Follow Me

We went to see Peter, Paul and Mary last night at Wolf Trap. What we saw was Peter and Paul and a couple of old, sick guys playing backup. Mary is very ill. Mary is also the heart of that group so we left at half time. It wasn't all bad because we went to a place called Tap and Vine by the house to have an apres infirmary brew. I've been wanting to try the place and it looks like it could be a good hangout. When we got home I went to Itunes and downloaded some of the songs I missed at the concert. Follow Me was just one. Another was Hush-A-Bye.

When I was in India we played a game where you had to sing if you didn't perform whatever task you were assigned. I wouldn't do it because Adrian asked me, when he was about 4, not to sing to him at night anymore. I've been reticent about singing ever since. The song I loved to sing to him was Hush-A-Bye. Besides not being able to carry a tune, I also couldn't remember all the words and sort of made them up as I went. He hated that. Now I will listen to it all the time and sing it to him when he comes out for Labor Day week. :)

Someone else who required following was Mr. Cheney. With a net. If you don't believe that we were tricked into voting for Bush after reading Greatest Story Ever Sold, you may believe that we were tricked into agreeing to attack Iraq on the flimsiest of conceits after reading Hubris. We know all this. Some of us wouldn't have voted for Bush under any circumstance and some of us wouldn't believe his and Cheney's stories about Iraq unless one of them walked into a nerve gas cloud. Not that it wouldn't have helped. That's it for me, though. I just can't read any more about the duping of America. Aren't you lucky.

Fireflies

You know how beautiful our garden is. There is a new and interesting flower or plant every few feet. It takes a lot of work to keep it looking good. Cindy got home from work early last night and corralled Eric to help with some of the weeding and mulch spreading activities. I was exhausted from a long day of sitting in an empty office, so I just cooked dinner.

Something Cindy and Eric did prompted the must beautiful display of fireflies that any of us have ever seen. I'm still excited to see a few at twilight. Last night, the entire front yard was full of little sparkling lights. The weeping cherry and the azalea shrubs looked like they had been strung with blinking white lights. Most of the flowers had a light or two on them.

Amazing.

Sorry I can't share a picture. I thought about it five minutes after we went inside. With a digital camera, you know if you've been successful immediately. What I didn't expect was that when I went back with my camera, all the lights would be stripped from the trees. We were back to a couple of guys winking around some of the flowers. I wish I had words (and pictures) to express how lucky I felt that we three should have seen this fleeting light show.

Amazing.

Flowers

I've added pictures to my Picasa flower page. I forget to take pictures. In fact, I just remembered that I was either going to count or take a picture of the number of tomato plants we have in the way back garden.

I learned that this is a double lot. That's why it has so much garden space. The house across the street is for sale. It is on a single lot and is very small. Still, it costs $660K. We'll see if housing prices are depressed if it takes a long time to sell. Two bedrooms, a small office or large closet and a bath upstairs; little kitchen, dining room, living room and sun room on the ground floor; big rumpusy room and bath in the basement. No toilet at all on the ground level. That is so wrong on so many different levels. :) And just a little dog run size space behind the house. We have room for a garage and a vegetable garden behind the house. A veg garden with space for X number of tomato plants. Next time I will remember.

As everyone knows, Michael Jackson died this week. What some don't know is that Reg knew him. Reg's business partner's son was once a roadie for the Jackson 5. Reg went with him to the Jackson family's home in Encino and met them all. He got a picture of the family and Michael autographed it to Adrian. I showed Adrian when he was older. He didn't know who the guy was because, by then, Michael looked like a wholy different person. Sad man. Sad life.

