Gamelan

One of the few things I really enjoyed in college was playing in a Javanese gamelan ensemble. One of the colleges I went to, a small college in the Midwest of all places, actually had a full gamelan (made out of metal from a decommissioned ship, no less), and every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon during the two years I was there I crammed into a tiny room in the music building along with a bunch of other hippie-ish students, stepped carefully over the instruments which were packed in about as tightly as possible, and banged on loud pieces of metal for an hour or two (you can actually see a video of us performing with dancers on YouTube — well, you can see the dancers, and hear the gamelan orchestra, in which I would have been playing.

Anyway, since we were driving by, I thought I'd take the kids in to see the instruments, especially as S is now taking drum lessons and in general, likes to bang on things. The college has since built a much larger music building, so the instruments are laid out with much more space — safe to let a couple of kids around:

Midwest retail

For whatever reason, yesterday as we were driving through Wisconsin and Iowa, a lot of retail signs caught my fancy. Because, I mean, who could turn down eating at "Beef & Etc."?


And, let's just cut to the chase about what brings white people into Mexican restaurants:


The most impressive range of services was available at this laundromat in La Crosse:


And what could improve a meal like "pleasoning"


We went looking for creemees on the road in Iowa, and found their strangely colorful cousin, the "Flavor Burst," in Elkader:


And finally, I just couldn't resist taking a picture of this huge plastic strawberry in Strawberry Point (IA):

Wisconsin

Yesterday, we left Chicago for a trip through Wisconsin. First, we drove up to Madison, where H had spent several years in the early 90's pursuing an advanced degree in Sociology, otherwise known as "The Painful Elaboration of the Obvious." We visited the UW Sociology building, which had this lovely decor on the walls, "Man: Creator of Order and Disorder":


S practiced his TA section-leading skills:


After spending the bulk of the day in Madison, we drove up to the far north of the state to visit one of our friends, a former union organizer sister who now has a large organic garden and does some other odd jobs. Today, we went out on a canoe:


S found a big stick, and practiced his "Red Guard" stance:


For equity's sake, here's a picture of the older sister:


After an hour or so on the lake, we went hiking/tick gathering, and found this fascinating micro-ecosystem in a truck tire rut:

Brick city

After leaving Detroit on Saturday, we spent a few hours in Ann Arbor and then drove on to Chicago. And what did we choose to do in that city of big shoulders and fascinating labor history? That's right, we drove out to the suburbs to visit the Legoland Discovery Center in Schaumburg:


There was a Lego Obama:


And a replica of the downtown Chicago skyline (later in the day, we had dinner with a friend and trade union brother who took us on a guided tour of the real skyline)




Of course there was a place to build your own Lego city buildings:


And, what theme park (even one in a suburban mall) would be complete without a ride (the things they are riding in are replicas of a certain Lego vehicle, and they pedal to raise themselves up):

US Social Forum (with kids)

After a couple of days travelling through Ontario, we spent much of the last week in Detroit for the 2010 US Social Forum.

I helped represent my union at the World Social Forums in 2002 in Porto Alegre, Brazil and 2006 in Caracas, Venezuela, and was part of a delegation of about a dozen folks from the Vermont Workers' Center who attended the first US Social Forum in Atlanta in 2007. So I was not going to miss the 2nd USSF in Detroit.

However, having largely replaced myself in both organizations, I was going in to this one with a lot fewer responsibilities, so rather than go crazy trying to visit all the workshops and be hyper-political all the time, I thought I'd integrate it into a family vacation, bring the kids, hang out, etc. We marched in the opening march (above), window-shopped at all the tables for radical posters and literature and so forth. H took the kids out into Detroit on a "work bridage" to do some work on one of Detroit's many urban gardens:


The kids even went to a couple of workshops that they enjoyed: one on writing run by the folks at Rethinking Schools and an anti-militarism fashion show.

And, of course, a bit of running through fountains: