Friday 31 July 2015

Washington to Oregon

This is a bit later than I expected my update to be, a combination of long and tiring days, and the fact that despite staying in the home of a senior Microsoft executive, we did not have access to wi-fi over the weekend in Seattle. 

The first part of our second week in Friday Harbor was uneventful. Both ADC and I worked hard so that - Woohoo! I finished uploading edited versions of the nine articles I had to read while at FHL, and send a summary of my comments to my co-editors. That was a marathon ten days, during which I edited another article (I'll be paid for that one, though), but now I'm done! ADC also finished writing his article, up to and including figure legends an acknowledgements, so on last Thursday our holiday really started. 

Not that this hasn't been a partial holiday, anyway, of course. Last Saturday we took the bus to Limekiln Park, aka Whale Watch Park, where we had a very enjoyable time hiking. We almost missed seeing orcas, as they were not in the vicinity most of the time, and in fact we only saw a few in the distance just before we had to leave the lighthouse viewing spot in order to catch the last bus. ADC was rather disappointed, as the potential was much greater than the actuality turned out, but the rest of us were thrilled anyway. We also saw a golden eagle while we were hiking, which was almost as impressive. 

We followed up the whale theme by going to the Whale Museum in Friday Harbor on Tuesday. It was almost as much of a trek to get there as it was to the park, on the other side of the island, because we made the bad mistake of ordering sandwiches to go from a coffee shop, rather than the deli, in town. I've never had to wait 50 minutes for sandwiches before, and not been offered any kind of recompense or apology, not even a glass of water while we waited. The staff was overwhelmed by the lunch crowd (which struck us as being probably normal for the height of tourist season), and the single woman making the sandwiches was clearly not a professional: not only did she mix up orders (part of the reason for the delay), but she was incredibly slow and inefficient. I think that even S, who spends part of his time on another planet, could have worked faster. Adding insult to injury, when we mentioned how long we had been waiting to the staff, one of the women said "We're not a restaurant" - well, if you can't cope with a "to go" option, why offer it? And in the end, neither the sandwiches nor the cookies we bought were very good.

The Whale Museum was not what I expected. It was smaller than I thought it would be, a bit over-didactic and had almost nothing on the relations between humans and whales throughout history. I was expecting a museum with much more about whaling, but apparently that was never a major industry here, only further north, in Canada and Alaska. The in-depth studies and genealogical charts of the pods of the southern resident orcas were interesting, though, even though I felt that the anthropomorphism was a bit much: yes, whales are clearly intelligent, but they are not human. 

After the museum, ADC went back to work, while the boys and I wandered around window shopping. We went into a place called Island Studios, selling arts and crafts made by locals. I was shocked to see ruffle scarves, the kind that I matched the hand-dyed wool to the previous week and whose yarn costs about $6 per ball, for sale for over $40!!

The boys have taken up geocaching with a vengeance: on Wednesday they spent all afternoon wandering round town by themselves, looking for caches. They had a false start, as after they got to town A discovered his batteries had run out. When they arrived home, S discovered that his hat (which he had been wearing) was missing. He borrowed A's spare and they set off again, and found two caches and S's hat (it was next to the hutch where you could buy eggs on the honour system). Lucky boy! On Wednesday night, once it became fully dark we went down to the docks. ADC and the boys went rowing, in the hopes of seeing bioluminescence, while I stayed on the docks and joined a group of students who were "night lighting": sending down an electric light into the water to see what might be attracted. I think that we were very lucky: a huge nereus worm swam around and around, there was a salmon migration and one swam into the net held by one of the students - I don't know who was more surprised, him or the salmon, and best of all, a harbor seal swam by really close: you could count each of his whiskers! 

Our last full day on San Juan Island was spent at the north end, thanks to a kind neighbour who lent us her car. We started at English Camp, where the British garrison lived during the joint Anglo-American occupation of the island from 1849-1871 until the Kaiser's arbitration awarded the San Juan Island s to the United States rather than to Canada, then walked up Young Hill for a fantastic view of Haro Strait across to British Columbia, and finally visited the resort of Roche Harbor, clearly where you go if you have a yacht. We found three geocaches, which pleased A greatly.  

We left Friday Harbor in the rain, similar to what we had woken up to on our first morning there. The trip back to the mainland was uneventful, although this time we knew to choose seats around a table with a jigsaw puzzle. I knitted and occasionally helped the others, and we completed the puzzle as the ferry drew in to port at Anacortes. Once we debarked, we quickly found the rental car agent, who took us in a pick-up truck into the actual town of Anacortes ("salmon canning capital of the world"), where we spent much longer than anticipated actually getting the rental car. Part of that was despite ADC having called to confirm, they didn't have a full-sized sedan that could take five suitcases, so we had to take a midi-SUV, which needed its oil changed before being driven to California. We went to have lunch - which was very nice - but took about twice as long as we thought it would. Clearly the Pacific North West lives at a different tempo than the East Coast. As a result, we only made a brief stop at Deception Bridge, instead of a proper hike, on our way to IB and E's place in Bellevue. 

