Atherton Family Notes

Well, here it is, the beginning of May, and yesterday we finally got all of the posts finished for our trip to Colorado that ended on April 3rd.  Sheesh.

This should free up some time to work on other things for a while.  I don’t expect that we will spend very much time travelling between now and the end of July, when our guest from France, Tiphaine, arrives.

I’ve added this post so that we have a chronological listing of all of the posts we made about the trip.

St. Louis Gateway Arch

Spring Break Snowstorms

Plan B for Colorado

Kaleidescope and the Hallmark Visitors Center

Hey, Kool-aid!

Nebraska to Colorado

Sinclair Dinosaur in the Middle-of-Nowhere, Colorado

Driving in the Rockies

GO TO COLORADO IMMEDIATELY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Our Crazy Day

…And despite it all, it was a pretty good day

Celestial Seasonings

Garden of the Gods, part 1

Garden of the Gods, part 2

Another Garden of the Gods Stereogram

The Saga of Flat Stanley

Pikes Peak

Arcade Amusements

Driving to Cañon City

An Odd Travel Habit

Royal Gorge

Dinosaur Ridge

Hammond’s Candy Company

The Wal-Mart Aurora Experiment

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The kids and I went to the Indianapolis Zoo on Saturday.  This is something we do often enough that we don’t usually bother taking pictures.  When we went by the seal tank, though, I was surprised to see how still they were, sleeping in the sun, frozen in a resting pose.

They were so still, I was able to take two pictures and make a decent stereogram using the crappy camera on my iPhone, even as slow as it is.

It’s definitely worth clicking on this image to see the higher-resolution version.

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I had the good fortune to attend a business meeting in Maryland today, and even better, the meeting ended in time for me to get a chance to do a very, very brief bit of sightseeing.

As you can guess from the title of this post, the part of Maryland I was in was very close to Washington DC. So I drove into Washington to spend a little time walking the National Mall. In the short time I was there, I walked to the Washington Monument, the World War II Memorial, the Vietnam War Memorial, the Lincoln Memorial and the White House. Not bad for an hour. Obviously, I didn’t spend much time at any one place, but I did get some exercise and the walk was certainly more interesting than traipsing through our neighborhood for the umpteenth bazillionth time.

I did have one small scare though. I parked my car by what I thought was east of the Washington Monument and was quite surprised to find that my car wasn’t where I thought it was when I got back. It turns out I had actually parked to the north of the monument, and I figured this out only after staring at the picture below. I knew I had taken the shot just after I crossed the street from my car, and the position of the buildings behind the monument helped me figure out the angle.

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Last Saturday, while Sandi was out of town visiting her aunt, the girls and I went to the 38th Annual Children’s Folk Dance Festival, held in downtown Indianapolis at the convention center.  Carissa’s school participates in the event every year and this was her second year to be in it.

The festival, which organizers say attracts about 1000 kids (I can’t confirm this, but there were at least several hundred), is operated by the Indianapolis Parks Service but attracts dancers from all over the state and one school from Kentucky as well.

Carissa has spent one afternoon a week after school for the last couple of months to practice the dances with the other kids in her school.  Westlake sent about 30 kids this year. They do a lot of different dance styles from all over the world from the Virginia Reel to a Chinese ribbon dance to a Bolivian dance called the Chilili.

This year, they added a dance called “Country Walkin’” that is allegedly an American dance. After about 15 seconds of listening to it, I was pretty sure it had been misidentified. The song does sound like it might be a traditional American song, but it isn’t. It’s a cut from an album by “Rednex”, a group from Sweden that specializes in taking sounds from traditional American sources and setting them to Techno.

The track used for “Country Walkin’” is the song “Pop in an Oak”, which apparently is written in English by someone who has never actually spoken English. Here are the lyrics of the chorus:

Old pop in an oak, pop in an oak
Once you could hear the sucker linger show
Thought I ever gonna see my old pop in an oak
Ever gonna see his old pipe in a smoke

This song was very popular in Europe in the mid-1990s, but never made it in the US. It’s a catchy song, though and one of the kids’ favorites. Rednex did have one hit in the US, a Techno-reworking of portions of the folk song “Cotton-Eyed Joe.”

Carissa told her music teacher about the origin of the song, and she didn’t believe it.

This morning, Carissa and the other dancers from Wayne Township performed some of their dances for the Arts Alive festival at Ben Davis.

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Hi! Mom you are cool,funny,awesome,and mom you rock! I love you!

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i made this video for you because we saw a Jibjab video on Youtube and thought ‘hey we should do this for you!!!1!!!!!!’.

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I hope you have a fantastic mothers day, mom!

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While I was on my high speed tour of the National Mall, I did take a few pictures. Unfortunately, I only had my iPhone with me, so the quality of the pictures isn’t that good. I tried to make up for that by taking interesting pictures, which was also pretty hard to do with such a crappy camera. So my third attempt was to make a few stereograms.

I only got about a 40% success rate on that as well, but that’s better than nothing. On most shots, the 3D elements didn’t stand out enough to be worth it. At least the weather was nice, and the relatively good lighting minimizes the camera’s flaw.

After all was said and done, I did get a few interesting stereophotographs, and I’ll post those over the next few days.

The first one is a shot of the Washington Monument. I posted half of this picture on Friday… this was the shot I used to determine where I was standing when I left my car so that I could find my way back to it.

It’s been long enough since the last time I was in DC that I had forgotten how large the Monument is. It is shorter than the Gateway arch (which we recently visited) by about 75 feet, but the Washington Monument is still the biggest object in the area. I knew I was close to the mall when I was driving into town and saw the Monument behind the buildings I was driving past.

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Until last Friday, I hadn’t been to Washington, DC since before the World War 2 Memorial was installed, so I spent a little time exploring the monument during my whirlwind tour.

Having been to the Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial in Coleville-sur-Mer, I actually found this monument kind of dry. Perhaps it’s because this memorial is not the final resting place of thousands of men, but this place seems very far away from war.

I tried to take a few pictures of the overall memorial, but my iPhone just wouldn’t cooperate. I settled for this stereogram of one of the Bas-Reliefs aligning the sides of the monument.

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I’ve always found the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington to be one of the most moving war memorials that I’ve been to. It effect on me is similar to the way I felt at the German military graveyard that I visited near Mont St. Michel in France. I suppose there is nothing like losing a war to make a country truly realize the cost of war.

The simple, elegant grace of the memorial, which traces the initial trickle of dead to the rain of deaths in the middle to the trickle at the end as the war faded out has always been for me a stark reminder of how we pay for war: not just with our treasure, but with our people. I especially appreciate the statue of the three soldiers across from the wall, seemingly both trapped in a moment during the war and solemnly observing the names of those who went before.

This is an interesting contrast to the WW2 Memorial that I wrote about yesterday. The WW2 Memorial is just there, the Vietnam War Memorial makes me feel empathy for those involved in the war.

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