Spring Approaches

I have been working sporadically in the garden, mostly raking the leaves that are still left from the Fall. Spring is just a few days away and I am trying to get rid of the old before the new arrives. On the left you can see the new that is starting to pop up. Cindy planted hundreds or thousands of red tulips in this part of the walkway. Okay, not a thousand, but lots. They are just starting to poke their noses through the soil. The ratty looking plants around the edges will have white flowers. It will be beautiful. When they are here in full, it will really be Spring. For now, we have the pretty purple crocus growing up in the lawn. What a pleasant surprise. It is their pretty faces that prompted me to go out to clean the garden. Little bulbs are starting to poke up everywhere. I have to be careful as I rake not to step on something trying very hard to make its presence known.
This is not a dry season. I decided to read Love in a Dry Season because I liked the way Shelby Foote wrote about the Civil War. He's a champion story teller, his characters are well formed. This is true in this book as well as in the other books. Actually, this reminded me a lot of Elmer Gantry. fI just checked, it isn't read by the same person, so it must be the writing. And the main male characters are equally into themselves. Once again, Foote has written about interesting characters and places. My goodness, I think I really like novels. I had no idea.
My blast from the past is of Cynthia and Teena. I love going through my pictures to see the people who have made me smile. I've been promised pictures of Teena's little boy and have never seen one. Oh well. I tried to call Cynthia a few days ago and got voice mail. I'll try again and will actually leave a message.

It's Winter!

It snowed last night.  Since Eric told me that snow rarely sticks here, I figured it would be gone by this morning.  But it is very cold out there.  It may not snow again for a while, but this snow is going to stay for a while.  

I am so happy it waited until Adrian left.  He does not like the cold one bit. Such a California boy.  The weather was beautiful while he was here. After getting of the first leg of his flight here in New York and hearing that it was 20 degrees outside, he was not looking forward to the cold.  But the weather turned warm - in the 50's most of the time he was here.  At Thanksgiving, Cael, Sean and Adrian went outside to play football.  Cael is delightfully all boy with the sweetest disposition.  He was always happy to be able to go outside to kick and throw the football.  Cindy got a little boy ball and a big boy ball.   He must have had trouble figuring out which he was.

We went to the Kennedy Center last Saturday to see Shear Madness.  A little silly, but had a lot of audience participation that was fun.  The Kennedy Center is, of course, awe-inspiring.  It's very grand and we will be 

going back there for New Year's Eve.  Isn't this a fun place to be?  On the left you will see us with JFK in the background.  He is looking very severe.  I don't remember that aspect of him.   

Maybe it was all that sitting.  I had a fever the next day and had to go to the ER.  It was an infection and I've been taking antibiotics ever since.  Once again, Cindy saved one of the Lundstrom kids.  She called my doctor and we agreed that I should go to the ER.  I wasn't too happy with the nurse, but Sandi shared her experience with blood-drawers and gave me a different perspective.  Okay, we'll let the nurse live. The good news is that I am feeling great, considering I had major surgery less than two weeks ago.

Yes, I've been reading.  I finished the second Civil War book.  The South is in dire straights.  They are considering changing the draft age, which was 18 to 45 to be lower and higher.  Grant has been found to be the hard driving General that Lincoln has been looking for.  Other generals on both

sides tend to hang back to make sure their positions are secure.  I 

will get the last book of  this series by Horton Foote a few days before Christmas.  

My friend, Marilyn, sent me a book from her book club.  This is The Giant's House.  The book on the left is the one she sent me.  The book on the right must be the paperback.  I like both covers because they tell a lot about the story.  The woman telling the story is a librarian.  She meets James, the giant, when he comes to her library.  He is a young man with a voracious need to read and learn about everything.  It started with magic and then roamed through most shelves of the library.  Another story line was how hard it was to keep this boy clothed and, particularly, shod.  I like the difference in the shoes on the right.  Adrian is no giant, but I can easily slip into his shoes when I was wearing my own shoes.  It looks like you could stuff a lot of shoes into James' shoes.  It is a lovely book.

Fall

Have I said that it is beautiful here? The trees are slowly turning into all those fall colors we read about in California. Some do it slowly. I don't know any of the names of these trees. Is it the maple that slowly changes from green to orange? And what tree is it that all of a sudden, pfoomp, turns yellow?

Even my car is happy to have soft deciduous leaves covering its windshield wipers instead of pine needles and oak leaves. They were never this pretty. And thinking about those live oak leaves, these leaves are easier to walk on bare-footed.

Another sign of Fall is baseball. I celebrated the baseball playoffs by reading the book Faithful by Stewart O'Nan and Stephen King. It was written during the 2004 baseball season. These two authors and old friends decided to keep journals about every game the Boston Red Sox played that year. The Red Sox hadn't won a World Series since early in the last century. Their book was based on the premise of how faithful the fans remain despite never winning the big one.

