Changing the world, one letter at a time

I came across an interesting website (http://www.elphos.org/) that encourages people to send hand-written letters with positive messages to others. I thought that this really is a wonderful idea and wrote a short thank you note to someone who helped me several years ago. This simple act does make me feel better about this world and I hope that the person who I wrote to will find this to be a pleasant surprise.

I envision that this is something I can do every now and then. After all, making the world a better place is a good excuse to have fun with my pens.

Old friends and very old motorcycles

Today we got together with Kate and Robert at the Barber Motorcycle Museum in Birmingham, Alabama. Kate and Robert are among the first people we know when we moved to Iowa. Ann and Kate both started their graduate program in Landscape Architecture in the same year and become best friends with their countless hours together in the studio. It has been four years since the last we saw each other in Ames and they have moved to Mississippi shortly after our move to Georgia.




So this weekend we decided to meet half-way in Alabama and I get a chance the visit the Barber Motorcycle Museum. The museum is really great in almost all aspects (other than that you don't get to ride the bikes there). The building is beautiful and the collection is amazing, from the earliest to the latest motorcycles in history. I'm also very happy to see that a Kawasaki Ninja 250 is included in the exhibition.



Although a Honda NSR 150 is nowhere to be found, they do have a Honda NSR 125 in exhibition.




There are some very interesting bikes in their collection, such as this one with a beautiful wooden sidecar:


This one for riding on icy road:


Two from Michael Jordon's team (I don't know he was into motorcycle racing):





Folding scooters:




This one that I've no idea how to ride:




One more great thing about the museum is that you can see a part of the racing track next to the building (a tight U-turn). They happened to have a event going on today (don't know if it's a race or just a track day) and we get to see a lot of bikes racing down the track. All kids got very excited to see that, David keeps jumping up and down in the stroller whenever a bike passed by. He also complains a lot and keeps pointing to the track whenever we moved away from the windows. It's great that he's showing such good potential, we probably can have our track days together pretty soon. :)

Absurd fund-raising call

I've never said something bad about the schools which I graduate from before (or at least haven't done so in public), but I guess everything has its first time.

Ann got a really absurd fund-raising call from the College of Design at Iowa State University today. To begin with, I don't think it is appropriate to set a "minimum donation" of $500. I thought the way donation works is you go out and ask people how much they are WILLING to give you, NOT to ask people for a minimum amount of money they HAVE to give you. When Ann told them that we cannot afford to give out that much money (considering that our parents are stilling paying for a part of our living expenses), they said we can do this in "five easy payments". This is way too ridiculous, what do they think they are doing? Some TV shopping network selling vacuum cleaners? Why not ask for $499.99 (plus $4.99 for shipping and handling of the acknowledge card)?

Ann was too polite to just hang up the phone or say something that's not so nice and the phone call lasted a good while. They said that they will call back again soon to see if Ann will change her mind. I look forward to getting that call. Usually I try to be nice to everyone but sometime I do want to take it out with someone who deserves it.