're very fast paced, but going well.

• Web design and construction for organizations: I'm already learning a lot in this class. Our major project for the summer is to redesign a university website -- bring it up to date, make it accessible, usable, and easy to maintain. My group has taken on Student Legal Services and we're hoping to bring the site into the 21st century. (It currently resides in 1999.) I'll post the redesign here when we're done.
  
• Administration and management: I want to recommend one of the books I read for this class, Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely. Blurb about the book: "When we make decisions we think we're in control, making rational choices. But are we? Entertaining and surprising, Ariely unmasks the subtle but powerful tricks that our minds play on us." This class is focusing on understanding human behavior (particularly our own behavior) and learning to manage ourselves. Good stuff.

And the last bit of news is that I have a slightly altered hairstyle. I got a haircut last week after soliciting salon recommendations from friends on Facebook. I wanted it to look like Reese Witherspoon's hair and unfortunately I still don't look just like her, but I am pleased with the results.





















I went in to Michael's place of work right after the haircut and he said, "Wow. Your hair was really . . . big . . . before." He's right. It was.

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.