I have finished my research in Alexandria and Baltimore, so I am leaving this morning for Holy Cross Monastery on the Hudson River in West Park, NY.  I will probably be out of touch by e-mail for several days, which is great.  Saturday I will be connecting with Stephanie, Duncan, and Emma in Albany, NY, for a wedding.  It will be great to be back with them.

I took some time out from my researching tonight to go to a minor league baseball game.  It was the New Britain Rock Cats vs. Bowie Baysox.  The weather was great, clear skies and not too hot.  And to top it all off, it was dollar night at the ballpark, so my admission was just $1.00.

I certainly got my money’s worth.  It was a double header, so we got two games in a row.  And both of them went to extra innings.  Now, I am a huge baseball fan, but that is a bit much even for me.  We lost the first game and won the second one, although the second one ended with a throwing error by the pitcher trying to get a runner scoring from third.  But at least it was exciting!

Now, back to the research.

We have a new feature here at Out and About. On the sidebar, you will find a link to our photo albums. This will take you to a section where you can see some of the latest pictures taken on our adventures. I have just added some albums from our time in Maryland and Tennessee, and more will be coming as we travel through the US this summer. Enjoy!

We went to the Maryland Science Center in Baltimore today.  First, we went to see a show in the planetarium.  They showed us Ursa Major (the bear) and how to find the north star.  They showed us other constallations as well, including Casseopaeia, Draco the Dragon, Casseopaeia’s husband, Cygnus the Swan, and Scorpio.  There are four planets that can be seen right now: Mars, Saturn, and Jupiter at night and Venus right before sunrise.  We got to see how the stars and planets rotate during the night.  It looked like all the seats were moving as the stars moved, but it was only an optical illusion.  Afterwards, we asked them to show us what the sky would look like in Lithuania, and they gave us a sky map to find stars at home.

When we went out of the planetarium, we met up with mom and Emma, who had gone to see a bug show in the IMAX.  One of the scariest parts they said was a closeup of a huge spider.  One of the gross parts was when a praying mantis was eating a fly (of course, everything was in 3D).  We then had lunch with them.

After lunch, we went into a room that explained physics.  I made a tornado.  I played tug of war with two people, but I had an advantage because my rope was attached further away from the pivot point of the beam.  I got to play with balls that swung and transferred energy from one to another.  And I made an earthquake.  There was another experiment that show how balls on short strings swung faster than balls hung from long strings.

My favorite thing in that room was pulling myself up with a rope.  The ropes were attached to pulleys that we attached to a chair.  Each one had a different number of pulleys.  The one that had only one pully was hard, but the one with four pulleys was much easier.

We then went upstairs to see an exhibit about the human body.  We went in a walk through tunnel that was like the brain.  They had a group of tubes.  One group was cold and the other was warm.  When you touched them together, they felt hot.  The warm ones told your brain it was warm while the cold ones told your brain it hurt.  So, you brain said warm plus pain must be hot, so that is what it felt like.  You also got to stick you hand in six different holes and try to figure out what was inside by feel (over the box was a flap that you could life up to see what was inside).  We also got to use a microscope to look at our skin and a computer that showed us what our fingerprints looked like.  I also got to look at how old I was according to my habits.  It said I had the body of an 8 year old, which is what I am.  My dad’s body is like a 39 year old, even though he is only 38.
In another area, Emma and I got to dress up like astronauts.  We got to put robots together and control them.  Another section had a robot like the one on Mars right now.  You sat down at a computer and got to move the robot, while looking through its camera to see where you were going.

Overall, it was a great day.  I really like Baltimore, and I consider it my home city since I was born at the Greater Baltimore Medical Center.  It is less than a mile outside of Baltimore.  The house we are staying at is ten miles north of Baltimore in Cockeysville.

This morning we did our first church presentation. We were at All Saints’ Episcopal Church, the parish where Stephanie served as rector before we took this job in Lithuania. It was great to be back home and see friends. I showed a short film about LCC and talked a bit about what we are doing. Many of our major supporters are in this parish and it was good to catch up with them.

This was the first time I had been in an Episcopal service in over half a year. I really miss the liturgy. We do a generic Protestant service at the International Christian Fellowship, which is fine, but I prefer the depth of the theology and beauty of the language in a liturgical service. I can’t describe how good it felt to worship in this way. Just to be there and allow the words and music to wash over me, letting myself sink into the spirit of God. Although I am enjoying our time in Lithuania, I am really looking forward to when I can return to worshipping this way on a weekly basis.

Our closing hymn for the day was particularly appropriate, considering that we were talking about our ministry in Eastern Europe.