Summer begins

And we started the summer off by shipping Jimmy off to EFY* in St. Peter. One down, three to keep occupied. Jimmy will be gone a week and has every intention of having a good time, despite the potential dangers of sharing a room with a kid (a friend from church) who has spent the weekend being sick. Cross your fingers and knock on wood.

Then after dropping Jimmy off at the friend's house (they are all riding to St. Peter together) I loaded up the remaining children and we spent an educational two hours at the science museum learning about the Titanic. Some things I learned from the movie/exhibit:

• I don't think I'll ever be a Jacques Cousteau-type person. Even a movie about a submersible makes me claustrophobic.
  
• If I ever do go down in a submersible, I will try not to sit so that an old man's face takes up my entire scope of vision.
• This particular old man had a veritable forest in his nose.
  
• And they sweat a lot when going down in a submersible designed to explore ocean depths of up to 20,000 feet.
  
• People who are paid to dress up and wander amongst the exhibit, telling their "stories" to the patrons frighten me a little. I don't want to hear their spiel. Please don't follow me, "Captain"
  
• But I did find "Victoria Jessop"'s head piece fascinating.
• I wanted to try to sit in the "lifeboat."
• But I probably would have gotten stepped on. There was no lifeboat, except for a lighted floor plan projected onto the floor.
• I tried very hard not to imagine being one of the 3rd class passengers trapped on the Titanic.

As we were looking at the menu options for the various "classes" of Titanic passengers, Matt told me that he would have rather been a 3rd class passenger. I asked him why and he said "Because I like the food on the 3rd class menu better. I recognize almost all of it." So I'm a 3rd class cook. Granted, I'd probably rather eat barley soup, boiled potatoes, stew, etc, than Vegetable Marrow Farci (served in to first class passengers) anyday.

All joking aside, it is a very sobering exhibit. There is a computer-generated video detailing how they think the ship sank (time-compressed, of course). There is a big sheet of ice that you can touch and imagine as an iceberg passing close by while you are strolling on the promenade. There are many artifacts recovered from the wreck and several stories of passengers, both survivors and those who didn't make it.

*Especially For Youth--a conference for LDS teens