Where I've Been (Partly)

If anybody's reading this (still not clear to me), one reason I've been so quiet is I've been working on getting my newsletter, The Estimate, back up in a new electronic form after a months-long hiatus. I've got a now-active blog going on, and am trying to get a mailing ready. More when I can come up for air.

Still Here

It's been nearly a week. Sorry. More soon.

Labor Day Weekend

Saturday of Labor Day weekend was spent with very old friends visiting town. More soon.

I keep slipping and referring to this as Memorial Day. I think this is mainly because it doesn't seem possible that the summer is gone already. What happened? Wasn't it just April?

Fashion Tips

More coming soon, but meanwhile I need to record for posterity a conversation when I picked up Sarah from school tonight. I was wearing a new pair of shoes I bought last weekend.

Sarah: Are those your new shoes?

Me: Yes, they are.

Sarah: Awesome. Really cool. But Dad, can I tell you something?

Me: Sure.

Sarah: Can I give you a fashion tip?

Me: Okay.

Sarah: They really don't go with that shirt.

Me: Well, maybe not. But I was just trying to come and get you from school.

Sarah: I can give you some fashion tips later on.

Me: It may already be too late for me.

Sarah really does have a sense of fashion and style that is pretty alien to both Tam and myself. She has a sense of color and arrangement and what goes with what that seems to be innate. I don't record this conversation to make fun of her at all: I'm sure the shoes didn't go with the shirt. (I'm not sure I've ever thought of whether my shoes went with my shirt, to tell you the truth. I don't always stop to think whether the shoes even go with the socks.) I never own more than about four pairs of shoes at a time anyway. Dress, loafers, sneakers, maybe one other comfortable pair. Who needs more? I'm not Imelda Marcos. (Of course, nobody remembers Imelda now anyway, so I'm probably showing my age again.)

But at seven, Sarah really has a sense of style. I'll be 60 in 17 days. I'm still waiting for mine to develop.

Still Alive...

It's the old story: you come back from vacation and find tons of stuff waiting for you. In my capacity as Editor of The Middle East Journal, I found that in seven days, eight manuscripts had been submitted. Each author expects an expedited assessment through peer review of his/her manuscript. Also in the first two days there were two general meetings of department heads, a problem with my car (replaced battery, hopefully solved it), and of course the first day of second grade. I hope to post more shortly. There's still much to say about the vacation, not to mention some family history stuff. But right now I'm still playing catchup.

First Day of Second Grade

I'll catch up on my blogging soon. Meanwhile I just wanted to note for the record the first day of second grade. It was nowhere near as momentous as the first day of first grade. I managed to get four photos which are up at Flickr, but several times when I asked Sarah "Do you want me to take a picture" she just said "no". We also were asked to drop them outside, not accompany them inside as last year, and even before we got to the door of the school Sarah announced she was going on in and headed off away from us, the big second grader totally in control. She's an old hand at this now. No big deal, so don't make a big deal of it.

China doesn't seem that long ago to me...

Back Home

Vacation's over. We came back yesterday (Saturday) since Sarah starts second grade tomorrow. It was good to get away, good to have a week with family, but between the pinkeye (Tam and I both may have relapses) and the cold or allergies or whatever I had affecting my nasal passages and causing me to cough (which worsens my hernia), it wasn't as relaxing as it might have been. The heat on Friday also got the better of us, and plans to do a kids' museum in Porsmouth, VA before leaving Saturday got canceled when Tam got pinkeye again, since we didn't want to infect other kids on the eve of school starting. Sarah extracted a promise that we'll do something special to make it up to her. We ended up seeing a movie to keep cool in the afternoon, hardly the ideal thing to do when on vacation. ("Mr. Bean's Holiday," the only thing G-rated at the theater near our hotel, which was, well, not quite as bad as I expected. I've never been a great Rowan Atkinson fan.)

I'll have more on Jamestown at some point.

Jamestown Again

Dig at Jamestown Fort, originally uploaded by michaelcollinsdunn.

