Home Again

We got back to Peoria today. What a weather contrast: light snow leaving Green Bay, and upper 40's and almost no snow in the neighborhood when we reached Peoria. Overall, it was a very enjoyable trip north to celebrate Christmas and my parents' 40th anniversary. Here is a picture from the anniversary dinner. Karen's dad and stepmom are now here visiting for the next few days.

Visit "Up North"

Visited my parents' cabin near Mountain, WI, today. The snow is thick - and pretty - up there. We got up there not long before sunset, but Dace, Susan, Kris, and I made a quick dash to the summit of the outcrop near the cabin. Kris made a snow angel at the summit. It was interesting watching the wind gusts kicking up clouds of snow in the distance.

Lots of snow in Green Bay

Green Bay has been getting lots of snow this winter, more than I have seen in years. We had another 4-5" of powdery stuff last night. I'm not sure how deep it is here at my parents' house, but it was up to my knees when I was wearing my boots. I finally got to use my snowshoes today, but I only got 9 inches of "float" from them - therefore the snow was halfway up my calves WITH the snowshoes. Tiring, but fun! Pictures of Kris, my nephew Arlan (he says "Uncle Dean" very cutely), and my dad are attached.

Merry Christmas!

Everybody made it up to Green Bay to celebrate Christmas and see lots of relatives. Happy Birthday, Jesus!

Wintry Mix

The ice on the trees and power lines and so many other things has proven remarkably tenacious in the cold weather. Some people are still without power. It is melting, especially with warmer temps today. I really struggled to capture pictures of how beautiful it was, though. Entire groves of trees looked like they were made of glass. Here is one of the maple in our front yard, and another of our aptly named icicle lights.

In other news, we were all packed up to travel to Green Bay for Christmas today, but waves of wintry weather between us and our destination are in our way. We hope to be there at Christmas. My brother's family is dealing with airport delays traveling from Seattle, but my sister successfully fought her way up from Chicago early this morning. On the plus side, I have made some paperwork progress today.

Among the things we have been doing over the past few days is watching selections from my large collection of Christmas videos. A funny cartoon short that we have featuring Chip, Dale, and Donald Duck called "Toy Tinkers" can be found on YouTube, for example at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=miEi3F8s8H8

Glazed Over

We got a quarter inch of ice Friday morning and it is STILL HERE on Saturday night. It just has not warmed up enough. It is so pretty and I have taken LOTS of pictures, but there has been some damage with downed power lines and branches. We lost power for a little while on Friday morning; 9000 customers are still without power tonight. Tomorrow it's supposed to be windy, which could wreak havok on the already heavily laden trees and lines. Lots of church services and other events are being canceled in anticipation of the wind, iciness, and cold. It should be interesting.

In other news, Bradley had its December graduation this morning (marking the "end" of a long semester) and the keynote speaker was Patrick Fitzgerald. He is the nationally famous U.S. District Attorney involved in terrorism cases, taking down Governor Ryan, and now going after Governor Blagojevich. He was scheduled as a speaker well before the whole Blagojevich thing, but it certainly made people more interested in what he was going to say. Of course, he did not say anything about the case, but he spent his ten minutes touting public service as a very rewarding career path.

Snowflakes

Light snowflakes fell from a sunny sky this morning. Here are some pictures of them on the sunroof of my car. What was also cool was how when they melted the drops had the shapes of snowflakes. Recommended reading: the children's book "Snowflake Bentley".

In other news: we might have a significant ice storm on Thursday. Also, Bradley graduate and retiring local U.S. Representative Ray LaHood (R) has been tapped to be Barack Obama's Transporation Secretary. (I sat a table near him at a local restaurant just last week.)

All sorts of weather

Between finals, Christmas preparations, and a bunch of other things, the Campbell household has been really busy. The weather has been up and down, with a windy thaw, a cold snap, and now a couple inches of snow. Saturday I parked our car at the edge of a store parking lot and when I came back to the car later a couple of shopping carts had blown across the lot (the tumbleweeds of capitalism?) into the car. The other picture is of Kris brushing Bugs.

Karen's honors

Karen has been doing so well in school that she has been inducted into the Phi Kappa Phi honor society.

I was in East Peoria today and stopped by the riverfront to take some pix. Tonight I took some birch bark that I collected in Wisconsin over Thanksgiving and made a little Christmas tree (I saw ones like these for sale a while back).

Miners' Car

A few years ago, I found out that a woman at our church has a sister whose boyfriend was killed in the May 18, 1980, eruption of Mount Saint Helens. When I visited the volcano in August, 2008 (see previous entries) I found the person's name, Richard A. Parker, on the memorial, along with those of his aunt Natalie and uncle Donald. When I got back I tried doing a little web searching to find out how they died. Apparently the aunt and uncle had a cabin and mine (gold, I think) near Meta Lake. Richard was caught outside by the blast and thrown. I have never been to the actual lake before in my many visits, but I have been very close. It turns out that the Miners Car (a car blown around by the blast and left as a memorial) belonged to the aunt and uncle. I have included a picture of the car from a book and one that I shot in August, 2007. I relayed these pictures to my church contact; she passed them to her sister, who told her that she remembers riding in that car. I was also told that the couple knew there was a risk but chose to ignore it. Anyway, I thought this was sort of one of those small world kind of things, and helps add color and context to an event that I have an interest in.

