Start Spreading the News . . .

Well, we're not leaving today, but a week from today. I know I dropped from sight almost three weeks ago, but the good news is I've been putting up videos at our YouTube site regularly to recorxd the interim. The bad news is I think only one of our relatives is signed on to see them, so I need to add some commentary here and note that if anybody among our kin are reading this, and can't see our YouTube site, ask and we'll invite again. We shifted from the Winchester Trip into a busy Mother's Day weekend, and a lot has been going on. I'll catch up, I hope, over the weekend now beginning.

Meanwhile, if the Sinatra fans couldn't figure it out from the headline, we're going to spend the Memorial Day weekend plus the previous Friday (thus a four-day weekend) to show Sarah New York, New York. I didn't see the Big Apple for the first time till I was 19 or 20, but then I wasn't growing up just 250 miles to the south. Tam loves New York more than I do — I like it, but I think it is not in my top two or three favorite places, as it clearly is for Tam. But it's unlike anyplace else in these parts, that's for sure. And neither Tam nor I have been there since some time in the mid-90s; once Sarah came along life got busy, and we haven't been traveling out of the country either so we haven't even been flying into JFK, which is at least technically New York and you can see the skyline. Speaking of which, neither of us has been there since 9/11, so it's a different skyline (though I remember the days before the World Trade Center went up, but then I'm old, as Sarah keeps pointing out).

We're still working on what to see in a limited amount of time, My nonnegotiable demand is Katz's Deli on Houston Street in the Lower East Side. The classic Kosher Deli, the "Send a Salami to Your Boy in the Army" place. (And site of a well-known scene in the film "When Harry Met Sally." It's the "I'll have what she's having" scene. Enough said.) It's been there since 1888. I'm not sure I've been there since maybe 1978, but from the looks of the website, the only thing changed is the prices.

We're going to be staying in Secaucus on the Jersey side (less than half the cost of any hotels we'd want to stay out in Manhattan, and close to trains and buses into the city). We should be able to get to Penn Station from there in a short ride, and then spread out over the city. We aren't exactly rolling in money (is anyone these days?), but we aren't going to be eating at the Waldorf, either. More like street food, Pizza, and deli. Maybe a splurge or two.

More as we get closer, and some catching up in the next day or two.

Almost Heaven, West Virginia

Sarah took the photo at left herself. She's rightly quite proud of it and we may suggest she enter it in her art contest at school.

It's nearly 1 am after our trip, and I have to work tomorrow, or rather later today. So forgive me if the rest of this account is saved for Monday night. I'll leave this on the site until I have time to explain what all we did.

Meanwhile, a key: the river is the Upper Potomac west of Berkeley Springs, West Virginia, seen from the slope of Cacapon Mountain, taken from this overlook. the river curves (blocked by the foreground) to the right across the picture. Foreground and land to the left of the river is West Virginia; to right of the river is Maryland. At the distant water gap you can just make out the more distant crests of some blue mountains that overtop by a little bit the green foreground mountain; the distant ones are Pennsylvania.The town visible left of the river is Great Cacapon, West Virginia.

Meanwhile Flickr and YouTube sites will have some stuff but it will make more sense once I'm able to post here.

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Winchester and the Snow White Grill

We're in Winchester for an overnight. Again, since I started blogging on the Middle East at work I haven't been posting as often to the family blog. Mostly now it's when we're out of town doing something interesting, though last week — when I didn't post at all — we did do the great Lincoln bicentennial exhibit at the Library of Congress, which combined with the National Museum of American History Lincoln exhibit which I had already posted about (and there's a video on our family-and-friends YouTube page), plus our visit to the newly opened David Willis House in Gettysburg, plus a still-to-do reopened Ford's Theatre and a visit to Lincoln's summer white house at the Soldier's Home, we're immersing Sarah in a lot of Lincoln for the 200th.

