THE PEOPLE MUST HAVE THEIR DAN MILLER

Went out this morning for another bike ride. Not as many hills on this one, and I did pretty well. I have this one listed at 4.5 miles, and it took me 24:38 (8:14:00 to 8:38:38) which is 11.69 mph. I think that one of my distances must be wrong, because it definitely felt like I was faster this morning. Maybe soon I will get an odometer.

Out of Madeira’s 120 streets, I have now completely ridden 22 (Iuka, Rita, Rathon, Dee, Britten, Berwood, Jethve, Homart, Locust, Wesley, Juler Ct., Maxfield, Longfield, Camargo Woods Dr., Camargo Woods Ct., Indian Trail, Camargo Greene, Naomi, Marvin, Dones, Steigler) as well as part of 6 others (Sanoma, Thomas, Miami, Camargo, Juler Ave, Osceola)

I have been enjoying using my bike signals. Though I have to say every time I make a right turn signal I feel like I’m about to baptize someone . I did get to stick it to a car today. I was coming down Thomas, and it was downhill so I was flying down in top gear. As I was about to turn left to go up Sanoma, I looked back and there was a car behind me. Obviously he wanted to pass me, but I put on my left signal and zoomed up the hill. That was nice because I was able to use my head of steam to get me most of the way up the hill. Some of you may recall that this intersection was the site of my failed attempts to come home last December when it snowed like nobody’s business. I didn’t blog about it because lo, I didn’t have one at that time.

In other news, the Red Hot Death came from behind as I slept and won 5-4 in 10 innings. Nice to have that happen instead of the reverse (I’m winning when I go to bed and wake up and have lost), which seems to always happen.

Well as I believe I mentioned a few days ago, I have set out to ride my bike the length of every street in Madeira. I finished my route planning this afternoon, and set off on my first ride this evening.

The routes that I have planned out are 10 routes of 6.2, 6.0, 6.4, 5.3, 6.8, 6.7, 6.1, 4.8, 4.5 and 13.6 miles. The thought is to work my way up to the longer one. I can’t be completely sure of the accuracy of these numbers, since I just used Google Maps to calculate them, and it’s probably not that accurate at short distances due to roundage.

The route upon which I set out today was labelled as “Trip I” (I labelled them, in no particular order, from A to J). This one had a posted distance of 4.8 miles. I had some problems finding my watch and nearly gave up on going, since if it couldn’t be timed, there was obviously no point in going. In the end, I borrowed Carolyn’s watch, and counted from the second hand. The ride was somewhat challenging. Lots of hills in this particular area. As Carolyn was pointing out when I got back, you don’t really realize how even a slight hill can be quite big when you’re not just riding over it in a car. I will admit that on one of them I had to get off and walk. That was going up Indian Trail Drive, which you can see here. It’s the black street right in the middle of the map. The street just west of it is similarly hilled, but I got to go down that one . Don’t worry for all of you purists out there, because this was a cul-de-sac street, after I walked up part of it, I did ride all the way down it, so no disqualifications on a technicality!

Anyways, the trip of 4.8 miles took me 21 minutes and 19 seconds (from 7:05:06 to 7:26:25). That works out to 13.51 mph. That seems to me a bit high, considering the walking time as well as a few other hilly areas that I rode very slowly. I suppose it is possible that I just underestimated how fast one can ride on a bike – I was thinking around 10 mph. The other, probably more plausible, explanation is that it wasn’t really 4.8 miles. Perhaps I will investigate further at another time.

So the plan now is to continue to ride until I have reached my goal. I will try to see if I can find some less hilly sections however! I will keep you, my faithful readers, informed.

DO YOU CARE that if one wants to get an accurate portrayal of where our house is located on online map/satellite providers such as Google Maps, you have to use 7345 instead of 7317?