Of course the book is well written and it has the wonderful ending of the curse being broken. (No spoiler alert needed, unless you really don't like baseball. And then you won't care.) One of the things that I've come away with is that these guys play way too many games. The season starts in cold weather and may end on Halloween. We got to watch the players play for several innings in the rain in the final game this year. We all like to make a lot of money, but I think the TV stations, team owners and players need to get a grip. Too much, guys.

In any event, Faithful takes you into the minds of guys who wouldn't mind if the season was longer. What do I know?

We went to watch a few horse races on Saturday. This was an absolutely gorgeous Fall day. The air was chilly, the clouds were drifty. I packed cheese, crackers, fruit and wine. Eric bought some new fun folding chairs. Do you see the foot rests attached to the chairs? Very cute, but very hard for me to climb over. Most of the horses did better than that on the jumps.

The clouds were as much fun to watch as the horses. This was a steeplechase. The horses ran right in front of our picnic spot. They even started there for a couple of races. It was really a great day for cloud, horse and people-watching.

Nothing to Lose

We all know that I am working at Booz Allen every Wednesday until I'm not. A couple of weeks ago I worked the other four days for a different woman in that office. The picture on the right is of Kim, on the left, and Crystal. Crystal is the woman I'm temping for on Wednesdays. She is learning how to do more techie stuff on those days. Kim is the delightful woman who has been there every day. She works in a different group, but sits next to Debbie, the woman I temped for on those four days. Confusing? Just know that these woman have helped me a lot as I get to know more about the BAH culture. Isn't that a fun company? It's either Booz or BAH.

Eric and I took a drive to Appomattox Court House Thursday and Friday of last week. There are a lot of places that I want to see when I'm in Virginia. It's a little difficult to decide where to go first. And there is the question of whether Eric needs to go with me each time. One of my goals was to see where the Civil War ended. Adrian and I had visited Fort Sumter when he was six. He says he remembers that. I'm sure what he remembers most is getting a bit sea sick on the boat over to the island.

I decided that I needed to see where the war ended. I'm not sure if this means that I won't be visiting any more battlefields or not. Is the war over for me at last? I have seen a lot of battlefields; not even most of them, but certainly the most well known. So it was good to see this place. Appomattox Court House is the name of the town. It is the county seat for Appomattox County. Poor General Lee was leading very hungry and weary men at this point. No matter which way he turned, events turned against him. Supplies were late or lost. Troop movement was slowed or delayed. Union soldiers moved more quickly than he expected. He realized that he could do nothing else. He had to surrender his men.

He sent one of his men to find a place for him to meet with Grant. The Court House itself was closed. Most buildings were closed because of the battles going on just across the fields. Finally they found the McLean farm. Mr. McLean had fought in one of the first battles of the war and then moved to this quiet country-side to get away from it all. It came to him instead. The surrender was signed at these desks. Grant sat at the one on the left. Lee sat at the one on the right. US (Unconditional Surrender) Grant was not so mean with these terms. I guess he got that nickname someplace else. He was very generous to the Southerners. So now, that war is over.

I have always wanted to go to the Cumberland Gap. Must have read too much about Daniel Boone in my youth. Eric said it was too far. Next time, I will go by myself. It is at the south western most corner of Virginia. We only got as far as Roanoke. Then we took a drive up the Blueride Skyline Parkway Drive. It is very lovely. I say the leaves are starting to turn although most were still very green. We saw deer; in fact, Eric almost hit one that bounded at our car. These fellas on the right were moving a little more slowly. We got to watch them lope on the other side of the guard rail until they made a break for the other side of the street. Just enough time for me to get out my camera.

The next day we went for a picnic on the Potomac for people from Cindy's office. It was a beautiful setting. You can almost see the pair of kayakers in the picture on the right. There was also fishing from a row boat going on in the inlet just to the right of this scene. Bucolic. We ate fair barbeque and listened to the young folks from the office. These people do interesting work. One gentleman is moving to Huntsville to continue his work with the military. I don't remember what he does, but he's been doing it for many years. Now they've moved everything to Huntsville. He seems very excited about the prospect. I could understand starting a whole new life in a new state. I hope his is just temporary, too, but he did mention selling and buying houses. Yikes.

