Training Log Archive: barb

To the Blue Hills and back, and then to the store for groceries. Through Roxbury, Mattapan, Milton. Signature sound: crushed beer can blowing along the street. Saw someone on a Bike Friday. Stopped by the Dunkin Donuts on 138 on the way to Houghton's Pond.

Orienteering training set up by Jeff Saeger in the Blue Hills. Dave and I alternated memorizing legs and navigating them. Very fun. Faster than I'd have gone on my own, especially near the beginning. Weather was raw, which was fine for orienteering and biking.

Highly recommended book: "Dr Tatiana's Sex Advice to All Creation"

Tonight I'm looking forward to a book discussion club ("Suite Francaise").

I am starting to work on making reservations for a family canoe trip in Algonquin Park, Ontario, for this summer. I used to go on trips like this in the Boundary Waters & Quetico in northern Minnesota & Canada every summer as a kid, and I'm psyched to finally be able to introduce my kids to it. Afterward, we're going to drive for 3 days east to go to the orienteering in the Bay of Fundy.

C • BWCA 15

David's homework: Design for a Holocaust Memorial





Here, at the front of the monument, is the small gate labeled "Arbiet Macht Frei" (Work Will Make You Free). This slogan was used on the gate to one of the German labor camps in the Holocaust.



Here is the whole monument from the front. You can see the incinerator chimneys in the middle, the maze-like passageways on the front and sides, the strange blocks in the back, and just a bit of the dome of ashes. Reaching to each corner are four segments of railroad track symbolizing the trains that were used to ship Jews, gypsies, homosexuals and others to the concentration camps.



Here is a birds-eye view of the monument. The maze represents the trickiness of being in hiding or running and trying not to end up in the hands of the Nazis. A few dead ends are marked with pictures symbolizing different events that happened in the Holocaust.



Here are two examples of the pictures at different dead ends of the maze. Above, a synagogue is burning in the fires of Kristallnacht.



In this picture, a woman and two children are cowering in front of a Nazi soldier.



Here are the incinerator towers. The tallest one reaches to a monstrous hight of 86 feet. They are built in the middle of the monument to symbolize that they were the one dead end most concentration camp prisoners ran into.



Finally, here is the "pile of ashes" at the rear of the monument. It is supposed to represent the ashes of all the dead who were burned instead of buried.

C • I am impressed 4

PR for quarter mile. Racing Elizabeth, who is turning 10 today.

C • Excellent, perfect rogaine ... 3

To Anna's Taqueria, then to King Open school to drop off burritos for Isabel and Zedal before their show, then on to the Burren in Davis Square to hear the Bag Boys with Dave & Bill, then to Harvard Square to catch David's dance performance. Giovanni's dad Renato is in town and we got to see him at the show - the last time we saw him was at that excellent outdoor dinner in Italy, at Katia's parents' house. Hopefully we will get to hang out with him some during the 2 months that he is visiting Boston.

Event: Flying Pig XII
 

David drew this design for a house on stilts, with a pool, in Google SketchUp:

school for parent teacher meeting, work, home.

Yesterday evening we went to a lecture at MIT by David Macaulay, author of The Way Things Work. It was titled "The Way David Macaulay Works", and aptly so, because the lecture was a breathtaking fly-through of how he develops ideas for his books. It was entertaining - he was really funny. We were treated to sketches for many of the drawings of his books, as well as ideas that he started to work on but did not finish. He showed us the sketches for Why the Chicken Crossed the Road while telling a brief version of the story. Same with Unbuilding, about deconstructing the Empire State building to send it to the middle east for a rich sheik. Weirdly, in that 1987 book he'd mentioned the twin towers of the World Trade Center - something about the oil baron being willing to pull them down too. After 9/11, he started working on the book Mosque, and showed us how he carefully researched it and built models (we got to see photos of these) and checked in with experts. He loves Rome for many reasons including the juxtaposition of old and new. He showed us several of his failed attempts to write a book about Rome and then a draft of the story he did end up publishing, Rome Antics. In that book, he has some nice visual devices to imply movement, and David was pretty interested in these. For Ship, he told us about learning to snorkel and dive, and how he drew underwater archaeologists as they worked, using a #2 pencil and mylar paper, floating above them with his snorkel. We got to see several other books as he worked on them, including Black and White. He talked a lot about his current project, on the human body, and mentioned his next two projects which I'm spacing on at the moment, but which sounded interesting. Oh, one will be about Earth.

Felt fat & slow & sore. Ran over to the quarter-mile MIT track and went around it once as fast as I could, at the blazing speed of 1:58.

Family & friends surprised me with a birthday party this morning at 7 am:



Ann Marie talking about the shingles she's just recovered from...


Still F45...

C • Happy Birthday to you!! 10