A day at the beach

We've been really craving a vacation lately, but going on vacation right now is not in the schedule or the budget.  However, last weekend we decided to try to fulfill this desire with a mini one night vacation in our favorite shore town.

Becky reads on the beach.

The Jersey Shore Roller Girls were having a bout versus the Philadelphia Roller Girls.  You may remember our last (and only) encounter with roller derby, which we declared a good time worth repeating.

If we're being honest the roller derby itself was less entertaining than it's New York cousin, with fewer fans and too many bouts started with kneeling and hand holding (are we playing red rover??).  It was really interesting though to finally see the inside of the Asbury Park Conventional Hall, and they definitely get extra points for the opening and half-time band:

 I asked Becky what the connection was between bag pipers and roller derby.  She replied, "quirky."

Speaking of quirky, we had to stay in a new bed and breakfast because the one we traditionally stay in was not yet open for the season.  The new b&b featured a sort of African-ish theme and included this lovely piece of decor:

    

close up

 This creepy monkey lamp threatened to eat Becky in the middle of the night.  I valiantly offered to save her when she expressed concern at the beginning of the night, but sadly I slept through the actual attack.  You'll have to sit on the edge of your seats, wondering if she survived, until she graces this blog with a blog post.
Just kidding, here she is being attacked again the very next day:

On the way home from "our" part of the shore we stopped to tour the country's oldest lighthouse.

What's a good vacation without a little history lesson and climbing 10 stories worth of winding metal stairs?  We're so cultured.

Well, it cost a lot less than the week at an all-inclusive Aruban resort or the week of volunteering at the Sri Lankan elephant orphanage that we were dreaming about, so it will have to do for now.

Fancy Shmancy Trunk o' Books

This evening Becky crawled to the back of our storage room and pulled out an unopened cardboard box. On the side of the box is printed "Harry Potter boxed set 1-7. Do not display before October 16, 2007." Seeing as it is now 2011 I think she's safe from the publishing powers-that-be coming after her! Inside the first cardboard box is a spiffier looking cardboard trunk, which I suspect in turn contains the aforementioned books. I tried to open the trunk and check on the books while Becky took a break to dish up some ice cream. But I got yelled at for my actions. So I guess I will just have to have faith that the trunk truly contains all seven books. For now I'm enjoying the "Deliver to: Hogwarts" label, the yarn handles, and the printed hinge graphics.

Although I already owned several of the books (and now of course cannot find most of them), in 2007 Becky and I were not anywhere near engaged, and therefore she felt a burning desire to own them all herself. She obsessed. She pre-ordered. She obsessed more. And then she stashed. Every time another of the movies has come out we have chatted about a need to re-read the books. Every time we have chatted about pulling the trunk out. And every time we have eventually gone to see the movie without re-reading the books. But this summer the final movie is coming out, and by golly (haha, I can't believe I just wrote that), this time we're going to re-read the books.

I'll keep you updated on whether Becky lets me peek in the trunk. In the mean time, here are some pictures from way back in 2007 when we attended the book release party at Scholastic for book 7:

UPDATE: After exclaiming "My trunk got locked!" she figured out how to open it, confirmed that her books were still shrink-wrapped, and started playing with the enclosed bonus stickers for decorating the trunk. And then she declared that her books are exempt from the joint property conferred by marriage, and that the trunk is locked so I cannot get in. I am feeling the love, how about you?

P.S. For some reason blogger is having a lot of issues with my attempts at spacing lately. I apologize.

Inequality

Well, I'm not the Wisconsin girl, so I will leave any lengthy commentary on that to her. But suffice it to say that this was a sad week in cheesehead land. "Where free unions and collective bargaining are forbidden, freedom is lost." -Ronald Reagan

This is what class war looks like. It's all about priorities, but I especially don't see why children/education/the future should suffer to provide tax breaks to billionaires. Eat the Future, in the words of Paul Krugman. Helping children, even poor children (maybe even especially poor children), improves our country in the long run.