The reason, I believe, is because the Census data upon which these things are based on (or more accurately, the for-pay mapping services that they are based on which in turn are probably somewhat based on the Census data) lists Iuka as going from 7200-7399. So when you put in 7317, it figures that’s a little more than half way down the street. But in reality, it only goes from 7200 to about 7350, so 7317 is about 3/4 of the way down the street.

Why does this matter, you may find yourself asking? Well to you, it probably doesn’t, of course, unless you’re trying to stalk me. But to me, I’m starting a new exercise project. I’ve been trying to think of ways to exercise. Early mornings are out because I just don’t see myself reaching to get up early and go do it. So I thought of going on the evenings, and riding a bike around.

But, I thought that would get pretty boring, and so I knew that I needed to make this into some sort of game or competition. It’s a guy thing I’m sure. My first thought was to track how long I rode each day and track that against my EFC route to simulate going through all 88 Ohio counties. But then I thought since that route is like 1200 miles, it might not be a good short-term goal. So I came up with the idea of riding on every street in Madeira. I found a map online and modified it to suit my devious devices. I didn’t attach it because it’s like 150 KB, but if you want to see it, here it is.

This is reminiscent of a project that my friends and I had when we were teenagers. We made it a goal to drive on every street in North Olmsted. This ended in the infamous “Elston” fiasco.

In any case, I wonder how many trips this will take. Or really, whether or not this will actually ever happen. But I figured something like this not only makes it into a competition, it also engages the other insane part of me that likes planning routes and such. I will keep you posted….

If you missed my last post about the retaining wall, scroll down or follow the link to see my laborings of Saturday morning.

After the trip to Home Depot in the afternoon, I went back out after dinner. As you can see from the below picture, I managed to get layers 3 and 4 pretty much complete.

A brief summary of the plans for the wall after this, though it is kind of hard to explain. The wall that is in the foreground will continue back and around (following the curve of the path to the steps). This path (the part that is not done yet anyways) will be at the 4 brick level (matching with the wall that is now in the background). The path that starts near the house will have 2 more levels put on it (making it 6-high), and continue in sort of a 90 degree circular arc to meet up to the first step (opposite of the tomato plant). That will make the back section (that is currently full of grass) 6-high, which should give everything a 3-tiered effect, with 3 different levels. I may add a 4th level to divide that back section – we’ll see. It is my goal to make the entire lawn one giant retaining wall, as it cuts down on mowing .

The reason I stopped last night is that I appear to have unearthed a yellowjacket’s nest. We have these bugs that like to hop around that have infested our front yard. So when I saw lots of things flying around I just figured that was them. But then I noticed a distinct bee-like flavor to these flying things. So we’ll need to take care of that first.

In closing, here’s a closeup of our tomato plants.

I went out this morning to work on ye olde retaininge walle. I’ve been meaning to work on it for awhile, but it seems like every time I finally have some time to work on the yard, the grass is getting long and I have to cut it. Plus it’s freaking hot. I went out about 8:00 this morning so hopefully it wouldn’ t be quite so hot, but it still was pretty hot.

Here’s a picture of what it looked like the last time I took a picture of it, which was back when we had the garage sale, and may be the last time I worked on it.

I used up all of my blocks, and now here’s what it looks like:

In the back you can see our monstrous tomato plants. We got some from our neighbor and we have reaped quite the harvest. So far we have harvested 111 tomatoes, and we’re averaging 20-30 a day. 29 yesterday and 24 today.

It’s hard to see exactly what I did this morning on the wall, but I put a couple of rows on the middle row. This is layers 2, 3 and a few blocks of 4, counting 1 as the bottom layer. Eventually the front row (NE corner of the wall) will be 2 high, and the middle row will be 4 high, and the back row will be 6 high. If I planned things right, the back row will also line up with the steps going up to the front door, though I think that I did not plan it right enough. As you might imagine, it was a bit difficult to plan just where I needed to dig and put the bottom row so that 6 blocks higher would line up with something that was 4-5 feet away.

