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With some hot temperatures around here recently, I got to thinking about what people think is hot compared to what a car thinks is hot.

Actually the thought process started years ago during a trip to the Badlands. As the temperature was well over 100 (note all temperatures here will be in F not C), I was worried about the car. I knew I would be unhappy being in the sun (no shade in sight, and you can see a long way in that area of the country) with the temp being 105. And I wondered if the minivan was equally unhappy.

It’s easy to tell in general, because cars have a temperature gauge. As long as the needle stays in the middle of the gauge, everything is happy. But I have also learned that if the needle starts leaving the good zone, something is bad and it’s too late to do much about it other than turn off the engine.

But I’ve since realized that what we think are hot temperatures are not hot to the car. It was replacing a thermostat and radiator that helped me understand that. The thermostat was rated for 195 – that’s the normal operating temperature of the engine coolant.

My body’s thermostat, however, is around 98.6 degrees, about half that of the car. So although I’m in danger of overheating in 105 degree weather, the car is not. Going from 80 to 100 degrees is significant to people, but to a car that would feel like going from 40 to 50 degrees to us.

It’s like dog years – a car degree is half a people degree.

Recalling my thermodynamics class back in college: heat moves from the hotter object to the cooler object, like water flowing from a higher point to a lower point. Once the air gets above 98.6-ish, I’m not longer giving off heat, I’m absorbing it. But for a vehicle, that point is 195. And if the air temperature is even close to that we have bigger problems.

With a couple different vacations this summer, I’ve had time to read some books. Half of these I picked and half of these were recommended to me by the wife and/or kids.

I’m going in order of when I read them.

First up: The Time Machine by H.G. Wells

I have read this book before, but it was a while ago. It was on our shelf when I was looking for books to read, and as it was a small book it looked good for a vacation read.

I like this classic sci-fi type of book, and because it’s such a classic I feel any review I give will be mostly useless. If you’ve never read H.G. Wells it would be an okay start.

Next up: King Solomon’s Mines by H. Rider Haggard

I picked this book off our shelves as something to read for the last few vacations, and took it along but never got around to reading it. It also is not a very large book. It was a more interesting story than The Time Machine. I liked it, but it’s not for everyone these days. It was written a while back and different things were socially acceptable back then.

Spoiler Alert

After I read it, I was thinking it would make a good movie, but no one would make it as written. It’s about white people who are journeying into the heart of Africa to find some treasure, and helping a displaced king of a tribe regain his throne. I was thinking what they could do to make it into a movie, then I realized that’s basically the plot of Black Panther. Any attempt to make a movie of KSM would be seen as a white man’s Black Panther. And to remove the African tribe element would turn it into any other adventure story, which would probably be fine, but then it wouldn’t be this story. I think its time has passed for a movie.

End Spoiler Alert

Next up: Story Thieves by H. James Riley

Just kidding, the author is James Riley. But all the authors so far had a first initial of H. so I tried to continue the trend.

This one is like Inception. Except it’s a book. I’ll call it Bookception.

James Riley wrote this book, but in this book there’s an author who is writing his book series, and the protagonists move between the two. It was an entertaining story. There are more books to the series than this first one, which worked well enough as a standalone. It left the door open for the rest of the series but its not like some books that don’t resolve enough in the first book so you have to read the rest.

I don’t remember anything objectionable, so it’s probably fine for anyone who wants to read it. Lower middle grade certainly.

My only complaint is that now I’m interested in reading the book series that’s in this book. I was going to call it the fictional book series. As opposed to the fiction book series. James Riley should take up the pseudonym of the guy in the story and publish those books.

Next up: The Blackthorn Key by Kevin Sands

This one was highly recommended by my son, who is entering 9th grade. It was a refreshing change of pace – a unique setting and characters. England around the time of the Black Plague.

It is a little violent and gruesome, but not out of place with the things that probably happened back then. As with the previous review, I have read only the first book, so I can’t vouch for the rest of the series. But no problems with upper middle grade readers for this one.

