So, while looking for something else, I found this article, Mysterious Detour While Driving? This is the phenomenon, frequently observed while driving in rural America, where the road comes to a T or makes a pair of 90-degree turns for no apparent reason. I learned that some of those curves are due to the fact that the Earth is round ( Read more... )

Clarification

Some people understood my Friday post to read that I had missed a flight. No, somebody else in line had missed their flight.

ResearchSo I mentioned that I'm traveling to The Old Soil in August. One of the pre-travel questions I had was "where in Lithuania exactly was the old soil?" Fortunately, my great-uncle Walter went back to ( Read more... )

Randomness that's accumulated from the Week That Was ( Read more... )

I went to Westville, The Home Soil, for the weekend. Westville is in Vermilion County, IL, and the economic engine of the county is Danville, Il. In reading the Sunday papers at home, the lead articles were the closure of the oldest indoor swimming pool in the state (built 1911) and the planned closure of a Danville school building built in 1922 ( Read more... )

I went downstate for the Labor Day weekend, and much fun was had, including a reunion with my high school class (30 years!).

I did not stay to see the annual Labor Day parade, perhaps fortunately, because at the start of the parade somebody accidentally ran over 9 people watching said parade. None of the injuries were life-threatening, but the ( Read more... )

Today is Boxing Day, AKA the day after Christmas. I am downstate at my parents house, where a very nice Christmas Eve and Christmas was had. We're now in the cleanup phase, in which things like the Christmas glasses and plates get restowed for the year. My favorite local winey, Sleepy Creek Vineyards, is closed today, but re-opens tomorrow. I'm ( Read more... )

In America, we fetishize small towns. But we don't live in them, a fact that my most recent trip home to Westville made clear.

While downstate, I read the local newspapers, and saw that several high schools in Vermilion county had signed cooperative agreements so they had enough players to field a football team. When I was driving home along ( Read more... )

I'm back from Westville, where I watched the 104th marching of the Labor Day Parade. It was a typical small-town parade, so the real purpose of attending was to see family. I did, and spent most of Sunday moving PCs and helping my dad install a new computer desk for my mother ( Read more... )

I went south to The Olde Sod for the weekend. The primary purpose was to install Dad's new Windows 8.1 PC, including migrating data and installing a real Start button.

After the PC was made fully operational, we attended a performance of the Danville Symphony Orchestra. Mom and Dad have season tickets, and Saturday night was a scheduled ( Read more... )

I am in charge of our annual fundraiser at Carriage Greens in lovely downtown Darien. (Come on down - $30 a head to sample food from 10 restaurants.) I will, thusly, be busy tonight. Tonight it's also supposed to snow, which will undoubtedly make tomorrow's commute interesting. So, in the calm before the storm, two thoughts:

UkraineLike this ( Read more... )