But that was last weekend. This weekend we decided to get out of Dodge since the weather forecast sounded good — but there's a catch. It's sunny and warm all right: 93 degrees (our van temperature was showing 95). IN APRIL. A little too hot, so we've been snapping at each other, and we abandoned the idea of doing some of the many civil war sites in the area (Battles close to town: First and Second Winchester, First, Second and Third Winchester/Opequon. A few miles farther out: Cedar Creek, Fisher's Hill, Cool Spring, Stephenson's Depot, etc.etc. . . . Winchester claims to have changed hands 72 times in the Civil War. To get there they have to count every time a cavalry scout rode through town, but it was a busy place. Due to the heat we limited ourselves to the Old Court House Civil War Museum. It's air conditioned.

We did stumble on Old Town Winchester beginning a week-long celebration of Apple Blossom Festival, which concludes next weekend. We ate at the Snow White Grill, which I've posted about before, and which is still great, but also now has its own website, since it's celebrating its 60th anniersary. History and photos here; the all-important menu here; like Fred & Red's in Joplin, it's the sort of place they should make a National Historic Landmark. Or National Historic Greasy Spoon, a new designation for preservation I could really get behind. Photo above is not from today, but photo at left is, showing the Apple Blossom crowds.

Also, as we are in high dog-love mode right now, Sarah stopped to pet every dog we saw (even at a roadside rest stop, but certainly at the Apple Blossom Festival). A photo that doesn't show her face, left.

Near the Visitor's Center we saw a mother duck with eight very new ducklings, so there was that. We've always liked ducks, and who doesn't like ducklings? Mama Duck and little ones, in the final pic of the day.


More after dinner, if I have anything.

UPDATE: Dinner at Castiglia's down the street. Good, reasonably priced Italian. Tomorrow we hope to go to Berkeley Springs, West Virginia, where Sarah enjoys playing in the spring, eating ice cream, and other such diversions. We've done all this several times before, but it's got something for everybody and it's not that far from home.

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Ninth Birthday and the Easter of the Chocolate Chicken

Sometimes life gets so busy you can't actually record it: living it takes up too much time and space. That's what it's been like lately. Since I've been blogging on the Middle East at the MEI Editor's Blog, I get tired of looking at the Blogger interface, and haven't been doing a good job of recording our family adventures.

Before I say anything about the weekend just ending (a fairly routine one), I'm just beginning to blog last weekend, which marked both Sarah's ninth birthday (Friday, April 10) and Easter (Sunday if you couldn't figure that out on your own). Her April 10 birthday means it always falls close to Easter, but this was the closest yet.

And the German chocolate chicken, shown in the photo, is part of the story.

First of all, Sarah was off school on Friday for Good Friday. I work from home Fridays anyway, while Tam had to work. Since her birthday fell on Good Friday and the following weekend was Easter, we figured it was not the time to have a party for friends. She wants a sleepover anyway, so we'll do that another weekend when Easter doesn't intrude.

So Friday was a Daddy-daughter day, which we used to have regularly before she started preschool, but which are less frequent these days.

First we had lunch at our local La Madeleine. The days when the lunch request was aways MacDonalds are past. Of course it's more expensive, but the food's better.

Friday also coincided with the opening of the Hannah Montana movie. So we took in a matinee. Not surprisingly, there were virtually no males there except a few other Dads with daughters. It actually could have been worse, and Sarah enjoyed it.

We then headed for our local outlet of German Gourmet, which Sarah quite rightly thought would be the best place to pick out a chocolate cake for her birthday. We chose a Black Forest Cake — $25, but you're only nine once — and as we were waiting in line to pay for it, she spotted the Easter chicken shown above. Since everyplace else has chocolate Easter rabbits, she thought the chicken (which sits on chocolate Easter eggs) was hilarious. (I think it's just a cultural difference, and the German shop had rabbits too.) And yes, I bought the chicken.

That evening we had a small party for the three of us, then she played with a friend for a while. We gave Sarah a few gifts, though several of her birthday gifts had already been given ahead of time. Also, by prior arrangement Sarah began getting a regular allowance on her birthday.

