Politics, Poker, Potty Training and Pepper Potts

So, I haven't posted much in the last few weeks. Work and the great, although cool, weather has kept me busy.

I was in fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada, for 5 days at the beginning of the month for the 100th annual conference of the American Planning Association. Yes, that's right. The good citizens of Bloomington paid to send me to Sin City. This was my first trip to Las Vegas and it may have been my last. The conference was great, but the city was more than I can handle. The conference Keynote speaker was Congressman Earl Blumenauer from Oregon. He spoke about McCain's "Gas tax holiday" and the sorry state of public infrastructure and infrasture funding in the country. I also got to attend a session by Jack Dangermond, founder of ESRI about the future of GIS including consumer oriented geographic data systems, like Google Earth, and the sharing of data and data analysis tools over the web. Of course I had some fun too! I played a little video poker, a little 3-card poker, a little video blackjack, a few slots. In the end, I came out about $20 ahead. I ended up checking out 5 casinos; Paris, Bally's, Bellagio, Planet Hollywood and the classic downtown Golden Nugget. The whole city stank of capitalism to the extreme, unchecked growth and wealth, and conspicuous consumption however. Everything was for sale and had a price. Not really my style. While in Vegas, we made one trip out of the city to Red Rock Canyon. This was the first time I'd ever been in any kind of desert. We were lucky because it was a beautiful spring day in the 60s and the desert flowers were in bloom.

I saw Iron Man on Tuesday. It was phenomenal. They stayed true to the comics story line and Robert Downey Jr. was a perfect Tony Stark. If you haven't seen it yet, be sure to stick around in the theater until after the credits. There's a great scene with a new character and major hints about future movies. Also, if you're quick enough, you can apparently catch of glimpse of Captain America's shield in Stark's workshop and the band in Caesar's Palace (Which I didn't get a chance to go into while I was in Vegas) is playing the Iron Man cartoon theme song from the 1960s. In my opinion, this was the second best super hero film that's been made, right behind Spider-Man 2.

We are in full blown potty training mode with Parker and it's going well! He's been using the potty sporadically for almost a year. He's been wearing underwear almost exclusively during the day for about a week. He still doesn't go #2 in the potty, but we're working on it. We bought him a bunch of underwear with his favorite characters on them and we're keeping spare pants with us all the time. I hope he's totally potty trained in time for George's wedding in October.


While I was in Vegas, I missed the highly anticipated Barack Obama rally at Assembly Hall. I was impressed when I heard that 17,000 attended. That's more people than live in Lebanon! This pales in comparison to the 75,000 he attracted in Portland Oregon last week. Cathy didn't get a chance to attend the Obama rally either, or the Hillary Clinton rally 5 days earlier. My parents got a chance to hear Bill Clinton speak to a less than half full Lebanon Middle School gym. Only 750 people turned out to see him. Kind of sad considering this was the first time that a president had visited Lebanon since Abraham Lincoln. The Clintons' visits to Bloomington and Lebanon didn't help much. Obama won both counties, but Clinton pulled out a narrow victory in the state. To all but Clinton, the primaries look like they're all but done. Obama has Clinton the pledged delegate lead and is 57 56 delegates from clinching the nomination. November can't come soon enough!