The More it Snows

So, with all the ridiculous snow we've had of late, I thought it was time to strike back.  So I invite you to submit snow/winter/weather based limericks and haiku.  No prizes (except bragging rights), but maybe we can warm ourselves up a bit.

The snow keeps falling
The banks grow ever taller 
The world turns to white


Or

There once was a person from Concord

Who found the snow driving him bonkers

With redoubts made of snow

And with trenches below

In Concord we'll never be conquered

OK, so maybe not my best efforts ever, but it's a start.

OK, so it's been too long

Let's see...November, December, January...June, July... 9+ months since I last blogged. Oops.

An awful lot has happened in that time...some highlights:

• Wendy got into Bryn Mawr early decision. But you probably know that, since the scream could be heard for miles when she got the phone call.
• Teddy survived his first year of high school. He was on the fencing team and got himself a crowd of new friends.
• Harry finished 5th grade and is about to start middle school at the very same school I attended 38 years ago. Fortunately it's a much nicer place now than it was then.
• Beth had a good second year at Brandeis, but now that the summer is over I think she's pretty psyched to be heading back.
• Wendy spent the summer volunteering at Minuteman National Historical Park. She was hoping to wear her 18th century clothes, but in fact she got a kind of volunteer ranger outfit and worked well over 100 hours in the visitor center. She had a blast.
• Teddy got started on a cool bike trip from Seattle to San Francisco. Unfortunately, a week into the trip, he had a mishap with a kitchen knife and severed the flexor tendon in his right pinkie. So he had to have surgery, flew home, and when we went to see a surgeon for follow up, we discovered that the repair had ruptured again. So he had surgery again and is now engaged in a long period of recovery in which he cannot use his hand. Good thing he's left handed.
• Harry had another awesome month at his camp. We got to hear his rendition of the Hebrew "Grace after meals" (Birkat hamazon) tonight after dinner.

In July, Colleen took the train to the midwest for her knitting camp. She had a good trip, including sleepers for a leg in each direction. We had one of those awful episodes on her return trip, though. I figured that I'd surprise her by taking the train down to New York, spending an afternoon in the city, and then magically appearing on her train when it arrived at dinner time. So I did. Just before I got to New York, I got a call from her that there was an issue with our AT&T account that I needed to deal with immediately. Well, I couldn't do anything from the train, since we were diving into the tunnels of New York and I had no cell reception. And when I finally got to street level, I had just enough battery left to find the nearest AT&T store (right across the street), where I paid our bill and was on my way. I headed off to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for a great afternoon of making myself footsore. I ended up enjoying the 18th century European collection, as always, not to mention the swords and other weapons. Then I took myself to the museum store, where I got myself 3 ridiculously heavy coffee table books and then headed back to the subway.

Why, by the way, are the subway stations in New York City hotter than the streets above? In Boston, the subway tunnels are usually cool, but I swear, they must heat the New York tunnels or something.

Anyway, I got back to Penn Station way too early for the train. So I got myself some dinner and tried to find a comfortable place to sit and wait. Oops, the station isn't air conditioned, although the area for passengers with reservations at least had a nice strong fan. So I found myself wandering through the station, sweating like a pig, my arms killing me because I was carrying the books, wishing the time would go faster. Then the little TV screen with the arrival/departure information started to show that my/Colleen's train was slightly delayed. Oh great...ended up being about 30 minutes late by the time it got there.

So I made sure I was one of the first people downstairs (I was sure something was going to go wrong), saw her through the window of the train, got on, walked up, and said "Is anybody sitting here?" She started to tell me how it was, but she was saving it because she needed to keep her arthritic knee elevated (oh, by the way, did I mention she had the meniscus removed from her right knee in May and she's on cute pink crutches now?) so if I could sit somewhere else...so I said something else (like "even for me") and she finally noticed who I was and did the expected double-take.

So we rode home on a delayed, slowed train for the rest of the evening (and into the start of the morning), while she told me all about how she'd been freaking out because I was unreachable all day. So while she thought I was sweet for surprising her (sweet, me? I'm blushing here), it was definitely a mixed feeling. Some day (maybe already) it will be a good story, but not really the outcome I was looking for.

I could go on about the reenactments the last few weeks, which provide a good deal of fodder for fun, amusement, franticness, etc., or the preparations for taking Wendy to school, but this is already insanely long as it is... So until next time....

