Road Trip!

Now that Mike and Tammy are relocating to Raleigh, North Carolina, it's time to start planning a new road trip. We have done two road trips to Portland, Oregon while they have been living there, hitting all the major scenic hot spots like Mt. Rushmore, Yellowstone National Park, and the Corn Palace (look it up - it's pretty cool) in Mitchell, South Dakota. We have also spent some time (and money) in Reno and driven through the Bonneville Salt Flats of Utah. We have one last trip to Portland planned for Mike's graduation, but unfortunately we're flying out because of time issues. It will be sad to say goodbye to Portland - we really like the area and it's close to my brother and sister-in-law - but now we are planning a trip east to the Atlantic. Well, not right now. Now we are getting excited about Nate and Dana's wedding this summer in Chicago. But when we do plan to head east, we already have one destination picked out.  

When we were vacationing in St. Louis many years ago with the Lighthalls and the Robinsons, I picked up a sign that I kept on my desk at school for twenty years. It read "No one gets in to see the wizard! Not no one, not no how!" It is a manifestation of my enjoyment of all things Ozian. I loved watching the Wizard of Oz movie when I was younger. Back in those pre-cable days, it ran on CBS exactly once a year. There were no recorders so if you wanted to see it, you had to be planted in front of the TV while it ran. You couldn't buy it from Amazon or even in the video store - neither of those existed in 1960. It was definitely "must-watch" TV. I read some of the original books when I was growing up, then bought the collection for my Kindle and have been working my way through it again. There used to be a Wizard of Oz Museum north of Valparaiso, Indiana, on our way to Ohio, but it closed a few years ago.  

I was excited, then, to find that west of Raleigh, North Carolina, on Beech Mountain, there is an abandoned Wizard of Oz theme park. I first read about it on Roadtrippers, which is my go-to road trip app. The Land of Oz was opened in 1970 with the intention of keeping the ski lodge employees working during the summer months (it's up in the mountains). It got 20,000 visitors a day at first, but fell victim to a fire in 1976 which destroyed some of the Oz memorabilia, then closed in 1980. Several years later, the theme park opened for one weekend only to allow former employees a chance to get together again. October 5th of this year is the 20th year of the "Autumn at Oz" celebration. The rest of the year the park is closed.  

But there is a loophole. Tucked away on the grounds of The Land of Oz is a house built to model Dorothy Gale's house in Kansas and it is for rent year round. For $165 a weeknight, you have access to the grounds of the theme park. 

And even though the park is in bad shape, there are still lots of things to see. So, sometime in the next year, "We're off to see the Wizard, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz." I just hope it can live up to the splendor and awesomeness of the Corn Palace. 

WHS Commencement Address, 2014

It's that time of year again. WHS graduated last Sunday; the two middle schools graduate next Tuesday. I have been giving the commencement address for the last twelve years, with a couple of years off to go see Mike and Nate graduate from college. There is concern that you take the right tone with the speech - it needs to be for the parents of the graduates as well as the graduates. But I'm sure very few of you would remember your high school commencement speaker or her/his text for the day. So although there is some pressure, it is not overwhelming. Just try to be a little funny and finish quickly. Unfortunately for the people I know, the commencement address is at times a story, and so my family, usually Nate and Mike, often appear in the story in an exaggerated way. At other times I just simply make something up to fit the theme. I'm a first level Keillor in this dungeons and dragons game: I can't help it. Unfortunately, this graduation had a cloud hanging over it: Tom Weber, who had been on the board for 19 years and is the biggest WHS booster in town was in the hospital after suffering from a stroke and would pass away that evening after graduation finished. He was always in our thoughts as we handed out diplomas. Anyway, here is this year's version.   

Commencement Address

May 18, 2014

Wauconda High School

John Armstrong

Parents, friends, faculty, and members of the graduating class of 2014:

On behalf of the District 118 School Board, I welcome you to the 98th annual commencement of Wauconda High School.

For the second time in the last five years, I received a distressing envelope in the mail from someone that was once my friend. Inside the envelope was a letter reminding me that it had been 45 years since I had graduated from high school and it was time for a high school reunion. Now, I won’t pretend that you’re thinking “45 years, Mr. Armstrong? That’s not possible.” But, in fact, 45 years ago, in a small rural town in Ohio, I sat in a seat much as you do now and listened to a commencement address. I don’t remember who gave the commencement address at my high school or what the address was about. You won’t remember yours either. By this time next week, it will be relegated to that portion of the memory devoted to your sister’s birth date and the quadratic formula.

It was thinking about that invitation to my high school reunion that made me want to talk to you today about friends. We all know what a tremendous impact your parents and the rest of your family have on you. And we are very proud of the quality of the teachers and staff here in District 118 and recognize that they have a profound influence on your lives as well. But today, I want to talk to you about friends. As my school board friend Mr. Swanson is fond of saying, “There is nothing better than a friend, unless it is a friend with doughnuts.”

