Party's over...

Well, the holidays are coming to an end. The girls (and Al) head back to their homes away from our home. Here Anne, Alana and Erin make a toast to a fun week. The good news is, the antlers go back in storage soon...

Movies & Games

When our family gathers with lots of free time, two favorite things to do are 1) watching and then discussing movies and 2) playing lots of games.  This time, the movies included the requisite masterpiece "Lord of the Rings" (all six DVDs of the extended version - some viewed more than once), requisite seasonal gems "It's a Wonderful Life," "Elf," and "A Christmas Story," and some new releases: "Avatar" (a blue version of "Ferngully") and "Sherlock Holmes" (a high action reworking of the great detective). 

Here are E & A in the 3D glasses they brought home from "Avatar."  LaLa is starting to play with my and Ack's old SLR 35mm cameras.  These photos were taken with the Pentax, my first major camera.

As for games, we started the week off with a game we've had for decades, The Beaver Game. It's a political indoctrination against the Army Corps of Engineers in the guise of a board game (I purchased it for us back in my most political days).  It's actually an amazing game where you take on the challenges of life as a beaver.  It's tough - all five of us died way before our time!  The other bright spot of a game is one that Erin and Al gave me as a gift for Christmas, The Settlers of Catan.  Fun, but frustrating when you're not doing well.

Merry Christmas!!

Merry Christmas.  Erin and Alana are home, and Al visited for a day or two (weather kept him an extra day).  It was a fun and relaxing day. Turkey, potatoes, brussel sprouts and trifle for dinner.

Shopping...

We did some shopping today in San Fran -

San Fran

Ack and Anne are in San Francisco. Ack has a conference (16,000 participants) and Anne arrived on Wed to tour a bit with Ack. So far tours include seeing "Wicked", getting great coffee at the Blue Bottle Coffee Company, a wonderful champagne night, a bit of Christmas shopping for the girls and hanging at the Ferry Market. We are soon to go fly a kite.  This tree is in a square that we came across while walking one night. It is about 30 feet tall, and all red and orange lights.

Sunny Sunday

Ack took this photo of me on Sunday before he left for San Francisco. It was a great day for sitting in the sun. Just before sunset, I went skiing over in Cherokee Marsh. The snow was a little heavy but it was a fun ride.

Lookin' Back

Ack's been feeling abandoned in the blog so here's a post I could have done from a few weeks ago -- Michael and Evelyn visiting the weekend before Thanksgiving. 

Winter is here...

The winter solstice is the day of the year with the fewest hours of daylight. In 2009, this occurs for the Northern Hemisphere on December 21. The winter solstice is often referred to as the first day of winter. But there are other definitions of winter. For example, the beginning of winter might be defined on the calendar day, on average, when precipitation has an equal chance of falling as rain or snow. For Madison, that calendar day is November 15. Meteorologists often define the three months of winter as December, January and February – the coldest of the year.

Of course another way to define winter is when you get a lot of snow. Which we have - over a foot!

Happy Thanksgiving!

Happy Thanksgiving! Game playing after the dinner.

Visitors!

Evelyn and Michael are visiting us for a few days. Ellen and Carrie stopped in for a Sunday brunch.

Packers 17 - Cowboys7

Anne & Ack were at the Packers vs. Cowboys football game in Green Bay. Packers won in an exciting 2nd half, which is about to begin in the photo. Ack was also happy because he got enough points to win his Fantasy Football game.

In DC...

Ack is in DC doing a workshop on climate change for non-science K-12 teachers, along with Margaret Mooney. It is funded by NSF and supported by NOAA. We had a chance to dine with Alana, and discuss Fantasy Football. Notice the new bike helmut!

Happy Halloween

Happy Halloween! Ack and Anne went trick-or-treating with Bob, Christy and 1-year old Katrina in their Tenny Park neighborhood. It was a very neighborly activity - there were lots of families with kids walking their neighbor and lots of folks knew each other. And households get into the holloween spirit - lots of decorated pumpkins and ghosts in windows. One house even ran a little skit on their porch; trick-or-treaters needed to participate in the skit in some small way to recieve their treat (which was chocolate). We live in a friendly neighborhood, but very few kids (maybe 1) which makes it have a different feel than Bob and Christy's neighborhood. Here, dogs take on the role of neighborhood children. To keep up with what is going on, it helps to have a dog to walk in the morning so you can meet folks and chat.

