At home today due to the holiday – President’s Day. Doing
laundry and general cleaning to end the long weekend. Loren is having some
friends over to engage in role-playing games.
As I am sitting here there are four teens engaged a role
playing game in my living room. The game
as I catch bits and pieces of it is set in a post-apocalyptic world. The campaign leader is laying out the
scenario of the world. Europe is
trashed. Canada is back to a frontier
state and the northern part of Africa is the place to live. Trolls are Christian and dwarves are Jewish.
Dwarves apparently had some issues that have yet to be worked out.
Okay the only difference in this from what I played as a kid
is that it is occurring indoors and there are no plastic toy guns
involved. Neither is there the endless
running and screaming of my youth. When we were playing war back at Patsy’s
Hill there in Pedricktown sometimes we imagined the Germans would have won
World War II and we would be freedom fighters allied with sordid
interests. This probably came from the
comics of the day. In addition to
plastic lugers and Tommy guns we would be pulling up dead corn stalks and using
the clump of dirt at the bottom as a potato masher hand grenade.
As the campaign wages in the next room I am doing house
work. We, the family, just returned from a trip to Valparaiso University. Part
exploration part business the jaunt to the campus was slotted in on a weekend
that was open. Back now in the pale blue house on Oxford Streeter laundry needs
to be done. Suitcases needs to be place
back in the basement.
The drive to northern Indiana was uneventful. While snow was
everywhere around us the roads were dry and the contents of a heavy laden grey cotton
sky stayed aloft. The drive back was also
okay. However this was only because we
opted to stay for an extra day. Choosing to stay put was a very wise move.
After my youngest son’s music audition we kept getting odd
reports about the east bound trek. Based on these vague reports of tough travel
and a weather report that kept changing we opted for another night at the
Holiday Inn Express Valpo.
At the day’s end while I was lying in bed I pulled up news
stories about what was going on. Turns out the Indiana Toll Road had been
brought to a stop on Saturday afternoon from the white outs and tractor trailer
wrecks. The roads in the three north
most Indiana counties were closed by midevening to everything but emergency
vehicles.
On the road back Sunday late morning we saw six different
semis twisted in the median. Huge tow trucks
were straining to get the twisted remnants out of the center wash that lies
between the eastbound and westbound lanes of the Toll Road. As I understand it
cars sat on the highway for hour after hour in the near zero weather.
The whole reason for this jaunt was that Loren did an
audition for baritone voice on Saturday. We ended up in the VUCA (Valparaiso University
Center for the Arts) for a 10 a.m. performance.
Having driven in Friday we got up Saturday to head over and there were
little blasts of white out. Clear moments would happen but the snow squalls were
coming in off the lake and increasing in frequency.
We met up with the woman who had been the music departments
point person to me. She was very kind
and seems attuned to drawing the best out of the applicants. We met some from folks from Texas. The daughter did not seem too overwhelmed by
the weather. Well it is one thing to see
it for a weekend and another to live with it for months on end.
Because we were staying in town they gave us tickets for a
mezzo-soprano’s and a cellist’s evening concert at the chapel. The temperature
was zero when we walked to the chapel. The chapel was about a quarter mile from
the car. As we walked to the chapel it
was a white out and the wind was about 50 miles an hour. About died.
Will find out about the audition in three weeks.
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