The Mindless Wonderings of an Insane Person: 2009

Holy Texting BATMAN!

As a former EMT I remember all too well accidents like this. The producers of this did an extremely good job of recreating an accident caused by texting while driving.

We NEED to show all of our children or students this video to give them an clear idea of how much their stupidity can cost.

Here is a small video montage of up-state NY for all of you who have never been here.

Rest Areas are not all created alike.

Ok, so we all stop at those very necessary of facilities: the Rest Area. Most of what I have experienced looks something like this:

This is the typical Washington / Idaho rest area. It has a parking area, a water fountain, phone and bathrooms on both sides.

Yet on though the last few years, we have had the experience of traveling the entire length of I-90, from Seattle, all the way to Massachusetts, and I can tell you that NOT all rest areas are created alike!

Now keep in mind that the facility shown above is nothing to get excited about, but it is nice enough, and it does the job. Go over the border, however, to Montana here is the first Rest Area that we came to:

So along I-90 we have experienced basic outhouses and simple bathroom facilities. That is until we made it to New England. Rest Areas are a completely different animal in that they have manicured landscaping, gas stations, two to three restaurants, gift shops and huge, clean restrooms.

A typical rest area entrance.

This one has three restaurants: McDonalds, a Pizza shop, and an Ice Cream store.

Rhode Island Pastor and Teacher Convention

This past week we went to Providence RI to go to a Union wide pastor and teacher convention. The convention was inspiring, Christ-filled, and very powerful. I think some great long-term things will come from it.

Here are some pics from Providence:

The hotel we stayed in.

Providence skyline.

The end of the week, the end of the month.

Where did July go? This is crazy, we are now more than halfway though 2009, and I can’t account for several of the months, namely May, June and July. Perhaps David took them and put them somewhere….

Yesterday I finally got keys to the school… Oh my, there are a lot of keys to the school. For some strange reason they don’t believe in keying the school with a master key or two, so now I have a couple of key rings that contain exactly 2,407 keys. I think I will take the 3 or 4 most used and put them on my key ring, and then stash the others in my desk.

Also yesterday I got my office at the school. It is down the hall from the two classrooms that I will be teaching in: History and Bible. So today Kristie and I are going over to make some plans and start moving things around. She also has an office inside the Music classroom, so we will need to spend some time in there as well.

I will post some pics of classrooms, and offices later on (when there is something to show.)

Slow Monday

Nothing particularly new from the home front today. We just unpacked more boxes, and ordered a new refrigerator, as the one in this house has, well, very little to be desired.

One thing cool that we discovered in this area is Fire Flies (or Lightning Bugs.) They are all over this area, and are really cool to watch. Unfortunately, the lighting conditions are awful for photography or video, so I haven’t been able to capture the beauty of the soft flickers of light that blink around in the evening darkness. However, I have been trying, but the pictures and video just don’t do the actual experience justice.

Here is the best that I have so far. You will need to click the image to make it full size, and if you look to the right of the tree, you will see several bright points of light – those are the fire flies.

View our trip!

Apparently our GPS receiver keeps a log of everywhere we go. So I converted the log into a cool Google Earth file that you can see everywhere we drove. Unfortunately we had trouble with our GPS unit, so the trail starts in central South Dakota.

You will need to zoom in slightly before the trip trail will appear, but once you begin to zoom, you wont have any difficulty seeing the trail (it’s multicolored!)

If you recall from a previous post, we ran through the rain to go to Denny’s (not great food, but close enough for tired people.) Below is a sample Google Earth image that shows the route we took through the rain to Denny’s. Since I had the GPS in my pocket, it recorded where we went. As you can see, it goes through the center of another motel. This is because it was raining so hard we decided to take a shortcut though the other motel’s lobby area to try to avoid as much rain as possible.

Click the image above to make it bigger.

Click HERE to download the Google Earth file Note: it will open a new window. Find the download link to get the file.

Our home and USA

USA is a cool and patriotic abbreviation for our new school: Union Springs Academy. Our house is not bad, but it needs a little work, and I think that eventually we will be quite comfortable here. The area is beautiful, surrounded by trees, and of course a lake close by. It is very humid, and I think that will take some time to get used to, but like any environment, the body will eventually acclimate.

We are very close to the school, so we will be able to walk to work, which will be very nice and will help save gas. So here are a few pictures of the house, and of the Academy.

Above: panoramic view from our front door.
Below: Some pics of the Academy.

Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania and New York

Like I mentioned on the previous post I didn’t have Internet access until yesterday, and because I was so busy getting something loosely resembling a living environment, I didn’t have the change to update the blog. So here are some pics of the states we passed through up to the point of arriving in Union Springs. We arrived at about 12 noon on Thursday, and began to unload the truck. We were fortunate to have dry weather to unload with because it had rained on us fairly steadily since arriving in Cleveland. In fact there was a Denny’s about a block from our motel, so we decided to make a mad dash and just run to it. However, only seconds into our jog, the sky dumped onto us and didn’t stop until we arrived in Union Springs.