Earlier this summer on a trip to Richmond we stopped on the way back to see Jamestown Settlement, the State of Virginia-run reconstruction of Jamestown, an Indian village, and the three ships that came over. We didn't have time on that trip to stop at the original site, now called Historic Jamestowne, run by the National Park Service and the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities. Both sites had had remakes for the 400th anniversary this year (the Queen's visit and all that), a huge new museum at Jamestown Settlement and a new visitor center at Historic Jamestowne, along with the new archaeology museum (the "Archaearium") which had opened just before we were down here last summer.

As I explained elsewhere, I'm a bit of a Jamestown buff, and blogged earlier about the 400th and some personal connections. I wanted to see the new visitor's center but also catch up on the dig itself, where they're excavating the original 1607 fort, originally thought lost under the James.

We got to see the new stuff, but the heat was considerable and the Jamestown settlement was, of course, founded in a swamp. Sarah melted down quickly and I wasn't far behind. I do recommend both the new Visitor's Center and the Archaearium, and as always, I recommend that anyone visiting Jamestown do both the federal and state sites: one is for the archaeology and original site, the other a superb reconstruction and interpretaiton. You should see both.

Tam and I both prefer both Jamestown sites to Williamsburg, and they cost less, too.

I'll blog more on the day later. It was too hot to do too much outside, so we ate lunch (there is a Williamsburg MacDonalds), and retreated to a movie.

A Day at the Beach

Virginia Beach, originally uploaded by michaelcollinsdunn.

I'll post more at some point. Today we simply let Sarah have her day at Virginia Beach. Mostly running into the surf and laughing hysterically, plus building a sand castle.Took a while to get all the sand off. More at another time.

Day to Regroup

The vacation, as previous posts may have indicated, has not been completely smooth. Yesterday was the first really by-the-book, as-planned day. Today (Wednesday, August 22, though this post will go up after midnight), at midweek, we took a down day, to get our act together, rest and recover. Tam and Sarah got haircuts, I did a laundry, Tam and Sarah spent quite a bit of time in the hotel pool, and Tam and I crashed for maybe a two hour nap in the afternoon while Sarah watched cartoons on TV. We ate at an old-fashioned hot dog joint in Newport News for lunch (Gus's Hot Dog King) and at a great, small, mom-and-pop Italian restaurant tucked into a shopping mall (Mamma Lina's) for dinner. [UPDATE: We went back for pizza our last night in Newport News.] Sarah liked it so much she asked if we could make them honorary members of our family. I'll blog about them instead. A guy dressed as a chef came out and asked if everything was okay in a sort of New York/Italian accent; Sarah asked if he was the chef and he said, "I'm the chef, the pizza guy, the manager and the owner." I guess that means he's also Mamma Lina, but we didn't ask. [UPDATE: Later I saw a review saying Mamma Lina's son runs the place now so I guess that's him.] Very good Italian food for a shopping mall. We may go back before we leave. Sarah still wants them to be honorary family members.

I know I've blogged more on weekend trips to Baltimore than I have on this week-long vacation. Mostly it's because we've been feeling poorly. We all started with pinkeye; Tam and I have some kind of coughing/nose running/eye itching thing that could be allergies, a summer cold, or a low-grade bug of some sort. I've also got diarrhea. I have an untreated hernia (I won't burden you with the details right now, but it'll be fixed soon I hope), and everytime I cough I pull bits and pieces of my abdomen apart, and it hurts.

Okay, enough about my intestines and such. We're doing okay, though the first couple of days were a washout and there've been a couple of bad thunderstorms while we've been here. The hotel pool at least, is indoors; pics of Sarah's increasing prowess at swimming are on the YouTube site. We haven't actually been at a beach yet though we did see the ocean yesterday. Tam and I like the open, bare beach at Cape Henry in Fort Story at the First Landing Site, where the Jamestown colonists erected their first cross and where one of the country's oldest lighthouses still stands, but Sarah says she wants an urban beach, so we'll go to Virginia Beach tomorrow and re-visit the Virginia Aquarium so she can pet the stingrays some more. It amazes me that she loves it so much; when younger at most touch tanks/petting zoos etc., she insisted Tam or I do the actual touching while she watched. And the stingrays are amazingly friendly for creatures not as far evolved as sharks: they seem to like being touched, stick their noses (if that's the right term) out of the water and flap their wings against the side of the tank.