On Saturday, we ran errands mostly, but also, since the real birthday present sometime in the upcoming months is going to be a dog, we stopped at the local Petco, which has dogs for adoption on Saturdays. While we're not ready yet — we need to get more fencing in, and get the house dogproofed — we're actively educating ourselves to give Sarah the sense this is really going to happen. The rescue group had a number of dogs there, giving Sarah plenty of interaction time (and she's very good with dogs, and always asks neighborhood dog walkers if she can pet them). She particularly liked Maggie (link will only work until Maggie is adopted), though she's also fond of corgis and some other breeds. Saturday night we went to Easter Vigil for the first time with Sarah, but it proved a bit too long for her: dozens of people were being baptized. Still, she made it through.

On Sunday we joined our old friends Cynthia Lancer-Barnes and her son Jake from Bermuda, with Cynthia's mother, aunt and another old friend, for a long brunch (that ran till about 5 pm) at Meiwah restaurant in Friendship Heights, MD (just over the DC line). So an Easter with friends, wrapping up a good weekend.

Though Sarah knows now that the Easter Bunny is us, she insisted we hide plastic eggs fullo of candy anyway, but we didn't get around to it until we got home at nearly dusk, so we did it inside.

I'll try to come back later and talk about this weekend, though there's less to report.

There are videos of the birthday cake and Easter at our YouTube site.

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Gettysburg Day Two: Devil's Den

It's very late and I'll be brief. The second day of the Gettysburg adventure went well. A good part of the day was spent in the rock warrens of Devil's Den, which prior to parenthood I always thought of as interesting rock formations that provided excellent cover for sharpshooters; now I learn that, for kids, it's a terrific playground. Sarah climbed in and out of tunnels and up and over rocks both before and after lunch, and had a ball.

In the afternoon after a second round at Devil's Den (and some time admiring passing dogs since dog lovin' is very important right now), we did do the Eisenhower farm. Perhaps I'll post more another time, but this will have to do for now. Pic (not showing Sarah's face, as per my blog rules) above.

A new two-part video is up at YouTube, complete with slide shows etc.

Oh yes, and we went to the Eisenhower farm as well: more on that another time.

Sarah Takes Gettysburg

I haven't blogged for a couple of weeks; busy with work and the work blog, etc.

We're in Gettysburg; it's part of our effort to teach Sarah about Lincoln during the Lincoln bicentennial year, and we're using our Hampton Inn points for a free night's stay. One new attraction is the renovated David Wills house, where Lincoln spent the night before his speech at Gettysburg, putting the finishing touches on his "few appropriate remarks." It just opened to the public on Lincoln's birthday. Has the bed he slept in, etc.

We had lunch at Ernie's Texas Lunch, originally founded in 1921, "Home of the Texas Hot Weiner," and (this printed on the checks) "the most famous address in Gettysburg since Lincoln's." That kind of place.

Then I showed Sarah the Angle, and Little Round Top, and explained Pickett's Charge and Chamberlain and the 20th Maine; I have a DVD of the movie Gettysburg with us and am trying to get her to watch it (the movie made from The Killer Angels). I didn't subject her to a reading of the famous lines about Pickett's Charge from Intruder in the Dust; Faulkner's a bit heavy for the third grade, but I still think of it whenever I'm at the clump of trees, and my blog readers aren't getting off so easy:

For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it's still not yet two o'clock on that July afternoon in 1863, the brigades are in position behind the rail fence, the guns are laid and ready in the woods and the furled flags are already loosened to break out and Pickett himself with his long oiled ringlets and his hat in one hand probably and his sword in the other looking up the hill waiting for Longstreet to give the word and it's all in the balance, it hasn't happened yet, it hasn't even begun yet, it not only hasn't begun yet but there is still time for it not to begin against that position and those circumstances which made more men than Garnett and Kemper and Armistead and Wilcox look grave yet it's going to begin, we all know that, we have come too far with too much at stake and that moment doesn't need even a fourteen-year-old boy to think This time. Maybe this time with all this much to lose and all this much to gain: Pennsylvania, Maryland, the world, the golden dome of Washington itself to crown with desperate and unbelievable victory the desperate gamble, the cast made two years ago.