It was lovely to see them again, after such a long time. IB was in ADC's class in high school, and he has known E since the army, before they became a couple. Their eldest daughter Y  is eight months older than A, and their second daughter, AM, is the same age as S. They also have a much younger daughter, N. The five children got on amazingly well together, considering that they hadn't seen each other in about five years. Some of the time they split into a pair and a trio, other times they were all together, but they all played nicely. 

Saturday in Seattle began with pouring rain, so we got up slowly, had pancakes for breakfast and only left for Pike Place Market aound 11:00. As well as having a late lunch there, we bought provisions for a picnic supper, while watching a Shakespeare in the Park production of Much Ado About Nothing by GreenStage. That was the highlight of the day - despite a light drizzle falling intermittently, it was not too cold, and the production was very good. There was great chemistry between Beatrice and Benedick (who was fantastic, I had him autograph my programme), and as usual, I failed to understand the possibility of Hero and Claudius having a happy ever after. Next day, while discussing the play, S said - on hearing that Kenneth Branagh had also played Benedick - that of course he had, since Hamlet and Benedick were really very similar. I think that there is definitely a seminar paper there, since I think that their main similarity was being written by a man who gave the main characters the best lines (except for Romeo and Juliet, there Mercurio has the best lines).

Next day was much better weather, cloudy and cool but not raining (at least once we had crossed the Cascades to the east). We set off on a hike to Gold Creek Pond, where Y and I took the wrong turning and walked the loop in the other direction from everyone else. Quite frankly, I wasn't bothered, as Y knows a great deal about the local native flowers - her school has a module on them during sixth grade and she remembered a lot. I really enjoyed spotting flowers with someone who was also enthusiastic (rather than mainly humouring me and much more interested in birds). There were far more flowers around the lake than there had been on San Juan Island, and Yael also identified various ferns and flowers that are not in my mini guide, so that was also very useful for the future, too. Once we were done at Gold Creek Pond, we continued to Snoqualmie Falls, a waterfall and the oldest underground hydro-electric plant in the world. The falls were quite small, since we are in the driest time of year and the past winter was very mild, but still impressive enough. After that, our hosts went to an art fair, and we went shopping, to stock up for our road trip south.

Monday was devoted to Mt St Helens. The forecast being for warmer weather now that the weekend was over, we all wore shorts, forgetting that we would be significantly higher than in Seattle - and we weren't dressed warmly enough. That is my only complaint, though - the views of the mountain were incredible, and visibility improved as the day went on and as we went higher. We went to three visitor centres, one telling the story of the 1980 volcanic eruption, one about the return of the forest (much more quickly than expected), and one about the current monitoring and observation of the mountain and its volcano. Each one was at a different altitude with different flowers. I found the human stories of the people who survived very moving, and the differences between the treatment of public and private land in the aftermath was very interesting. Public land became the Mt St Helens National Volcanic Monument, and was left to recover with almost no human intervention, while on private land, which was largely owned by logging companies, the first order of the day was to salvage as much of the lumber from the trees blown down by the lateral blast of the mountainside as possible. 

We were tired and hungry by the time we reached our final destination of the day, Vancouver WA. After checking in, we went in search of a restaurant, and found a very pleasant Hawaiian place called Tommy O's. Everyone was very happy with their choice, and especially with their desserts. 

We had very high expectations of Portland, where we spent the day today, and it mostly lived up to them. Our vague plan back in DC was to go to Powell's bookshop, SockDreams' brick and mortar store and the Rose Garden. We managed to do two out of three, and several other things, too. We started by parking at Washington Park, which is the cheapest place to park, and on the way to the Rose Garden we walked through the Hoyt Arboretum. The Arboretum has thousands of fully-grown trees, and walking through it is almost like walking through a natural forest. in fact, it is what I had expected the National Arboretum to be like - a green piece of nature in the middle of the town. The Japanese Garden, across the road from the Rose Garden, had been recommended to us, but we decided (mostly at my urging, I must admit) to skip it in favour of the roses. I love rose gardens, and this is really an impressive one. We spent over an hour wandering through bed after bed of roses of every colour, smelling them. Our favourites were Young Lycidas, which smelt just like Turkish delight; Elle, which had a more citrusy rose scent; and Barbra Streisand, which was a combination of the three. If I ever grow roses (Jerusalem is not the ideal climate, I fear, and our window boxes get very little sun), I would pay more attention to their scent than to their appearance, and I'd like one of those. 

