Thank you to all of you who expressed concern
and well wishes for my grandpa. To catch you up, we flew down to PR that Wednesday, arriving in San Juan and undertook the three hour drive to the Mayagüez Centro Medico on the west coast where he was being held. We found out in the parking lot of the hospital that he had passed about a half hour after we'd touched down. He
held on long enough for us to reach the island and that was all he could do. Even though we knew it could happen at any time it was disappointing to miss him by so little, but he did
know we were coming so hopefully that was a comfort. And, in a way, it was good that we arrived for this next stage of things to be there for Grandma and Aunt Manny. The viewing was an all day marathon from 9am to 12 midnight. Talk about grueling. We didn't stay for the entire time. Grandma has a great sense of humor and was dealing pretty well with everything. He'd been suffering for some time and she'd worked hard to care for him, so there was a sense of relief, mixed with the grief. He's finally at rest now. I also posted a short video above of the
beautiful song of the coqui frog of PR. You never see them, but you can hear them all over the island. Those cute little buggers can make quite a racket.
It was a good visit
over all though. Sue and I stayed in a Howard Johnson in Mayagüez that used to be one of the oldest convents on the Island. I've only ever driven through the city
at night so it was cool to actually check the place out for once. There's a nice
square lined with neat statues, a church at one end. Traffic was unusually bad even
for this normally crowded island because it just so happened that Mayagüez was hosting the Pan American games that week and the city was mobbed with cars and people. But mainly it was good to hang with Grandma and Manny and meet some relatives I didn't know existed before. Communicating in Puerto Rican spanish was surprisingly hard for me after the slower spoken Guatemalan variety. Different accent, faster cadence and different words for some things, like "chinas" for oranges instead of "naranjas" (oranges originated in China, so there is logic to it).
So the semester is over and everything went pretty well. I
enjoyed my classes and Sue even got to teach some fun
stuff. So far so good
good, but next semester I take on algebra, so I'm sure my streak of A's will come to a sudden halt. Here are a sampling of some of the drawing, design and typography projects I've
completed. The last typo project was to make up a wine and design a label for the bottle. The name had to be based on an idiom and so I called my wine "Youngblood"
and decided to go with a gothic, vampire inspired theme. It may be hard to make out from the photos but there is a pattern of wrought iron fence shapes in a very dark tone on tone in the background and puncture marks on the neck. The tag line below the initials says "Stay young, drink wine." Yeah, I know, a goth wine, surprise.
Yesterday marked the end of the week long River Fest, a big music event that takes over downtown every year. Unfortunately, we've had some cool, wet and occasionally severe weather
this week which dampened the festivities. Monday we had a tornado producing event pass right through west Wichita and a couple
tornados and some funnels were spotted near the airport, just down the road from Newman. Kind of scary. I was in the car with the music blasting reading something and I looked up to see people actually running for cover. But there was no damage, luckily, no CGI'D flying cows, everybody's ok. Sue and I only made it to the River Fest for a few hours yesterday. We had to try the chocolate covered bacon. Well, Sue had to try it, I refused at first. But after taking a bite I decided it wasn't so bad, a lot
like chocolate covered pretzels, sweet on the outside, crispy and salty on the inside. They had events on the river like group waterskiing and boat racing and those waterskiing kids deserve a round of applause just for getting into that dirty water.
Oh by the way, this boat, perched on the east bank of the Arkansas River in downtown, looks a little out of place, doesn't it? I mean, the river
isn't anywhere near deep enough to accommodate it. Turns out it's the actual boat that won the Americas Cup back from the Ausies in 1992. Some of the best sailors come from Kansas, who knew? Something about the crazy, unpredictable winds. It's also the first boat built by an aerospace manufacturer, which is the big industry here. How about that? Don't mess with Kansas, I'm warning you.
Ooh ooh ooh, before I forget, Sue and I will be in the Northeast for three weeks, the last week of July to mid August. We'll probably be doing a lot of driving around visiting people but we will be in contact with those of you we are hoping to visit. We will be arriving in Philidelphia on July 27th and leaving August 15th, fyi.
Hope you are all having a pleasant spring and that we get to see you soon.
