Black and White Winter Ramblings


white swans black gese and ducks
Originally uploaded by V'ron
Typical winter must-do-something-about-this-cabin-fever-ness:
  • Finally, finally FINALLY we got snow that was snowy enough to go sledding in. I had a bazillion things to do, but chief among them was getting them all done so I could scoop up the kids after school and hit Humboldt Park, with its Sonny Bono and Kennedy trees frightening me. It's a perfect sledding hill so long as you keep going right between the trees, so the first thing I made the kids prove to me was that they knew how to bail out of the sled should it take a funky turn and head toward a tree. That proven, we had a wonderful time.

  • I went to my first indoor soccer game last weekend, same day as the Packer game, so I "watched" the Packer game on twitter. It was when we took our seats (good ones, friends had won them in a work contest and didn't want to skip the Pack) that I'd just realized that this was the first tim I'd ever been in the Arena. I closed my eyes and tried to imagine the days when NBA ball was played here: what a barnburn that must have been. And I learned whatever happened to the old Bradley Center jumbotron that was replaced this year -- it's here at the Arena. I also have to admit that indoor soccer in person is a lot more exiciting than regular soccer is on TV. Maybe it's because we can see the players more closely. Maybe it's because we can take it in in a single line of sight. Maybe because -- by the size and speed of things -- it's really hockey played on grass. We even got a fight! A bench-emptying, player-ejecting, NHL-style fight! Woo! Still didn't make up for the Wave losing miserably, and apparently (you can tell we don't follow them closely) this game decided the division leaders, who are now Baltimore. Oh well.

  • Missed the debut of Rose on Fire, Laurie Kern' new group. Well, girl, what did you expect on a Thursday night. Still, the reviews are pouring in and Laurie Kern is BACK, apparently. She was a songwriting-s sauraus in the 90s, and she kind of faded out for awhile and lately, she's gotten a second wind and it shows. She's always had that beautiful clear voice, and could always put a good tune together, and by all accounts, she's also put a good band together. Babysitter and time will allow me to see this for myself, but enough people I trust have good things to say about Rose on Fire, so i'm taking their word for it and putting them out as a recommendation.

  • Also recommended, the Mummies exhibit at the Museum of Dioramas aka, the Milwaukee Public Museum. It's eye opening because it's not just those "traditional" egyptian mummies, they're from all over the world, and not all mummies are intentional mummies. Worth reading all the side notes too. Of course I had the kids with me, and they were equally fascinated and freaked out. There was one mummy, very clearly male, in an obvious state of rigor, if you catch my drift, and Stella and Sammy were cool enough about it to not say anything. Well, not until some high schoolers whom we decided to call Beavis and Butthead showed up and started in on giggles. So, fair word of warning: the mummies are very interesting, but some of the viewers are who you should be concerned about. Tip: if you were kind of leaning toward an Egyptian experience, check out the "Mysteries of the Nile" IMAX show when you're done.

  • We grabbed our Zoo Pass card on Friday since the kids had off school and headed to see the animals in winter. How fun! First of all, MPS wasn't off, so the zoo was fairly unpopulated with people. But get this -- the polar bears weren't out. Of all the animals we expected to see out and about, they were inside sleeping. The big cats were quite animated, though, and we got to see animals we normally miss because they're hiding: moose, the dall sheep. And a lot of the small mammals were really jumping about. Even in the nocturnal section. Lake Evinrude had a large non-frozen section, and it was littered with geese, ducks and the swans, who held our attention for a long time. We followed up with skating at Red Arrow Park and came home to sleep up for that wonderful Packer game yesterday.

Comments

Popular Posts