Saturday Stuff

Our rabbit, Bugs, was ill this week and the illness could have potentially been fatal if left untreated, so we took him to the vet. He seems to be recovering, but is not at 100% yet. One of our remaining pumpkins have ripened indoors so we cooked it. We started putting up indoor Christmas decorations today. (Karen pointed out that for the two last years we have had snowdays in early December to work on this.) Here is an experiment in decorating using our bird's nest collection and silver Christmas balls. We are also working on shopping and the letter.

Campus conjunctions

I missed the closest meeting of the moon, Venus, and Jupiter on Monday night due to clouds, but here they are above campus on Tuesday night. (Venus is on the left and Jupiter is on the right, just to the left of the clock tower.) I have also attached another curious conjunction picture.

Saturday and Sunday activities

Saturday we went to Door County to visit Karen's dad and stepmom and her uncle, aunt, and cousins. I also went for a walk and took some pix of an abandoned schoolhouse. Today we drove back to Peoria and encountered more snow than we anticipated. After unpacking, Kris and I added to our outdoor decorations.

Friday activities

Today none of us partook in the "black Friday" activities. My mom, dad, Kris, and I went to their cabin for a while, then picked out a Christmas tree. It is very tall.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Happy Thanksgiving from Wisconsin! This picture was taken on the way back from church this morning and shows about a dozen wild turkeys to the left of the pine trees. We also cut wood. After a HUGE Thanksgiving dinner we cleaned up, puttered around, and did a Skype call with Dace and Susan and Arlan (who captured the image and sent it to us). Oh, and I included a nice picture of the fireplace. Maybe you can use it as a screensaver.

Sunday stuff

Here is a recent picture of construction of the new Bradley University fieldhouse.

The weather was relatively warm this afternoon, so I hauled downed branches out of the woods, cut or broke them into reasonable lengths, split some of the wider pieces, and stacked them. It was good exercise, but rigor mortis is starting to set in.

Tonight we watched the "Clone Wars" movie, which we rented. It was not as good as the six movies, but it is still Star Wars. For the sake of the battle scenes I wish I had seen the movie in theaters. There was no scrolling exposition text at the beginning! Kris was initially not interested in seeing it, but she got really into it. She liked the silly lines by the battle droids (e.g. "Outnumbered? Let me count...). She had not remembered much of the other movies; I guess it is time for a refresher.

Saturday stuff

This morning we rang bells for an hour at the mall for the Salvation Army. Kris and Karen have done that for a few years now as part of Karen's involvement in the Heart of Illinois Association for the Advancement of Young Children. They asked me to do it too, and I was a bit unenthusiastic about it, but when I heard last night that the homeless shelters in Peoria are seeing record use in these rough times I was more motivated. It was fun.

Tonight we helped Kris study for an exam about Illinois history and geography. It reminds me a little about learning about Wisconsin history at about her age. Y'know we send our Catholic daughter to a Protestant school and have not had too many issues, but I tell you, raising Kris as an Illinoisian weighs heavily on me sometimes. Born and raised in Illinois, now learning about geography of this state more than Wisconsin....I'm motivated to say stuff like "What river forms the western border of the state? The Misssissippi? Good! By the way it also forms the western border of Wisconsin." Trying to maintain that cheesy heritage!

Tonight we attended a play at Bradley (Karen won free tickets for most of the season). The play was a postmodern deconstruction of the Greek trilogy Oresteia (so they said). It was an interesting mix of conventional staging, projection, puppetry, audience plant interaction, and even text messaging. It got a bit preachy/un-subtle and had a bit of rough language, but the most unusual part was when they summoned the audience plants up to the stage near the end to act as the jury for Orestes. One of the names they called was a "Mr. Campbell" - I had a moment of panic there!!!!

Piano playing

Kris takes piano lessons, Karen is taking a piano class at Bradley, and now it looks like Bugs is in on it. By the way, Karen has now created a Facebook account for me.

Canning Weekend

Saturday we converted our accumulated blackberries (mostly), black and red raspberries, strawberries, and blueberries (just a few) to three and a half batches of what we simply call "berry jelly". It tastes good. I was able extract more color from the berry sludge after the jelly making and plan to use the purple solution for acid-base indicator demos. Today we converted a grocery bag of frozen tomatoes from our garden into just three pints of tomato sauce.

Dean

New LEGO model

For years I have occasionally tinkered with the idea of adding a "buckyball" to the array of LEGO models of molecules that I have been involved in developing. I felt it would make a nice complement to the diamond structure https://pobox.bradley.edu/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://mrsec.wisc.edu/Edetc/LEGO/PDFfiles/UCinstruct/diamondwhole.PDF and graphite structure http://mrsec.wisc.edu/Edetc/LEGO/PDFfiles/UCinstruct/graphite_whole.PDF.

Others have built the structure using very unorthodox LEGO pieces, but I was going for basic blocks. This I have viewed, if nothing else, as a good challenge. (It’s kind of like the game “Jenga” with LEGO bricks.) A couple nights ago I got to thinking about it again and hit upon a new approach. The result is not a perfect sphere and it’s not the strongest structure (especially when the support rods are removed), but it does feature the appropriate number and pattern of hexagons and pentagons.

November Oak Leaves

Stopped by Lauterbach Park in Bartonville for a little while this morning. No luck fossil hunting in such a short time, but I took some pix that I like. This afternoon we raked (hopefully for the last time) and I put up the icicle lights on the house. I hope I will not be accused of contributing to "Christmas creep" as columnist Gregg Easterbrook likes to talk about, but we do not plan to light the lights much until after Thanksgiving.

By the way, my wife, Karen Campbell, now has an page on Facebook. Look her up sometime!