The editor in me says that someone should have given Faulkner some extra punctuation marks (a period here and there and a whole lot more commas would help), but it does evoke something anbout the mythology of Pickett's Charge for southerners (at least white southerners). And of course, unlike Faulkner, I never won the Nobel Prize for Literature. I use too much punctuation.

Later: Sarah actually watched the Little Round Top and Clump of Trees scenes in Gettysburg, as we explained the places we were today. Of course she stayed up till midnight and I'm now updating this post after midnight, but otherwise I got the point across.

We'll do more of the battlefield tomorrow, and perhaps the Eisenhower farm.

Yes, the statues Tam is standing by (on Gettysburg's town square) in the picture above are of Abe Lincoln apparently giving directions to a 21st century tourist. I don't completely get the modern tourist statue, but what the heck. Abe's looking good.

One reason I'm a civil war buff, I think, is the knowledge that my ancestors fought on both sides. A Missouri great-great-grandfather fought for the Confederacy; a Georgia great-grandfather fought for the Union. Yes, you read that right: he was a member of one of only two companies of formal Georgia Union infantry (there were also some irregular guerrilla units). Not only was he a Georgian who fought for the Union, he later commanded one of the only two Grand Army of the Republic (the Union veterans' organization) posts in Georgia. Punchline: it was the William T. Sherman post. Really. He was also a Northern Methodist preacher in the south, and sometimes preached, I'm told, in black churches. His mentor used to preach wearing a sidearm since the KKK was after him. You can read my profile of the Rev. John Henry Dunn here, if you want to know more about him for some reason.

If my southern ancestor fought for the Union, my border state Missourian ancestor fought for the Confederacy. That was a lot more common, but it had the downside of his dying a long way from home, and being buried in Mississippi, a long way from the Ozarks. That's another story, But when I stand at the Angle at Gettysburg, I see myself on both sides, and when I stand on Little Round Top, I fully appreciate the accomplishment of Chamberlain, but I also, looking down that hillside, appreciate the guts it took for those Texas and Alabama boys who were trying to go uphill against a fortified position. Sam Hood is not one of my favorite Confederates -- I've been to Franklin, Tennessee, and that made less sense than Grant at Cold Harbor, and killed a bigger percentage in about the same amount of time, but unlike Grant, Hood blamed his men, not himself -- but at Little Round Top they ought to get credit for the sheer daring of it, though Chamberlain naturally deserves the reputation he has gained in recent years.

As for Pickett's Charge, well, back in the 80s when I didn't have a car I sometimes got to visit Civil War sites by giving tours for friends who did. After one friend had been with me to Gettysburg, we later were doing the Seven Days around Richmond, and at Malvern Hill, looking out from McClellan's position towards Lee's, he said, "this reminds me of Gettysburg." Ah, I thought, well are you learning from me, young Jedi. Indeed Lee's tendency for frontal assaults tended to come out when he didn't have Stonewall Jackson around to come up with a better plan. At Gettysburg, he should have listened to Longstreet. I have now offended roughly half of America's Civil War buffs and cheered the other half. Good thing no one reads this blog but family.

More on Gettysburg tomorrow.

A Good Weekend

Monday we had a snowstorm. Yesterday (Saturday) and Today were in the 70s. 77 today at Sarah's school, according to the local "weatherbug" reading, and last night after midnight it was still showing at 67, as it is again now at nearly 11:30. From a snow day to shorts and shirtsleeves in five days. I'll settle.

Also last night we went to daylight savings time: I like the new extended weeks, and now it's light later in the evening. I hate Decembers when I pick up Sarah in the dark.

Yesterday we sought to go to Alexandria's Saint Patrick's Day Parade but left a bit late and got there after all the parking was gone, so we headed on downriver and spent a little time along the Potomac, with Sarah climbing a tree, petting various dogs (the overture to the dog is crescendoing about now, as it's going to come sometime soon after the birthday in April), and enjoying the weather. Today we went to the National Museum of American History at the Smithsonian, and did the "Abraham Lincoln: An Extraordinary Life" exhibit (excellent), one of many Lincoln bicentennial exhibits around town. Plus some hands-on kid's stuff, ice cream, a simulator rider (Bermuda Triangle) and other things to please Sarah. A really good, first spring weekend family time.

