QOTD: "This must be the Red Sox' year. Statistics of the last 75 years prove that the Sox always win the World Series one year after a Russian revolution." - Dan Shaughnessy in 1986
Reading: not quite done with Bleak House by Charles Dickens but will finish it tonight
Listening to: the cast recording of The Curse of the Bambino of course!
Decluttering accomplishments: I'm sure I must have shuffled a few papers around but I've been a bit, um, distracted
Sorry this is late, but life got a bit insane. Last week was merely hectic with a two day (one night) trip to Boulder, which featured a bloody useless meeting in the form of an eight hour design review which had about 15 minutes of actual design presented. I managed to amuse some of my former colleagues and offend others by noting some of the less illustrious aspects of this. I also did other Boulderish things like eating a nice dinner at Chautauqua and shopping for mysteries at High Crimes. The biggest problem is that taking a flight that leaves Dulles at 6:15 a.m. one day and one that returns at 11:30 p.m. the next day is exhausting.
Work continued the exhaustion, with various crises and lots of shouting on the part of assorted senior leadership. That mostly meant my writing a lot of emails telling various people what was going on and just what had other people upset. For what it's worth, this is getting worse as our program's avowed enemy has emerged from hibernation for his annual October assault on us. Telephone and email have been buzzing away. At least it keeps me busy.
As for what really kept me too busy to write, I went to Charlottesville for the weekend. It was a pleasant drive down, despite rain up this way. My first stop was Monticello. For anybody who wasn't paying attention (or might not be American), this was the house that Thomas Jefferson built. Jefferson thought of himself as a farmer, but wasn't all that good at it and died badly in debt. His real problem was that he didn't live within his means. I was particularly amused to learn that he spent about a third of his income on wine. The he did things like buying hundreds of plants, many of them unsuitable for the climate. When they died, he just ordered more. Some of that was legitimate experimentation (e.g. his attempt to produce maple sugar, which won't work without the right temperature and humidity profiles to make the sap rise in the late winter). But some was downright stubborn refusal to learn any better.
The other problemmatic aspect of Jefferson's life was, of course, slavery. He wrote about how abhorrent he found it - but he only freed 2 of his 120 some odd slaves during his life. He freed another five in his will. And he wrote some pretty nasty things about race, full of comments about the inferiority of other people. Then there's the whole Sally Hemmings matter. I imagine that the staff at Monticello are rather tired of being asked about her. By the way, they do a very good job on all of the tours - house, plantation community, and gardens.
So he was a flawed man. Jefferson still accomplished a lot as President. And, in my view, sending Lewis and Clark out to explore makes up for a lot. The entry hall has a lot of artifacts from their exhibition and it's clear that Jefferson took a personal interest in it. All in all, Monticello was well worth a few hours. By the way, everyone takes a shuttle bus up the hill from the parking lot to the house. I walked down to the graveyard and then walked down the path back to the foot of the hill, which was particularly pleasant on a cool autumn day.
Then I drove over to downtown Charlottesville, picked up the historical walking tour booklet from the visitor center, and meandered the older parts of town. Pleasant enough, though not much of the architecture is particularly exciting. It's pretty much your standard southern town, with a large courthouse square and so on. I browsed a few used bookstores but didn't find anything I absolutely had to have. Then I headed to the hotel, had dinner, and watched TV.
Sunday, I drove up to Montpelier, which had been James Madison's estate. I didn't tour the estate itself, but went to the Fall Fiber Festival, which had been my actual excuse for the whole excursion. I bought a few things - some books, a set of felting needles (I've only done wet felting before, but I want to try dry needle felting), soy silk and fixative to make it into paper, and a couple of skeins of llama wool. What I'd really have liked to buy (but don't have a place for) is an actual llama. There were sheep and goats and angora rabbits and alpacas, too, but the llamas are just so cute. I think my fondness for them goes back to the picture of the push-me-pull-you in the edition of Dr. Doolittle I had as a child. It was a pleasant couple of hours and I finished by watching a little of the sheepdog trials before driving back.
Somehow, I managed to miss a critical turn and drove home by a somewhat inefficient route. I probably didn't add more than an extra half hour or so to my route, but I added plenty of stress. And I had errands once I got close to home. So I was too stressed to write before Yom Kippur.
As for last night, I was too wrapped up in the Red Sox to do anything but watch, white-knuckled. They pulled it off and will now face the Source of All Evil in the Universe. From what I saw and read, the first round of the division series was as bizarre as any Red Sox postseason play. Losing game one with an 11th inning bunt was bad enough, but the obstruction rule coming in twice during game 3? That's just way weird. Game 5 last night wasn't especially strange, but had a bit more excitement than is really good for my blood pressure. Reverse the Curse!
Oh, yes, I almost forgot to mention the other stressful thing is that the travel agency that was setting up my trip to Vietnam went bankrupt, before having forwarded my deposit to the tour company. It's all getting fixed (I'm now dealing directly with the tour company, which involves a lot of emailing with them in Australia) but I still have to deal with my credit card company to get the deposit refunded. Mostly it's a pain in the neck, but it looks like everything will work out okay in the end.
Copyright 2003 Miriam H. Nadel