Talking Caves and Robots

(Or more accurately, talking about caves and robots).

Several times a year I give talks for the local Learning in Retirement program.  They are a good audience especially for the history oriented topics.

Recently I gave a talk on Forgotten Brewery Caves.  Hey, why not?  With the passing of Wayne Kroll a while back I suppose I might actually be the world's leading authority.  At least I know enough to talk for an hour and a half.

The venue:  Tap room at the Lazy Monk brewery.  Really a better place for a talk about beer than the Lutheran Church some of my previous talks have been held in.

It was a good crowd.  Too good actually.  The registration had been capped at 40, as that's all the room could hold.  There was a waiting list of another 40.  A dozen of them showed up anyway and we had to cram them into odd corners.  This might be a talk I'll repeat in the spring.

Afterwards a group of the sure footed ( we left some folks behind at the tap room ) visited The Cave of the Mad Poetess.  A brief candlelight reading of Bad Poetry was included in the tour.  Some of these folks remembered hanging out in this cave as young people, engaging in the sort of low level mischief that one would expect.  Efforts to locate specific names in the extensive graffiti were not successful. On the principal that it is never a good day unless you learn something new, we all had a good day.  A geologist in the group corrected my identification of the specific stone type in this cave.

You'd think in retirement that I'd never be busy, but just by random chance it happened that I had another obligation that meant I could not linger in the congenial surroundings of the Lazy Monk.  The first actual team meeting of the FIRST robotics team.  This of course meant that I was very moderate in my "indulging" at the Tap Room Talk.  Beer and anything school related don't go together.  Well, I think the Hockey Booster Club gets some sort of special dispensation.

The robotics team meeting also went very well but as usual I did not have time to take any pictures.  A busy season awaits.