Sarah wants one as a pet, but for that, I think, we can cite the laws to say we can't do it.

More tomorrow.

UPDATE: Belatedly it occurs to me I should record for the record where we're staying: it's here.

A Much Better Day

Closeup of Carrier at Norfolk, originally uploaded by michaelcollinsdunn.

Above, a carrier -- not sure which one -- at Naval Station Norfolk, the world's largest navy base. I think it's standing out to sea, as earlier in the day it seemed to be docked. Your naval intelligence report of the day. We were stuck in traffic at the Hampton Roads tunnel approaches. If you don't know this area, it's very military intensive (if you're a hostile, you might say target rich): besides the world's biggest naval base, there's the Newport News Shipbuilding, which actually builds the carriers and other major combatants; Oceana Naval Air Station, which hosts the air groups from the carriers among other things; Langley Air Force Base, which hosts F-22s and once trained the Mercury astronauts; a Marine base at Little Creek; the Army's Fort Eustis and the soon to be decomissioned Fort Monroe (where you can still see Jeff Davis' prison cell); Fort Story; probably some others I'm not thinking of. And the CIA's famous if not acknowledged training camp known as "the Farm" is somewhere between Yorktown and Williamsburg, I think. Today we saw a lot of Navy F/A-18s flying out of Oceana.

This is technically day four of our vacation, though I've called yesterday "Day 2" on our Flickr/YouTube files because Saturday, our first day, wasn't vacation at all, but a hellish day on the road, eight hours to go a three hour distance. So I'm calling it day three. Call it denial.

In some ways it was day one. It's the first day things went pretty smoothly, without either outright battles with Sarah, trouble with the hotel, or traffic problems. It actually worked well. It may be tomorrow before I can log more of what's been going on, but today went well. Pics are already at Flickr and YouTube, but of those we've invited not many have joined.

Meanwhile, till I have time (hopefully tomorrow) to blog more, here's what we've done so far:

Sunday, August 19: Virginia Living Museum, in Newport News, followed by the Virginia Air and Space Museum, in Hampton.

Monday, August 20: Nauticus in Norfolk.

Tuesday: August 21: The new Monitor Center at the Mariners' Museum in Newport News, followed by the Virignia Aquarium in Virginia Beach. Details soon. Pics already up.

Coming Up for Air

Okay, last Friday I said we'd be blogging regularly from the road. That was 72 hours ago. It's been a somewhat rough beginning, and I don't think I can give the full blow-by-blow. As I noted, we all had pinkeye to one degree or another when we started. Tam and I were suffereing from what we thought were bad allergies but which I now think is/are either summer colds or sinus infections. We've been feellng lousy most of the trip. In addition, an untreated hernia I've been putting off the surgery for has been giving me trouble, especially since I tried to push something for Sarah at a museum yesterday. So nobody's been feeling good, me least of all.

And that, oddly enough, is the good news. The trip down on Saturday was horrendous. We left fairly early (about 10:30, which with a seven year old is up with the chickens when you have to make sure you have everything you need). It shouldn't take more than three to, at the most, four hours to get here from home. After three hours we weren't even at Fredericksburg, 50 miles south of home. We were starting to feel like the Union Army of the Potomac, which took four years to make it the 110 miles to Richmond. I-95 was moving at a snail's pace. The radio kept saying there were no obstacles, though we later heard there'd been a bad truck accident somewhere. We bailed to US 1, the old road, but so had everyone else. Finally I decided to strike out for the territories, driving on back roads clear over to the Bristow/Nokesville area, then south, then across on Route 17. We'd hoped to get down here in time to do at least one sight before checking in. We hit the motel at 6 pm, nearly 8 hours after leaving.

Okay. Sarah loves the indoor pool at this hotel, and had a great time there. Then I fired up the laptop and checked my bank account. Instead of deducting a week's stay on my debit card (I was trying not to dip into credit but to use money set aside for the trip) I found the hotel had posted the charge twice. Long story short, I got several different explanations but not until this morning (Monday: we checked in Saturday) did I get this rectified.

