The Seacrest barn

Today was a celebration of the Seacrest barn's 125th year. This is an octagonal barn about 15 miles east of Iowa City. We have enjoyed visiting old barns, and this celebration also included a demonstration of Belgian work horses loading hay in the barn. So we went out and enjoyed the afternoon quite a bit.

The barn is quite complex, with a lower level having stables and milking stations, a "main floor" (where the ramp shown in the first picture leads) with workshops and various equipment, and an upper level that would have stored hay for the winter. The upper level was gorgeous, with an amazing domed ceiling that almost looked church-like.

The Belgian horses are beautiful, massive animals that are clearly capable of an amazing amount of work, but they are also very well mannered and take directions readily from their owner. It was beautiful to see how they worked, and it was amazing to see just how difficult it was to move hay from the main floor of the barn to the upper level. It seemed to take at least two different pulls on different ropes to get the hay lifted up and then moved over to the right storage area.

Perhaps the most surprising event of this aftenoon was seeing a graduate school friend at the barn. Kent Fuller worked for the same advisor I did, Frank Anderson, and I knew that he was in the Iowa City area, but we hadn't looked him up after I moved here. He and Gretchen were at the barn, though, and it was nice to say hello. I'm sure we'll get in touch with them when we can have time to catch up. A very nice treat for the day!

Class reunion

Last weekend we went down to Ft. Madison, Iowa, for Judy's high school reunion. I won't say how many, but if you look closely at the second photo you can figure it out...Ft. Madison is a very nice small river town on the Mississippi, almost on the Missouri border. It has had a consistent set of employers, and the town is in very good shape. The old part of town is particularly nice, with many lovely old homes. One of them has been converted into a B&B, the Victorian Bed and Breakfast, and its photo is above. We had a suite, not just a room, and the biggest and best breakfasts we've ever had at a B&B, and that's going some!Of course, the real function of a class reunion is to catch up with your high-school friends, and Judy saw many friends she hadn't seen in many years. Some of them had gotten old, but some (including us, of course!) hadn't. She had a great time and I was very glad to meet people who had been important to her growing up. (That's Judy in the front row, just about in the center of the photo.)

Teacher's Day

China has an annual Teacher's Day, when people celebrate the teachers who are or were important in their education. It's a wonderful idea, and says a lot about how China has gotten where they are in the world. This year it was September 10, and a friend of ours, Yang Ke, sent us a photo of his teacher, Shi Jiaoying, with himself and some of Prof. Shi's other students. This is doubly wonderful because Jiaoying is one of our best friends and was part of my birthday celebrations this summer. Here's the photo, taken on the new campus of Zhejiang University; it's clear who is being celebrated, and Ke is the young man on the right, who has just finished his PhD and is about to start working with Microsoft Research Shanghai.

Another birthday dinner

Birthdays, like other good things, are just too good to only have once. We had wanted to take Prof. Jiaoying Shi to dinner when we got to Hangzhou, but it ended up as a family dinner with our very good friends.From left to right: Prof. and Mrs. Shi, Ke Yang, Judy and me, and Mingmin Zhang and her daughter.

We went to the Kuiyuan Restaurant, a restaurant with a long history in Hangzhou, and had their specialty shrimp and fried eel noodles -- along with lotus-leaf chicken, a specially-prepared fish that we really like, and several other things. Noodles are, of course, a birthday specialty meaning long life.

Greetings from Nanjing, China

We have been attending a conference on education and entertainment, hosted at Nanjing Normal University. We had a good trip, flying north from Chigago near the North Pole (sorry for the poor quality of my cell phone photo of the in-flight map) to Beijing and then on to Nanjing.During the conference there was a book signing for the translation of my beginning graphics textbook into Chinese, and the photo shows Prof. Jiaoying Shi (right), me (middle), and Prof. Zhigeng Pan (right); Prof. Shi led the translation team and Prof. Pan worked with him. A number of others contributed to the translation and I appreciate all their work.We expect to have other things to share from Nanjing soon.

Birthday (1)

This month is my 66th birthday, and our good friends Qi Hua and Jun Ni invited us over for dinner a couple of days ago. I'm really sorry that I didn't take a photo of the whole table, because they and Jun's parents really gave us a wonderful dinner. We just don't go out for Chinese food in the US any more (unless we have Chinese friends with us who know how to order off the menu) because we're so spoiled by real Chinese food.The sixty-sixth birthday is a very special one in China, because six is liu(4), and liu also means "luck". So sixty-six is liu liu, or "luck luck" -- a very good birthday. Our friends made a very special dessert for us, "eight-treasure rice". The eight treasures are dried fruit and nuts in the sticky rice, with sweet red bean sauce as well. Yum! The photo is a dish of eight-treasure rice that they sent home with us and that we shared with Rick for dinner last night. What a treat to have such good friends who spoil us so!