Next up: Land of Stories by Chris Colfer

This is another one that I’ve been trying to read for a while. This was one of the better books I’ve read recently, as far as getting into it and wanting to read it once I’ve started. It’s good for people who know all their fairy tales and nursery rhymes and such. So if your kids don’t know those, have them go through Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen, and Mother Goose collections.

As with the previous review, I have read only the first book, so I can’t vouch for the rest of the series. But no problems with lower middle grade readers for this one.

That’s it for this review. Maybe I’ll be able to finish a series soon.

I haven’t had a Family Conversations post in a while, but this should fit in that category. It’s just one though. Now that all the kids are in middle school and up, they don’t talk as much.

The scene: Delta has an origami book and has been practicing making paper cranes, and they’re turning out fairly well.
Delta:Dad, let’s see who can make a paper crane faster.
Me:Ok…go!
We both commence folding. I win the race.
Me:I’m done.
Delta:No, dad, one that looks good.
I do not know how to fold paper cranes. I folded something, but you would not have guessed it to be a crane. Unfortunately, I did not save it nor photograph it.

I just watched Pocahontas for the first time, and it was funny how closely it stuck to the standard Disney formula. I knew there were certain themes that were popular, but after that I listed all them I thought of and now I present those to you, dear reader.

• Main character is the daughter of the king/chief/etc. Bonus points if her mother has died.
• The king wants his daughter to follow traditions, but the daughter is impetuous and does not want to.
• She follows her own way and ends up falling in love with someone not from around these parts, which causes trouble.
• The king or villain or mob of townsfolk tries to kill the love interest, but …
• The daughter intervenes and changes her father’s heart / persuades the locals / helps defeats the villain to save the day.
• Everyone, including loyal animal sidekicks, lives happily ever after.

I came up with this list mostly with Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, The Little Mermaid, and Moana in mind (and Pocahontas of course), but some of it also applies to Mulan and Tangled.

Side note: I think some of the success of Frozen is due to its not following the formula.
Barely related note: The Emperor’s New Groove 2 (AKA Kronk’s New Groove) was made with minimal effort. They really phoned it in for that one – do not watch unless you have a lot of time to kill and nothing better to do.

Here are some thoughts I jotted down that aren’t quite sufficient for their own individual blog posts. If you’re the type of person who likes Twitter, pretend each of these is a tweet.

• There are two phases to Jackie Chan’s career – the good old days and the not-so-good newer days. If his movie was produced by Golden Harvest, it’s from the good phase. Once he started making movies with Hollywood, it was all downhill from there.
• Isn’t all food ethnic food? Or when people say “ethnic food” they mean anything other than their ethnicity?
• It’s summer, but it’s August so football is back on the radar. This year, I’m going to keep track of which announcers know the difference between a reverse and an end-around.
• If you take a laundry bag on vacation and bring it home full of dirty laundry, make sure that it contains only dirty laundry. This last vacation, someone packed the shaving kit in the laundry bag because it was easier to carry that way. We didn’t find it until we moved the laundry from the washer to the dryer, because laundry bags just get dumped into the washer.
• Tip for husbands: if the wife ever references TOH, she’s probably talking about Taste of Home, not This Old House.

This is the third of a two-part series, like the fourth book of a trilogy. You can also read about the first part of our trip here.

After we returned from Canada, we had one day to unpack then one day to repack, then on the third day we left for the shores of Lake Michigan, where we vacationed with purpose.

The first thing we noticed is that the old dirt-and-mulch pathway between houses was upgraded. As far as we know, this is a volunteer effort by the one homeowner, so I just wanted to note that it looks good.

We arrive Saturday, get setup, have dinner, then go to the Saturday concert. Afterwards is a walk down to Lake Michigan to see the sunset. Here is the view at the beach that first evening.

That’s not just overcastiness, that’s the effect of the Canadian wildfires. They were going strong while we were in Canada, but you couldn’t really tell while we were there. Then we came back to Michigan and got a much stronger effect.

