Tom, Jackson, and Holden

Upon leaving Chicago, we drove back to Michigan via Indiana. Around lunchtime, we stopped to eat and to take a (not so) small detour. We had seen signs on the highway for the Indiana Dunes State Park and decided to stop and see some dunes since we were near Lake Michigan. We entered the park into the GPS and set off. Straight for the National Park Service park headquarters. We got directions to the park visitor center and set off again.

When we finally found the visitor center, I discovered the 3Dune Challenge. The 3Dune Challenge is to hike to the top of each of the three dunes in the park. It’s exactly the kind of semi-arbitrary accomplishment that appeals precisely to my semi-arbitrary personality. There’s no real reason why you should hike three dunes other than to say you hiked them all, but you do get something out of it – a hike, some nice views, a good story to tell afterwards. It’s like why I’ve been watching musicals for the past seven months and why I do things like hike twenty miles in a day for fun.

On the beach

It was hot, and we intended to walk the beach for awhile, maybe see a dune, but (when doing anything with me, there’s always a but) then we walked up the first dune. Since we were already up there, I voted to keep going and summit the other two dunes as well. Let me make it clear that I did not force anyone to do anything like keep hiking in sun/humidity, but we were already one third of the way to hiking all three dunes, so why not? Let it also never be said that I don’t give good answers for why I do things.

Back to the dunes. We hiked all three of them. I had just spent over three days in Chicago moving my brother’s apartment, watching him graduate, and eating while surrounded by concrete and diesel fumes. I needed some sweat, dirt, and handfuls of sand in my hiking shoes. Well, I didn’t really need the sand in my hiking shoes, but it was an unnegotiable add on to the 3Dune Challenge. Round trip, from the parking lot to the dunes back to the car, it took about an hour and a half without rushing. If that was my local state park, I would be back over there trying to see how fast I could do it, hiking multiple laps, summitting while carrying a twenty pound sack of potatoes, etc., because we’ve established those are the kinds of things I do for no reason other than I thought it would be a good idea.

There were more trails that we didn’t get to hike because we needed to be on our way to Michigan, but based on the parts we did see, it’s worth stopping by. If you have more time than we did, you might even be able to complete the challenge and lounge on the beach.

Proof that we made it to the top of all three dunes. And who what Tom, Jackson, and Holden are.

Chicago Not The Musical

When I arrive in Chicago and get picked up at the bus stop by my brother and father, the first order of business is not “have a nice dinner” or “relax at the hotel.” No, my first task is to load as much of my brother’s apartment as possible into our rented van. I spend the next two hours hauling books, clothes, and furniture down a flight and a half of stairs, because who needs elevators? After packing the van, my brother went out for dinner with his friends and I ate McDonald’s oatmeal after parking the van at a garage that cost more than a week’s worth of groceries. Finally, we walked over to the hotel where I settled in on my saggy sofa bed to watch Mexico beat Honduras 3-0 in World Cup qualifying.

The next day, my options are not “visit a museum” or “see a show” but inspect my brother’s new apartment and spend the rest of the day moving all his things into it. Except that wasn’t really an option because there was no “or.” The apartment was nice. It also cost a multiple of my yearly salary. Which wasn’t really a surprise.

Chicago River at night.  And buildings.

The following day is graduation. I again have no options for how to spend the day. I also accidentally delete my pictures from the previous three days before Convocation. And as an added bonus, my computer has been refusing to turn on. But the graduation ceremony is a reasonable length, the sun does not beat down on us like it’s the Sahara at noontime, and the clouds do not weep like they’ve just broken up with the love of their life. The speaker is a chemistry professor who gives a nice speech about learning. The most puzzling aspect is where they found all the bagpipers to lead the processional and recessional.

The University of Chicago has an additional afternoon ceremony where each student is recognized and given their diploma. Before that, they feed all the families lunch. It was an impressive feat, even if my lettuce was wilty. I did get a chocolate chip cookie though. The interesting part of the diploma ceremony is that the students are split up by the dorm they lived in during freshman year. Some of them haven’t seen each other in three years, but they graduate together. Cornell does the smaller ceremonies by major, which would seem to make more sense to me, but I’m not a graduation ceremony planner.

Afternoon graduation.  Note the absence of heat-induced mirages or small lakes of rainwater.

Anyway, we sat through the diploma ceremony. It was hot. Several students had their names severely mispronounced and one girl had the wrong major announced. After that, we wandered around campus for awhile then went out for dinner. Peking duck. (The night before was ramen and I had tempura udon; the night after was dim sum. So my brother knows his food places. I would later feed my parents handmade sandwiches crafted from only the finest grocery store ingredients.)

Sunday was our last day in Chicago; we visited my brother’s church and walked around a bit. At the end of the weekend, I did get to see a bit of Chicago, finally set foot on my brother’s campus, and eat some good food. So it was a worthwhile trip, even if I didn’t get to see any of the museums or spend much time in the parks (one of them had a climbing wall).