Eric and I listened to a book on our drive. It's a little difficult to pick a book that two people will listen to and enjoy. But I had found out that Eric likes the Jack Reacher books by Lee Child, so that made the choice easier for me. I bought the newest book so I knew he hadn't read it already. This was Nothing to Lose. These books are becoming more than a little formulaic and they may be off my list for good (or until I go driving again with Eric.) I think Eric might be ready for some other writer in the genre as well. In another book he and I had listened to, one man sort of owned the town. Same here. Different convoluted subplot, but basically the same. We listened to the whole book, well, almost the whole book. We only had an hour left. I listened to that part the night we got home and shared it with Eric as we were going to the picnic. He kept asking detailed questions, beginning with Why. We both started to laugh, because there is often a very tenuous Why in these books. I finally had to say, "Because it's Reacher." Not a very good reason. Jack can still beat six men and not get a nick. But even that gets old. So there was nothing to lose, listening to this book on our drive. Just a few brain cells.

The Joint Was Jumping

Saturday was a zoo at our house. A carpenter has been working on the place for over a week. This day, he brought friends. Lots of friends. They were painting, putting in the new French door (see below), fixing rotten wood, replacing trim, repairing brick. You know, just your average household projects. They started cutting out the hole for the doors late in the work week. The drilling noise was amazing. It was like a dentist's drill on steroids. So worth it. The doors are beautiful. They let in an amazing amount of light and air. There is now a sliding screen door behind the windows.

They weren't the only ones working. No, not Eric and I. I could say we were supervising, but I went to the farmer's market and did stuff like that. Maybe Eric was supervising. Kaitlin, on the left, thought she found a quiet place to do her homework. It was quieter than her place. I can't imagine what that must sound like. Cindy, on the right, is always working at her desk. She faces the front yard. Just outside that window are several bird feeders. It is an amazing view.

I learned that one of the meat vendors at the Arlington Farmer's market was written about in The Omnivore's Dilemma. Eric keeps teasing me about buying dead "happy chickens". Once happy because they roamed free, now dead. I mentioned that to the purveyor and he said all their animals were very happy. Just read the book! I don't know why that pleases me so much, but it does. It's a good thing, because they are fairly expensive.

Mark and Trina were visiting the area. He was here for a Navy football game, she for a company conference. Eric and I went to D.C. to meet them. We had brunch by the waterfront. Behind the three you can see the Kennedy Center and just to the left of that is the Watergate complex. We enjoyed their company and watching all the boaters. There were a lot of sculls, canoes and yachts. And it was a beautiful day.

Savage Wars - Internal and International

I don't usually do this, but this review from Amazon of the Savage War of Peace tells it all. It's from The Washington Post. Once again, I don't know why I decided to read this book. But it is so relevant to what has been going on in our country and in Iraq. You must read the new edition. The author tells about all the people in the current administration who have read/are reading the book. He seems to suspect that they are only reading it because "everyone is." The truths don't seem to have sunk in.

Even if you don't relate this to our current situation, you will learn a lot. The battle for Algiers took place in my lifetime. I have a vague recollection of reading about it at the time. This book makes it perfectly clear what was happening on all sides of the war.

The Review:

