Summer vrs Spring

As I was looking for a new picnic spot today on Google Maps I came across something that brilliantly showed the stark difference between Spring and Summer. This shows the satellite photos of an area near us where some of the photos are taken from the Spring (on the right) and some from the Summer. As you can see (and I'd recommend clicking on the image to enlarge it) there is not a speck of green to be seen in a Minnesota Spring (at least the early part of it).

First Bank Holiday of the Year

You have to wait a long time for your first holiday of the year in the US; Memorial Day doesn't come until nearly the end of May! We ramped up for the holiday by hosting a minor party for Doug's 40th. Andy made a profiterole cake (which they don't have in this part of the US at least).

Ken found Doug a Def Leppard t-shirt (now filed under 'great present ideas' - check out the look on Ken's face)
Doug was pretty happy about turning English and 40 in the same week
The weather has got a lot warmer and we all made the schoolboy error of staying outside until very late and then retiring to watch English comedy shows (in this case Father Ted and Green Wing) until 3:30am - really not clever when you have 7 kids in the house who do a fair impression of rioters, except rioters don't get up before 7am.

The rest of the weekend was somewhat more sensibly paced, we revisited Minnetonka Regional Park on a glorious Sunday afternoon.


And the Zoo on the Monday

Nice parrot - its a Hyacinth Macaw
Dan and Becky would play all day (or at least until the hypothermia set in) in the water fountains

And I have to put this on the blog even though it is proud parenty as I want to remember this when Dan paints his room black and won't be seen in public with me. Andy asked Dan to think of words to describe me and Dan's (unprompted) list was:

• Strong
• Clever
• Cunning
• Encouraging
• Good to play with
• Good Dad

For those of you who tried the mystery city quiz on the last post the answers were:

1. Chicago Style (the city was Chicago and it had a whole style of architecture named after it - the style involved deliberately showing where the structural elements of the building were from the outside)
2. The biggest building in the world by volume is the Pentagon
3. The World Fair in 1893, the idea was to show that Chicago could do grand buildings in the European style
4. The strange thing about the 3 leaved skyscraper is that the architects who designed it had never designed any building before (not even a house), this was literally their first project!

Guess the City

Andy and I got away for a long weekend leaving Dan and Becky with Martin and Margaret and visited a very cool US city. Can yuo guess which one from the following clues

Your starter for 10 (for our UK readers) is on architecture and is a picture round
The architectural style of this building is named after the city in which it is found, what is the style of architecture?


For 5 more points another building from the same city, this is the second biggest building (by volume in the world), what is the biggest building by volume in the world(not in this city)?
5 more points for this question. This building was built in the Neo-Gothic style to show the world that the city was up to holding which prestigious world event?

The next picture shows a famous landmark building from the same city, what was unusual about the architects who designed the building?

If you haven't already guessed the city by now here are some more iconic buildings to give you a clue.

Grandparents and the Zoo

Giant lollies all round
Dan with his dirt stew!
Dan also had his school concert where the classes all dressed as different animals (or cabbages!) and sang lots of French songs. The children were supposed to sit still for an hour which is a little like trying to stop the tide from coming in as you can see from this little snippet!

Still Brown

Apologies for the huge delay in posts, work has been a bit grim recently and its now reached the point where there is nothing more that is humanly possible to do to rectify the situation so I can afford not to worry about it. Mustn't make it sound worse than it is, its still mostly good but a lot of hard work recently.

Anyway, back to Spring, these pictures are from the middle of April and as you can see it looks like Autumn, the ground is covered with dead leaves and there is not a green leaf or shoot in sight. Its a bit weird because the winters are so long and cold that the leaves from the previous Autumn don't decay. A couple of weeks later and the trees had a full covering of new leaves and it looks like Summer - yesterday (mid May) was 35C (95F) in one part of Minnesota and 2C (35F) in another just 140 miles away.



Here is Dan at his school fair
And Becky at Izzy's birthday party