Our Family

Tonight we stayed up late to check out the lunar eclipse.  The parapro in Elliot's class at school has been telling them about it, so he was excited.  Finn was too.  Elliot knew it would start at 8:43 PM.  We stayed up until about 10:30 and saw it starting to have a reddish tint.  Here is a photo I took.

Grandma and Grampa B and Coby came up this weekend, and today we toured several exhibits at the Midland Center for the Arts:

Grossology
there we learned all about the science of snot, poop, farts, etc.  It was a shame that Uncle Kevin missed out on that one.

Timeless Warriors & Relics: 1500 Years of Ancient China
includes a couple life-sized terracotta soldiers.  They are two of some 8,000 life-sized warriors, soldiers, and horses uncovered during excavation at the tomb of the first Chinese emperor Qin Shihuang (246-210 BC).  It is estimated that it took a million workers to construct the army of figures, each one unique.

Age of Armor from the Higgins Armory Museum
artifacts spanning the classical age of armor, from the late Middle Ages through the Renaissance

I think the boys really enjoyed seeing all of the above.

One thing I've noticed about some of these exhibits (and the Pirates exhibit we saw in Cincinnati last year), is that photography is prohibited.  This is annoying to me.  I'm sure it's because they want to sell more merchandise in the gift shops.

My parents are visiting one of my sisters this weekend and apparently brought with them a stack of school artwork.  My sister didn't recognize a couple of them, so she sent me scanned images thinking they were probably mine.  They are.  I took an art class in ninth or tenth grade.  Kinda funny.

Last week I went to Germany.  I flew out of MBS Sunday afternoon, made a connection in Detroit, then to Amsterdam, then finally to Hanover, Germany.  On the Detroit to Amsterdam flight I thought I was going to watch 3:10 to Yuma and Into the Wild, but the video system wasn't working properly.  It would play for 15 or 20 seconds, pause, and then start playing again at some other point in the film.

In the Amsterdam airport there was a guy reading Stephen Colbert's book.  I spotted it by the red-tinged pages.  As I got up to board the flight to Hanover, I told him I had the book with me in my backpack but haven't started it yet.  He said it was funny, and we shared a moment.

Scott, David, and I got a car to drive from Hanover to Bomlitz.  On the drive, I tuned to an English-language radio station out of the UK.  They were talking about a father who jumped from four stories with his 6-year-old son and younger daughter.  His marriage was in the process of breaking up.  The man and his daughter survived.  The boy died of massive head trauma.  It's not like I'm not used to hearing terrible things on the news, but for some reason (probably because I was so far away from my kids at that moment) that story really got to me.  I started trying to imagine myself in a state of mind like that.  I imagined how terrifying it must have been for kids for their dad to do what he was doing.  I wondered if that guy had anyone to talk to...maybe his wife was his only friend.  Maybe there were other people who knew the state he was in but didn't know what he was capable of...and didn't reach out to him.  I was convicted by a desire to be someone who takes the time to talk to people in crisis.

It was raining in Germany and obviously hadn't just started because water was standing everywhere.  We stayed at the Hotel Forellenhof in Walsrode.  Most of the week was spent in a conference room or eating meals.  No site-seeing.  Almost no pictures.  Below is a photo of the hotel room  and of me having dinner in a hole-in-the-wall bar.

Friday afternoon we drove back to Hanover and then flew to Amsterdam.  We spent Saturday night at a hotel at the airport and then flew home the next morning.  On the flight back I watched 3:10 to Yuma, The Beach, and Balls of Fury.  All three were enjoyable, but surprisingly Balls of Fury was the best of the three.