October Gardening...

Anne and Ack worked on Anne's community garden at Troy. We thought Alana might enjoy this picture of a well tilled field.

New Game

We spent this cold, first snow of the season cleaning the garage (mostly). We also have discovered Banana Scrabble. The evening we will visit Cindy and see how her house painting came out.

Sailing the Chesapeake

After getting back from England, Ack and Anne went sailing on the Chesapeake with some of her folklorist friends: Amy, Guha and Lisa. This photo is Anne sailing wing-on-wing. We sailed the upper Chesapeake for 2 1/2 days in a 33 foot sail boat. We experienced strong winds, calm winds and a bit of rain at night. More photos are at:
http://picasaweb.google.com/pryor.anne/OnTheUpperChesapeake?feat=content_notification#

Bath at Night

Here is the Roman Bath at night. It is usually closed at night, but we had a reception there. The buildings in Bath are of course old, but they are also very similar in color to the brick of the 'cream city'.

Bath

An afternoon trip to Stonghenge with Tom and Betty. It is amazing what people have been able to construct. The evening was a reception at the Bath Museum of Fashion. Interesting fashions, it is easy to tell the decade for which the "Dress of the Year" was crowned. To me, the best fashion is Anne in worn out blue jeans and a red sweat shirt.

Bath

Ack is in Bath England. Here's a photo of the Roman Baths, with the Bath Abbey in the background.

178000

Our van hit 178000 miles! Every 1000 miles we try to write down what we all are doing. Anne is getting ready to go to China to give a talk. Alana is going with her. Ack and Anne head to Chicago for Tom and Sue's wedding. Ack is also ordering pods to move his Dad from Shelter Island to North Carolina to live with Louise. Erin and Al are still in Indiana learning how to do fantasy football.

Folk lore

Anne and Ack are in Green Lake at an Elderhostel. Anne is giving 4 presentations on life in Wisconsin. Tomorrow we leave for NY.

We will be moving this blog site to another - so stay tuned...

Happy Anniversary!

Anne and Ack celebrate their 29th wedding anniversary today. As Anne says: "It seems longer than that...."

We spent it touring the central northern regions of WI. Anne had to visit some Native American artists, give a talk at Dillian and we ended up at Green Lake. It'll be a 5 day tour which included activities like visiting Fred Smith's Concrete Park.

Coffee and Horses

Anne and Ack were to go horseback riding today, but the person who was going to give us the lesson forgot. So instead, we ended up at the town of Stoughton's Coffee Break Festival. They claim that the 'coffee break' originated in Stoughton, Wisconsin. Meanwhile Alana is stuck in an airport trying to get to New Orleans while Erin and Al are cleaning house in preparation for going to Maine.

Art and Dancing

Anne and Ack went to a fantastic sculpture garden, run by a visionary artist, Tom Every, also known as Dr. Evermore. He uses scrap materials to build huge and small sculptures. His most famous and largest piece is the Forevertron, a fantastical type of space ship. The creation shown here is of a giant insect; the eyes are made of geolocation markers and the body is part of the lunar module. Not sure why NASA ever got rid of that, but it is here for all to see.

After visiting Dr. Evermore, we went dancing at the Chateau in beautiful Devil's Lake State Park. The Hal Edwards Orchestra was playing some great big band numbers but the pace was too slow too often. The night was hot so Anne went swimming in the lake after the dance.

Santa Fe

Ack is in Santa Fe at a NASA planning meeting about a future satellite mission. I took a longer lunch and visited the New Mexico Museum of Art. One art work I found very interesting was The Springtime Rainbow by Jozef G. Bakos. It captures the regional weather accurately and pictorially. Yesterday, late afternoon, several of us stood outside the meeting room drinking coffee under the sun. The conversation was interpreted by the roar of thunder and to our left was a dark sky and bolts of lightning. This is seen the painting. To the upper left is a storm cloud, but part of the landscape is illuminated by the sun. Rays of sunlight slash trough the canvas like the scattered showers of this region. While we didn’t see a rainbow this day, I suspect rainbows are common in this area as the sky is big and showers scattered providing opportune conditions to view a rainbow. I actually saw a full sky rainbow after a short shower during dinner.

