ugh ugh ugh

Bad night at work. Someone got all upset at something the supervisor is doing and walked out, leaving us very short handed for the night. And it was very busy on top of that. The person says that she will not return this week; I hope that when she gets home she might calm down and change her mind. Otherwise this will be the week from hell...

We continue to work on our vacation plans. We now have reservations for the first Chicago leg (including White Sox tickets and tickets to the King Tut exhibit & for the hotel). Tonight I added the hotel reservation for the night in Madison, and we will not need a reservation for the particular tour we will be taking at the Frank Lloyd Wright estate. So just the Wisconsin Dells (hotel) and the second Chicago (hotel and Cubbies tickets) leg to go, and we will be all set.

I should be paying the bills right now, but felt like working on the trip instead. Though I will begin sorting and paying the bills in a few minutes.

We've been having wild weather. The ground is saturated with water from all of the heavy rain and some of the area farm fields are underwater. We had more thunderstorms last night and this morning, and we've been having a pretty bad wind storm since this afternoon.

Only two more nights to go, then Bill and I will be heading down to Muncie to visit Ball State again...I can do this. I can do this even if my coworker really doesn't come in....

sick again

Well, last night at work stank. It was fairly quiet at the beginning of the night, and I even managed to get some of my required continuing education done. But everything sort of fell apart at the end of the night, when one of the narcotic dispensing machines broke down. And then I got nearly uncontrollable diarrhea. I was crying while I was driving home from the pain from the cramps. When I got home I found out that Steven had it in the middle of last week, so we're passing around germs again.

We've pretty much made up our minds about the vacation, though we still have to make some of the reservations.

Saturday: drive to Chicago

Sunday: White Sox game

Monday: King Tut exhibit at the Field Museum, then drive to Madison, Wisconsin

Tuesday: visit the Frank Lloyd Wright estate in Spring Green, Wisconsin, then drive to Wisconsin Dells

Wednesday & Thursday: Wisconsin Dells and water parks

Friday: return to Chicago

Saturday: Cubs game

Sunday: drive home

I am still sick today, but less frequently, so will be trying to go into work.

trip planning; wrestling tournament

I still have that lingering headache. Steven also has it. Dan has it ,too. It has to be either a shared cold, allergies, or perhaps the fact that another storm system is coming in tomorrow, with thunderstorms.

Steven and Dan went down to Ohio today and Steven wrestled in a big tournament down near Toledo. He came in third - and the two kids who finished in front of him are also (like him) kids who have placed in national championships. A fourth kid, whom Steven pinned, is a medalist in the Ohio state middle school championships. So this was a tournament with superb athletes, and he did very well to place.

Dan and I have spent the last five or so hours trying to do some trip planning on the Internet. So many things we had wanted to do on this trip are just not looking possible. We had wanted to go to a play at the American Players Theater in Wisconsin, but their season will not really be going yet (they will only be having one performance, and that is a preview, and it is not Shakespeare). We might still head to Spring Green to see the Frank Lloyd Wright estate. Some of the tours made us gasp at the cost, but there is one of a school building he designed that is more affordable, at only $16/person. We are still looking for a hotel with a good water park in the Wisconsin Dells to make reservations for the Wisconsin leg of the trip.

For the Chicago portion of the trip, we found a Best Western by Grant Park that had a vacancy, and while expensive, wasn't too bad in comparison to some of the other hotels in the downtown area. We got tickets to a White Sox game and to the King Tut exhibit at the Field Museum. But the kids wanted to see the Cubbies, not the Sox, and those games were all sold out. We checked some scalper sites, and the mark up was beyond greedy and into the ridiculous. We checked out the offerings at the Chicago Shakespeare Theater, and one play being performed that month will be a Greek tragedy that I'm not very interested in, and the Shakespeare was an offering of two of the history plays offered back to back, which lasts over 5.5 hours, which would be a long long time for out butts to be in a seat. And they were charging an arm and leg for that, too. They were charging nearly $100/ticket, and that's an awful lot for four people! And there is no way I would leave my kids by themselves for that long in a big city! (Well, I would not leave them alone at all, but you get the idea).