I have good video but for some reason it's hanging when I load to YouTube. Will do it during the week as I think TouTube is getting clogged on weekends.

I learned a really bad thing though: the Smithsonian-Folkways record collection (Smithsonian bought out the old Folkways record librart when they closed) is now mostly available for digital download. Since this is the greatest folk-blues-roots music-ethnic music collection in the world, this could get expensive.

The Bars of Cairo

There isn't going to be a lot of cross-fertilization between this blog and my work blog, but this post likely belongs here as well, so I'm not just going to link to it, but also cross-post the entire post, and perhaps tell more personal stories in this vein as we go along later:

Here's the entire post:
(From MEI Editor's Blog, Tuesday, March 3, 2009)

Huffington Post on the Bars of Cairo? Actually, Worth a Read and it Reminds Me of a Story...

Since I noted in my earlier post that today's news wasn't very inspiring, a little social commentary may be in order. Thanks to a link from The Arabist, I was led to this interesting piece over at The Huffington Post, of all places, about the decline of Cairo's non-elite downtown bars.

This is actually a good story, and what gives it away is that the authors were not just going to middle class bars but to the baladi bars in "popular" working-class neighborhoods like Bulaq. I know the Bar Massoud in Bulaq, which they mention, among others. It was a true baladi bar (that is, "of the country," "native,") working-class bar. The equivalent of a blue-collar bar in a steel-belt city, only it would be a white-galabiyya bar where the locals worked as vendors, doormen (bawabin), cab-drivers, laborers and such. If I remember Massoud correctly it was one of the biggest in Bulaq, which then had six or seven, and it may even have had Western-movie style swinging doors. One of the Bulaq bars did. I don't know many Westerners who ever went to them, and it wasn't a regular hangout, but it was a real glimpse of an Egypt even the Egyptian middle class never sees.

And it evokes a somewhat dormant area of my scholarly research product . . .

During a post-doctoral research year in Egypt in the late 1970s (1977-78 for the record, the year Sadat went to Jersualem), several fellow scholars (who have achieved some level of professional success and might not want me to identify them by name) and I actually wrote up a little underground guide to the baladi bars of Cairo. There were, as the article notes, a lot more of them then; the 1980s and 1990s were devastating to the baladi bar scene as religious pressures closed a lot of the bars lower-class Egyptians could afford, even while more five-star hotel bars were sprouting for the tourists and the nouveau riche. We explored the old, declining bars of the downtown and its outliers, described in the article I've linked to, as well as such areas as Shubra, Bulaq, Faggala -- mostly neighborhoods with minority or (Faggala) majority Christian populations,which meant they were a little less vulnerable to Islamist pressures as most of the bars were owned by Copts -- as well as such really down-market places as the makers of the ancient African fermented wheat drink known in Egypt as buza (a true speakeasy sort of place, but with families and, I'm sure, no sort of government license whatsoever). We disdained the big hotels and the upmarket areas such as Zamalek and Heliopolis. Our guidebook, typed up in the days before personal computers and circulated as a xeroxed samizdat, is pretty much gone with the wind (I may have a copy in a storage room somewhere, and a few mid-to-late-1980s updates on a 5 1/4" disc), but the memories endure, and are rather like those evoked by this story. [Readers: If you have an original complete copy post a comment and let me know.] Most of the bars we explored are gone now; some of those we patronized were known to Naguib Mahfouz and others of the literati, but most were holes-in-the-wall where foreigners were a decided oddity, and the Egyptian middle classes rarely showed up unless slumming. (And of course, one had to speak the language.) You do not want to know about the sanitary facilities.

Perhaps this article will remind other old Cairo hands of a different era in Cairo, before Islamist pressures closed the bars in the "popular quarters." I understand the bar scene today is one of wealthy young Egyptians with their cell-phones and text messages, not the baladi bars of old men in galabiyyas drinking Egyptian brandy, evoked in the article linked to.