Having left the museum I entered the city Plaza and window-shopped. This is a tourist trap: many stores and many tourists and much fake Native American art. Fake pottery, fake carvings, fake spices, fake jewelry, fake everything. I suspect there were some quality stores but I got a bit depressed and decided to head back to the hotel, reflecting on the price of our newly painted ceiling. I passed through a public park and suddenly became aware of lots of public art – real art, real sculptures. Our hotel in infused with sculptures in the gardens and pathways. They were visually appealing and mentally relaxing. It was nice to have this feeling given the recent painting of our house. Real painting. Expensive, yes – perhaps too much, but should we not surround ourselves with artwork and color, and the positive visual stimulation that it has?

Happy Birthday Anne!

Anne left the pool of 54ers yesterday July 31. So, we need to come up with a new blog theme. Send us your ideas. Meanwhile, we'll stay here for a while. Ack finished up hosting a NASA meeting of 125 folks - including a party at the house. Anne (with Ack tagging along) is working at the Midwest folklife festival.
Steve

Madikwe Game Reserve

Madikwe Game Reserve

At the Backsberg winery on Sunday, the day that we left Africa, we sat in the shade of an oak tree, eating spit-roasted lamb and sweet glazed pumpkin, sipping their Sauvignon Blanc. A mimic musician sang songs from around the English-speaking world: covers of James Taylor, Dire Straits, Beatles, The Proclaimers, sounding like each one in turn. In the distance, the sun shone on the cradling Simonsberg mountains. At our feet, the black cat with livid green eyes patiently let the crawling baby delightedly touch its nose and back. Cigarette smoke wafted over from the next table, reminding us of one of the true pleasures of Madison: smoke-free public spaces.

“I touched the rains down in Africa,” sang the one-man band. The lyric sent my mind searching over the past two weeks of our trip. Had the rains of Africa touched me? Had I touched them?

For our entire week in Madikwe, the bush was dry. The most moisture we saw was on the coldest mornings when, in breaking light, trying to stay warm in the open Land Cruiser, we passed areas of frost on the ground and grasses. Our ranger, Gareth, pointed them out as rare sightings. As I pulled the wool blanket higher over my chest and gratefully cradled the hot water bottle in my lap, I thought I should be able to see my breath. But the arid air kept that as only a memory of moist Wisconsin.

The not-thick-enough tires of the Land Cruiser sent dry red dust flying in our wake as we drove with Gareth off-road in search of Christy’s giraffe, elusive wild dogs, or absent hippos. The loose soil was thick enough to provide plenty of tracks for our Ranger to follow; from the moving Cruiser, Gareth could follow the paths of lion or elephant, or even spy the marks of a porcupine’s long dragging quills. His own tracks would mix with those of the four-leggeds when he left the vehicle for closer inspection, sometimes drawing a circle with his finger around an especially interesting track for our novice benefit.

We saw some evidence of past rains on our game drives – large empty depressions in the red or brown clay earth that had once been watering holes. Gareth explained that in the rainy season, a small depression might catch some water. Then an animal will drink or wallow, expanding the size. More rain would catch, more animals would use it, and there you had the birth of a water hole. We drove around many dry ones; only the largest still had water in them and that’s where we sighted groups of white rhinos: young males, a mother and infant. The first baby rhino we saw was impatient, eager to get going; the second was playful, mixing it up with the young adult males.

The dry rural air gave us glorious night skies. Every night we saw the Milky Way to an expanse that astounded and inspired. Even the large waning moon that tracked our nights couldn’t diminish the number of stars we saw. The constellation I was most eager to see was the Southern Cross and it never disappointed. Ack’s computer constellation program helped us to identify it but not much else. And Gareth, so knowledgeable about all things land and water based, was woefully unknowledgeable about the sky. To appease us after an evening game drive with very few sightings, we sat on the lip of the reservoir and Gareth pointed out Orion – upside down to us Northerners– and told us an invented story about an ostrich constellation.

Madikwe was glorious and moving onto Cape Town felt like a loss – of a land whose beauty we recognized only gradually, of the lifeways that Gareth was teaching us to see, of the night sky that reflected the vast depth of the universe. Transitioning to the grandiose Cullinan, we mourned leaving the earthy design of the &Beyond lodges with its delicious plentiful food, creative competent service, and safe pampered environment.