When Americans talk about the raging insurgency in Iraq, they often draw parallels with the Vietnam War, but a better analogy is probably the French war against nationalist rebels in Algeria from 1954 to 1962. That's one reason why the landmark history of that conflict, Alistair Horne's A Savage War of Peace, has been an underground bestseller among U.S. military officers over the last three years, with used copies selling on Amazon.com for $150. Indeed, "Algeria" has become almost a codeword among U.S. counterinsurgency specialists -- a shorthand for the depth and complexity of the mess we face in Iraq. Earlier this year, I referred to Horne's book while conversing with one such expert in Taji, Iraq, and got a grim nod of agreement.
Now a new paperback edition of Horne's 1977 classic has been issued, cutting the price of wisdom to a more reasonable $19.95. In a new preface, Horne makes the connection to Iraq explicit. First, he notes, the Algerian insurgents fighting to end France's colonial control over the country avoided taking on the French army directly; instead, they attacked the police and other more vulnerable targets, thereby demoralizing local supporters of the French presence. Second, Algeria's porous borders greatly aided the insurgents, who could receive reinforcements, arms and sanctuary from neighboring countries such as Tunisia and Morocco. Third, and most emphatically, he writes that "torture should never, never, never be resorted to by any Western society."
Those three parallels are provocative enough, as far as they go. But many other, perhaps less obvious points in Horne's lucid, well-organized history may do even more to deepen our understanding of the Iraq War.
Again and again, Horne wrote passages about the French in Algeria that could describe the U.S. military in Iraq. As I wrote about the U.S. Army's big "cordon-and-sweep" operations that detained tens of thousands of civilian Iraqi males in the Sunni Triangle in the fall of 2003, I remembered Horne: "This is the way an administration caught with its pants down reacts under such circumstances. . . . First comes the mass indiscriminate round-up of suspects, most of them innocent but converted into ardent militants by the fact of their imprisonment."
Like the Americans in Iraq, the French in Algeria consistently misunderstood the nature of the opposition, focusing too much on supposed foreign support and too little on the local roots of the insurgency. Horne also detected a distinctly familiar pattern of official optimism among French officials, who were quick to declare their war "virtually over" four years before it ended in their defeat.
Moreover, A Savage War of Peace draws an important distinction between torture by the police and torture by the military. The former damages mainly individuals and need not be hugely damaging to the war effort; the latter, Horne quotes a former French officer as saying, involves the honor of the nation -- as it did at Abu Ghraib and other facilities where Iraqis were abused by American soldiers in 2003-04.
Along the way, Horne offers three other comments that are not particularly encouraging. First, when considering the Bush administration's policy of having U.S. forces stand down as newly trained Iraqi forces stand up, it is worth noting that throughout the eight years of the Algerian war, more Algerians were fighting on the French side than on the rebel side -- and the French still lost.
Second, when trying to understand Iraq's current violence, it is good to recall Horne's comment that "such a simultaneous internal 'civil war' " often rages alongside a "revolutionary struggle against an external enemy."
Finally, when we hear U.S. military officers arguing that they achieved their mission in Iraq but that the rest of the U.S. government failed or the will of the American people faltered, remember Horne's quotation from a French general, Jacques de Bollardière, who was critical of his army's performance: "Instead of coldly analysing with courageous lucidity its tactical and strategic errors, it gave itself up to a too human inclination and tried -- not without reason, however -- to excuse its mistakes by the faults of civil authority and public opinion."
To be sure, there are huge differences between the two wars. Most notably, the United States isn't a colonial power in Iraq, seeking to maintain a presence of troops and settlers as long as possible. Rather, in Iraq, victory would consist of getting U.S. personnel out while leaving behind a relatively friendly, open, stable and independent government. And while elements of the French military tried to assassinate French President Charles de Gaulle for pulling out from what he termed "a bottomless quagmire," there is little fear that U.S. officers will go down that rebellious road.
But there are numerous suggestive parallels -- mainly relating to conventional Western militaries fighting primarily urban insurgencies in Arab cultures while support for their wars dwindles back home and while the insurgents hope to outlast their better-armed opponents. As such, anyone interested in Iraq should read this book immediately.
Reviewed by Thomas E. Ricks Copyright 2006, The Washington Post.

Be Near Me

And I have finally read the winner of The Times Book Award for Fiction. This is a lovely book. If you read it, you should go Audible. It takes place in Scotland and the reader does Scottish very well. The protagonist is from England and that is important in the book. The reader does an excellent job of reading these voices in the correct accent.

This is about a priest who strayed while meandering his way through life. He has wonderfully supportive people around him. I loved reading about his mother and his relationship with his late fater. The characters are well drawn, the dialogue is realistic. Loved it. Please listen to it.

My life

I have been working hard this past week. I had two different jobs, worked 5 days. Argh. It was good for me and I keep meeting lovely people from whom I learn a lot. So, life continues to be good. Construction goes on at the house constantly. Workmen are putting in a beautiful door in the dining room and a hundred other things. The joint is really jumping in VA

Exploring, At Last

Be proud of us. Eric and I finally got out of the house! Not for shopping or going to work. No, we went to Richmond. Oh, I felt the wind in my hair. (why is there no type font that would indicate dripping sarcasm?) In any event, we were on the road.

