Friday means music. And ice cream.

Friday's in Dexter mean live music in the park downtown, so that's where we headed tonight, on foot, with our picnic packed and stowed on the bottom of the stroller.  The music was rockabilly and enjoyable, and there was a pig to boot.  Really, a pig.  You can see for yourself.  We had a great picnic in the shade, then danced for a while, then chased the pig for a while, and lastly we headed for the Dairy Queen for the quintessential ice cream cones.  And, of course, the quintessential mess.  You can see that for yourselves, too.  We can't say that it's the same as The Top of the Park, but in many ways we can say we enjoyed it more - far fewer people, the band wasn't as loud, the park was far more comfortable, and the ice cream more reasonably priced - and we wonder if that's a sign that we are starting to become Dexterites.  That would really be fine with us.

More pictures in the July 2008 abum.

Summer entertainment

We mentioned recently that our calendar had been briefly taken over by Calvin's various "end of the year" events, and today marked the conclusion of that situation with a picnic and drum circle for his music class participants.  This was our first time taking part in a real honest to goodness drum circle, and it really was delightful for all three of us.  If you are wondering what a real honest to goodness drum circle is, we couldn't really tell you, but we can tell you that this one involved all the kids and their family members sitting in a circle around a big pile of rhythm instruments, and a rhythm leader who kept a steady and interesting beat for us as we made our way through such child and rhythm friendly songs as Funga Alafia and the ABCs (which can, yes, be quite rhythmic if done right way).  We all got the chance to use many different rhythm instruments from around the world and to pick songs to sing and perform.  It was truly impossible not to get swept into the movement, singing, and rhythm of the circle, and, after a wonderful potluck lunch, we all went home and collapsed at nap time.

Our evening entertainment wasn't nearly as coo, but it did involved some rhythm and dancing (at least on Calvin's part).  With so much to do in our own little village we hadn't ventured into Ann Arbor town for its many activities yet this summer, but after reading about tonight's entertainment at Top of the Park, we figured we'd better check it out.  As it turned out, Heliosphere, performed by a group called Dream Engine, was too loud, too short, and too repetitive and not nearly as much as the band that came after.  And, actually, it wasn't so much the band itself as watching Calvin dance that made that part of the evening riotous.  He enjoyed Heliosphere just fine, but when the music came on he got up and started shaking it right in the middle of the crowd.  He had quite the audience, too.  It's amazing what self-assurance we are born with that is ultimately replaced by a sense of propriety, but at Calvin's age all the world is his stage for sure.

More pictures:  June 2008, too album. 

Jammies at the Library

It's not every day that you get to wear your jammies to the library, but Calvin learned something about special exceptions today.  The children's program at our little tiny library has been one of our greatest enjoyments in our new tiny town - Calvin absolutely loves weekly story time, and throughout the summer they have at least one activity every week to get kids into the library for fun - and the activity this week was Bedtime Stories night.  For about thirty minutes pajama clad kids of all ages crammed themselves into the main room of the library to listen to our phenomenal and well loved children's librarian read bedtime stories and lead bedtime songs and dances (yes dances).  From "No Jumping on the Bed" to "I'm Not Afraid of Monsters" Calvin was absolutely captivated, plus he seemed to greatly enjoy the fact that he was wearing his pajamas out of the house.  And since, if we're making some exceptions, we might as well make a few, yes that is a lion hanging out with those farm animals on the felt board (for more information on lions as farm animals, please refer to Pete Seeger's recording of "I Had a Rooster"). 

A touch of irony.

Sooooo.... raise your hand if you need a long week to recover from your long weekend.  And now, if you're raising your hand, you can put it down because you look silly - we can't see you.  But if we could, we'd be all for commiserating.  We fully understand that the long Memorial Day weekend is a time to commemorate and remember, and we spent Monday morning doing just that while sitting at the side of the local parade route and watching young children maul each other over thrown pieces of candy, but the rest of the weekend we used to get started on the plans we have for our new yard.  We started this task at ten in the morning on Saturday, armed with a couple of shovels, and finished our work just before dinner on Monday after putting away the pick ax and sledge hammer that we'd added to our selection of handy tools.  If we've learned one thing this weekend it's that clay, especially bone dry clay, is not a digging friendly medium.  But even taking into account such breaks as the pizza party with Jon's family on Saturday, the BBQ ribs party with my family for Sunday dinner, the bonfire with the neighbors on Sunday night (have we mentioned how much we love our new neighborhood?), and the parade on Monday morning, we have a long list of accomplishments to tack on our refrigerator door before bed tonight.  We ripped out two to three feet of sod all the way around the house, and improved the grading where needed;  we extended our sump pump pipe by five feet, dug a trench, hauled in a trunk full of free rocks from a local farm, and installed a dry creek to disperse the flow of water; we removed a large area of sod from the SE corner of our backyard, added a property defining garden, then transplanted two bushes and one tree from our overcrowded front garden to populate it and hauled in ten 40lb bags of topsoil to mix into it; and we removed two rather large and rather dead bushes from by the front walk way.  It may not sound like much, but ask our muscles and I'm guessing they'll disagree.

And what about the above mentioned irony?  We spent hours upon aching hours chopping at the sod with such inefficient tools as shovels, trowels, and even the aforementioned pick ax.  Then the very last thing we did on Monday night was ask our neighbor if we could borrow his lawn mower again (since ours is still at the old house that we are still mowing), only to have him ask if we might also want to borrow his sod ripper.  Say what?  At least the parade was fun.

Garden pictures in the Yard Transformation album. 

Parade and other new pictures in the May 2008 album. 

You know you live in a small town when...

This move has taken us into a whole new world, really.  We both have always lived in a city big enough to have "household mail delivery," or mail delivered directly to your home, and that is why we failed to ask about how we might be getting our mail in our new house, and that is why we spent an entire week trying to figure out where our mail was going.  There are no boxes on the houses here, not even curbside boxes, and the banks of boxes the entryways to the subdivision didn't have house numbers on them (and we had no box key).  We finally gave over to the embarrassment of not knowing such a thing and called our local post office where the nice postman replied "oh yeah, the first owners left their key here at the desk in an envelope marked with a C."  And if that isn't small town enough for you, then how about this:  when we went to the post office to pick up the key there was only one person working, not because the others were on break, but because there's only room for one person to work behind the desk (or in the whole building for that matter), AND... there was no line.  That quick visit left us with not only a key to our box but also with a hand drawn map complete with instructions, and a coloring book for Calvin.  So after naptime we embarked on a journey, hand drawn map in hand, to locate our box.  It has a nice location nestled between a neighborhood pond and the grocery store, and after a little additional exploring we stopped in to pick up fresh ingredients for dinner.  How very European of us.  This could become a habit.

And how about one more small town anecdote?  Before our actual move we called what we thought was the listed number to put the waterbill in our name and were gently told that in order to take care of such a thing she would need to "call Brenda, down at the town hall" or some such a thing.  And when she did call "down to some such a thing," Brenda turned out to be a real person with no automated answering system and didn't' even put us on hold.  And she also turned out to be a wealth of friendly, if unsolicited, additional information.  Before hanging up the phone (five minutes later), not only was the water bill put in our name, but we also knew when and how our garbage would be picked up, when and how to do recycling (although they are out of containers and don't know when they'll get more in), and the best route to get to several choice parks in the village.  Thank you Brenda, for reminding us what real personal customer service is all about.  We love it here already.