Jet Lag Blues

I've been waking up at 2 am with chills and diarrhea for the past two mornings and then falling asleep at odd times during the day, like at work or a restaurant, or worse, while driving. I think I'm getting over it though - slept all the way until 4 this morning with no problems down below when I woke.

So what do I do while I suffer through my jet lag? Write. I wanted to reflect on South Africa before the glow and wonder of it wore off from contact with everyday life at home. So I will post a series of reflections I wrote during my early morning insomnia sessions. The first - Madikwe Game Reserve.

Home, Sweet Madison

We're home, happily. Great trip but great to get back too.

We walked into the newly painted house with very different reactions. Ack really likes it and Anne really hates it. Lots of conversations coming up!

Cape of Good Hope

We got to the Cape of Good Hope where we hiked and Anne flew her kite. The second picture is one Andy will understand (it is also the view out our guest house room in Hout Bay).

Cape of Good Hope

Ack and Anne are heading to the Cape of Good Hope for the weekend. Photos to come....

Madiba's 91st Birthday

Today, we had the amazing experience of receiving a private tour of Robben Island. Robben Island is where Nelson Mandella (also lovingly known as Madiba) spent 18 years as a political prisoner in the 1970s-80s. Vanessa Mitchell, Director of Adult Education for the Robben Island museum, met us at the ferry and toured us around for our 2.5 hours at the former prison, thanks to a connection made through Anne's folklore colleagues in Michigan. It's a physically beautiful site, despite its terrible history. We saw lots of African penguins while there as well as the prson buildings, a few shipwrecks on the shore, and the limestone quarry where the most feared prisoners, like Mandella, did hard labor. This is the quarry (background) with a pile of stones in the foreground. During a reunion there of political prisoners in 1997, after it had closed as a prison, Mandella took a stone and laid it at the entry to the quarry. All the others did too. The pile is a symbol of "never again." Tomorrow, 18/7/09, is Mandella's 91st birthday. There are a lot of celebrations planned, including a call by Madiba for each person to do 67 minutes of community service (he has been fighting for freedom for 67 years).

Happy Birthday

Anne says Ack can't be on the 54 blog anymore, as we sit in Capetown celebrating his 55th with a Castle beer (along with Christy).

OK - based on Erin's comment, here is a birthday photo of Ack, celebrating with fellow Badgers late at night in the lounge of our hotel. We were playing a fun fortune telling game we made up based on those wacky capsule sponges that open in warm water.

Africa

We made it to Safari. Had a great time! Wonderful place! Here is one of the photos we took of a large giraffe; and a lion walking towards us he just finished eating. More later.

A Weekend in Madison

This photo essay of the wonders of Madison was posted in the NY Times. Too bad they left out life on the river.
www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2009/07/05/travel/20090705-madison-slide-show_index.html

Red Carpet

A large part of the movie "Public Enemies" was filmed in Wisconsin. So, Ack and Anne went to a special preview as a fundraiser for Film Wisconsin. It was a good movie - after all it was "Made in WI"! Yes, we did get to walk on 'a red carpet'.

Fire Works

Ack and Anne biked down to Warner Park to see Rhythm and Booms, the biggest fireworks display of the Midwest, the weekend before the real celebration.

Shuffle Board!

Painting a shuffle board court on the driveway in strong wind (peaking to 35 mph) was not a lot of fun - but it was done! After all that work by Ack, here's Anne not beating him in a game. A note to Alana - we even have it in the correct size!

Happy Father

Here's happy champagne-drinking Ack, enjoying a toast from his beautiful daughters' Father's Day gift.

Paddling Heaven

Anne spent the weekend paddling on the big one - Lake Superior, one of the most beautiful places on earth. Excellent weather, terrific company, great camping, and lots of fun on and off the water. I can't wait to get back there for more.

The photos show a beaming Nikki Mandell, my travel

buddy for the weekend, emerging from an arch on the northeast shore of Stockton Island, and a joyous Mike Nolte, an artist friend from Milwaukee who, along with wife Shelia, was also there paddling.

Cool links related to the weekend - Inland Sea Symposium and Ashland Daily Press article "Kayakers Make Global Warming Statement."