welcome spring!

Well, winter is over and spring is here.  Although, I don't remember seeing much winter this year.  Hope we don't see much summer either.  I'd be happy for spring or fall weather all year round.

Anyway, March was somewhat uneventful.  But we did have a couple of celebrity sightings this month, but no one too exciting.  So not exciting that I didn't even notice till someone pointed them out.  

We did have our cub scout pinewood derby.  It was a stake event although a lot of the cub scouts in our stake are just members of our community and not members of the church.  Here are some of the cars that competed.  There were a a few more that came later but these are the majority of them.  We had 2 boys in our pack win trophies for design.  That one with the pac man characters on a skateboard won 3rd place design in the Bears.  And the one on the right with the lights around it won best design over all the cub scout cars.  You can't see, but it also has a small compartment with water that you drop dry ice in to make it smoke.  Pretty high tech stuff.  Anyway, we were really happy he won best design because every other year he's competed, he's won 2nd place design and he was determined to have the best design since this is his last year to compete.

  One of our leaders and his son, pictured here, made this cool ghostbusters car.  The car did fairly well placing 3rd among the Wolves.  Unfortunately, this kid is only 5 and not a cub scout, which our leader  fessed up in the end because he felt bad.  They were racing for fun and it just ended up being one of the faster cars... oops.

They gave all the kids those rubber bracelet things and this is what some of the kids (from different packs) were doing with them during the race...  I was laughing so hard.

 Oh, what?  You want to see a close up?

We also visited the Natural History museum again and was able to see some other exhibits we didn't get to last time.  I think this display was in the hall of Pacific Peoples.  I can't remember what's going on here or what the figures mean but I thought they were humorous.

We also visited the Highline park one day.  It's not really a normal park you'd picture. It follows an old elevated railroad track that transformed.  It's about 15 or 20 blocks long.  So most of it is like a pathway with some wider areas to stop and sit or stand, or sometimes just benches along the sides.  And they had vegetation growing all along the path.  It was pretty cool.

Here you can see some of the old tracks.

And here you can see that they just built around the tracks.

We were there long enough to see the sunset behind New Jersey over the Hudson.

 We also did something cultural by going to see this play called Galileo.  F. Murray Abraham played Galileo.  I know you don't think you know who that is, but you do.  He played Salieri in the movie Amadeus and won an Oscar for it.  The stage was really small and round and the audience was wrapped around three sides of it so there were really no bad seats and we had a clear view.  It was about Galileo's life and condemnation by the Catholic church for his scientific beliefs.  It was really enlightening.  Worth a watch if you get a chance.  Well, if you like that kind of stuff.

And that wraps up the month of March.