Every year, our neighborhood has its own parade for Memorial Day, and I looke forward to it. It’s a small event, but it’s a chance to remember the holiday in the right way and see our neighbors. For the first few years, Neil participated as a cub scout, and one year Kelly dressed up for the costume competition. But last year and this year, we just go to watch the parade and visit the festival.

The parade seemed smaller this year, but it also didn’t involve a costume competition. We still had some of the classic cars (one of them with our local beauty queens–the daughters of the car owner and their friends), the San Jose Sharks firetruck, Sharky, the JROTC and a marching band. We met our neighbor Gus sitting along the parade route and saw the children from the neighborhood schools on their regular boat float.

As usual, the festival involved honoring the armed forces, represented by people from our neighborhood in uniform, and a flag ceremony by the JROTC, as well as the singing of patriotic songs. Peter and Neil just bought themselves lunch and went home, but I stayed with Kelly so she could play the games and slide down the massive slide:

When she’d spent all our tickets, the Hawaiian dancers came up, and we watched them briefly, but Kelly wasn’t particularly interested since she couldn’t understand the Hawaiian lyrics.

So we went home, but it’s always the best Memorial Day celebration I could want.

I originally planned to take the children to the De Young Museum today; and another homeschool parent had told me about a free hands-on science day as CSU-Hayward; but in the end, I decided what I would rather do this weekend than on any other is to visit the Charles M. Schulz Museum again with my family.

Better known to us at the Snoopy Museum, it honors the work of cartoonist Charles M. Schulz, which is mostly his work on the Peanuts cartoon strip. It’s a small museum, but very comfortable: you can read selected (rotating strips) from the cartoon in a gallery, look at Peanuts-themed art work, romp and play with Peanuts themes in a garden area, or make your own attempts at cartooning and art (and watch Peanuts cartoons) in a special room upstairs. I figured the fact that, today the Schulz Museum had a real astronaut appearing in honor of Snoopy’s association with NASA, would make up for skipping out on a science day at CSU-Hayward.

We arrived barely in time to catch the presentation. The visiting astronaut, Dan Tani, spoke about his 4 months in the International (that is, Russian & American) Space Station, and showed the dramatic pictures he’d taken of Earth while in space. The audience’s questions were remarkably good: for instance, they prompted Tani to recount that when his American colleague on the station returned to earth, a malfunction during the descent caused the shuttle to speed down, and she survived 9Gs of force. We also got a better idea of how big the space station is, what it looks like inside, and what it’s like to live and work inside it.

When Tani went out to personally meet and greet the museum visitors, we checked out the Snoopy in Space exhibit. Kelly and I couldn’t resist the chance to dress up in astronaut gear and pretend we were astronauts in a space shuttle ourselves:

Just before it was time for him to leave, the long line to see Tani shortened, and I grabbed my family for a chance to meet him. He was just as personable and outgoing as he’d been on stage, even after chatting with strangers for an hour. Neil told him one of his father’s friends had helped design the “spheres” on the station, and Tani tried to get Kelly to come out of her shy attack for the picture I wanted to take of his and the children (to no avail.)

Kelly was full of excitement about seeing Snoopy and meeting an astronaut, so we went outside to the garden, where Neil tried to share a cookie with Snoopy while Kelly was distracted by Woodstock.

Then we went upstairs, where the art project of the day was creating a zoetrope. Neil made one that was pretty impressive, and hopefully he’ll turn it into an animation and put it up on his own web site.

So it was a perfect activity: fun, family-friendly, and interesting and informative. We love the Snoopy Museum.

His guess sounded more plausible, but for once, I was right: it was an attack, though it wasn’t related to the previous day’s gloomy news. Apparently, an unknown someone had cut the underground telephone wires. This was no casual accident, or goofball prank. Whoever it was knew exactly where the telephone wires were, and cut them as well as the redundant lines (in another location about 1/2 mile away); knew how to open the heavy manhole cover, which may have required special tools; and knew exactly which set of wires to saw apart. We knew it happened at positions on either side of Monterey Highway: in fact, I was driving right past one of the points when I was taking Kelly to art class and wondered why two police cars and a van were parked on the side of the overpass. Some reports also said the same scenario happened in San Carlos, but we only know south San Jose (through Morgan Hill and parts of Santa Cruz County) were completely down.

With the phone lines down, not only analog phones lines were affected, but so was internet (making Skype unusable). Also affected were ATMs, which could be a pain if you needed to get money from your account while the bank was closed. It reminded me of the old crime stories were a home invader would cut the phone lines to a house before breaking in, so the victim(s) would be unable to call for help. If you knew enough to bring down analog phones and internet regionally, and simultaneously cut electricity (which is presumably easier to do, since winter storms do this regularly) to that area, and you wanted to do mischief, you’d be shooting fish in a barrel.

