It's hard to believe that it was ever this cold in Bloomington:



It's getting up to 93 today, and above 90 most of the week. At least our plants like the sun! (Especially after last week's tornadoes...) We've been eating giant salads every day. This one has some beet "greens" added:



And by the time we return from our upcoming camping trip to Utah, we should have a surfeit of raspberries (on the right):

Summer can finally start now! We just got back (last night) from a rather long trip: we visited Grinnell briefly (actually, twice), each delivered a paper at a conference, and visited some really good friends in Colorado. Parts of this trip were certainly vacation, but for the most part, they didn't quite qualify as "summer" because the days were rainy and cool. We did a lot of fun things in Denver, though, some of which are pictured below:

We went to Red Rocks, where there is an incredible amphitheater and a nice hike:



We saw dinosaur tracks at Dinosaur Ridge:



We saw some awesome rocks at the Colorado School of Mines Geology Museum:




And we toured an old-fashioned candy factory:



Upon arriving home, we found that some garden plants have exceeded our expectations, while others are a bit disappointing. In the positive category:

spinach
beets
arugula
lettuce (tons!)
strawberries
raspberries (getting there, anyway)
leeks
peas

In the disappointing category:

tomatoes
peppers
eggplants

Next year, we'll have to try out some different methods of starting those last three...

Yesterday Sara and I sang in a fundraising concert for our local choir, Voces Novae at the Stone Age Institute. What a cool place! It's a beautiful building--most of the stone, we were told, is about 330 million years old (though there was a piece of flint over every doorway that was a paltry 80 million years old), and some of the stones had fossils in them.

The directors (seen in this video about the Institute) talked about two kinds of "experimental archaeology" that they have been doing lately. One is teaching a group of bonobos (in Des Moines!) to make and use stone tools--apparently, they have also taught the bonobos to play instruments, and Paul McCartney and Peter Gabriel jammed with them for a few hours. The other experiments they've been doing were butchering elephants and wildebeest with stone hand axes. We got to see one of the directors make just such a hand axe: he's really good.

In addition, the directors have a rock band that records (apparently at the rate of about one song a year) educational rock songs, one of which we performed in arrangement. They said that soon they will upload these songs to their website (fromthebigbang.org), so I urge you to check that site in about a week or so and listen to "From the Big Bang to the World Wide Web," which gives you the highlights of known history, and their other song, which apparently goes through human origins (imagine singing "Australopithecus" in a laid-back reggae-flavored sort of way).