Christopher made his debut performance today with the Carmel High School marching band in the city’s Fourth of July parade. The weather was hot and humid, but the band sounded really good. And Christopher said marching in the parade wasn’t as bad as he thought it’d be. They apparently do a good job of toughening the kids up in practice.

Before the parade the saxophone section had a breakfast at the section leader’s house. On the drive over Christopher was a bit apprehensive about his first social event in high school, but he says he had a good time watching videos of past band performances and getting excited about playing in one of the top high school marching bands in the country.

Here’s a short video of the band playing a pretty good-sounding Stars and Stripes Forever several times at different parts of the parade route. You can spot Christopher by looking for the tenor saxophone player wearing the black shoes:

The day before the Super Bowl we drove through downtown Indianapolis and for some reason blue and white colors were everywhere — even at the top of the Indiana state capitol building.

Photo by Melinda Taber.

I glanced up at the screen and saw that it was the final three minutes of the Indianapolis Colts-Baltimore Ravens AFC playoff game, with Indianapolis leading 12 to 6. So it made perfect sense that a lot of the people in the waiting area for a flight to Indianapolis would be more interested in seeing how such a close game ended up than just about anything else, including boarding a plane that was about to take off.

But then I noticed that when the Colts managed to pick up a first down, some of the people standing around me expressed not happiness but severe disappointment. One guy even slammed his briefcase onto the floor and said something about being cursed. So I looked closer at the gate right next to ours and the flight leaving from there was going to Baltimore!

We had Baltimore people on the left side, Indy people on the right side, and the TV in the middle. And it wasn’t until the Colts definitively clinched the game by hitting a field goal with 28 seconds left, that the poor Continental Airlines people managed to get anyone on either side of the TV screen to board the planes for the impending flights.

(Originally uploaded by anikarenina on Flickr.)

This is so cool I just had to blog it.

I don’t remember if anyone thought to carve a “D” into a pumpkin when the Tigers were playing the evil Cardinals in the World Series in ’68, but if they did I’m pretty sure no one took a photo of it and posted it on Flickr for expatriate Tiger fans around the world to see and enjoy wherever they might happen to be.