Handstand Sofapictures

Monday, October 14th.

Monday was Jack's real birthday. Since Peggy teaches school and Wes goes to high school they both had the day off. Jack didn't, but decided not to go into the office but do some work from home instead. Our plan was to move on to Madison later in the day, so after eating a good breakfast with the Martins we set about reorganizing our stuff for the zillionth time, as usual trying to devise a new setup in the van that could accomodate the latest junk we'd picked up :)

After getting everything set up reasonably well we said goodbye to the Martins and attempted to thank them for their wonderful hospitality. We then made our way through the western suburbs to get on I-90 towards Madison.

Halfway there we made a stop in Beloit, WI, just over the border from Illinois. One of Dan's good friends goes to school there and although she's presently studying a semester in Senegal and therefore completely out of town he wanted to take the chance to stop by and see where she goes to school when she's not on the other side of the world. Beloit College has a really quaint little campus and we couldn't resist the urge to take a quick couch picture there. We found a good place to put the couch, but instead of doing the usual thing of sitting on the couch we attempted to do handstands in front of it :) This was not entirely successful and Dan even managed to do a complete flip and land on his back in front of the sofa. A couple of girls walked by and had a good laugh at our antics but otherwise loved our trip idea when we explained it to them.

In the middle of the campus was an odd metal sculpture of a chair in a metal cage which had openings for a door and a window, and some odd square fixture attached to the front. It looked quite odd and out of place, and apparently wasn't too popular with the students either. Some rebel student had put up a sign in front of it with the following written on it:

Contract:
etcetcetc

In a spur of craziness we decided to put the sofa inside the cage. We managed to squeeze it through the door opening and place it upside-down on top of the chair inside the cage and take a picture with the two of us hanging onto each side of the cage. The picture was fun but unfortunately we wounded the couch trying to get it out of the cage again. The back of it rested on a sharp corner of the chair which tore a triangular hole in the couch. We rolled the couch back to the van and inspected the wound and decided that we might be able to sew it back together.

After that little aside we drove on to Madison and found the retirement home where Dan's grandmother lives and were reunited with and introduced to her, respectively. Dan had not seen her since she moved out of the house in Evanston which we'd visited a week earlier, so this was also the first time he saw her apartment. So we spent the rest of the evening having a nice visit with her and then went across the street to where Dan's aunt Connie lives to see her new condo and to spend the night there.