Subject to Change

Heartwarming.

If you watched the Milwaukee 225 yesterday you would know that our day got better, in spite of our morning frustration.

The weather was great for spending a day outside: overcast and mild. Maybe it was a bit too damp for racing, though. Our section of the track claimed three victims right in front of us! We even went home with a few small pieces of the wrecks, which someone on the cleanup crew collected for my son.

I don’t know much of anything about racing, but we all had a good time.

My family made me a card this year. We decided to bring it along to the Indy races for autographs!

On the front of the card, they used a peanut butter jar lid to make it look like a camera.

In order to help recognize the Frogs exhibition currently going on at the Milwaukee Public Museum, I thought it would be fun to share a frog (toad) experience of my own.

While we were traveling this summer we visited one of our favorite zoos, the Toledo Zoo. They’ve got a small amphibian exhibit, where we came across something totally unexpected: an endangered species. These toads have been displaced from their native home by construction of a hydroelectric dam.

Encountering an endangered species in a zoo shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. It is humbling, however, to think that half the world’s population of an entire species is in this tiny room.

As you may know, my family spent two months near New York this past summer. We’d long forgotten about the toads in Toledo until our final trip to the Bronx Zoo. We rounded a corner inside the reptile building and spotted a familiar looking animal right there in front of us.

The sign confirmed we were looking at the other half of the world’s population of Kihansi Spray Toads. We realized at that moment that we were among a very small group of people in the world who shared this experience.

Discoveries like this are one of the reasons we keep our zoo and museum memberships current. Reciprocity has been a huge asset with all of our travel. I highly recommend using your memberships to get outside Milwaukee. There are plenty of zoos and museums near enough to take a weekend trip with the family.

We spent last evening in Midtown.  The sights and smells were spectacular! We may have even walked into movie set.

Cole made friends with a couple from Miami, and he made most people smile. Everyone was so much nicer than I expected!

Cole’s blanket still smells like Manhattan.

When I saw this the tiny voice in my head who’s really fun at parties said, “now with pulp!”

I’ve finally managed to create a partial photostream of my travels to Columbus, Ohio last year. I was able to use this photo set to talk about some of the things I never had time to blog about. So, you’ll notice that some of the picture comments are quite wordy.

This turned out to be a great way to review everything we were going through in January through April. I hope that I can manage to finish the photostream over the next few months. I’m not paying for Flickr, which means I get to do this at a rate of 100Mb per month.

We enjoyed our experiences. Hopefully you’ll enjoy reading about them.

Can anyone guess where I was? I’ll try to tell you all about it later!

You may need to click the image to read the label.

Yesterday we scouted the Ohio State Fair. Today we went for real. For most of the day we enjoyed the DNR park, which is spectacular. Even though I’ve always enjoyed the DNR exhibit at the Wisconsin State Fair, what we saw here in Ohio puts our home state to shame.  There’s a mini zoo, with native wild animals like badgers, turkeys, bobcats, and beavers. There’s also a walk-in song bird aviary, a butterfly house, a fishing pond for kids, and other really great kid activities. For older kids there’s an archery range and shooting simulator. What’s a fair without a shooting gallery, anyway?

One of the DNR representatives gave us a temporary “Fish Ohio” tattoo for Cole. It didn’t get applied perfectly, as you can see.

Oh, well. We saw magic shows, jugglers, chain saw sculpting, a cow made out of butter, and a petting zoo. We also met this nice man on stilts.

In all I’d say that Ohio has much more midway and fewer animals at the fair. It’s similar enough to our own fair, though, that last night I found myself thinking that I’d soon be walking home and spending the night in my own bed. We live so close to Wisconsin State Fair park that we often go there in the evening just to eat an unhealthy dinner.This mural for the kids was a great idea! When we spotted it last night I couldn’t wait to bring Cole, so that he could make his mark on the fair.

He did.

Not even Full Throttle energy drink was enough to keep Cole awake after eight hours of activity. He slept through dinner and never made a peep.