Saturday at Kansas City's Central Market

Ready for Culture

Ready to Picnic at Art Museum

Nicolas Shrugged!

Rolling on the Hills

Jazz Combo

Rodin's The Thinker

Today is gray and wet, not a very exciting looking day, especially if we hope to go to the Open Air Central Market in downtown KC.  Marlena got up just after me, about 7:15, so she slept well last night.  The boys are downstairs, still sleeping, so we will have to decide when to wake them up if we go to the market.  Marlena is hard at work with her blog and helping Granny with Words With Friends.  Bella is sitting on my lap as usual, demanding to be scratched, as I multi task, blogging, scratching, watching MSNBC and drinking coffee.  Tom and Mary are in a downtown hotel, after the wedding party last night.  We hope to meet them if the weather cooperates.

Yesterday, Friday, was a lazy day, as we all got up late and didn't even have breakfast until 10:30 if not later.  We potsed around the rest of the day, till we had to get ready to head off to the Art Museum, around 2:45.  It was overcast but not too dark, so that it was a nice ride into town, about 25 minutes total.  The museum is really impressive, set up on a hill, a huge quarter of a mile if not more of lawn and sculptures setting if off from the road.

We were not sure where to start so we began with the Europeans, starting back with the early renaissance and worked our way up to contemporary art.  The kids showed a good interest though they enjoyed the impressionists more than the early religious works; I don't blame them.  I was able to explain to Nick some of the differences in styles, and he seemed to take it in.  He wanted to see a Van Gogh and the museum had only one, which cost it 82 million dollars according to the staff.  There were lots of painters from various painters that I had never heard of though they did have at least one work by the following masters, at least in my mind: Turner, Hals, Rubens, Poussin, Bouchet, Delacroix, Ingres, Monet, Manet, Renoir, Pissaro, Seurat, Cezanne, Gauguin, and Pollack.  There were a few more but no Picasso's, which was strange since he is so  prolific.  Marlena, as usual, asked lots of questions and really enjoyed the various works.

When Nick and Marlena got bored, we went out to the vast grassy front lawn, had a snack, and Marlena and Nick just loved running around the lawns, sprinting from one Henry Moore sculpture to another.  Marlena rolled down the hills, where possible, and we just enjoyed the settling of day into night.  Then we went in, viewed the Rodin exhibition before heading off to a free Jazz concert.  We sat in the third row, so we were able to see the three musicians up close, a drummer, base, and keyboard.  We listened to two or three pieces, then went off in search of the hot chocolate and cookies.  While we ate, the kids were able to play on a computer, and like Rodin, put together a computerized sculpture, like Rodin might have done, save it, and email it to your home computer.  By the time we were finished with our snack, the kids were ready to go home.  We stopped to look at some of Rodin's work on Balzac, the great French writer.  They were amazing, so expressive and powerful.  Marlena and I checked out the courtyard, like that of a Venetian palace, which is a dining room on Friday nights, a beautiful place to sit, have dinner, and listen to the music.  It was a great afternoon.

We picked up a pizza for dinner, picked up Peyton, Nick's buddy who is spending the night, and went home to a relaxing evening, the boys playing Modern Warfare in the basement, Evie and Marlena playing bananagrams, and I sat down and watched b-ball on TV.  Later, when Marlena went to bed, we watched Win Win with the boys, a movie about a wrestler we thought they might really like.  It's a great example of a film with solid characters, a great story, conflicts, and wonderful acting, understated but compelling, so unusual from today's action movies, where one action follows another.  I want to show Nick The Station Agent, a similar character study by the same film maker, Tom Mc Carthy.