Not too many happenings for December. It’s been cool down here, which is a nice change. Actually a few days ago we had to scrape car windows.
We took Erin to our town’s annual Christmas parade last weekend. It was her first parade and she really enjoyed it. We saw all sides of Santa - Santa the criminal (riding in the cop car), Santa the steel drum enthusiast in the Caribbean band, and of course Santa the dare devil, straddling a Saturn rocket.
What was really odd to us was about ¼ of the parade consisted of ROTC legions. Every high school here has a full functioning ROTC program and we saw several legions of Jr high ROTC. They even had an ROTC Princess that rode in a convertible. The thing that really got me was the elementary ROTC, they called it “Leadership Training”. It was bizarre seeing a few hundred little kids march in step and in uniform yelling chants. I had to make sure I was still in the US, but that’s just part of southern patriotic pride.
The temp was about 55 degrees and we saw people marching in the band with snow pants on. It was pretty comical to us northerners. I also was wearing my ISU hoddie and ran into a few carnies that grew up in Cedar Rapids; they had to tell me about their adventures in Strawberry Point. We then went out to Zios, our favorite Italian restaurant, for dinner.
Besides that we leave for Iowa on the 13th and are planning on driving. The shuttle flies on Thursday so we are keeping our fingers crossed that it takes off Thursday; otherwise it will put a damper on our Christmas plans.
1 comment:
ha, it's still a little hard for me to imagine your life directly affected by something so well known on a national level as the shuttle launch. that's uber-cool!
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