Late 2022

Fall is our favorite time of year; cool and crisp, no bugs, and beautiful colors.

Walking paths become works of art.

We visited the Indianapolis Zoo close to Halloween. They had lots of holiday exhibits and an unbelievable number of rugrats running around.

The zoo is big enough to have a wide variety of animals but not so huge that you get lost, and it has plenty of room for the animals to roam.

Kangaroos can reach a speed of 35 MPH and can jump as far as twenty-five feet in a single hop. When two males spot a female, they’re interested in, they “box” for the privilege of mating with her. The zoo only keeps one male of mating age, so they don’t get into fights. I’d always thought kangaroos were about the size of a dog, but they’re much bigger, an adult will get to around 200 Lbs.

This guy seemed as interested in us as we were in him.

Indianapolis has all the amenities of a big city; professional sports including the Indy 500 (which at 350,000 attendees is the largest sporting event in the world), museums, convention centers, symphony, zoo, several large colleges, world class medical centers, etc. yet it doesn’t feel huge because of the number of parks and the amount of green space. Downtown has a scenic canal walk where you can rent kayaks and paddleboats. You can even take a gondola ride. Ducks seem to particularly like the canal walk.

This statue sits outside a medical office in Carmel, Indiana. It’s freakishly realistic, I talk to him every time I walk by. As a kid, I remember riding my bike to a barbershop in downtown Westfield, N.J. (yes I did have hair in those days) where there was a shoeshine boy outside. He used KIWI shoe polish just like what’s in this statue. I can’t remember the last time I polished shoes; it was the last time I wore a suit which I also can’t remember when that was. There are advantages to retirement.

One of the places we like to eat is Big Hoffas. They have really good ribs, brisket, pulled pork , etc. Their peach and apple/cranberry cobblers are wonderful. The pirate motif is kind of interesting, although I’m not sure why a restaurant would want a theme involving lots of skeletons.

When we lived up north one of the things we missed was the Christmas decorations on houses. The houses up there are set back in the woods so you can’t see Christmas decorations from the road. It’s been fun to dig out all the decorations and to see all the decorations around town.

It was very nice to get back to normal holiday gatherings this year and to see everyone that we had only seen sporadically over the last few years. Hopefully all of you were able to do the same and had great holidays!