I thought I was going to run out of sand and have to go to Annoyo’s Hardware this morning, but I had just enough. I did run out of blocks though and we went to Home Depot and picked up 30 more as well as 2 more bags of sand. I suspect that that will get me pretty close to done, though I bet I’ll have to make one more trip to get more blocks, though we shall see.

I plan on putting some more blocks on this evening once it cools down. I think I probably have enough places to put them that I could probably use just about all 30 of the blocks I bought today without having to dig any more and lay sand (which is the most time consuming part, given that it entails making sure everything is all level and such). If I do, maybe I’ll take some pictures of how it looks after I do so.

Bit behind, so I’ll just recap the final days of our vacation.

Day 5 (Friday) we decided to just take it easy. We were kind of worn out of having to commute 2 hours one-way into downtown, so we decided not to on Friday. Our plans were to go see the Lincoln Park zoo, but we figured hey, we can see animals all the time – really what were we going to see that we couldn’t see at the Cincinnati zoo?

We drove up to go see the LDS Chicago Temple. It was cool to show the kids around the temple grounds – they seemed somewhat excited. We got some good pictures too. While we were in the area, we stopped by the Chicago LDS bookstore. It took quite the Googling to try and find out what it was called. I knew that I would know it when I saw it, and sure enough I eventually stumbled upon “Words of Wisdom bookstore” and I knew it must be it.

We browsed around for awhile – we ended up just getting a miniature Children’s songbook for Amy. There were a lot of things that looked nice, but everything was just so expensive. I had the idea that someone should start an LDS lending library. Just like the regular library, but it would have church books. I’d imagine that in Utah or places out west, that you could get books like the Work and the Glory set, or The Other Side of Heaven, or stuff like that out of the regular library. Not so much here. But it would be neat to be able to I think….

Anyways, Friday night we just hung out and swum and such. We did notice a building right next to our hotel that looked suspiciously like an LDS chapel and what do you know, it was.

Saturday we were out bright and early. Packed, dressed, ate and were on the road by 8:30. There shouldn’t be any traffic on 8:30 on a Saturday morning, right? Right? WRONG! Madness pretty much. We headed into downtown on 290 East, and it was pretty smooth sailing for awhile, but it got so bad that I got off the highway, headed south to I-55 on local roads and took I-55 into downtown and then 94/90/80 south. I-55 was pretty clear going into downtown so I’m guessing there must have been an accident or something on 290.

Lots of rain on the turnpike heading to Cleveland. From what I hear, there was lots of rain all week back in Ohio – we hardly had any in Chi-town. It rained so hard while we were driving that cars pulled off to the side of the road, which seems kind of silly to me. Silly for one in that it wasn’t really raining THAT bad (though it was coming down pretty good), but it just doesn’t seem to make sense, especially when driving east. Here’s my rationale – weather typically travels west to east, and not as fast as a car (i.e. not 60 mph). So if you pull over, yes, eventually it will pass by you, but then as you continue to drive east, you’ll just catch it AGAIN! Anyway we got to my parents house around 5 and ate and hung out.

We drove home Sunday and it was pretty uneventful. We were glad everyone was back in their own beds….

Overall, a good trip. Budget broke down:

Lodging:
Hotel: $749.25

Food:
Ice Cream: $2.53
Lou Malnati’s Pizza: $26.17
Milk / Bread: $4.05

Entertainment:
Children’s Song book: $15.10
2 Cubs Tickets: $55.10
Museum of Science and Industry: FREE
Children’s Museum: FREE

Transportation:
Gas: $33.98
Gas: $26.43
Tolls: $9.90
CTA Visitor passes: $40.00

Total: $962.51, 38 dollars under budget, though I suppose it could be argued that some of the supplies I bought before the trip could be counted here (I didn’t because I bought them with gift cards I’ve accumulated). Or it could be argued that the song book shouldn’t be counted since that wasn’t really a vacation expenditure (similarly I didn’t count the Harry Potter or Seinfeld DVDs that I bought with Garnier gift cards at Borders on the way up)

I think that next time we are going to try smaller vacations. I think a week is just too long with kids this young. Maybe instead of 1 1-week $1000 vacation we’ll try 2 3-day $500 vacations or something of the sort. Now we just have to decide where to go next…. Memphis? St. Louis? Atlanta?