There's a secondary class of bar worth remembering: the mid-level colonial bar. The old Bar Cecil on Midan Tawfiqiyya (Urabi) was a stupendous one: once a hangout of the British officer class, but not the ranks who hung out at Shepheard's, it was glorious for its big windows on the circle, its brass rails, and so much more, but it died, became a branch of the Bank of Commerce and Credit International (BCCI), itself of later scandalous infamy, and is forgotten. Another mid-level British officers' bar survives I think (last I heard) in the Barrel Bar of the Hotel Windsor, which was an overflow for the original Shepheards burned in 1952. But the old colonial bars have their own fan clubs, and this post is really aimed at remembering the baladi spots.

And, to try to give some additional "redeeming social value" to this post, let me add a comment that spins off the word baladi in its sense of local, down-market, working class. It's still sometimes a bit of a pejorative "a baladi neighborhood," the baladi loaf of bread is the heaviest barley round, not the nice white bread of the middle clases, etc. But it also can mean "everyman": In the era of the monarchy the standard "Egyptian public" figure in Egyptian political cartoons -- the equivalent of the old "John Q. Public" in US cartoons of a certain era -- was a dapper gent in a tarbush (fez) called Misri Effendi, roughly "Mister Egyptian" using an honorific not used for the working classes. After the 1952 Revolution (and we can talk another time about whether it deserves the name of a Revolution), the standard character in political cartoons became Ibn al-Balad, "son of the country," usually a fellow in a white galabiyya and a skullcap. Middle-class types still appeared in cartoons where appropriate, but the national personification became Ibn al-Balad. Of course, the real Ibn al-Balad types didn't read political cartoons in Roz al-Yusuf or the big dailies, but at least they replaced Misri Effendi as a stereotypical cartoon icon.

Boombox and Musical Progress

I still haven't posted on the last day of our Shenandoah Valley trip, now nearly 10 days ago. I will, but wanted to add a few notes that I don't want to forget.

We stopped at the Wal-Mart in Staunton, VA for a few necessities and because we don't have one near us. Our "few necessities" managed to ratchet up to $141, but the take was worth it.

Our Family Room stereo's five-CD changer is getting sticky even with multiple cleanings, so we looked at CD players. Sarah fell in love with a modernistic shaped boombox that plays both CDs and MP3 players, and it was only $30 so we bought it for her. [Update: For about five days this post has said "it was only $30m so we bought if for her. I would like to clarify -- especially to friends and relatives who might want a loan -- that it was not in fact $30 million, but only $30. The "m" was a typo. We love Sarah, but we will never see $30 million. If we did, the boombox would be on a yacht or a Learjet. That is all.]

Now I've been downloading MP3s of songs she asks for (mostly from Disney Channel or Nickolodeon programs: has Disney become the mysterious master of us all?

So at the Staunton Wal-Mart we got Sarah a boombox. Of her own. That she can use in her room, and that takes earphones when she's in company.

I'm delighted, though, that she likes some of the songs I like. She likes Tennessee Ernie Ford's "16 Tons," and she likes "Yellow Rose of Texas," and Alabama's "Song of the South," and Horton's "Battle of New Orleans." Also "Country Roads." She also likes some at least of the early Rock I've been playing, giving at least a moderate thumb up to Chuck Berry doing "Johnny B. Goode."

It may be the greatest triumph since she started to like chili.

Mardi Gras: Happy Fat Tuesday

It's fat tuesday, Mardi Gras, Carnival. I still have a lot of posts to catch up on, but meanwhile a happy last day of debauchery before the onset of Lent. UPDATE: Sarah made a Mardi Gras mask and got beads today. Since her face is not revealed, I'm posting it here.

Outside of New Orleans Mardi Gras doesn't have much hold in this country; maybe a tad in Savannah and in some Spanish communities, but the idea is a good one: we're about to fast for weeks and give up the pleasures of the flesh, so let's indulge them all for a day or a week or whatever. (Actually, lent ain't what it used to be and only the most devout try to fast, but is that any reason not to party?)