You all know by now that I love nifty county-by-county maps. Today Becky found a new one for me. I don't love this one as much as some of the others and I'm honestly not entirely clear on what message the creators of it were trying to send, but it does show some interesting national trends. I grew up in what The Atlantic defines as Industrial Metropolises; Becky grew up in an Emptying Nest. I can't see the map well enough to figure out if our current county is an Industrial Metropolis or a Monied Burb, though I'm quite certain that our town would be defined as a Monied Burb. We have strong interest in moving to a Campus and Careers (or y'know, more Monied Burbs) county. I'm particularly intrigued by their definition of large areas of the upper Midwest as Emptying Nests. We've always heard about the Midwestern brain drain, although Brookings tells me that according to 2000 census data, in fact the Midwest has large numbers of young educated workers while the Northeast has large numbers of aging educated workers in addition to young educated workers.

And that's probably enough demographic nerdiness for you for one Friday evening. Happy Weekend!

Computer Lab Nostalgia

I read some huge exciting news today via the little birds on Twitter: Facebook versions of Carmen Sandiego and Oregon Trail will be released in February!

Someone mentioned in the comments on this article that she remembered playing these games 20 years ago. Which caused me to realize "Holy crap, it really HAS been 20 years! How is that even possible?!" You see the problem here is that someone who can clearly remember things that happened 20 years ago must certainly be a grown up, and I am certainly not one of those.

But this realization got me to thinking about the good ol' days in the computer lab at my elementary school. My school got a computer lab when I was in 3rd grade, and let me tell you, it was a BIG. FREAKIN. DEAL. I think some PTA members may have sold organs on the black market to fundraise for that thing or something. It was awesome--each of us got to use a computer at the same time. And the computers had games! Two of them! Those games were Oregon Trail and....something else. I think maybe it had dragons? And something about designing your dream bedroom? Anyway, Oregon Trail was clearly the superior choice. I have such fond memories of watching my little green oxen plod across my tiny black monitor, and my incredible inability to shoot anything in my efforts to hunt. Seriously, that buffalo could stand right in front of me and stare me in the eye, and I wouldn't figure out how to shoot it.

A year or so later, my family got a computer at home, and in addition to Oregon Trail, we acquired several different versions of the Carmen Sandiego games. Each of these games of course included about 7 installation disks (and I seem to recall a fair amount of swearing from my parents when the computer didn't seem to want to recognize them in the right order) and a world almanac or similar reference, which was of course absolutely necessary for answering questions in the game. Oh, life before the internet. (I admit, I do sort of miss those pages in the middle with the pictures of all the countries' flags.) I'm curious to see how they've modified the game to make it a little more challenging in the age of Wikipedia.

Do you have any fond memories of early computer games or experiences? Are you as crazy excited as I am for these games?

On home ownership and New York

Well, I had Becky all lined up to blog for you tonight, but then she got busy with other things and couldn't do it.  So I guess you're stuck with unprepared me!

A few weeks ago Becky apparently decided that she was sick of feeling impoverished and decided to take a whole pile of personal finance books out of the library.   She has since been methodically making her way through them, while I occasionally pick one up and page through in a sign of support.  I certainly got a few laughs out of Suze Orman of 2005 waxing on about the wonders of investing in home ownership.  But despite the change in circumstances since 2005 I hear it's still a pretty decent investment.  And it's something we aspire to do someday.  But not here.  Gothamist illustrates plainly and easily why not.  Why is New York so strange?  It is at the same time a cultural capital of the United States and not in the slightest bit quintessentially American.  And apparently it's become the city I love to hate (okay, and just plain old love too, despite its crazyness and insane cost of living).

While I was browsing over at Gothamist I also came upon this Walk of Shame, which has a similarly favorable outlook on the great New York experience.  Woo-hoo longest commute in the nation!  Of course I'm not sure if they calculate this based on where you live or where you work, so I don't know whose commuting average we're driving up...either way I think we're clearly hurting someone's average.  Does that make me a New Yorker yet?