We decided that Amy, Joel and Carolyn would stay back while Scott and I made the trek into downtown. We left around 9:30 and took the blue line to Grand, and the #65 Grand over to Michigan Avenue. So…. apparently Chicago has double-decker streets. I did not know that, and being the road-geek that I am, I would have expected to know that. A brief history on that – there are many double-decker (and a few triple-decker) streets in downtown Chicago. We sort of have one on the Brent Spence bridge here in Cincinnati, but here, southbound traffic goes on the top, and northbound on the bottom. In the streets in Chicago, the bottom layer is 2-way and the top layer is 2-way too. It’s quite odd. Apparently, in the 1850s the folks of Chicago decided that their streets were always muddy and such, so they raised them 5-7 feet above where they were to allow for proper sewers and drainage. The first double-decker street was Michigan Avenue in the 1910s. If you’re interested in more info, follow the link above…

Anyway, we wandered around downtown for awhile looking at the double-deckerness of it all, and then made a foray into the Lego Store. I wasn’t really impressed. I mean, they did have some pretty cool things, like a life-sized Darth Vader made out of Legos, but (at least my impression was that) it had a huge area for kids to play and experiment, and that just wasn’t the case. It had some small areas, but nothing too exciting. Scott did enjoy playing with some Thomas the Tank Engine trainset / lego pieces, but we didn’t do a whole lot there. We ate lunch at the mall-type area there, and then since we had some time to kill, took a tour on the “El” in the Loop. We did a circuit and then got on the Red Line going north to Wrigley Field. The train was VERY crowded – standing room only. I had to pull the old line of telling Scott “Sorry Scott there’s no room for you to sit; all the seats are taken.” A college kid heard me and offered her seat, but she was too far away for us to get to it. Eventually some folks got off and we got to sit.

Wrigley Field was cool. We almost missed the first part of the game because we got there a bit late, and the line for Will Call was long. I was a bit afraid that something was going to go wrong, but it didn’t, and we made it just in time. We had seats behind first base on the main level, underneath the upper deck (i.e. in the shade). Really good seats. Cubs spanked the Pirates, 5-1. Mark Prior threw a 2-hitter. There was some good excitement – 2 good plays at the plate, both outs (Neifi Perez trying to score from first on a double, and Derrek Lee trying to score from third on a wild pitch). Overall, Scott seemed pretty bored, but he was a trooper, and I have to say it was a very neat experience taking my son to a ballgame.

Bus from Wrigley was very crowded as well. Pulled the same trick and got us a seat. Scott fell asleep in my arms and slept most of the way. I was quite nervous about missing the Blue Line stop, but shouldn’t have been. We were up in the front, and as I was walking down to the train level, I saw a train coming in, so I busted in there (carrying a sleeping Scott) and we just made it on.

We decided to go out to eat, and so we stopped by Lou Malnati’s pizza, which is a big local chain. There was one right by our hotel, which we found to our dismay was just a carryout / delivery one. So we decided to just order one and I drove back and picked it up 30 minutes later. Kids didn’t seem to like it, but I thought it was good.

Wednesday morning started off bright and early. Everyone kind of ended up getting up at about 6:35. We had set an alarm for 7, in the hopes of getting an earlier start on the day than the day before. We went and ate breakfast and when we returned to our room we realized we had forgoten to turn the alarm off, just like I used to do to Cliff when I’d go to Cleveland, all those years ago…

We took a different way to the park and ride, and even accounting for the fact that we got a bit lost, it did not appear to be faster than the original way. We got off the Blue line at a different stop, and took the #65 to Navy Pier. We had to wait at the bus stop for probably 10-15 minutes before the bus came (foreshadowing!), but we still made it to the Children’s Museum at about 10:05, just after it opened. There was no line to get tickets, though I do wish these places would make up their collective mind about whether we (as members of a reciprocal museum) should go to the regular ticket line or the line for museum members. Yesterday at the Museum of Science and Industry we had to wait in the regular line (it’s the same at COSI) But today, they told us to go to the members line. It didn’t really matter since there wasn’t really a line at either place.