Oddly enough, Mardi Gras is pretty much a Catholic thing, though others will join in. Protestants just don't seem to get into the spirit of the thing (for one thing they never did Lent; for another, the Puritan streak doesn't approve of the partying). Catholics -- at least Mediterranean Catholics and their descendants abroad -- seem to still cling to the understanding that repentance is rather empty if you haven't sinned a bit. Before you put on the sackcloth and ashes, party down, dude. Our Orthodox brethren usually start lent on a Monday and their lent makes even the pre-Vatican II version seem hedonistic: they don't eat eggs, fish, cheese, and lots of other stuff (basically if I have it right, all animal products) on most days. I've never heard of an Orthodox Mardi Gras. I think the Greeks have the national panache (though there's probably a better word in Greek) to pull it off if they decided to.

When I say Mardi Gras is a Catholic thing I don't (of course) mean an Irish Catholic thing. It's found in warmer Mediterranean cultures where it's easier to take off most of your clothes in February and March, and where the women drink like the men. An old friend (Portuguese speaking American) once described Carnival in Salvador, Brazil to me. Sounded wilder than Rio or New Orleans, but he was young then. But if you don't have a Lent, how can you appreciate a raucous, orgiastic blowout before it starts?

I've heard that Mardi Gras in New Orleans has gotten pretty tacky at times (usually involving girls lifting their tee-shirts to get more beads), but I'm not sure if that differs much from Rio where (it being summer down there) a lot of clothing doesn't seem to be necessary in the parade. And let's face it, even in non-Mardi Gras seasons, the French Quarter was not exactly Cotton Mather country.

There's an essay waiting here about the differences between Latin Catholicism -- French (New Orleans), Italian, Portuguese (Rio) -- and, say, Irish and Spanish Catholicism have such different attitudes towards such things as Carnival/Mardi Gras. Another time. Begging my Irish ancestors' pardon, I'd rather be Creole on Mardi Gras.

Happy carnival, happy Fat Tuesday. Indulge yourself. Eat, drink and make merry [and yes, I heard the "make Mary" joke before most of you were born], for tomorrow is Lent.

More on other subjects shortly.

More on the Weekend: Day Two

It's harder and harder to find time for the family blog when we're not on the road, since I'm also blogging for work now and obviously, despite massively different subjects, the task is somewhat similar.

I already blogged a little about Saturday of the three-day weekend. Sunday we headed down to Lexington, VA, one of my favorite little towns. Lexington is a fairly small town, but Mecca isn't the biggest city in Saudi Arabia, either. Lexington is the burial place of Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, Lee's horse Traveler, Jackson's horse Little Sorrel (whose skin is also mounted in the VMI museum), the library/museum of George C. Marshall, and two fine universities: Washington and Lee and VMI.

Now, it just so happens that two of my real heroes are George Marshall and Stonewall Jackson. Lee is another member of the Virginia pantheon, though I've never been as admiring of him. Still, Lexington is a little town with a huge amount of Virginia mythology burned into it.

We also stopped at the Virginia Horse Center since Tam and Sarah are both horse people, and watched a bit of a small competition and then wandered through the stables. ("Don't step in the brown stuff," Sarah noted -- always, I think, a good rule in any context --) I'm no horse expert, basically knowing there's a pretty end and an unpleasant end and you don't step in the brown stuff -- and that I haven't ridden one in so many years I can't remember where the brakes are -- but I also like to indulge my horsey ladies.

Dinner that night was at an Italian place in Waynesboro -- Scotto's -- and that was day two of the three-day weekend. I'll do day three tomorrow or soon.

Days Two and Three

I'm going to have to post about days two and three of the President's Day weekend trip in the next few days. It's now past midnight and tomorrow's a work day. Yesterday (now meaning Sunday as it's past midnight and thus Tuesday) was a good day in Lexington, VA with Stonewall Jackson stuff, today (Monday) a slow progression down the Valley with great scenery Video of Sarah swimming is up at TouTube; today's odyssey is currently a 30-minute film too long for TouTube, which we may package as a DVD for relatives.