Finally, please note that this has been a post about Chicago without a picture of the bean (Cloud Gate – made of 168 steel plates and weighing 110 short tons, in case anyone else was wondering¹). That’s because I accidentally deleted my pictures of the bean.

¹Also under the category of things people might be wondering: because Cloud Gate is hollow, it weighs 99.5% less than a solid 10 m x 13 m x 20 m rectangular prism (dimensions found online) or 99.2% less than a cylinder with a diameter of 10 meters and a length of 20 meters (a rectangular prism overestimates the volume occupied by the bean). This assumes a stainless steel density of 8000 kg/m³.

Yet Another Travel Misadventure Story

In my latest adventure, I visited five cities in three states in ten days. My first stop was Chicago, Illinois, and to get there I took the bus, which sounds innocuous enough until we remember that this is me we’re talking about. One of my many talents is being plagued with every sort of travel delay possible, except not normal things like refueling or flat tires. No, I find myself waiting at the bus stop or stuck on the tarmac for things like losing the deicer coin flip and stopping to look at a snake.

This time, my journey began at the bus stop. I decided to take the Ann Arbor bus system (AATA) instead of the U of M buses so I could get off at the transit center and directly transfer to my next bus instead of having to walk with my bags from another stop. I even checked to make sure I had more than one minute to transfer. A couple minutes after I arrived at the bus stop, I saw a bus pass by on the opposite site of the road. Well, I thought, worst case scenario is that I have to wait for that bus to loop around the end of the route and come back to pick me up. A few minutes later, I went to the AATA website to track my bus. The site said the next bus was coming in less than ten minutes.

For the next ten minutes, the site kept telling me that the next bus was arriving in ten minutes. Finally, I stopped checking for a few minutes and watched to see if the bus was coming at its scheduled time after all. Sometimes the site is wrong. The next time I checked, the next arriving bus was updated to the bus scheduled after the bus I was waiting for. The bus I saw on the other side of the road had disappeared from the tracking site. I spent the next twenty minutes waiting for the bus, but I wasn’t that concerned. Yet. When the bus eventually arrived, the driver careened through the streets of Ann Arbor trying to make up a half hour delay on a ten minute ride.

I got off at one end of the transit center and walked over to the other side to catch my transfer. The bus was already there, but the driver wasn’t. As I was standing there waiting for the driver to arrive, I realized that my rain jacket, which I had slung over my messenger bag, was gone. I retraced my steps hauling my backpack, a messenger bag, and a sleeping bag, unsure if I left the jacket on the bus or it slipped off while I was walking around the transit center. When I rounded the corner around the building, I could see my jacket waving in the wind. The driver had helpfully hung it on a post. I went and grabbed my jacket, double knotted it to the strap of my bag, and circled back around the building. Thirty seconds later, the bus driver showed up, let everyone onto the bus, and drove off.

The last time I took a bus to this area of Ann Arbor, I missed my stop. This time, I watched every stop closely and got off at the correct stop. My next task was to find the pickup point for the bus to Chicago. The email said that we were boarding at parking lot pylon fifteen. I gazed over the vast expanse of the parking lot and located the nearest pylon. In large, clear numerals, it said fifty-eight. In disbelief that I could be forty-three pylons away from the bus, I peered into the distance and saw pylon six. I figured that had to be nearer than fifty-eight, so I started dragging all my things in that direction. As I approached pylon fifteen, I saw no sign of the bus, but there were other people waiting with luggage, so at least I hadn’t missed the bus.

It showed up on time; I lugged all my things on and spent the next four and a half hours in transit to Chicago. We arrived at the precise minute listed on our tickets.

Chicago River and buildings

The Sound of (More) Music

The next batch of musicals. Including two more live musicals (because they’re already filmed, and so end up on DVD), two classic-ish (depends on your definition) musicals, and three Disney-related musicals.

Into the Woods (2014 movie) – The plot mashes elements of “Cinderella,” “Jack and the Beanstalk,” “Little Red Riding Hood,” and “Rapunzel” with the story of a baker and his wife trying to have a child. I realized halfway through that I had previously seen Into the Woods Jr., which cuts the entire second act, so there were still a lot of things about to happen. It was a bit dark, but I was pleasantly surprised by the cast. I did not know James Corden could sing, though I guess he does host carpool karaoke. . . . The princes were wonderfully dense (see “Agony”). Also, Meryl Streep as the witch was pretty fabulous.
Notable songs: “Prologue: Into the Woods,” “Giants in the Sky,” “Agony”

Peter Pan Live! (2014 live TV production) – This was based on a musical adaptation of Peter and Wendy, J. M. Barrie’s play. I haven’t seen the Disney movie in years, but I remember it being at least somewhat decent. That said, Peter and Wendy did not make a great musical. Most of the songs, excepting the pirate features, were forgettable or not that exciting musically or lyrically. At least the choreography in the pirate songs was fun to watch. Neverland was very Technicolor. I don’t think I would have gone quite so cotton-candy-colored, but that’s a production choice. Also on the production side, the commercial cuts were terrible. The scenes would cut out while the orchestra was still holding their last note. That’s not how cutoffs work.
Notable songs: “I Won’t Grow Up,” maybe?