Our frequent companion on the trip.

Chicago as we are leaving.

Indiana country side.

Ah, the rain.

Cleveland

Yes, I realize they are only signs. But believe me, the country side at this point all looks the same. Especially in the rain.

But just so you believe me, here is some New York.

Cleveland Ohio

Today was spent with alot of driving though Illinois, Indiana and now Ohio. We do have some pics to upload but they will have to wait. The scenery is very nice, but not much different than what I have already posted. It is mostly flat, but thick with trees. We are so far finding people in this side of the country to be very nice and exceptionally helpful.

One particularly cool thing we found is the rest stops. Unlike the scary outhouse rest stops that we found in Montana, the facilities here are top notch. They are large buildings housing extremely large bathrooms, usually two restaurants, a large gift shop, and a gas station.

Tomorrow we finish our trip by continuing our drive though Ohio, Pennsylvania, and then into New York. We plan to be at our new home by 12 noon NY time. We won’t have internet until Friday, so don’t expect any new updates here until then, but I will be able to post some facebook updates from time to time. (Unless I can find someone’s WiFi to tap from.) :-)

Sears Tower Video

Chicago

Today we spent the day playing in downtown Chicago! We found that we were actually a little further from the city than originally thought (35 miles) so instead of fighting drivers and having a bunmer of a day, we decided instead to hop a train and go to Union Station which is only about 2 blocks from the Sears Tower.

Now if you haven’t already heard by now that building is no longer called that, but rather Willis Tower, perhaps you have been living under a rock. Regardless, I think the name is lame, and since I have called it Sears Tower for the entirety of my life, I (as I would guess most of the American public) will continue to call it by its proper name: Sears Tower.

After arriving at the building, we had to wait about an hour which included going though airport quaility security, then we were allowed to take the 60 second ride up to the 103rd floor to the “skydeck.”

New to the skydeck is what they call “the ledge” which is a series of glass boxes protruding from the building that you can walk into and look straight down. If you look at the top of the building in the photo to the left, you will see the three boxes protruding. It was really cool to step into one and look down at the buildings and ground below.

Waiting in line

Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Illinois

Today we left Minneapolis and traveled though Wisconsin and then into Illinois. So far this is what I have learned: Montana is slightly less boring than I remembered; Wyoming has some really beautiful areas in its northern corner; South Dakota has to be the most flat and boring place in the north west portion of the US; Minnesota has some fun places, and very nice people; Wisconsin is a very beautiful state with rolling hills, and many, many dairy farms; and Illinois drivers suck.

It has been really fun to watch the natural scenery changing from the tall mountains and thickly forested evergreens in northern Idaho, to the flat plains of South Dakota. Then to the gradual change of evergreen trees to deciduous trees and finally to thickly forested deciduous trees.

Today we stopped in a city just outside of Chicago, and tomorrow we plan to go into the city to visit a few places, but our main goal is to visit the Sear Tower (now called Willis Tower.)

Wisconsin scenery. (I would have pictures of Illinois, but I was too busy fighting off rabid drivers.)

Horrible Illinois Drivers!

Illinois drivers are the most brain dead, self obsessed troglodytes that I have ever had the misfortune to share the road with! I have driven several really big cities in which drivers are typically bad drivers, including Denver, Portland Oregon, and Seattle. I have personally dealt with driving on the same road with bad drivers, but driving in Illinois takes the cake. Keep in mind that I am not even talking about Chicago drivers specifically, but drivers throughout the state in general. Today I have seen the most selfish, reckless, and mindless driving in my life, and I was two hours away from the city. These drivers have no concept of the 3 second rule, speed limits, or even the notion that others are sharing the same road as they are.

Sadly, I get to find out how bad Chicago drivers are.

The Mall of America

Yesterday I forgot to blog about our day, so I am making up for that now. We went over to the Mall of America, which is located in Minneapolis, MN, in the morning and spent the entire day (until closing time) there. It is a very, very large mall, but nowhere near the size of West Edmonton Mall, in Canada. In the center of the mall is a large theme park, based on Nickelodeon cartoons, such as the Fairly Odd Parents, and Spongebob. We spent the day shopping, riding roller coasters, and getting lost in a mirror maze. It was a great day, in which everyone had fun, and even David rode the roller coasters… all of them!

The following Pics are from the Lego store. They of course sell just about any lego and lego kit you can imagine, but also, the entire store is nearly made of legos, including hte clock tower you see below, and the life size Bobafet.