We toured the museum for awhile, and then went out and ate lunch in the food court and walked around for awhile on the pier. While we were planning this vacation, we had talked about doing the Amazing Funhouse maze, but we decided to axe it. Same thing as the Cardboard Box syndrome I blogged about in my last post. It would probably be fun, yes, but would it be $30 fun for 15 minutes? Just seemed like we could find better things to spend our money on.

After lunch, we went back to the museum and wandered around some more. It was a much better experience than yesterday’s trip to MSI. The winning exhibit by far was called Big Backyard. It’s a little hard to explain, but there were white sheets (kind of like what you would pull down to use an overhead projector), and then projectors of some sort shooting things on to the sheet. Somehow it could tell when someone was standing in front of the projector, and it interacted with the shadow that you projected on the sheet. There were two different kinds. The first one projected butterflies and other insects, and if you stood still, a butterfly would “perch” on your shadow. You can kind of see an example of this at the link I posted above. The other one was more fun – it “dripped” beads down from the top of the sheet, and you could “catch” them by cupping your hands or other parts of your body (or props that they had there). I’m pretty sure Amy could have stayed there doing that for the entire day. Luckily we didn’t find this till the end or I doubt we would have gotten them to go anywhere else… A close 2nd as far as exhibit coolness, at least for the kids, was a working traffic light / crosswalk symbol that just alternated green/yellow/red and walk/don’t walk continuously, so, you know, cardboard box.

The #65 bus that we took to the museum was taking forever to show up as we waited in front of the museum, so we took a #124 “Navy Pier” bus that got us back to the blue line. Oh, one other thing I want to mention is that to Amy and Scott, the hotel == Chicago. Whenever we’re downtown or at the museum or on the train or wherever, they always talk about “going to Chicago” which means the hotel. “Let’s go to Chicago and go swimming!” “Time to go to Chicago and eat dinner!”, etc. No amount of telling them that we’re already in Chicago will convince them. It’s quite funny.

Well that last post was getting a bit long, so I thought I’d write a separate one for last night. The night went much better. We stuck Joel in his crib in one of those bathrooms, and that seemed to work out pretty well. That allowed us to sleep on the bed, which was much better than the smelly fold-out couch.

We also decided that not all of us would go to see the Cubs on Thursday. There were a couple of reasons for that:

• We hadn’t gotten tickets yet and there was limited availability. When I looked a few days before we left there was nothing available, but last night I was able to find a few.
• Even though I (somewhat deservedly) get ribbed for being a cheapskate, I don’t mind spending money when it’s going to return good entertainment value. For instance I think spending the money on this hotel was a good idea. But realistically, Amy, Joel and Carolyn (mostly because of Amy and Joel) were not really going to be able to enjoy the game, so spending $25 each for them didn’t seem to be a good idea.
• A corollary to #2 is a little something I like to call “Cardboard Box syndrome”. You know, you give a kid a toy and they’re more interested in the box it came in. And while I do believe that as parents you need to make your kids enjoy new experiences, since a lot of times they don’t really KNOW what they want or would enjoy, I don’t believe it’s necessary to always buy your kids tons of stuff for them to enjoy themselves. In fact, if you asked Amy or Scott their favorite thing about this vacation, they would probably say that it was swimming in the pool
• Speaking of Joel, we weren’t sure quite what to do with him. He doesn’t need a seat being an infant, but if we don’t get him a seat, then we have nowhere to put his car seat. Which makes it quite hard to get him to sleep, which might make the whole outing a bit of madness.