So while I am happy to see the Sox and King Tut, I am also a bit frustrated. Neither of the theaters which offer Shakespeare is offering anything that we could both (either?) attend or afford. And how Wrigley Field is sold out for every game, but hundreds of tickets being available through scalpers for every game is beyond frustrating.

Maybe if we find a bit of time I can finally get to the Art Institute of Chicago this trip. I noticed on their web site that they will be offering a special exhibit of pueblo pottery from the Southwest in June. I would be extremely interested in seeing that...

Vienna Philharmonic; head ache

Busy couple of days, compounded by a nagging headache, which I think is due to the poor weather we have been having the past few days.

Let's see...Thursday night Dan and I went into Ann Arbor for dinner and the Vienna Philharmonic concert at Hill. We parked  at a bank where he does a lot of work (so they give him parking rights) downtown. We walked in the rain about a block to an Indian restaurant. Now, a lot of the Indian restaurants in Ann Arbor (or at least most of the ones we have previously eaten in) are Hindu. This one was Muslim, so we got some treats we have not previously had, such as this wonderful mellow Indian cheese. The appetizers were quite good. I got these pastries stuffed with spiced ground lamb and peas; Dan got the veggie version stuffed with spiced potato chunks and peas. Since we each got two, we quickly switched so we had one of each. Both versions were great! We also ordered this wonderful very buttery nan bread. For dinner Dan had spicy lamb and potatoes over a bed of rice. I got chunks of cheese in a spinach based sauce over a bed of rice. The food was excellent!

The concert was...different. It is hard to evaluate, in fact. It was like two different orchestras showed up that night. Most of the first half was technically brilliant but completely lifeless. There was no emotion at all in the music; they were utterly and completely flat. I was sorely disappointed; the New York Philharmonic had played so much better than that last winter when they came to town; the Detroit Symphony Orchestra had played even better in December with a guest conductor when they did Beethoven's Ninth.

I must not have been the only one to feel let down. After the first piece, the Schubert overture, the audience started coughing loudly. After each movement in the Mozart symphony more and more people got into the coughing thing, and they giggled as well. It was horribly rude, and from the stage is must have sounded like an avalanche of angry noise.

The crowd must have either angered or woken up the orchestra, though, because all of a sudden during the last movement of the Mozart piece, and for the full second half of the program (a Schubert symphony and a wonderful tone poem by Strauss) and for the encore they played with a lot of passion and fire, and you simply could not hope to hear better playing. They proved that they are amongst the best musicians in the world.

It was sort of a weird night; the poor initial playing (music without feeling is really not worth listening to...), the horrid rudeness of the crowd (I have heard of that before when a classical concert is not going well, but have never experienced it), and then the orchestra catching fire like that.

Today I still had that nagging headache, so did not get much done other than laundry and napping. I did go down to Ohio with Dan and Steven this evening so he could weigh in for tomorrow's wrestling tournament. Afterwards we went to the Krispy Kreme. It has taken me months to track one down even remotely close to our home...Steven was very pleased.

Tomorrow if I can get out of bed in time I will head down to Ohio with Dan and Steven. Otherwise, I will get a quiet day at home with Bill and the bills and laundry. Then back to work on Sunday, hopefully the weather will clam down a bit, and the headache will go away.

yeti crab

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/03/0309_060309_yeti_crab.html

Photo in the News: "Yeti Crab" Discovered in Deep Pacific

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March 9, 2006—Its silky white looks may make it seem more at home in the Himalaya, but this unique creature was recently discovered in the deep darkness of the South Pacific.

Scientists found the small, blind crustacean last March during a deep-sea expedition some 900 miles (1,500 kilometers) south of Easter Island, which lies off the coast of Chile (map).