Here’s a shot from the same time of day but on Tuesday rather than Saturday, and it’s more how it should look.

We had our usual array of activities during the week:

Tie-dye T-shirts

Crafts

And a shuffleboard tournament

My team did not win the tournament, in case you’re wondering.

Maranatha has a weekly event of the Staff vs. Guests Basketball Game. Our kids have never played on a basketball team, but they have been known to shoot baskets in our driveway setup. For some reason this year, both Alpha and Beta decided to join the game. Guests were ahead for a bit in the first half, but ended up losing by about 9 points.

And we always participate in the sandcastle competition. We had no good ideas this year, so we went with spray cheese.

We did not win first place this time.

A new thing this year was they had one day for a food truck to come in for lunch. Chick-fil-A. Gamma and Delta wanted to try it. I agreed, because we were on vacation. But if they want to do it next year they’ll have to pay for it themselves.

But overall, everyone had a good week. There was only a small amount of sunburn.

Our morning speaker for the week was Karl Clausen, mostly known for hosting a show on Moody Radio. He has lived a very interesting life, and thus has a variety of interesting stories to tell.

I can’t remember if it was him or the evening speaker (Dr. Winfred Neely), but there were two quotes from that week that I remember. One is “Don’t just GO to church – you are to BE the church”. The other one is “There is no inherent merit in poverty.”

The End

This is the second of a two-part series. You can also read about the first part of our trip to Canada here.

Day 4:
This was a half travel day. We got up, finished as much of the leftover dumplings as we could for breakfast, packed up, and headed west. I wanted to drive a bit before filling up on gas. Good thing I did, because there was a noticeable price drop once we crossed from Quebec into Ontario.

Nothing too much eventful, just driving along the freeway. Our goal, because we were going to get to Toronto before the rental place said we could check-in, was to go to the St. Lawrence Market and pick up some more fresh food.

However, as we got closer, Some Wife wanted to check something, so she went to their website and discovered that they are closed on Mondays. So over to Plan B, which is ask for an early check-in. They never did respond, so we just parked at the place and walked along the waterfront for a couple blocks. Our place was only a couple blocks from the waterfront, so that killed the 45 minutes or so that we needed.

The place was just what I was hoping for. We were up in a high-rise, the type of place we don’t have around here and thus the kids haven’t really experienced.

So here’s what part of it looked like.

And here’s the view out the window. Yes, it had balconies if you didn’t mind being 400 feet above the ground with a thin railing and sheet of plexiglas to keep you and other things from falling.

And here’s the place itself. We were a couple floors above the bridge thingy.

Our plans were somewhat in flux, but it was nice weather, with not the best forecast for the next couple days, so we decided to go out to the Toronto Islands right after dinner.

Even though I’ve been to Toronto before, I was not familiar with the islands until this trip. They are a nice place, highly recommend.

It was a walk of about 10 blocks to get to the ferry station. A long walk, but we noticed that Toronto has a streetcar system, so I suggested we could ride that on the way back. The ferry runs once an hour, so we had to wait a bit at the station for the next ferry.

We rode over, getting a nice view of the skyline from the water, then made our way to the far side of Centre Island, because that’s where the beach is.

The Toronto Islands are a great place, I wish we had more than 1 hour there. But if we didn’t catch the 9:00 ferry back we’d be stuck on the island until the 10:00 ferry, and we did not want that.

But I did get a chance to go to the shore on the close side of the island, where there is no beach, to get a shot of the Toronto skyline, which is one of the more iconic skylines out there.

As it was, the 9:00 ferry was late. All the families that wanted to get back before dark were waiting in the line, and people seemed to be either worried (are we going to get home today?) or impatient (come on, let’s go already). My favorite was the family that looked to be from India, but not much of an accent so probably 2nd generation. They had young kids, and they passed the time by singing “Oh where is the ferry” to the tune of the hairbrush song. Very catchy.

