PEORIA -- Ten days of travel and interaction with a visiting 7-year-old has left no time to blog. Until now.
(Kids are great but they are a lot of work. They like to eat, and home cooked meals are best for them. No more frozen dinners for a while.)
This evening, July 5, a full moon graced one of Peoria's under-praised attractions -- the Peoria Municipal Band concert at Glen Oak Park. We took a picnic supper and enjoyed the lawn, the band, the nearby playground and the moon -- an experience that somewhat rivaled Ravinia near Chicago.
The band sounded terrific, as usual. The moon was spectacular. The 7-year-old had to be bribed away from the playground with a dessert treat from the concession stand.
Large signs at Glen Oak Park screamed "no alcohol" in the park. Luckily we forgot the bottle of wine at hone.
Nobody set up elegant tables on the lawn, a la Ravinia. We packed sandwiches in a cooler and carried in lawn chairs and a quilt to sit on.
But the event was free, versus substantial sums at Ravinia. At last, something fun and free from our city taxes.
Full moon July 5 at Glen Oak Park Bandshell.
The recent travel, to collect the 7-year-old, also was enlightening. One stop was at the Morton Arborteum, outside Chicago on U.S. Route 53. That's a wonderful place with a new children's garden that features real wading ponds and tree houses to climb into.
If there's a kid in your life, go this summer.
We also stopped for a couple of days in Bar Harbor, Maine -- a beautiful resort town at Acadia National Park, a gem of a place with a sandy, rocky beach, Cadillac Mountain, named for the founder of Detroit, wildlife including a convenient-to-the-road beaver pond, as well as brick carriage roads to hike and bike on.
It's loaded with history and somewhat redeems the wealthy in the US. Around the turn of the 20th century the Gilded Age robber barons so enjoyed this place they began buying the property and gave it to the US for a national park.
So what have the recently rich done for the US? Not much comes to mind. But here is an article about today's rich that will frighten and infuriate you -- about how Goldman Sachs, the investment bank, not only engineered last year's oil crisis by speculating in oil as a commodity, it has ripped off the taxpayers for bailouts and now plans to rape the cap-and-trade program designed to cut back on greenhouse gases.
And Goldman Sachs former executives run the government under Obama, protecting their friends in that company as if they still worked there. (Obama, are you listening? Do you care?)
The piece is called "The Great American Bubble Machine" by Matt Taibbi, and it's in Rolling Stone.
Here's a link to some of the article. It's not completely on the web yet, but likely will be soon. Read it all if you can, and weep for our nation and our 7-year-olds, as their future is at risk!
-- Elaine Hopkins
7/6/09: Also check out this link, another story by Taibbi on Goldman Sachs.
7/10/09: Comment by Rebecca Carey: I enjoyed reading about the band concert at Glen Oak. I pretty much grew up in Glen Oak, and we spent a number of Sunday evenings at the Band Shell by the Pavillion. Back before anybody had residential AC. Sometimes when the wind was right, we could actually hear part of the concert all the way down to Park & Monroe. Sometimes we could hear the lions at night at the zoo.
I love the amphitheater at night. I did Cat on the Oregon Trail in Children's Community Theater circa 1965. Under cover of darkness all of us "Indians" snuck around to the grassy knolls at the back of the amphitheater and then made our entrance through the center of the audience. It was sooooo cool! -30-
Comments