I know the police, Santa Clara County, and AT&T (which laid and maintains the sabotaged lines) are even more concerned and on the case than I am–and AT&T has a $250,000 reward out for any information leading to finding the culprits. But it doesn’t make this chicken little feel any better.

Our holiday season started with Thanksgiving. Our Thanksgiving was low-key, and we just had steak and potatoes instead of a turkey we’d be not eating for the rest of the week. I turned one of my army of fall pumpkins into a pie, and Peter had the children help him make an apple pie that turned out beautifully:

Peter got up early the next morning for the Black Friday specials, but it wasn’t really anything special. He bought an XBox at Target, but none of the other offers we’d seen in the paper or online were compelling this year.

The next weekend, we went downtown early for the San Jose Christmas Parade, which is always wonderful. And even better this year for us, since Peter’s office is right downtown and faces down upon the parade route. Nontheless, we went downstairs for a street level view closer to the park where an announcer told us who was who and the performers would play or dance for us as they passed by. We saw middle-school-to-college-level marching bands (the San Jose State marching band being particularly impressive), beauty queens, balloons, local politicians, all sorts of dancing troops, and of course, the star of the show, Santa Claus. The parade has no particular theme, so we also saw the Sons of Liberty celebrating the Fourth of July, and Darth Vader and Storm Troopers, but that’s really a big part of its charm, too.

Santa was taking a break between the parade and taking Christmas wishes as the Santa House, so in the interim we bought and decorated Christmas trees for our home and office. Then Kelly and Neil waited to see Santa. Some protest was going on over by the Basilica, but they were incoherent, so we couldn’t figure out if they were Proposition 8 protestors, anti-Capitalism hippies, or Mumbai massacre awareness folk. The only sign we could make out was “Honk for Peace” even though honking for peace actually disturbs the peace, and everyone (including terrorists) is always saying they want peace.

Anyway, for the first time, Kelly actually got up the courage to talk to Santa directly, and she told him (as she’d written earlier) that she wants a pogo stick and a stuffed-animal kitty. Neil told Santa he wants A New Kind of Science, even though I think Neil’s already read that tome twice over. Santa reminded them to leave out cookies for him, and gave the kids candy canes after we’d all posed with him.

The next week turned out to be less hectic than I was afraid it would be, and on Tuesday evening, we decided to go the Christmas party at Borders, where our favorite storytime person, Andrew, works. To our surprise, at the 6 pm starting time, we were the only guest for the party, but it meant Kelly got 2 storytimes, and our whole family participated in coloring Christmas tree decorations. I took a break to walk around the mall, during which more children appeared for the party, and Kelly won some prizes in a snowman toss and Santa Says. At 7, I was back to enjoy the highlight of the party: a group of carollers Andrew had gathered together from his family and church.

The songs were deliciously Christmassy, unlike the watered down for political correctness and fear of Christianity songs in public schools. Kelly adored it and even adopted a caroller as a temporary grandmother.

The next day, I had to take her to our favorite thrift shop so she could get Christmas-themed clothes like the carollers had. She now has a top with candy canes and a playtime-friendly red velvet dress. But she’s still wearing her Superman outfit most of the time, because nothing says festive like…super-heroes.

So, thanks to Andrew, Santa, and Kelly, we’re slowly catching on to the Christmas spirit.

On the other hand, it was interesting to finally be able to notice how the museum differs, ever so slightly, from typical texts on ancient Egyptian history. It isn’t organized by time periods (which is how I prefered to teach it), but rather on themes of ancient Egypt, such as Religion and the Afterlife, Pharaoh Akhenaten and his reforms towards monotheism, and relations with Babylonia/Assyria. From our texts, Neil had one take on Egyptian history, such as King Tutankhamen was poisoned by his sinister vizier Ay, but our guide had information that implied Tutankhamen was killed in a chariot accident, whether accidental or deliberate we don’t know (but we can guess!). It was also only clear at the museum that ancient Egypt was almost certainly richer, at least in consumables, than Sumeria, because a lot of Mesopotamian artifacts have been found in Egyptian digs, but not so much Egyptian stuff near the Euphrates river: this (at least according to the museum) implies Sumerians were sending their goods to Egypt in exchange for Egypt’s grains.

