Karin's Adventures

This year Halloween was on a Saturday, so no reason to spend an entire day in the office dressed up with a scary costume.

I got lucky though!
The invitation to Indiana Tech's 2010 Fund Drive kick-off party said 'feel free to come dressed in your favorite costume'. So I dressed in plain black for the day, and just threw on a cape and painted my face in time for the party.

It's been over 22 years since I last owned a motorcycle. I enjoyed riding very much, but my life just didn't have any room for a bike in it for a long time. Now things have changed to my favor, and I'll be riding again. Last week we drove to Hayden Honda in Kendallville and bought a blue-silver Honda Shadow Aero.
Today we picked her up.

I watched the 200th episode of my favorite TV show *Alarm für Cobra 11* on RTL's website today. The title was *Das Ende der Welt* (the end of the world).
It was a double-length, action packed, suspenseful story about Semir and Ben saving the world (and themselves) from a deadly virus.

The episode aired last Thursday, and today was the last day that it was available to watch for free on the web.
Tomorrow the next episode will be showing on TV, and then I would have to pay .99 € to watch this one.

I know, I'm cheap.

Did I tell you that I think pigs are cute? Well, to be honest, I'm not so sure about this one. He is four years old and weighs 1175 lbs., or 532 kg for the metric people. He is one of the attractions at the Indiana State Fair, where Tom and I spent roughly four hours walking around in 90°F heat today. Good thing that there are many airconditioned buildings with indoor exhibits to enjoy, otherwise I would have passed out.

We combined a shopping trip to COSTCO in Indianapolis with a visit to the fairgrounds. While the focus is clearly on agriculture, you can see lots of other very interesting inventions. Would you like shoes with big springs under the heels, or an extremely comfortable hanging chair? We signed up to win a Harley, and we calculated our 'health footprints'. I held a two inches long Brazilian cockroach on my hand. Other people where petting centipedes, five inches long, as thick as my thumb.

On we go with more summer festival fun. This time at the Allen County fair grounds, where you can enjoy some good old healthy 4-H activities. They had lots of animals on display. Cows, horses, goats, lamas, chicken, turkeys, rabbits, and (my favorite) pigs. I find piglets absolutely adorable. If we didn't have a dog already, I would seriously consider a pig.

Independence Day means a 3-day-weekend for me. Enough time for a trip to Portage, the Indiana Dunes State Park, and Central Beach at Lake Michigan.

Armani enjoys riding in the car, digging holes in the sand, and making Tom run up and down the beach. This time he even went in the water to swim with me a little bit.

The weather was perfect, overcast, light wind blowing, drizzling rain later in the afternoon.

Summer is here, festivals all over the place. Like Churubusco's Turtle Days.
OK - the story behind this one is highly unlikely (giant monster snapper turtle sighted in a pond??), but who cares.

Here's how it works:

You park by the school, then you slip through this door in the fence.

Then you have an overpriced gyros sandwich - excellent taste, but no tools supplied with it, so it's messy.

You look at some of the rides, and wonder if they would pass a TÜV inspection.

You find it odd, that there is no beer tent anywhere near the place.

At last you see truly awesome fireworks, after you found out where they were having them, wandering around in the dark, guessing the location by watching other people congregate somewhere.

We went camping with Sarah and Dan to the Pokagon State Park. Camping can be fun, if you have a big tent, good air mattresses, a grill and a stove, lots of bug spray, electricity, a screen tent to keep mosquitoes out while you're eating, and enough food and beer.

While we were sitting around the camp fire, I looked down and saw something move around between last year's leaves and brown dirt. I thought, it was a frog. But Tom said if it's dry and brown, it is a toad.

I always associated toad with something fat and ugly, but this little guy was really cute. If he hadn't moved, I would have never seen him.

Looking back less than a year ago, when I started to learn how to yodel, I've really learned a lot. Now my problem is not to get those practice yodels figured out, the problem is to find new practice yodels that I like. This one sounds perfect on a sunny day!

I taught myself yodeling with Kerry Christensen's CD *U2 can yodel*. When I had worked my way all through the lessons on the CD, I posted a video response with my performance of the last, hardest, yodel to Kerry's YouTube info-mercial.

I hadn't expected him to take note of my yodeling attempts, much less contact me about anything.
But that's exactly what he did! Yesterday he wrote me an email, saying that he also saw my interpretation of Melanie Oesch's Kuku-Jodler and would like to talk to me about that.

Today Kerry Christensen called me on the phone, to chat about yodeling in general and my approach to learning *harder* yodels, like the Kuku-Jodler. I told him that I used 'Audacity' to modify the sound files, that I sing along with for practice. I slow them down, so that I can get them figured out. I also transpose the pitch to match my voice range.

Kerry is a really nice guy! He said I'm doing a good job at yodeling. We'll stay in touch, I hope.