So, in the end, we got 2 seats in Section 219. Hopefully it will be fun.

First of all, I wrote a nice long post detailing yesterday but lo, Blogger ate it. I will try to recreate it, but can’t promise to do it justice. Just think of how funny I am, and I’m sure that you’ll be able to imagine that my other post was 40 times as funny

Anyway, we got a bit of a late start to the day. As I mentioned before, it was a bit of a rough night. I was laying in the bed and I could see the light through the curtains. I sat there in half-conscious mode for awhile, trying to determine what time it was. There were no clocks of any sort within viewable distance, though, since I wasn’t wearing my glasses, viewable distance is about 6 inches.

After eating breakfast (pancakes and eggs), we came back to the room to get ready. In the interests of time, Carolyn sacrificed a shower to be “smelly” Carolyn, but it was still 9:15 before we set on our way. Our multi-modal trip to the museum went as follows:

1. 35 minute drive to the park and ride. Actually it was a kiss and ride. Parked there, and paid the $3 in quarters to the little machine, and went inside the terminal. There was another tourist group from ‘Sconsin buying their CTA visitor passes, so we had to wait for awhile till it was our turn. Their website lists 1, 2, 3, and 5 day passes, but this kiosk only had 1, 2, 3, and 7 day options. Since we are going to be here 4 days, I was already annoyed to have to buy a 5 day pass, but since that was not an option, I bought 2 7-day passes for $20 each. It did not occur to me until we were already on the train that I should have bought a 1-day and a 3-day for $17 each.
2. As it turns out, we just missed the train, but another one came by in 7 minutes or so. The train ride was fairly uneventful, as train rides go. I thought it was pretty cool, and Scott enjoyed looking at the passing trains.
3. We got a bit lost making our way from the train platform up to the street level, but eventually walked the 1-2 blocks to our bus stop. We had to catch either the 2, 6, 10 bus (or the 28 but that didn’t stop where we were). We didn’t have to wait long, but while we were waiting, an apparently homeless guy approached me, but instead of asking for any money or anything, just asked where we were going. When I told him we were catching this bus right here, he just left. It was somewhat weird. Right after he left, the #6 bus pulled up, but right behind it was the #10, which, given that its Route name is “Museum of Science and Industry” took us right to the front door of the museum (the #6 would have let us out a block away)

Brief rant on public transportation. The trip ended up taking us 2 hours. And I think that this was a fairly normal trip. We could have driven about 20 minutes to take a METRA train which would have also taken us into downtown, but I suspect that would have taken just as long, and we still would have had to take a bus after the train ride. Plus METRA isn’t covered by our visitor pass, so it would have cost $5 for each of us (one-way). And I am now coming to the realization that public transportation is just not viable except in certain rare cases. I voted for the light rail in Cincinnati (though it went down to heinous defeat), but I don’t think it would really work. People are just not going to be willing to spend 2 hours commuting. I certainly wouldn’t. Though maybe that’s just a Cincinnati perspective. When we got back to the hotel, I was talking to the lady at the front desk. I told her about our trip and how it lasted 2 hours. She asked if that was just from when we got on the train and I said that it was from when we left the hotel. She said, “Well, that’s not bad then”, so I joked that in 2 hours I could drive from Cincinnati to Columbus! She laughed and said that in Chicago you could drive 2 hours and just be in traffic.

Anyway, the museum. When we got there, there was a massive line to buy tickets. All in all it took another 45 minutes to buy tickets, and then we ate lunch, and by the time we got into the museum, it was 12:30 p.m. And as for the museum, it wasn’t that great, which was very disappointing. This was the one thing that I most wanted to do (besides Wrigley). I remember going with my parents, and it was a lot of fun. So I don’t know if it was just because now I’m an adult, or if the exhibits are not as good, or if it was having to deal with 3 kids, but it just wasn’t that good. It was okay, but nothing spectacular. Hopefully, the Children’s Museum will be better….