Woke up, it was a Chelsea morning...

There was a bit of excitement around the University this week as Chelsea Clinton stopped in to stump for her mom. I went over to check it out and I was glad I did. I remember Chelsea as kind of a funny looking kid, but she is really a quite attractive young lady now. She was only twenty minutes late which was remarkable because these things are notorious for running hours behind schedule. After a mercifully brief introduction by the University president and the son of a local pol, she started right in asking for students’ questions.

There were several hundred people gathered in an atrium that is five stories high, so there were people ringing the balconies as well as sitting on the floor in front of the risers. A real Secret Service nightmare. The first character to ask a question wanted her to compare Hillary and Obama, but she put him in his place by insisting that she had come to talk about her mom, not anyone else. I got some pretty good photos of the event, and after a few minutes I had to get back to the office.

As you all undoubtedly know, we are hosting the next Democratic debate on Feb. 26. We just got word at the end of the day on Friday that classes will be cancelled on that day. It’s not a very good deal for us because we all still have to go to work, which I don’t mind, but more importantly, that day falls smack in the middle of our big deal Spring Career Week. We have several workshops scheduled that day that we hope we can move, but if not, we will have to cancel them. Last year it was a snowstorm that caused classes to be cancelled during Career Week. We can’t seem to catch a break around here.

Max.is.so.tall. He was sitting in his little red plastic chair tonight and his knees were up to his chin. We asked him if he is the tallest in his class. He answered, “No, Miss Barlett is.” (We didn’t ask if he was the tallest kid in his class, so he answered the question we asked.) We started the evening with pierogies, as Max wolfed down three of them. He was especially looking forward to salting them, since he’s ordinarily not allowed to salt his food, probably a good idea. Then we moved to “Gooey Louie”, a particularly disgusting game, appealing to a five year old’s sense of humor. It required pulling boogers out of Louie’s nose until his head explodes. We then played a short round of the Memory Game with “Finding Nemo” characters on the cards. Then Shane and Max started on building a robot. There is no end to the fun around here. I bought eight cases of water for work, and Max immediately saw the possibilities: “Let’s build a water fort!”

On Saturday afternoon Kathy and I drove out to her sister's house to watch a movie on their new 52” big screen TV. The movie was “Across the Universe”, a kind of musical love story written with Beatles’ songs to tell the story. In short, it was wonderful. It tracked the characters through the Sixties, and we had fun picking out symbols and historical artifacts, plays on words and funny scenes and secret messages. The characters were named after characters in Beatles songs. It avoided kitsch when other movies might stumble, and even handled the psychedelic scenes without embarrassing us. Like my brother in law said, it was the best movie no one ever saw. Later he cooked up some great hamburgers and we had a pleasant dinner.

Today is the Social Justice Social up at church. We’ll have about 30 people from our group, counting spouses and such. It’s warm rainy day, so it’s good day to do something like this.