Divers using submersible vehicles were about a mile and a half (more than two and a quarter kilometers) below the surface when they spotted the animal near hydrothermal vents.

The creature, dubbed the "yeti crab," is so unusual that a whole new family of animal had to be created to classify it. Its official name is Kiwa hirsuta, and even after a year of study scientists say there's still much about it they don't understand.

One mystery is the purpose of the fine, hairlike filaments that coat the crab's arms and legs. The fibers trap bacteria, which the crab may use as food. But some scientists think the germs may filter out the toxic minerals that spew from the deep-sea vents.

Biologists with California's Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, which organized the expedition, hope to return to search for more yeti crabs farther south, in the waters off Antarctica.

—Blake de Pastino

walk the line; no news is good news?

I just caught the movie Walk the Line on dvd this morning, and thought it was one heckuva movie.

Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon gave wonderful performances as Johnny Cash and June Carter. And they did their own singing?

I thought it was very moving - how Cash survived a difficult childhood, went on to have an even more difficult adulthood - and finally found a moral compass and a reason to live in the love of June Carter and of her family.

That awful and awkward Thanksgiving dinner scene, where June's parents watch the interaction between Johnny and his father and then step up and begin to give John their support - that and the following scenes where John's life and health are finally starting to straighten out as he begins to dry out with the help of the Carters - that was an incredible series of scenes.

I'll admit it - the ending made me cry.

What a good movie.

I have been calling around today trying to find out how the girl who got in the car accident is doing today. No one has any news about her since last night, when we were told she was being taken in for brain surgery. I am hoping with all of my heart that in this case no news is good news!

I do not go out very often to things that require me to get dressy. Tonight a concert by the Vienna Philharmonic would certainly call for nice clothes. And with the rain, I do not want to wear a skirt or a dress. And I am tired of my one nice black lace pants suit to each and every dressy occasion. So tonight I will wear my silk trousers, so pale pink they are nearly white. I will wear slightly pinker lace panties underneath (I'm not sure if the silk will become see through if it gets wet from a hard rain - I do not want to be revealing, and those panties were the closest I have to a matching color), white stockings with tiny pink hearts on them, and a bright pink very low cut sweater (Dan will like that). For shoes I will wear my black dress shoes with copper embroidery and pink beading. I will carry my pink Coach mini bag. I hope I will be dressy enough for the occasion, and not look like the country girl that I am. City sophisticate I am not, I am a jeans and sweatshirt kind of girl. But it is nice to be get dressy every now and then.

I also made sure that I have plenty of cash to take with me. We have free parking in one of the structures near the auditorium, as we are subscribers, but we will probably eat at one of the very good delis near the hall; also one of the local merchants sells CD's in the lobby of the performing group, with the profits going to the music society. i am thinking that they might have some pretty good music for sale there tonight...also, there is a first rate French restaurant near the hall. It is very expensive to eat dinner there, but perhaps we can indulge in one of their legendary desserts after the concert. Or maybe go to one of the many coffee shops for hot tea and cookies afterwards.

I have to go googling now. Steven came home with a story about a new animal some scientists found - some sort of crab with fur. He wants me to check out the pictures of it.

rain, rain, rain

While I am still looking greatly forward to the Vienna Philharmonic concert tomorrow night, that has been tempered by sadness. A girl I work with, only in her late twenties, and a very devoted mother of four young children, got into a car crash on her way to work this morning. There were icy patches on the roads.  She is probably undergoing brain surgery to relieve the pressure on her brain as I type this. It hurts so much when something so bad happens to someone who deserves it so little. She is a good person, a devoted mother, a good and supportive wife. I hope and pray that she will come out of this well. Her husband is in his last term of nursing school, and I hope and pray that he will be able to finish school this spring, as they had planned. It is horrible that this happened, just horrible.

It is raining very hard outside tonight. We are suppose to get somewhere around 2.5 inches in the next 24 hours...