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!

Visit to Springfield

I had a meeting at the Illinois State Museum in Springfield today. It's not bad for a free museum, and the Illinois fossil collection is pretty good. It is very close to the capitol building. I'm including a picture in case our governor has forgotten what it looks like. The gas prices continue to drop - see the picture.

The weather has been overcast and cold and most of the leaves have dropped. We have had flurries, but nothing has stuck. What a contrast to last weekend - November is definitely here!

The REO Speedwagon concert is on PBS again - I feel old again - but I still like it.

Show yesterday

In addition to the big election yesterday, we did an early and fast demo show at a local elementary school for roughly 400 kids. I have a soft spot for this school, because it's in a not so great neighborhood. The day before we did some demos for a group of visiting Russian high school students - working through a translator was interesting. So much has changed since the days of the cold war, and of course some things still need to change.

Beautiful fall day

We had pretty warm weather considering if was November 1. We enjoyed the leaves, Kris played at a fall festival at Peoria Christian School, and we roasted hotdogs on a bonfire tonight.