A Birthday and a Future Senator

Our explosively fun three-day weekend came to a close, and now Vivian and I have been enjoying the Great Indoors as the Midwest in general heats up to a broil. We stopped by the doctor last week and got to see some new images of our new baby. Everything seems healthy so far, and he/she even gave us a thumbs up.

We dropped by the Eagle's Lodge on Friday just long enough for Eric to try on Vivian's shoes before we made a break for the Donut Stop.

In other news, we finally got around to celebrating Nathan's birthday in Lincoln. He turned 31 a couple weeks ago, and we celebrated in the traditional way — eating pizza from Big Sal's pizza and playing several rounds of Mario Kart at his new house with Jonathan and Nathan's wife Ranae. We also got to meet his new golden retriever, Arthur, who was a source of boundless energy tearing around the place when we wasn't out of his little dog pen.

We also went to see Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life at the UN-L campus theater. It was a hipster indie film that tells the story of a couple kids growing up in Waco Texas and their passive-aggressive relationship with their overbearing father (played by Brad Pitt). They also threw in about half an hour of the creation of the Earth, complete with dinosaurs and several long shots of explosions and things bubbling on the earth's surface. Sean Penn was also in this movie for some reason, but he mostly rides up and down an elevator in present day and then had an explicable encounter with the rest of the cast on a beach toward the end. In short, it was an enjoyable film hacked together with bits and pieces of a Nova special and a screen test from Penn thrown in for no particular reason.

On the following Tuesday, I stopped by DJ's Dugout in Omaha for a meet-and-green with former Attorney General, current State Treasurer, and hopefully future Senator Don Stenberg. Our family attended First Covenant church with the Stenberg family back when we first moved to Lincoln back in 1995, so we've known him personally for quite some time. I've had the chance to vote for him twice so far — hopefully the third time will be the charm.

Also attending the meet-up was Spencer Zimmerman, who's also apparently running for United States Senate. He's never held public office before, hasn't set up a campaign committee, and has never been to Washington D.C. He passed around his business card, which belonged to a limousine company and had his name and phone number written on the back. Among his campaign ideas is to abolish the bicameral legislature we've had in Washington since the writing on the constitution and replace it with a unicameral like we have in Nebraska. It was a little hard to know how seriously to take him.