So we've had money and traffic hassles, aren't feeling well, and Sarah has been pretty obstreperous for much of the trip, sassing back more than usual and arguing with everything we say. So I haven't felt much like blogging up to now. We've seen some things and had some fun, and I will post details soon.

But so far, not the relaxing escape I needed.

The Family that Has Pinkeye Together...

Friday evening. Tomorrow morning, we leave on vacation. This morning, I woke up with an inflamed left eye. Two days ago, Tam did the same. As I mentioned a few posts ago, Sarah had pinkeye (conjunctivitis) last week. Guess who's got it this week? Right both times. One thing about being a parent of a grade-schooler as you approach 60 is the opportunity to get any childhood diseases you may have missed the first time around. (Actually I probably didn't miss it; I know I had to take eyedrops from time to time for something; I'm just not remembering pinkeye specifically. [How clearly do you remember the late Truman and early Eisenhower Administrations, you young whippernappers?!] And I had mumps and measles and chickenpox and stuff that Sarah is thankfully vaccinated against. But anyway, here I am on the eve of my vacation with a childhood disease. And Tam too. Sarah, of course, is fully recovered.)

Sarah's pediatrician told her not to go into a pool when she had it, since that is a prime place to spread it. The doctor Tam saw told her not to go in the water for two days. My doctor said, oh no, the pool's fine, the chlorine will kill the bacteria instantly. Ah, the certainties of 21st century medicine.

Our major concern is not having it go back to Sarah, so we're telling her not to touch our faces, and we're washing our hands a lot. So's she.

We'll be blogging our vacation unless the laptop gives out (it's six years old, bought before we went to China), and we'll also be putting stuff on Flickr and YouTube as we can.

Countdown

Vacation's coming and we're swamped. As usual, to take a week off you have to work twice as hard the week before. Standby for vacation blogging, and don't expect much before that.

County Fair!

The Fair, originally uploaded by michaelcollinsdunn.

Tam and I, being Midwesterners, have always wanted to make sure that Sarah, despite her urban East Coast upbringing, understands the rest of America as well. So we try to take in such things as county fairs, complete with blue-ribbon pigs and prize pies. Today we went to the Prince William County (VA) Fair, just south of Manassas, VA. It's one of the better ones in the area that still has an agricultural side to it. Pic of the Midway above. If you have access to our Flickr and YouTube family accounts you'll be able to see more pics of Sarah enjoying it.

Some observations: A county fair that is ride-intensive can be pretty expensive. Now that Sarah's over 6 and I'm not yet 60 (only about a one-year window) everybody has to pay $7 a head to get in. Only $21. But tickets are $1 each and most rides require three or four tickets, whereas for $20 you can get a ride-all-day wristband. I bought wristbands for both Sarah and Tam since often Sarah wants one of us with her on the ride. So before we'd done anything we'd managed to spend $61. Then, of course, there are the games: the sort of thing where for anywhere from $2 to $5 you can win your kid a poorly made stuffed animal worth maybe $1 max. And of course, the food. One of the stands was actually called "Fry City": I guess they're not even trying to pretend to be healthy. Actually Tam and I ate at a stand from one of the better barbecue joints, Dixie Bones of Woodbridge, VA. (As those who've been following us online for awhile will recall, we take barbecue seriously. See our The Search for Barbecue pages for more on this.) Anyway, by the time you've bought this stuff plus ice cream and popcorn etc., a mere county fair makes you wonder why we cringe at the idea of King's Dominion or Hersheypark, which tend to charge $80 to $90 to get in. but may be higher class on the rides, most of which are included.

Anyway we visited the animals, both the petting zoo (Tam and I are both having bad allergies tonight, Tam especially, perhaps because of the petting zoo), and the competition animals, and Sarah enjoyed looking at all the crafts, cakes, knitting, embroidery, and other competitions. She is shown in some of the pics and video doing this.

I think we all had a very good day. We did some Wal-Mart shopping after, so it was also an expensive day, but got us out of the city.

More later, perhaps.