The ferry finally arrived, and we headed back. The Toronto transit authority website said that you could buy a single-use streetcar pass at any station, and there was a station a block from the ferry landing, so it should have been perfect.

But the streetcar station did not have a kiosk for buying tickets. Only some main stations have them. So it was late, people were tired, and we had to walk the 10 blocks back. But it let us get this nice shot of the CN Tower.

Then it was evening, then morning, the next day.

Day 5:
This was to be our main sightseeing day for Toronto. First up, the hockey hall of fame.

We drove there, and parked in a lot close to that and our lunch destination (the St. Lawrence market that we tried to visit on Monday).

Be warned, they stamp your hand when you enter, so you can leave and come back later that day if you wanted. But the ink they use is some weird non-drying ink. Mine was still wet after 20 minutes. Gamma had fun with his wet ink and gave me another stamp on my forearm once he figured out it could transfer because it was still wet. He also ended up with half a stamp on his cheek. And I had to be very careful with mine because I was wearing light-colored khaki shorts. I did end up getting a little bit on my pocket, but it was mostly inside the pocket so no real harm done.

The HHoF was well done, and had some interesting things even for those not so interested in hockey. Like the masks.

And if you are an older hockey afficianado, you’ll appreciate that a certain hockey puck was enshrined in the hall of fame.

And of course there is the Stanley Cup.

The cup is kept in a building that used to be a bank, and it was a fancy old bank. The outside still looks like a classic bank, and they kept the inside fancy too.

After that we walked a couple blocks over to the market. There was a nice park in between, with some sculptures.

The St. Lawrence market was packed. Lots of meats and breads for purchase, plus a variety of places selling meals. We could barely find a place to sit. These types of markets are great, because of the variety and people can chose different foods. But with younger kids, it’s a mess because there is choice overload, and some do not like making decisions when hungry.

But we eventually all got something to eat, and it was pretty good food. Then we bought some things to take with us, including some souvenirs from the souvenir shop downstairs.

Then back to the van and back to the apartment.

The afternoon consisted of nothing. Just relaxing in the apartment – reading, napping, playing Legend of Zelda, etc.

After dinner, which we made in the sparse kitchen, the weather was good enough that we could go to the CN Tower. So we did.

So we went up into the tower, and the clouds provided some enhancement to the view.

But we probably spent most of our time watching the roof of the Rogers Centre finish opening, and then seeing part of the first inning of the Blue Jays game.

Hint: you can see the players moving, including the pitcher winding up, but you can’t see the ball itself.

After we were done in the tower, I wanted to check out the old railyard right across the road.

It had some stuff, but the kids were done and wanted to get back, so we only spent a couple minutes looking at things. Plus we’ve visited the rail yard in Greenfield Village, so this was not a novel thing to see.

A short walk back to the apartment, then it was evening, then morning the next day.

Day 6:
Our last day, with two main events: 1. visiting the Royal Ontario Museum and 2. Going home

First up, the ROM. We packed up and headed out after breakfast. The ROM is basically a natural history museum – exhibits on birds and animals and plants and people.

We haven’t gone to a museum like this with the kids before, so it was interesting. Now they can appreciate a movie like Night at the Museum a little more.

And they had fancy displays, with things you couldn’t touch.

Then we were done, and ready to leave Toronto.

We loaded up in the van and drove about 40 minutes to a Chinese buffet. If you’re ever in Etobicoke, I recommend the Mandarin restaurant. Make reservations though, otherwise you’ll have to wait for a bit like we did.

They had a large variety of things, and most of it was yummy. Like multiple dessert tables, and several scoop-it-yourself ice cream tubs. And standard Chinese buffet stuff, plus a sushi guy, plus pizza and spaghetti and salads.

Don’t order the lemonade though. It was some carbonated thing, and my kids are not fans of carbonation.

Then 5 hours of driving (with stops) plus 1 hour of waiting in the border crossing line, and we made it back. It’s always fun to hear the border guard say “Welcome home.”

The End.