I mentioned to Eric that I had been to the place where Stonewall Jackson was killed when I was in the area years ago. But, oh, the memory grows dim. What I really remember is seeing the trenches that his soldiers dug. They are still there. Some places never change. We stopped where Stonewall Jackson died. He had been shot three times by his confederate soldiers. He may have survived that, but he had pneumonia and died from that. This is the building where he died. I have a picture of the bed he lay in and the clock that ticked off the hours, but I thought I'd spare you that. He was one of my favorite generals in the war. He was very bright and didn't do stupid things that hurt his men. What more could you ask for? Well, perhaps that he fought for the Union side, but you can't have everything.

We didn't have Karen with us, so there was little advanced planning or maps or anything like that. We did stumble into a really cool museum. It was about Richmond during the Civil War and it is housed in an old Pattern Factory by the James River. A pattern factory did not make tissue paper patterns used to make dresses. It made and used patterns of big, clunky metal things. They would stick the patterns into sand and then remove them and then fill the hole with metal. The picture on the left is one of the pipes that carried steam or water. They used water originally to drive the work and then they used turbines around the time of the Civil War.

You may know that Richmond was the capitol of the confederacy. Lee's army worked hard to defend it. In fact, they held on for a very long time, despite being hugely outnumbered. This museum had the nicest rangers in it. It also had a movie and lots of memorabilia. I picked up about a dozen brochures so we will be better prepared when we return. One of the things we learned about was the 7 battle sites that surround Richmond. Eric and I will be back. I even bought a CD to play along with our driving tour.

On the way back we saw this road that goes off to the right. Of course you can't read that sign. It is the road to Powhite Parkway. Is the litter on the road... Sorry. I am much too easily amused.

The Girls

Both Cindy and Eric were gone last Tuesday night. "The Girls" usually sleep by the door of their room upstairs. As I've said, they live for the possibility that they may kill someone some day. Tuesday night they stayed downstairs, in front of my door. That's the door in the middle of the picture on the left. The bathroom door is at Sunshine's feet. Bailey is lying in the doorway to the dining room. So, when nature calls in the middle of the night, do you turn on your lights? All I could feel was dog under my feet. And still they didn't move. Turning on the light and taking their picture finally got a response from Sunshine. How could I disturb her sleep?

Sunshine got revenge on Saturday for me disrupting her sleep. I took a walk earlier in the week and took a picture of the sidewalk down our street. It has been beautiful in Arlington this summer. Everyone comments on it. That day, Eric and Cindy decided to take Bailey to the park. They left Sunshine in the house with the other old girl. I thought I had waited a decent period of time, time enough to go around the two blocks I'd been told about. So I let Sunshine out the front door to do what dogs do outside. What she decided to do was to follow the rest of her family. I got all the way down the block before I could grab onto her collar. We were a funny pair. She was not moving. No. We stayed on the corner for some time. We met a new dog and his master. They were very nice. We talked about how old ladies can't keep up with the young 'uns so it would be better to turn around and go home. Nothing moved her. Finally she realized that I was as determined as her. So we both got a little air that day.

Tea in McLean

One of the very nice things that happened last week was meeting the soon-to-retire EA when I was interviewing for her soon-to-be old job. I wasn't too excited about the job, but I really liked Isabel. She came to visit me a couple of times at my office to share secrets of getting along at Booz Allen. What a classy lady. Isabel is from Bolivia and will soon be a grandmother to her first grandchild. Both of those things give us a lot to talk about when we aren't talking about Booz Allen. (I haven't drunk any koolaid yet, so I can only do that topic so long.)

Isabel invited me to her good-bye tea at the Ritz Carlton in McLean. She wanted me to meet some of her friends who would help me with my life at Booz, since she would soon be leaving. Isn't that amazing? So gracious. All that and good food. The people at the Ritz Carlton love Isabel, too. She would go there for tea often, sometimes with friends, sometimes alone. They took good care of her and, thankfully, all of us who were with her. They gave us a package with lots of all the pastries when we left. Eric was in heaven.