I mentioned my upcoming reunion to my son, who graduated from Wauconda High School in 2001, a few weeks ago when we were visiting him in Chicago. He had missed his 10^th reunion three years earlier and was sorry about that. My son was very engaged in high school, heavily involved in sports and activities as many of you are, though not as involved in the classroom as his parents would have liked. He went to every dance and we often had kids spending weekend nights at our house. He had a group of 5 or 6 close friends, but seemed to know everybody. That was primarily a function of his extroverted nature. When he was a freshman at University of Illinois in Chicago, when we walked from his apartment to go out to dinner, I found he was on a first name basis with most of the regular homeless people in that section of Milwaukee Avenue. He made friends easily. When high school was over, though, he moved on to college and only sporadically would get together with his high school friends. Years would go by and he wouldn’t have had any contact with any of the kids he graduated with. His life changed and his friends changed, too.

Although I am not the extrovert that my son is, our experiences after high school were very similar. I left Ohio to go to college, then moved to the Chicago area right after college to go to work. When I drove from Wauconda to my old hometown to visit my parents, I might run into a former classmate at the grocery or at a restaurant, but I didn’t plan anything with my old friends when I was there. And years would pass before I would see anyone from good old Memorial High School. The only person I have stayed in touch with was the girl I went to prom with senior year, and that’s because we’ve been married for 40 years now.

I know what we write in our friends’ yearbooks in our senior year and what we say to each other when we reconvene downstairs when this ceremony is over. And you know what, it might not be true. You may end up going very different directions, and you may not see or talk to that person that is so important to you today for years at a time. And that’s OK. Just because that friendship doesn’t extend for years from now, just because you find other people to share your most important thoughts and feelings with over the next few years, doesn’t diminish in any way the importance of the friendships you have had in high school with the people sitting around you in this room. The years you spend in high school can be incredibly terrifying at times. The decisions you make every week can rebound with consequences for years to come, whether you recognize the consequences or not. And without the graduating seniors around you in this room, those four years would have been much more difficult. They have encouraged you, commiserated with you, cried with you, celebrated with you, and most importantly, they cared about you. And you cared about them. And whether you are still best friends ten years from now does not take anything away from how important they have been for the last four years.

When I go to my reunion next month and talk to people I haven’t seen since the last reunion five years ago, we will remember moments from those years together. We will tell stories only slightly embellished of things we did as teenagers and especially stories of people who for one reason or another could not attend this year. We will talk about Mr. Eversman’s Geometry class. About singing in the choir together. About being in the cast for the play “Our Town” in our junior year. And about four summers of two-a-day practices for football in the heat of August. And although we don’t say it out loud, mostly we celebrate how important we were to each other for those four years.

A friend doesn’t need to be a friend forever to be important. They just need to be a friend today.

Thank you for listening and congratulations on reaching this milestone in your life.  

What I Did Yesterday!

Anna and I have been talking about getting a new(ish) car since last October. We wanted something that would be comfortable enough for long drives and road trips. When we drive Ann's Subaru to Ohio, my knees are pretty sore by the time we get there. It's a great car for her, just a little cramped for me. My last car was a Chevy S-10 truck and we are going to hang on to it for a while. It seems with the summer finally here, we use that quite a bit to haul the mower in to get fixed, pick up paving blocks or bags of mulch from the Home Depot, and generally anything that would make a mess of the car's trunk. We'll see if we can afford the insurance for a while. Our intent is to drive the truck until it dies or gets killed, then donate it.   

Anyway, here is the car we came up with. It's a 2011 Nissan Maxima with about 29,000 miles on it. In the past we have bought new cars, but almost always in a basic version - very few of the bells and whistles that were available. I was hoping to step up a grade on this car, so getting it three years old brought it back down to my price range. It has a sunroof, keyless start and keyless entry (you just have to have the key nearby), a Bose sound system, and seats that remember where to adjust to. Which is a lot fancier than the truck or the Astro van (named the Tank by the kids) I had before the truck, neither of which had heated bun warmers. It also had the most rear seat legroom of the cars we tested, so I will now get to drive to some school board events (people keep saying "Yes" when I ask if they mind riding in the bed of the truck) instead of riding with Carey.

So, I have a new ride to cruise the local parking lots in. I watched the TV ads really closely this winter and saw all the people taking their cars up the mountain to go skiing or mountain biking or having everyone in formalwear and headed for the opera. I'm thinking I'll go to the Jewel this afternoon and buy something to grill out tonight. Woooooo!    

