Our state governor has been replaced! Hopefully Pat Quinn will do better. I have a list of others I am irritated with, both Democrats and Republicans.
If you get the chance, I recommend that you watch the Nova episode "The Incredible Journey of the Butterflies". The monarch migration from Canada to Mexican wintering grounds to partway back is, well, simply incredible. I think what surprised me the most is that only every 4th generation does it (the other generations live through the summer). How amazing is God's creation! Here are some pix of monarchs that I took last summer.
Do I get a prize for a 100 posts, or a smack on the head for spending so much time on this? :*) Anyway, some of the local TV stations show weather pictures that you submit (they have shown 2 of mine in the past), so I submitted the 3 pix that I posted in the previous blog. They have shown at least 2 of the 3 so far. In other news, this past week January Interim at Bradley University has finished and the Spring Semester has begun. It promises to be busy and a schedule challenge for all 3 of us. Yesterday we had a Family Science Day event at a local preschool where Kris used to attend and Karen used to work. It takes a lot of time and effort to set up, run, and take down a demo event, but it went well! The picture is of me showing a child how adding some kinds of salt to water will make the water cold (e.g. ammonium nitrate) or hot (e.g. calcium chloride).
I heard that the ice shelves along the river looked better after the recent very cold snap. I dragged Kris there after school for about a half hour. The bright angled sunshine made for some shots that I really like.
Friday my Mom and Dad drove down from Green Bay for the weekend. They have had a LOT of winter weather up there, and we were quite impressed by this snowblower. Both of my parents have birthdays in the next couple weeks, plus Kris's birthday party was on Saturday. Kris requested food donations to a local pantry rather than typical presents (her idea, not ours), and a lot of food was brought over as a result. After the party my sister stopped by from Chicago to visit. We then all went out to dinner with the Bosmas. Today, after everybody went home and church and stuff, Kris and I went sledding. It was the first time we did serious sledding since we saw that horrible accident a year ago, but we enjoyed ourselves safely. I'm convinced, but surprised, that I saw a bunch of robins at the park along a creek today.
This afternoon I stopped at the Carl Spindler Marina in East Peoria to look for ice shelves. When the Illinois River floods and freezing weather follows, ice forms at a high water level. Then, as the water level falls, ice slabs settle down over whatever lies underneath, for example, over the boardwalk path near the Marina. The slabs in the picture are about 2 inches thick. Ice can also cling to tree trunks as series of shelves. Though not as spectacular as the ones I saw at this location about a year ago, there were shelves on the trees. There were a large number of crows at the marina when I arrived (perhaps as many as I have ever seen at one time). They seemed to be working their way south along the river, investigating holes in the ice. What I thought was interesting was the marks that they left in the half inch of fluffy morning snow over the ice - not only were they leaving footprints, but also wing and tail marks in the snow. One set of marks looks like a crow snow angel!
Among other activities today, we watched some video footage of her as a baby. The outfit she is holding was the one she wore to come home from the hospital (and it was huge on her at the time).
A week or two ago, there were reports in the news about a swarm of earthquakes near Yellowstone National Park, provoking media reminders that most of the park sits over a caldera, a collapsed volcano. Crater Lake in Oregon sits inside a caldera created by a collapse of Mt. Mazama, but the large eruption associated with that collapse pales alongside that of some of the eruptions at Yellowstone, which has now been categorized as a "supervolcano". A modern supereruption would mess up life in the U.S., if not globally. Some scientists predict it could happen again, some say it won't.
The Illinios River is flooding a little again (it crested here yesterday). However, it is not as bad as last September.
2008 is done and 2009 is here. One pic is of Grandma and Grandpa Penny playing games with Kris on New Years Eve. The other is of Kris by a model (at the Lakeview Museum) of a building located in the Forbidden City (in Beijing) - this reflects our continued hope to travel to China to adopt (it looks like 2010 right now). 
