Lucy et alia

This morning we drove down to Watertown to meet up with Lucy and her friend Erin for breakfast. They are both part of the Windy City Rollers, a Chicago-based roller derby team, and in the winter they compete in speed skating events to stay in training. They won their race, which is not surprising.

Lucy is actually a pretty young woman -- reminds me of a brunette Kristin in many ways -- but her roller derby persona is aggressive. So that's what that picture is all about. In her real life, she is getting a graduate degree in public policy and will probably be in some sort of financial planning, assuming that the economy and governments ever recover enough to hire her after she gets out of school. For a number of years after she got her undergraduate degree, she worked as a union organizer. She has always been something of a jock -- having run track at the state level in high school and also was a Golden Gloves boxer.

All of Tom and Helen's kids are very bright, although the others don't seem to have done the sports thing. Rebecca is working on a doctorate at the divinity school at the University of Chicago -- clearly one of the finest schools in the nation. John is a law student at the University of Texas Law School. (Out of respect for you A&M fans, I won't say any more about that.) Peter graduated from St. John's last spring and is pondering his future even as we speak, I suspect.

After a nice breakfast and visit, Lucy and Erin went back to watch their teammates compete, and we headed back to the Dells, stopping along the way to do some shopping for ink cartridges for my computer, some books and shirts for Tom. We wandered around a large outlet mall at Johnson Creek, the weather being friendly. There were a lot of stores, but not much to interest us. Outlet malls seem to be mostly clothes and shoes, because the fashions change every year, Tom says. So most stores we just walked by. We did stop into a Bose speaker outlet, though, and were treated to a fantastic presentation on their home theater set-up. How nice was it? About $4,000 nice. (I don't think we will be getting one of those.)

As I say, it was a warmish day today, and we expect more warm days -- maybe even into the 50s! (10 C) -- later in the week. We also may have thunderstorms (tomorrow) and snow later in the week. So winter's not over, that's for sure.

Odd fact of the day: One of Lucy's classmates when she was in school was Sam Kass. He became a chef and eventually was hired by a Hyde Park family as their cook. When they moved into the White House last month, he went with them to continue as the personal chef for the Obamas. He's been in the news a lot because of his health-oriented meals. (And, according to Lucy, because he is good-looking. She shaved his head when they were in school, and that is still part of his look. I don't know if that will get her an inviation to dine at the First Table, though)