But my favorite part of the museum is their Coptic artifacts. I was actually surprised to find the Coptic (early medieval Christian) period almost ignored in most texts on ancient Egypt, but the Egyptian Museum seems to give the Coptic period as much weight as the Ptolomaic period. And if you consider a Rosicrucian point of view, it makes sense. After all, both period are ancient-Egyptian-derivative: no Egyptians were in charge any more, but the rules, Greek and Roman, kind of had a (scuse the irony) “when in Rome” sort of mindset. Here’s one example I took particular note of:

The jackal-headed god Anubis was in charge of bringing the mummified dead to the afterlife as shown in the picture above. Though the Romans officially had their own set of gods, the Romans living in Egypt thought it was prudent to play it safe, like this Roman guy who had Anubis engraved on his (?) headstone:

Just recently, the museum started selling “passports” for children, so they can go through the galleries in sort of a scavenger-hunt sort of way. I bought the passports (only $3.75 each) for Neil and Kelly, and they both loved stamping them in each gallery. The passports also came with pencils, so the children could take note (or draw pictures) of things they noted in each gallery, and a little blue flashlight which allowed them to read “secret messages” of information secreted in various places. I still think it wasn’t lowbrow enough for some children (who wouldn’t want to read the whole two sentences of text) but it was a lot of fun for Neil and Kelly.

Before and after we saw the museum, we walked through Rosicrucian Park, which is a worthwhile tourist attraction all on its own. It has faux-Egyptian buildings done up in an art-deco sort of way:

plus the secret-looking temple. At the Tapestry of Arts, the not-so-secret secret Rosicrucians invited us to visit their library, but it was closed this weekend, since the Rosicrucians were busy being not so secret at the Tapestry of Arts festival downtown. Someday, though, we may just take them up on their offer. because it’s cool to find out more about our local secret society.

Neil and Kelly posed Egyptian style in front of one of the sphinxes, though I’m not sure it came out all that Egyptian-looking:

But maybe someday in the far future someone will find that digitized picture and ponder how the mysteries of Egypt influenced the people of the 21st century. That mystery established, we went to visit Peter in his office downtown and have some coffee with him.

Anyway, as we came home from the party, my neighbor Amanda was out and she warned me that we were having earthquake weather. She had an uncle, she said, who was sensitive to it, and he’d put out the word to remain careful and aware for the next few weeks.

Now I know most people, including seismologists, don’t believe in earthquake weather. But it is a matter of serious lore among Californians. Those of us who experienced the 1989 earthquake and were outside that day remember how hot and still the weather was that day, and how it just set people on edge. It was just that irritation that had me on an early bus home (instead of staying after work with friends) that day, and as a result I wasn’t stranded in San Francisco that evening. But my sense is certainly skewed. I remember sensing earthquake weather in October of 2002, but nothing ever happened, and I didn’t feel anything before last year’s October quake.

It’s hard to describe earthquake weather, since it’s more of a sense than a description. As far as I know it, it’s hot, still weather, that’s somewhat odd for the season, and has animals (and even some people) out of sorts. It was Saturday’s weather, which was not predicted. Even the birds made themselves scarce, which disappointed Kelly, since she’d made a birdseed cookie and hung it up for our local finches.

Peter’s still skeptical, so he asked me to set the criteria, and I said it would have to be a quake strong enough for us to feel within the next week or two. So far, we haven’t had any such quake, so I’m putting Amanda’s prediction out here. She said her uncle had correctly predicted our October 2007 quake, as well as the Loma Prieta quake. If there’s something to earthquake weather, presumably we’ll know soon.

I was mortified. Had the time been changed unexpectedly? Had we completely missed the parade? Well, there was nothing to be done but to walk over the parade end point, and catch whatever we could of the festival.

As it turned out, the parade route had simply changed, so we happily waited at the parade route end instead. As usual, it had everything a good Memorial Day parade should have, even though it is still on the small side.

The parade was led by the local ROTC together with representatives from the Air Force, Navy, Army, and Marines:

There were clowns, both from the local high school’s drama department, and adult professionals. This one delighted Kelly by asking her to blow bubbles for him:

There were two marching bands, including this one:

Behind them was a boat that doubled as a float for the childrens’ choir; the cub scout troop Neil used to belong to; the girl scouts; and neighbors in costumes, decorated wagons or bikes. A new float this year came from Our City Forest, or as I like to think of them, the sane type of environmentalist:

They come from old-skool, Arbor-Day-not-Earth-Day-Gaia-Worship, environmentalism: plant a tree, it cleans the air, gives you shade, and possibly even food you don’t have to drive to. They were there to donate public trees to people willing to plant them in their sidewalk fronting, and interestingly enough, had played part in a local trees-vs.-solar panels conflict. In short, some trees had had to be cut down so some new solar panels wouldn’t be blocked from getting the maximum amount of sun. Our City Forest (and other flora lovers’) argment is trees work 24/7, not only in bright days; trees save energy by providing shade; and trees are a huckuva lot cheaper, efficient, and (duh) biodegradable than solar panels. But you don’t get green cred just for planting a tree, or growing a garden, do you? I was happy to see a green group that wasn’t all about carbon credits, global warming, or government control.