Mary Poppins (1964 movie) – Another Disney movie I hadn’t seen in years, and I was surprised by how good it still is. The scene inside the chalk drawing is still my favorite.
Notable songs: “A Spoonful of Sugar,” “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious,”
“Chim Chim Cher-ee”

The Music Man (1962 movie) – I’ve seen either the Jr. or full version of this performed live, so I knew the basic story – Harold Hill sells marching band instruments and uniforms to towns, collects the money, and flees before everyone realizes he knows nothing about teaching music, except this time he falls in love. Robert Preston is great as Hill and Winthrop is child Ron Howard. If you’ve ever wanted to see Ron Howard as an 8-year-old singing, this is your chance. I didn’t realize the number of songs I was familiar with, but it was almost half the musical numbers.
Notable songs: “Rock Island,”¹ “Seventy-six Trombones,” “Pick-a-Little, Talk-a-Little,” “Gary, Indiana,” “The Wells Fargo Wagon,” “Shipoopi,” “Till There Was You”

The Wiz Live! (2015 live TV production) – Like Peter Pan, this is another musical where I just don’t like the musical itself. The Wiz is a soul/R&B reworking of The Wizard of Oz, and it’s well done and produced, but I remain partial to the 1939 movie.
Notable songs: “Ease on Down the Road”

More of a split decision this time. Into the Woods was unexpectedly well done, while Peter Pan and The Wiz aren’t must sees, in my opinion, and Mary Poppins and The Music Man are two standards from the golden age of musicals.

¹This is a very clever song. It uses the natural sounds and rhythms of the words to suggest the motion of a train even as the actors remain stationary (in the stage production). “Comedy Tonight” in Forum (see previous musical post) does a similar thing where Sondheim decreases the number of syllables in a series of rhyming words to speed up the feel of the song without increasing the tempo. These observations courtesy of The Secret Life of the American Musical by Jack Viertel.

Roses are Red

Peonies are too

I actually go places
Who wants a gallon of glue?

Obviously I should quit my day job and become a poet. No, I really shouldn’t. But my point is that I do, on occasion, go places and do things worthy of being written about. I do also have a bunch of musicals to review, but last month I left my apartment to go on an excursion to see the peonies. Apparently peony breeding is A Thing that is a Big Deal to some people, and the University of Michigan arboretum has a very large collection of peony breeds, so one evening after work I biked over to see what all the fuss was about.

Some of the peony beds + people

It turns out I timed my trip correctly because the online peony tracker later told me I was there during maximum bloom. I had no idea what I was looking at, but it was rather pretty. There was a small crowd of people meandering amongst the peony beds, and I joined them for a few laps around the garden. After a bit of this, I decided to wander around the rest of the arboretum. It’s not huge, but there’s enough space that you can find some pretty quiet areas away from the hospital complex/railway tracks/river filled with tubers/kayakers paddling being carried down the river by the current.

I found a nice wooded spot (Heathdale) filled with ericaceous and Appalachian plants. Ericaceous plants dislike alkaline (basic) soil and prefer acidic soil and include rhododendrons, heather, and northern highbush blueberry. Note that I did not pay attention to any of that information while I was actually there; I looked it up on Wikipedia as I was writing this post. I also walked out to the edge of the prairie but I was ready for dinner at that point so I walked there, looked at it for a minute, and walked back to my bike. It was flat and grassy and I suppose prairie-like.

More peonies

In contrast to the arboretum at Cornell, Michigan provides bike racks at each of the entrances. Parking, however, can be a challenge. I’ve written about this before, but the arboretum at Cornell (Newman Arboretum) has exactly zero bike racks and over a dozen parking lots. The parking lots are scattered throughout Newman Arboretum so you can drive through it; you can’t drive (or bike) through Nichols Arboretum at Michigan and have to find parking in the surrounding streets. In terms of size, according to the internet, Nichols Arboretum is actually larger than Newman Arboretum, but it doesn’t feel that way. The Nichols Arboretum is hemmed in by the U of M hospital on one side and the river/railroad tracks on the other. Newman Arboretum is surrounded by hundreds more acres of natural areas, including the land the Cayuga Trail passes through. Minus the lack of proper bike racks, I still prefer the Cornell arboretum, though the peonies were very nice.