Barbecue, Blues, R&B, and "I Really Love Hiking!": The Last Day of Summer

A brief update on the weekend, in case I can't get back to it soon. After a stay-home day on Saturday, followed by an evening at Red Hot & Blue, where Sarah ate barbecue and bounced around to both blues and R&B (and on hearing Big Mama Thornton's original version of "You Ain't Nothin' but a Hound Dog" said "Isn't this a classic?" and "Didn't Elvis do a version?" I knew once again that we're raising her right. (She did ask if Big Mama was a man or a woman. Fair question when the voice gets husky, I think. And when I started to explain about Carl Perkins doing "Blue Suede Shoes" first, she zoned out.) She likes barbecue now -- the meat, not the sandwich, the sweet sauce, not the vinegar or hot, the inside meat, not the browned outside meat, etc. -- but any decent barbecue eater is picky.

Today after church she said she wanted to do some nature hiking so we went out to Manassas Battlefield. Our eastern battlefields are often our finest outdoor preserves; she had already had to hear my lecture at Antietam over Labor Day how the site of the bloodiest single day in American history was such a beautiful spot today. She insisted on walking a trail she knows -- the old Unfinished Railroad from Sudley Road westward, key to the Second Manassas battle -- and though we saw nothing more "nature" than a bunch of weird mushrooms, it was good to get outdoors on the last day of summer (Fall starts tomorrow morning) and it was a spectacular day. 80ish, not a cloud to speak of, dry. Hot when in open sun, but just great.

We then stopped at a Best Buy in Manassas to get a B-17 Nintendo DS game for Tam which Sarah then adopted as her own (the DS was her present from the tax stimulus plan), and some other stuff. We got ice cream at a 7-11, ate it in the car, and headed home. One of the things we bought was a DVD of The Princess Bride, one of my all-time favorite movies, which Sarah liked.

More as we go along, but now that she's into barbecue as well as chili I'm convinced that environment does trump heredity sometimes (though her Hunan genes may lean her toward chilis).

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