HIGH TEA SELECTIONS

Afternoon Tea Selection of Tea Sandwiches

Procuitto, Butter, Cream Cheese, Asparagus,Chive, Cream Cheese Star White Bread

Poached Pear, Walnut Cream Cheese,Chive Stick, Walnut 1/4, Wheat Bread

Classic English Cucumber,Chive Cream Cheese, Chervil Sprig White Bread

Smoked Salmon Rosette, Salmon Cream Cheese, Capers,American Caviar, Dill Sprig, pumpernickel Bread.

Selection of Sweets

Orange Scented Scones

Opera Torte

Raspberry Tart

Palmier

Pistachio Pain de Gene

Shortbread Cookie

Chocolate Dipped Strawberry

Chocolate Madeleine

Éclair

There is a Boy

Cindy's daughter, Carina, came to stay a week with us. She brought her son, Cael with her. You see him above with a huge tomato from the garden. Cindy waited until he got here to pick that thing. They got here on Saturday, so I had some time to play before I went back for my second week at work.

The frog swimming pool is very cute. When you plug the hose into the back, you get a little shower of water in the front. Cael is still a little young to fully appreciate the shower effect. But he obviously has a love for frogs. To see more of Cael with the frogs, click on the link. He was singing a happy frog song, but wouldn't repeat it for the camera. Too bad. It was pretty cute.

Eric bought a huge fish tank with plans of Cael enjoying the fish. But the huge fish tank is up the stairs in Eric's office. Cael couldn't really go up there without accompaniment. So Eric moved his old smaller tank downstairs and included the special fish that he and Cael had picked up. This is Goldie. I told Cael I wanted a picture of him with Goldie. This is his pose.

We had a good time with our two visitors. One was exceptionally loud. He's just two and a half and loves to screech at all hours. The other visitor rode in to work with me a few days. She is lovely and a joy to travel with. I'm getting to know Caitlin pretty well. It was very good to spend one-on-one time with Carina.

I went for my interview on Wednesday. It was supposed to be tomorrow. I was supposed to buy a suit and have my hair done and look all East-Coast-Professional. But the VP wanted to interview earlier. I am his second choice at this point. He likes the woman he interviewed who is working on her MBA. I wonder how long she would stay. I'm okay with this. I have a prospect of a four week temp job in a nearby town. That sounds perfect to me. I hope I'm not second choice again, but you never know. The best thing about the interview was that I met the woman who currently holds that position. She is leaving to care for a soon-to-be grandchild. We have become friendly, she visited me twice in my office in McLean, bringing all kinds of information to further acquaint me with Booz Allen. I'm going to her going away tea next Thursday if I don't have a job by then. I'm going to go shopping for a suit on Monday and Tuesday. I found one that I really liked at Nordstrom's, but didn't buy it. The pant legs were long enough for Cindy. And the interview was the next day. I could get it now and it would be ready for the tea.

Settling in. At last.

Going to the Dogs

Yes, my life is going totally to the dogs. These lounging ladies are the bane of my walking existence. Look at them lying across a doorway into the television room. They also lay in front of the door from my room and the door into the dining room, the entrance to the house once you pass the door from my room. They appear to be everywhere.

One of the joys of my life in Arlington is the weekly farmer's market at the courthouse. See the line on the far right? It continues around the van to unknown depths, since my picture is poor. But look at the sign I captured while trying to get a picture of Cindy in line - no dogs allowed during the farmer's market. Coooooool.

Today I went there and bought multicolored mini-tomatoes, mini sweet peppers, gooseberries, corn fresh off the stock, chanterelles, baby crimini mushrooms, mango peaches, an heirloom tomato, a boneless pork roast from a properly raised pig, a whole truely free range chicken and legs from properly fed and raised chickens. Cindy bought berries and peaches at the long line place and bread. The line was very short today. Hurray! The food was amazing at dinner tonight. Thanks to farmer's market, it is pretty easy to eat well here.

You may think that I have it rough with the dogs that block all my doorways. But look at what I saw this morning as I looked up the stairs to Eric and Cindy's room. These damn dogs are determined to kill someone. Don't they know that if something happens to us, they will be shown to the nearest dog "shelter" ASAP? That is, if I am the one who survives.