More details when I can. Sleep needed.

Valentine's Day in the Valley

It's Valentine's Day and also the first day of the three-day President's Day Weekend, so we're off in the Shenandoah Valley, an area that has always been one of our favorite spots. Though we've been to Winchester recently, we hadn't been to the upper Valley (like the Nile, "upper" means south since the river flows northerly), so we decided to use the three-day weekend for a quick getaway. It's been a mild February, keeping our fingers crossed.

We're staying at a Hampton Inn we call "Sarah's old hotel," since it's one of her favorite places and has been since she was about two. It's located south of Fishersville, Va, between the cities of Staunton and Waynesboro, near the old Tinkling Spring Presbyterian Church, one of the oldest congregations in the Valley, where early Scotch-Irish settled in the 1700s.

Tomorrow I think we're going down to Lexington, with its Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee associations. More later or tomorrow. Some video now going up on YouTube.

A Day at the Beach: In FEBRUARY!!

Today, the weather hit somewhere past 60, and it was February 8. Only a few days ago the high was in the 20s, so this was an opportunity.

Since I started my work blog about 12 days ago, family blogging has suffered. I don't think that's permanent, but more like birth pangs of something new.

Today we spent time at Leesylvania State Park, a Virginia State Park, down the Potomac between Woodbridge and Dumries, Virginia, which has a little river beach along the estuary Potomac.

Yesterday, we went up to Leesburg, Virginia, ate at the Downtown Saloon (ex-Payne's Biker Bar: yes, I take my daughter to biker bars), visited the Loudon Museum, and then a place we'd never been before (it only opened to the public in 2005), George C. Marshall's home at
Dodona Manor in Leesburg. I happen to be a big George Marshall fan: the only American general to win the Nobel Peace Prize, the guy whom nobody remembers but whom Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Harry Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower all credited as the greatest leader of World War II (not a bad audience, that!) and Churchill (I think) called "the noblest Roman of them all." Marshall these days doesn't have a lot of groupies but I'm one of them. When we're in Lexington, VA we visit his library at VMI where I've been many times and even attended conferences, but I hadn't seen his hom ein Leesburg. Marshall ranks, I think, above Eisenhower or MacArthur in WWII for his remarkable skill as Chief of Staff, his willingness to forego commanding Overlord because Roosevelt decided he couldn't do without him in Washington (so Ike got to be President and he didn't), and most of all, his skill at running the war. Forrest Pogue's four-volume authorized biography (GCM was the only biggie of WWII who survived the war but didn't right memoirs, except Stalin) called its third volume "Organizer of Victory." I've said it before and I'll say it again: as the Army says, "Amateurs talk about strategy; professionals talk about logistics." GCM was actually a fine strategist, and managed to hold his own against Churchill, who was no mean strategist himself but had an obsessive fixation on the Mediterranean.

Oh, hell, you're not reading this for a eucomium to George C. Marshall.

We went to the beach, at Leesylvania as I noted earlier. It was great. Tam found several whorl shells. our videos are going up on YouTube as I speak. It was relaxing, a tremendous break from February, a foreshadowing of spring. We're all ready. Bring it on.

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Happy Year of the Ox!

Happy Year of the Ox, y'all. It actually started Monday, but Chinese New Year's lasts 15 days till the Lantern Festival, and today was the parade in DC's rather small Chinatown. We went to the parade, ate at the Chinatown Fuddrucker's (Sarah likes their milkshakes), watched the parade, bought some souvenirs in Chinatown shops (mostly dragon related since Sarah was born in the Year of the Dragon and is big on dragons), and came home. Tonight we went out for Italian.

Today was a great day for the parade: low 50s, not a cloud in the sky. Some years it's been bitterly cold. Some years we haven't gone because Sarah didn't want to. She waxes hot and cold on how into her Chinese heritage she is, but we're in a hot period right now and she's really interested and wanted Chinese souvenirs. (She wanted expensive artwork, actually, but settled for stuff under $10, each, all with dragons.) More to come.