Helping Move

About a month ago one of my good friends and his wife moved from one house in Western Mass to another. He's helped me move a few times at least, so it was really no trouble to wake up a little early on a Saturday and head out there to help. No trouble until I sat stopped in traffic on the Pike for an extra hour, anyway.
Traffic, and the 90+ heat aside, the move went about as well as it could have. It's essentially standard procedure now that I'm one of the goons who crawls around in the recesses of whatever truck is being used, cramming oddly-shaped things into oddly-shaped spaces. My goal is to make myself useful by lugging heavy things around the hot truck and keeping the number of required runs as low as possible. You'll have to ask the people I've helped if that is actually a useful thing to do or not...
The movees are renting space in a friend's house, which was essentially already full of stuff. I felt a little bad about piling all of their things in either the garage, the living room, or their bedroom, but hopefully they have it all sorted out by now.
I unfortunately had to leave early in the afternoon to make it home in time for dinner plans, but as far as I know nothing was seriously damaged in the move, which is about all you can hope for. The leg of a table or couch or something made a bit of a mess of the plastic frame around a TV screen, but as far as I know it still works fine. Besides, now it has character.

Walking with Dinosaurs

Last month Amanda and I went to Walking with Dinosaurs at the Garden. I didn't know anything about it other than a vague promise of animatronics, and I was not disappointed. The show was actually pretty awesome. We were guided through a history of dinosaurs and their evolution by a nearly fearless human guide, who was dwarfed by the massive dinos walking around him.
The show was immersive, with elaborate and clever backgrounds and environments for the dinos to lumber around in. The lone flying dino required some slight imagination, but the effect came off well.
The dinosaurs themselves were surprisingly lifelike, and it required as much imagination to figure out how they worked as to think of them as real.
It was definitely worth the price of admission, and not nearly as campy as I would have thought.

New England GP

Last month the American Le Mans Series came to Lime Rock Park in Connecticut for the New England Grand Prix. Six of us made the three hour drive down and it was a blast. If you've never been to an auto race before, the first thing you'll notice is how loud it is. Some of the cars are absolutely deafening. One of the draws of the ALMS is the variety of cars racing against each other. Most series, like NASCAR, essentially use just one kind of car, and this is completely different. You can close your eyes and easily tell if a Corvette, Ferrari F430, or Porsche 911 just went by.
Lime Rock is a short, fast, narrow track so the racing is exciting for the whole race. There were no major wrecks, although one of the Audis pitched itself into a barrier pretty hard.
Basically the whole day was sitting out in the sun watching loud, fast cars scream by. I really can't think of too many other things I'd rather do.