Yeah, I grew up just down the street from that house. It's a nice neighborhood in a busy area.

It's just a smaller breed of the muscle car assholes that I see/hear on Glenstone and National all the time.

I don't understand the desire to drive your fun vehicle in town when there's all sorts of cool hills and valleys you can kill yourself on mere minutes away outside the city. Even as a mere Prius driver, that's always been infinitely more fun to drive than the main drags of Springfield.

Hope you feel better!

Definitely weird to be reading that book and see that reference.

Is it the Pioneer Museum?

Been there a handful of times, unfortunately not yet with this partner. We're going to make a special visit for that later so I can finally see the Frank Lloyd Wright house.

Right? Lol, I guess I tend to avoid that bit of traffic as much as possible though. Got any suggestions off the beaten path?

Yeah, I was afraid of that. I'm happy to travel a little bit out of the way (we're staying two nights) for something really cool, even south or east of ES.

Pipedream for sure, but I wish the city or some non-profit would buy that land and use it for shelters, self-improvement programs for at-risk individuals, community lecture space, etc. Or at least a more interesting cult.

I went to Greenwood, Catholic and Parkview, and Greenwood was the hardest one to endure. There was definitely a clique and bullying issue that made things difficult to navigate as an awkward youth, and because there isn't a huge student body, there's not a lot of places to go for other friend groups. My class itself had an issue where the 'smart' (driven) students would do the homework and the rest of the 'in' crowd of the class would copy it, but that class in and of itself was problematic to the extreme. They bullied teachers as well as students, and a lot of focus was put on not rocking the boat, aka, dealing with a cultural issue amongst the students that was clearly hostile. Again, it could be better now, but the politics of the office and the way the student body could get away with some pretty heinous behavior did not ever make me feel like I had an official avenue of recourse. I came in around 6th grade, so all these people already had relationships for years before this, and even some of them were permanently on the 'outs' because they were just a bit odd. The only black student I ever saw going there (at least in the secondary part) was bullied into leaving quite soon after they arrived. I'd say 95% of my class was white. So even that sort of 'innocuous' homogeny became an issue.

There are a lot of opportunities there, and some of my favorite/best teachers taught there, but there was also a lot of meh teachers. I will say the issue of the not-so-knowledgeable coach teaching history as a joke class is not as much of a phenomenon there as some other schools, so that's good. Student teachers from the college were a huge hit and miss. One semester I got stuck with some lunkhead leading both my science and math courses, and I felt I missed out on a lot because of it. Having greater access to the MSU campus as a whole was neat. I felt the arts program lacked greatly; no orchestra, only band and choir (the teachers were good, though). No theatre department at all, did like one school play while I was there. Not a lot in the way of art equipment like kilns, dark room, etc. I don't think shop/home ec or anything like that was ever offered.

I'd check in with the opportunities at your local public school--Parkview had a wider variety of classes and I earned college credit there quite easily even after switching schools twice and not performing great (Bs and Cs) up to that point. And socially, it was so much easier to find my 'group' when there were more people to choose from.

The pricecutter on National and St L has a wide variety of dried mushrooms now in the produce section.