I don’t know whether to be amused, amazed or appalled:

Strange things done with books

Artistic, yes, even beautiful. But also slightly disturbing, at least for those of us who treat our books like beloved family members.

Perhaps this is the next step in a world where fewer and fewer people read for pleasure but more and more buy “junk books” by the foot or yard, pre-sorted by color and size, to decorate their living rooms and offices.

One hundred years from now, what will art historians make of these pieces and the society that spawned them?

Back home safe and sound, after a long day.

We left Chicago bright and early and made it to Milwaukee in plenty of time for the opening of the gates at Miller Park. The game was great, a 6-3 Cubs victory. It was good to see the Cubs get solid pitching from Carlos Zambrano, and to play ball the way it should be played: make contact, get on base; make contact, advance the runners. Also good to be snug under the roof, after our chilly White Sox outing the other day.

It was a toss-up whether there were more Cubs fans or Brewers fans in the park. Certainly, the Chicago fans overpowered the Milwaukee folks during the 7th inning stretch singing of “Take Me Out to the Ballgame,” with “Root, root, root for the Cubbies” easily drowning out “Root, root, root for the Brewers.”

After the game we meandered our way north, and on the spur of the moment I took the opportunity to show my daughters the place where I lived for the first 11 or so years of my life. It was the first time they’d ever seen the old homestead, and the first time for me in probably 20 years. To put it kindly, the place needs work — new paint and a new roof would be a good start — but it was nice to see it again.

Finally, we hit the freeway and made a beeline north, with a stop for dinner in Green Bay our only other diversion of the trip. It was a bit disheartening to drive the last hour or so in a steady snowfall on slippery roads, but not unexpected for April in this part of the country, especially when most of the east is also shivering and shoveling.

Now it’s back to the grind, wondering how a week could have possibly gone so fast.

Medieval Times is pretty much unchanged in the 12 years since we visited last. It’s still cheesy, hokey, corny, overproduced — and it’s still a tremendous amount of fun. It pulls you in with brute color and spectacle, with clanging swords and thundering hooves, music, fog, drama. It grabs you and hangs on tight, and it doesn’t let go until the lights come up at the end of the night.

And yes, the girls said it held up for them, too. They were not only able to enjoy the show through adult eyes, but appreciate the production as well. After their backstage experiences, which have included working on the local stage crews for several Broadway touring shows (Aida, Miss Saigon), they could see and understand the sheer amount of work it takes to put on a performance like Medieval Times, from the lights, sound and effects to the costumes, sets and props.

And besides, they got to take a photo with their knight.

We had a slight mishap on the way to the Western Suburbs. No, not on the Chicago streets. Driving in Chicago is always interesting, but never as nightmarish as people make it out to be. Our mishap occurred before we even escaped the parking garage — an extremely tight, cramped labyrinth where traffic up and down the ramp shares a space about a lane-and-a-half wide, and where every corner is impossibly narrow and sharp, especially for us, in our oversized Northern Michigan pickup truck. We were entering the last turn, a right-hand maneuver of more than ninety degrees, around the wall and into the skinny lane at the pay booth. There was a car coming up at the same time, so I eased over as far as I could, a little farther, and a little bit farther still, and that was when the truck decided to strike up an intimate relationship with the wall. To quote Stephen Sondheim: Boom. Crunch. We now have an extra-special souvenir: genuine, authentic Chicago parking garage paint embedded in the side of our truck, and as a bonus, some minor body work ahead.

Today, our last day here, will be odds and ends. We tossed the agenda and decided to finish the trip just like we started it, hanging loose and playing everything by ear. Tomorrow, it’s an early start to Milwaukee for the Cubs-Brewers game, and then back to the snowy wilds of the north.

What have we learned? A lot. The biggest lesson, I think, is that Chicago is still the best, whether you’re a resident, a tourist, or a former resident who feels like a tourist. Despite what they say, you can occasionally go home again . . . but try not to do it during spring break, unless you like to wait nearly an hour to get into every restaurant.

I’m not sure if I’ll squeeze in another post from here or not. I’m guessing not. So I’ll leave you for now with one final glimpse of the lovely Chicago skyline, captured yesterday from the steps of the Adler Planetarium. This one’s worth clicking for the full-sized view.

Those darn meteorologists sure know their stuff. They had yesterday’s forecast exactly right.

It was 31 degrees at U.S. Cellular Field, the wind chill was in the teens, and snow flurries swirled throughout the game. In other words, a typical day for spring baseball in Chicago — and we took advantage of every minute of it, from the time the gates opened to the final heartbreaking out some five hours later.

Overlooking the questionable Chicago pitching, the game was an exciting one. It was, to use that favorite term of sportswriters, a “slugfest,” a seesaw battle that the White Sox only lost because of the Indians’ Jason Michaels, whose heroic catch at the warning track prevented Joe Crede’s two-out, two-on, bottom-of-the-ninth drive from knocking in the winning runs. Final score: Cleveland 8, Chicago 7.

Today it’s off to warmer pursuits: the Adler Planetarium this morning and a jaunt to the Western Suburbs to visit Medieval Times tonight. The famous “dinner and tournament” attraction was one of my daughters’ favorite places when they were in kindergarten, and rather surprisingly, it was near the top of their must-do lists for this vacation. Will it hold up for them, now that they’re 18?

The final score was disappointing, but the Sox did fire up the famous old Comiskey Park exploding scoreboard with a couple of homeruns.

We weren’t the only baseball fools who braved yesterday’s weather. The official attendance at the game was 26,337, though the end of every inning brought many departures. I’d estimate that fewer than 10,000 fans were left by the end.

No, not that. At least not at the moment. But I did have some time to kill this morning, so I tackled a long-delayed project: adding tagging capability to the blog.

Using tags will allow a deeper, more complete, more intuitive level of search and navigation than the simple categorization of posts. And they’re fun, since they can include keywords that are sensible and straightforward or lighthearted and odd.

I’ve not yet had time to go back and add tags to all the existing posts, but I’ve finished some of them, which should give you a good feel for how it will work. Eventually, at the end of every post you’ll find a list of tags. If you want to find other posts with the same keywords, just click, and off you’ll go.

Even better, you can use this entertaining tag cloud to find your way around the archives.

On another note, it looks as if the White Sox and Indians will play this afternoon, despite the bone-chilling temperatures (almost 40 degrees colder than yesterday) and some wind damage that occurred overnight at U.S. Cellular Field. We’re practicing our shivering and teeth-chattering now, so we should be all set.

Today was reserved for visiting a classic, the Museum of Science and Industry. Much had changed since I was there last close to 20 years ago, but some exhibits were the same. Actually, a few hadn’t been updated much since I’d visited as a kid, nearly 20 years before that. Some cool old stuff, some cool new stuff, an unsettling number of interactive exhibits out of order or down for maintenance, and an amazing Body Worlds 2 exhibition.

Oh, and they had a nifty display of vintage robot toys from the fifties and sixties, a few I even remember owning myself. When we were done there, we used a plastic injection-molding thingy to make our very own super cool family of “Space Robots.” Perfect little green souvenirs, which have now lined up on the hotel desk to send their greetings to you.