So I hope that wee bit of mappy goodness can tide you over until tomorrow night!

Fun with Census Maps

Hello friends. I could come here today and moan and complain about the buckets of money that we are pouring into my eleven year old car. I was actually going to do that. But I did a lot of private moaning and complaining, to Becky, to my coworkers, to my family. And now I'm moving through the stages of grief into reluctant acceptance.

So instead I will share with you a fabulous New York Times creation that Becky found for me to play with. You might remember my fascination with interactive maps. This one is pretty cool, huh? I love how populated New York is, and therefore how clear the neighborhood distinctions are. By either income or race, there is such an obvious line where Harlem meets the Upper East and Upper West Sides. By pretty much any measure Manhattan below 110th street is so very unusual; it is richer, more educated, whiter, rent is higher, and an absolutely insane percentage of elementary kids go to private schools. The whole crazy I-95 corridor from Boston to DC has these peculiarities to some degree too. The map of percentage of people without high school diplomas has a swath of color across the southern United States, even more than I would have expected. Check it out! And then come back and tell me what exciting things you learn! I need something to distract me from my poor decrepit car and its health care bills....

Baby names and Maps

Becky sent me an e-mail yesterday with the title "I'm almost afraid to tell you about this." Apparently she knows me too well.

Since childhood I've loved baby names. I loved going through books of names and coming up with names and personalities for enormous imaginary families. The families had chore schedules and pets (with names!) and all kinds of details. But mostly, names. For years I've talked to Becky about baby names and she has refused to participate, being one of those women who has not had her future children named for decades. Now that we're finally engaged, a few months ago, she finally let me have one conversation in which she entertained the idea of naming children something other than Rainbow Cloudforest and Cookiedough Christmastree. So yes, I love baby names.

I also have a long standing love of maps showing regional differences. For example, here is a really awesome one of the great pop vs. soda debate. Seriously, I could stare at that thing for hours. I love election returns maps for similar reasons. This cool one shows changes over time and this awesome one shows the 2004 presidential election results by county and population size. And here is an absolutely amazing collection of regional American dialect maps. So, if I haven't convinced you I'm a nerd yet...

You can imagine my excitement when Becky sent this my way. How cool is that? I wish there was some way names could be shown in colors on a map, but this is still awesome. Enjoy.

Death of the Brontosaurus

I learned something tonight that I feel compelled to share with you, despite the fact that it embarassingly exposes my paleontologic ignorance. Regardless of the fun-making that I have endured from Becky in the long minutes since I learned, I am daring to share my new knowledge, that it might enlighten any fellow unknowing blog readers.

The brontosaurus is no more. That's right, they no longer exist.

Now, I had seen photos of our long-necked friend mysteriously labeled "apatosaurus." Close relatives, I assumed. A new dinosaur. I had even briefly pondered (brief in this case should be measured in miliseconds) the lack of modern (and by modern, I mean post Land Before Time) representation of the brontosaurus. But never did it cross my mind that the brontosaurus was just gone! Until tonight.

Headlines on my internets announced to me that new research shows that the Triceratops was also doomed. OH NOEZ! Thankfully, further inspection revealed that the headlines were probably incorrect, and in fact some boring Torosaurus will actually gain the Triceratops name rather than the other way around. The articles noted the similarity of this problem to the Brontosaurus problem. Say what, I said. Frantic googling, paired with Becky's laughter at my ignorance, brought me to the truth. The brontosaurus has passed.

So this is the way it works. Scientists find out that two previously named dinosaurs are actually one dinosaur. One name has to go. They decide based on which name was recorded first. The Triceratops is spared only because Othniel C. Marsh named it in 1889, two years before he named the Torosaurus. Brontosaurus had no such luck.

Of further note is the fact that apatosaurus apparently means "deceptive lizard," whereas brontosaurus means "thunder lizard." I think they need to reexamine their naming system, isn't the cooler name painfully obvious??

So there you have it. The more you learn, the more you know. Or something. I'll be back to blogging when I finish mourning Littlefoot. And Pluto.