KAREN COMES TO TOWN!

We just spent three full days with our pal, Karen. (She might be my friend of twenty years, but I have to refer to her as our friend now because Dane and Aubrey absolutely adore her.)

She flew down from Seattle on Sunday and stayed until Wednesday night before heading to L.A. for her grandma's 99th birthday. While she was here, we dug sand at the beach, played mancala, stretched at a Yoga class, and drank good coffee.

On one of those days, we even took Dane out of school and expanded his education to include a city bus ride and an adventure at the Exploratorium.

Our favorite exhibits:

*Toilet/drinking fountain. (Karen would have none of this! Aubs was a little sicked out too, you may notice in the photo.) The exhibit was commentary on how our senses can conflict: the toilet has never ever been used as a toilet, and is safe as a drinking fountain, but drinking and toilet just don't go together for most of us.

*Color/meaning exhibit. At this exhibit a huge paragraph of colors was typed out. It looked kind of like this, but longer and more varied:
blue red orange green purple red yellow purple blue red orange green purple red yellow purple blue red orange green purple red yellow purple, etc.
You were supposed to read it out loud as fast as you could and say the color (not the typed word). Pretty tricky...

*The wind machine. Made a beach ball suspend in air. (Also fun as a wild hair machine.)

Needless to say, come Wednesday we were very very sad to see Karen go, but at least she'd found out she had a new gig to prepare for with Northwest Baroque. That concert's December 9th if you're going to be in Seattle and have any interest in attending. I'm sure you can find it on Karen's website: www.karenurlie.com. (Yes, we can give our friend some shameless friend promo here...)

[Last pic: Um, putting on a show for Karen.]