Yesterday we visited the Harley-Davidson Museum in Milwaukee to see the Indiana Jones exhibit. On display until April 30th are two motorcycles ridden by Harrison Ford and Shia LaBeouf in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.
We’ve been subscribed to Netflix since November last year and we still like it a lot. We have the cheapest plan, called “1 at-a-time”, which allows us to have one DVD at a time, but we are able to watch about two movies per week this way, which is a pretty good deal for $8.99 per month. And the best thing is that we don’t even have to leave the house for it. Each DVD we receive in the mail comes in its own return envelope, which we can put back in the mailbox so the next day the mailman will take it back. It’s pretty neat. More »
We’ve been following this Hummingbird Migration Map that shows the migration of Ruby-throated Hummingbirds. The small birds winter between southern Mexico and northern Panama and they start moving north as early as January. They cross the Gulf of Mexico nonstop for up to 500 miles and once in North America they migrate at an average rate of about 20 miles per day. We’ve been following their migration on the map since they entered the United States in late February. Today we saw that they have been reported here in northern Illinois, so we rushed out and set up our Hummingbird feeder:
We just got back from a short visit to Fox Lake, just 10 minutes from where we live, to see some Common Loons and American White Pelicans after reading about them on the Illinois birding list. Someone reported seeing pelicans and loons at Fox Lake with detailed instructions on how to get there, so we got in the car with our new Leica spotting scope and headed for the Mineola Marina in Fox Lake. It was pouring down rain, so we didn’t stay too long, but we did get to see 20 pelicans and 7 loons, which are two new birds for our lifelist. 🙂 More »
Just as we thought we’d seen the last snow for a while, we wake up to another winter wonderland. One week into spring and we had an overnight snowfall of 6 to 8 inches (15 to 20 cm) here in northern Illinois. March had been very mild until now, with temperatures in the 70s (20oC+) in recent weeks, but it looks like we have to get our shovels out one more time. Springtime snowstorms are hardly out of the ordinary in Chicago. The record for total snowfall in March is 23.1 inches in 1926 and the record for total snowfall in April is 13.6 inches, back in 1938.
The United States Postal Service has a great change-of-address service … in theory that is. When you move they’ll forward your mail for a full year, for FREE! I couldn’t believe this when I heard it, because in Holland you pay €2.25 per week (after the first month) to have your mail forwarded, and that’s just inside Holland; if you move outside Europe it’ll set you back €9.25 per week. That’s quite expensive if you consider that USPS will forward regular mail and packages for a year, and newspapers and magazines for 2 months, totally free. When Amy moved to Holland her mail all got forwarded across the pond, it was great. Well, this time it is not exactly working out for us. More »
This 25-foot sculpture by J. Steward Johnson is called God Bless America and was installed on Pioneer Court in Chicago last December 2008. It is based on one of the most famous American paintings, American Gothic (1930) by Grant Wood, which is in the Art Institute of Chicago.
In this video some guys strapped vests with lights onto sheep and had them run around in specific patterns to create art on a hillside in Wales. They even have them play pong! I’m not sure if it’s fake or not, but it’s still a pretty crazy idea. What is this for? A Samsung commercial? Very weird indeed!
Cloud Gate, nicknamed ‘The Bean’ because of its bean-like shape, is a sculpture in Chicago by British artist Anish Kapoor. The highly polished 100-ton steel structure was unveiled in May 2006 and forms the centerpiece of the AT&T Plaza in Millennium Park. I’ve seen it several times and think it’s a really cool sculpture. Here are some photos from our visit last Saturday:
At the end of the St Patrick’s Day Parade in Chicago last Saturday, they had three DeLorean cars! As a fan of the Back to the Future movies and someone who had never seen an actual DeLorean before, I thought this was very cool. Only approximately 9,000 of these gull-winged cars were made in 1981 and 1982 by the Delorean Motor Company in a factory in Northern Ireland, hence these Irish cars were in the parade. Only about 6,500 DeLorean DMC-12s are believed to still exist today.
