Well, the Museum of Science & Industry in Chicago is seeking to make this a dream come true for people like-minded as myself.  If only I was free to do this – I’d certainly be willing to try.  They are seeking someone to move-in to a special residence they’ve constructed and live at the Museum for a month – all the while capturing their experiences via blogging, videocasting, and social media means.

A blog post on ApartmentTherapy.com shows this picture, as well as more pictures of the living space. More details about the experience, called Month at the Museum, are available on the MOSI site.

Here’s a video preview

FRIDAY

Friday evening, we went to dinner at Kyoto Japanese Restaurant. We went there last year for Jihad’s birthday so it was a great place to go again. Who can not love the fact that you get fire in your face during dinner?  I didn’t get any great pictures, but we had fun.

SATURDAY
On Saturday we were busy just about all day.   We had a birthday party for Jihad at Chuck E. Cheese followed by a Nashville Rollergirls roller derby game.  It was the Music City All-Stars vs. the Tallahassee Rollergirls.

The Party
We’ve never hosted a party at Chuck E. Cheese before.  While I expected the chaos, it was certainly a lot to bear – almost overwhelming! We had about 20 kids total and about 15 adults.  It was crazy! But we had so much fun.

The cake we had for him was a Star Wars cake from Publix – a marble cake with buttercream frosting – good stuff.   It had Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker on top battling it out.

We think the kids enjoyed themselves. We were there for more than 3 hours, and I’d not expected that. The schedule at Chuck E. Cheese is well-planned – we had a party hostess assigned to assist us all.   Time passed very quickly.  Here is a video of Jihad in the TicketBlaster.  He won the largest prize there is to get in there too – a red ticket that gave him 200 free tickets.

After all was said and done, we packed it up and headed over to Municipal Auditorium for the roller derby game.

Roller Derby
This was our 2nd time attending a roller derby game.  We went last year and enjoyed it a lot! So, we’ve been looking for an opportunity to go back.  The Nashville Rollergirl teams are just cool.  There is even a Nashville Junior Roller Derby.  You have to be at least 10 years old to join, so if they’re still around when Kaleya comes of age – we’ll have to see if she has any interest.

Prior to sitting down, we ran into one of the players, Jersey Jackhammer.

Then, we sat down, and watched a great game. NRG won the game 159 to 70. I’m still learning how the game is played, but I have the basics down. Well enough to know when we were doing good and when we were not doing good enough.  Here is a clip of a round or “jam” as it’s called.  We see Rambo Sambo taking the “lead jammer” position.  Then, she circles back around to catch up and ultimately break through the pack to score points for her team.

The kids seemed to enjoy themselves.  They asked questions about how the game was played and even Kaleya joined in with applause when she heard everyone else doing it because of a good score.   It was a great game – during one bout, Rambo Sambo scored 28 pts.  Another player that was fierce was Lady Fury. All the players were great though.

After the game we went down to the speedway to see if we could meet the players; and meet we did! Many of them were still on the floor and we liked how well they interacted with the crowd. We got a whole series of pictures of Kaleya w/ the players and one of the Jeerleaders:

Kaleya with Union-Jack-U-Up

Kaleya and Union-Jack-U-Up

Kaleya and Dramatic Pyrony

Kaleya and Showstopper

Kaleya and Rambo Sambo

Kaleya and Lady Fury

Kaleya and Anita PBR

Kaleya and Maulin Monroe

As we were leaving the auditorium, the entertaining band, Halfbrass, was outside performing impromptu.  Kids were dancing, some of the Jeerleaders were dancing, and the crowd was singing.  See the video below.

A great birthday weekend so far! We plan to go back to their next game on August 7th.  All in all, a great day and now I must go to bed!  However, before I go, here are some things to know

• another video from the roller derby game – the girls being introduced
• see info about all the girls on the team
• Maulin Monroe & Rambo Sambo talking about the sport
• and the whole set our pictures from today are here

Day 1 & 2 – travel to Florida & detour through campus of the University of Florida, visit to Heritage Village, St. Petersburg Pier & climbing in a Kapok tree

Day 3 – Science Center of Pinellas, International Plaza

Day 4 - Florida Aquarium, Honeymoon Island Beach

Day 5 – Adventure Mini-Golf, visiting a Seabird Sanctuary, and Indian Rocks Beach

Videos

• Univ. of Florida Graffiti wall
• Snowflake Moray Eel & the Science Center of Pinellas
• an Otter plays @ the Florida Aquarium
• Swim with the Fishes @ the Florida Aquarium
• the No Bone Zone @ the Florida Aquarium
• the kids play in the water area @ the Florida Aquarium
• watching a hermit crab
• Miles getting splashed!
• Kaleya on the Indian Rocks Beach

Here is the slideshow of all the pictures

or, you can view them all here.

Now it’s Friday and again, we slept in before getting a late start out.  I had a hard time deciding what we would do this day but eventually decided on the Florida Aquarium.  Despite the high admission price it was well worth it.  In addition to the aquarium exhibits, they had an outside water play area that the kids played in.

The Aquarium offers scuba lessons which they call “Swimming with the Fishes” – that was interesting to watch b/c they have a tank where you can look at people learning to scuba.

Here is the “No Bone Zone” where you can touch some of the specimens.

Then, the kids went to the water play area for awhile to cool off.

Now, Kaleya was playing with the water squirt machines spraying other kids. I predicted that if she got sprayed she would not like it. Sure enough, she got sprayed and I hear her over there crying so went to see what was wrong. After she calmed down though she went right back over to get in the mix again.

After the aquarium we then headed to Honeymoon Island Beach. I wanted to go to a beach that was not filled with tourists and Honeymoon Island certainly was not. The shore was rocky, but overall the kids enjoyed it – they actively searched and found many seashells and began a small collection.

And that was the end to another great day.

Tonight is the Madonna episode.   I won’t be able to watch it for schoolwork calls, but I’ll catch it online later this week.  Here’s the teaser clip:

View all TED talks in a spreadsheet.