Life seems to be going by awfully quickly

In the last month, let's see...

Wendy did a visit to Bryn Mawr. This involved the two of us driving down to Pennsylvania on a Saturday, visiting the Philadelphia Museum of Art for a class project she has to do, then doing tours and stuff all Sunday afternoon. Then she spent the night in a dorm, went to a class, had an interview, and then we drove back home.

In the meantime, Teddy was doing his leaf project for Earth Science class. This involves finding leaves from a list of 50 trees, putting them together in an album, complete with annotations identifying the tree, where the tree may be found, etc...In the process, he wrote a parody of a well-known song...

Long time since I posted

And I don't have a lot to say today...except that Sudbury is tomorrow and Harry is sick. Sigh...I guess with 4 kids, the probability that there will be at least 1 sick at any given time is pretty high.

Oh well.

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thoughts on a long long long car trip

We spent three weeks driving to the midwest and back, looking at colleges and taking Colleen to her knitting camp.  I suppose a good blogger would have written while enroute, but I saved it up instead...

You can learn a lot from the billboards.  You discover political "zones" that way--where is abortion more under attack than at home, for example.  You also discover where commerce (or at least the billboard industry) is depressed--many many signs with different versions of "This sign for rent."

And then there are the fireworks stores (and to a lesser extent, the "adult" stores).  The weirdest part was coming into Michigan from Ohio.  Fireworks are legal in both states--but in Michigan, the fireworks stores are clustered close to the border.  Makes very little sense to me.  More generally, the sheer number of "the worlds largest fireworks stores" seemed a bit over the top.  And I guess there isn't much to do in the wide open spaces of flatland besides set off fireworks, buy porn, and go to strip clubs--drive for miles and miles and come across nothing but farms and those things...

Then there's occasional oddities--why is it, for example, that there are a LOT of wind turbines in northern Iowa, but none anywhere else?  Why was the price of unleaded regular higher than midgrade in eastern Iowa?  Why are all my questions about Iowa?

I also noticed a peculiar trend in college tours.  Most colleges, including those with gorgeous campuses, give tours to prospective students that involve going around the outer edge of the campus, from building to building.  This may be efficient, but it doesn't do a very good job of letting people see what the campus looks and feels like to a student.  If you have a college campus where the beauty of the physical space is a selling point, consider adjusting your tour route...

Tewksbury reenactment and general babblings

Last weekend we had a reenactment in Tewskbury, MA, in honor of the town's 275th birthday.  (Happy Birthday, BTW).

It was a fun time, although in some ways not the world's most authentic of reenactments.  I say this because we had the two armies encamped on a couple of soccer fields, fighting battles on a big hunk of playing field, complete with a large baseball backstop in the middle.  This is fun, and I'm not complaining, but it's not the way to get a "period rush."

What, you ask, is a period rush?  A period rush is that moment of "oh, wow, this is what it must actually have looked like/been like/felt like," when the modern fades into the background and the 18th century comes to the fore.  I've only had a handful of these moments, but they are pretty amazing.

The first one I ever had was during one of the first Battle Road reenactments I ever did.  We were at the North Bridge in Concord, shots had been exchanged, and the Brits were running away.  There wasn't much of a crowd of spectators for some reason, so all I could see was relatively decently dressed militia (we keep trying to improve!) and the backs of the retreating Brits.  There was this sense of having been transported in time, if not space, to something real. 

Fortunately, "real" doesn't extend all the way to the level of people getting killed and wounded!

The other major "period rush" moment I can remember was during the 225th Battle Road in April, 2000.  We were waiting for the British to come onto the field at Meriam's Corner, basically hiding along the tree line.  The British started to display onto the field.  There were a lot of them.  They kept coming and coming and coming, and I realized that this was probably more of them than I had seen at most events I'd been to up to that point.  They kept coming and coming and coming, and then I realized that this was only the advanced guard.  Then, as the main body of the British force came onto the field, I started thinking "you know, if I was actually a farmer, I think I'd be thinking about my crops right about now, and about how I really needed to get out of here in order to tend to my spring planting."

Fortunately, if not always wisely, our forbears stayed where they were and, by and large, did not head off to take care of their planting that day in 1775.  I always shudder when people start talking about honoring the sacrifice of our ancestors, predecessors, and so on, but at the same time, one has to recognize that they did some pretty darn amazing things.