Getting back to the parade: another regular feature is the fancy antique cars. Here’s one that was decked out for the parade as well:

I’d say that’s our local councilwoman Nancy Pyle riding in the car, but I don’t think it is. She was there, however, as she is every year, making a brief speech and awarding the costume contest prizes. She’s up for re-election this year, and I’m voting for her. How could I not, when she nominated Kelly for “most beautiful” in the costume parade two years ago? That’s what local politics is all about! I’d also like to note her opponent didn’t bother to show up for our parade this year, BTW.

It all ended with a fire truck and…a hot dog van. We followed the end of the parde into the back of Parkview Elementary School, where the festivities continued with Memorial Day rememberances and patriotic songs. I said hi to some of my neighbors whom I recognized. This year, the festival had added a crafters’ fair to its set of booths. I bought Kelly a ball from the local high schools’ booster club, but we headed home for lunch instead of buying food there.

The fact that it all comes back from the day when playgrounds and amusement parks didn’t feel so sterile is one of the things that delights us. On a hot day, you could scald yourself on the metal slides, and you can spin and spin in the merry go round until you puke. There’s an octopus in one of the playgrounds that jiggles as you move on it, and if you put a foot in the wrong place, it could hurt; and you could certainly take a bad tumble from the top of the bumblebee or hit your head on the maze. Some of the slides are so steep they frighten even the bolder toddlers, and I think that’s a good thing. Despite the potential danger, I’ve yet to seen anyone get hurt, and certainly not the way I see accidents at more modern playgrounds were the safety is assumed.

But I’m afraid it’s all going away. I found out a few weeks ago that Happy Hollow is closing down this summer for a full on renovation. Some of the announced  changes aren’t bad, such as a new restaurant, new seating in the puppet show theatre, and a bigger petting zoo. But I fear for the rides. Neil fears the rides will be revamped into the aggro branded-yet-personalityless type of rides you see at any other mediocre amusement park, like Great America. And I fear the anthropomorphic kiddie fun fashion of the 60s when the park was originally built will be usurped by the politically correct, enviro-precious fashion of the current day. It’s all too easy for me to image our Danny the Dragon turning into Danny the Environmentally Conscious Dragon with Snow White and the Seven Types of Recycling Dwarves. I know the shields from the Viking ship as well as the carousel characters are being sold at auction, so something more modern, and thus currently fashionable, is certainly taking their place. And I would place money on the fact that the metal slides will be replaced by less steep plastic ones, and that the merry-go-round and octopus as well as many other old play structures will be gone for good in favor of blander things like I could find at any other playground.

I took Kelly to Happy Hollow last Thursday, and like many of the other visitors being nostalgic, I took lots of pictures. By the time the park reopens in late 2009, she may have outgrown much of its little-kid fun, too. I’m happy we had it the way it was when my children were young, and I’m sure, no matter how well it’s improved, I will miss it the way it was.

As we drove up to it, Peter and Neil gave out shouts of glee. We’d already seen the Invasion of the Worlds Fry’s in Burbank, which is a pop culture masterpiece. This one was just as good, in a different, but just as delightful way: its design was all about gears. I only had my cell phone to take pictures, but it had to be captured. Here’s a blurry picture of the amazing gear front of the store:

A 19th century gear-and-cogs theme echoed through the store, from the gears that marked each aisle, to the girders and industrial workers mural at the back of the store:

The customer service counter even looked like it came out of steampunk work of fiction:

The Fry’s in Northern California have themes, but it seems the architect for the LA Fry’s went all out in creative nerd-culture-embracing enthusiasm. And personally, I like it a lot.

The confluence takes on weird forms, a good one being microbreweries, a bad one being the wicker motorcycle we spotted in Eureka. One of the forms that briefly expanded worldwide was grunge. I thought grunge had left this world for good sometime in the mid-90s, but it lives on forever in the great northwest. As we were slowing down as 101 slowed into Willits, I saw a young man walking up a hill wearing a skirt. Outside of Celtic festivals, I hadn’t seen such a thing since the 90s, when some grunge rock stars had worn skirts, and it had kicked off a short-lived trend for male fashion victims. But here, in Willits, the fashion had apparently never died. In confirmation of this, I spotted another man in a skirt, in the same town. Oh, and flannel shirts? Yup, still being worn in Willits.

I thought it might be a small-town quirk: maybe the men in Willits had bought into the 90s fashions hard, and since then had never had enough spare money to buy themselves pants or decent shirts, but I was wrong. Days later, when I was browsing in Powell’s bookstore in Portland, I came upon another man wearing a kilt. Close up, I could see its appeal. It really looked more like Roman uniform wear than a dress, and paired with the right kind of boots, it lets you trek through the boggy fields without having to worry about soggy trouser bottoms. And I guess the flannel’s handy when you’re clear-cutting forests, or steering your fishing boat away from the rocky coast, I guess.

But it’s still a very regional fashion, one that I had relegated to a lost long-ago time, so I was pretty amused to still see it live and well in the Pacific Northwest.