Our Incredibly Poor Sense of Time and History

The new version of Cosmos debuted last week on Fox TV on Sunday nights. The original version premiered on PBS in 1978 and was hosted by Carl Sagan. The new series is hosted by Neil Tyson and is a lot of fun to watch. We have seen over the last twenty years an incredible erosion in the country's attitude towards science at the same time we have seen an incredible explosion of new technology.   

Distractify.com has this amazing picture of an ad for Radio Shack from 1991:  

 

followed by "Everything in this Radio Shack ad from 1991 can now be found on a single smartphone." Go back and take a look at the ad. In the 80's and 90's, these were many of the things we had on our Christmas list: camcorder, clock radio, and a (CD) music player. Even the computer in the ad was probably less powerful than the computer on our smartphones. The guidance computer for the Apollo moon landing in 1969 had 1/6 of the processing power of a 10 year old TI-83 calculator.  

In spite of the love of technology we have, we have lost our interest in science as a nation. The representatives on the House Science Committee are often the most anti-science people in Wahington.   

From the National Memo's 2013 article about Paul Broun, representative from Georgia:  

Broun, who has served on the Science Committee since 2007, appears to believe that scientists are literally tools of the devil. In an October speech at the Liberty Baptist Church Sportsman’s Banquet, Broun declared “All that stuff I was taught about evolution and embryology and the Big Bang Theory, all that is lies straight from the pit of Hell,” Broun said.

So it's no wonder that the funding for science has gone backward for some time. I understand the stance against the idea of global warming. Many of the congressmen are kept in office through the good graces of big oil and traditional energy sources, like coal, that would lose out big time if alternative energies are funded and subsidized. If you need an example close to home for me, keep in mind that the great state of Wisconsin is now considered by some (see Charles Pierce of Esquire magazine) to be a wholly owned subsidiary of Koch Industries, with a governor and state legislature who get their marching orders directly from the Koch brothers.  

Today, radio astronomers announced new evidence that corroborates the idea of "inflation", the idea that for the obervations of the expanding universe to be as they are, there had to be a brief moment at the time of the Big Bang when the universe expanded faster than the speed of light. If so, there should be gravitational waves predicted by Einstein that should appear in the energy left over from the early universe. According to the New York Times today:  

Reaching back across 13.8 billion years to the first sliver of cosmic time with telescopes at the South Pole, a team of astronomers led by John M. Kovac of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics detected ripples in the fabric of space-time — so-called gravitational waves — the signature of a universe being wrenched violently apart when it was roughly a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second old.

I don't think it's even possible for us to get our heads around the amazing science that is described in that paragraph. 

In both the original Cosmos and the new version, the first show in the series ends with the Cosmic Calendar, a tool to help us understand our place in the Cosmos. It takes the roughly 14 billion years since the Big Bang occurred and marks it on one calendar year. If the Big Bang occurred on January 1, then the Milky Way Galaxy formed on March 15 and our sun formed on August 31. Think of the time span here - the year is almost exactly 2/3 done and the cosmos is just getting around to forming our sun. On December 14th, the first animals appear. The first mammals show up on December 20. And the first primitive humans show up on December 31 at 10:24 PM. The first use of writing appears on December 31 at 11:59 and 47 seconds PM. Sagan went on to make the comparison that if the entire Cosmic Calendar were scaled to the size of a football field, all of human history would occupy a space the size of your hand.    

Humans have been the dominant species on earth for less than a million years. Dinosaurs, on the other hand were the dominant terrestrial vertebrates for 135 million years. We have quite a ways to go to catch up.    

Note: I first started writing this almost two months ago and never quite finished it until now. The Cosmos show has been on for two months now and is a fascinating look at the universe. I would urge you to watch it if you get a chance.    

I know you're all busy, but

It's time. We haven't had a marshmallow fight list in more than two years (last post - Ann Armstrong's Top Ten Books), so we are way overdue. And if we wait until we have the time, it will be another two years gone by without a new list. I was looking at the lists this week and couldn't believe what was on my top ten movie list - what was I thinking - no Kung Fu Panda/Hustle/Anything Else Kung Fu. I missed the boat on that one. Anyway we need to do this again. Right now I have to be content with top four otters who look like Benedict Cumberbatch.

And while that is a pretty cool list, it's not doing it for me any more. So Nate and I will try to come up with a new list topic to address this summer. We can keep it to a top five list if you want to make it easier. And I know that some of you think you have more important things to do this summer like graduate or start grad school or have a wedding, but c'mon. It's like Jello - there's always room to make a new list.

Let me know if you have a topic to suggest. Try to keep it something we all have some knowledge of. So, I won't pick Top Five Photos Of Supernovas and Steve won't pick Top Five Trains That Used To Go Through Toledo. If we can't come up with anything, we'll have to go with Top Five Board Games. If you need help with that, I can give you a Clue. Sorry. Now I'm in Trouble.