By this time it was nearly noon, and we took the park shuttle to the MAX station, and then took the train to Pioneer Square, where we had lunch (Chinese steamed dumplings and Voodoo doughnuts) from food trucks and listened to live music, before setting off to Powell's bookshop, rightly called a city of books. We decided to limit ourselves to two books each, and urged the children to buy second-hand, as those books tended to be both cheaper and lighter. We reluctantly dragged ourselves away after just over two hours (ADC said to me: Can't me move in to this shop, to live?), feeling that we had only scratched the surface. I would have happily bought more - we are now considering sending all our books, except those we plan to read on the flight, home by mail so as to free up space and weight in our suitcases - and I am very glad that we went there. It makes me happy to know that such place still exists, despite Amazon and Kindle. 

After the bookshop, we experienced the least satisfying part of the day, walking down to the Willamette River and generally wandering around. Maybe we were not in the right places, but it was much less exciting than we expected. Did all the Portlanders go inside to escape the heat (it became significantly hotter as the day went on, hitting 30 around four o'clock)? What we did see was lots and lots of homeless people, far more than anywhere I've ever seen, either in the US or in Europe. I wonder if homeless people, who can easily die of exposure in East Coast winters, move to Portland to find a place with both a mild climate and a tradition of liberalism. Maybe there is more help for them there? It was unnerving going into parks, as almost all the benches were occupied by people and what were clearly all their worldly goods. Homelessness seems such a structural problem that I don't know that small amounts of cash (and who do you choose to give it to?) is of any help.  

I will now sound very heartless and shallow, I'm sure, by saying that my mood improved by finding a cupcake bakery and a games shop, and buying their respective wares. Certainly the people who told us we would like Portland were thinking of the shops - although we didn't get to SockDreams, as it is in a relatively outlying neighbourhood, not served by the trams. We ended the day at the Davis Street Tavern, where I had a more interesting meal than the previous day (kale and mushroom risotto beats stir-fry any day), and ADC enjoyed the charcuterie board very much. 

Tomorrow will be along day, as we set off to see the Columbia Gorge ... I will probably write again just before we leave San Francisco and the US. 

Thursday 30 July 2015

First week at Friday Harbor + special: A on geocaching!

This is a bit earlier than than my updates have been recently, but I think I will probably be writing weekly from now until we return home. We've done so much this week - ADC even finished the first draft of his article, and only has the figures and drawings to do, so this has been very worthwhile, and I have gone through half of the articles for the special issue on medicine that I am co-editing. While the two of us have been at work, the boys have done a lot of exploring and holiday homework: A has made a lot of progress catching up on geometry, while S has listened to an audiobook of White Fang (an abridged version, by OxfordOwl) and written a new ending of over 600 words. This was his dovrei anglit summer homework, which will go towards his mark at school in kita vav.

What else have we been up to? Last Sunday we walked back into town and explored what was there apart form the market and supermarket. We went down to the harbor itself and watched people setting off on a whale watch ($70-100 a person, I think we'll begin by seeing what we can see from land. Tomorrow we are going to a park semi-officially known as Whale Watch Park), before locating the San Juan Transit station, from which we would take the bus that goes to that park (the blue route) or to the alpaca farm (the green route), where I had been planning to buy yarn for myself and M, until we walked out of an ice cream shop and I saw a sign out of the corner of my eye: Island Wools. As you can imagine, as soon as I finished my ice-cream I went inside, and immediately became overwhelmed. The young woman behind the counter was very welcoming, and showed me the alpaca yarn she had: not from the farm on San Juan Island, but from the next one. The yarn was a bit disappointing to me, as it was much thicker than I really wanted - alpaca is really warm, so not that useful in Israel, and I was planning to use it together with another yarn, a ribbon yarn in a wine colour. As soon as she said that there was a range of yarns that were hand-dyed in the shop, I knew that that was what I wanted. I must say that everyone else was very understanding of me - not to say enabling; S found a pattern for a Robin Hoodie, and tried to convince me to knit his next Purim costume. However, the lack of space in our suitcases (to say nothing of the prices; that alpaca yarn was $34 for 100 gm) forced me to decide that I could only buy one skein. The colours available were all so gorgeous that it was clear that I would have to come back with a ball of the ribbon yarn in order to match the colours. 

Monday was a quiet day, as we were a bit exhausted from walking back and forth twice in two days, but on Tuesday the boys and I had a lot of fun: first of all, after a safety review on the docks, we were allowed to look at plankton that ADC had helped collect with the invertebrate embryology course. It was really fascinating, seeing all the tiny shiny balls that are actually real animals. After lunch, we walked into town, and while I went back to the yarn shop with the ball I wanted to match, the boys went geocaching. I will let A tell you all about that, and just say that buying yarn was even more fun than just looking. M also decided that she preferred colourful fingering-weight yarn to thicker alpaca, and I bought six mini-balls for her, and one large hank for myself, in a colour called Black Cherry. With excellent timing, the boys arrived just as I had decided what I wanted, and they were able to watch the hank being wound into a centre-pull ball. Not only did they enjoy watching that, they were relieved to hear that now they would not have to help me do the winding by hand :-) On the way home, we went past a second-hand bookshop that claimed to have 50,000 books and a computerised catalogue. Interestingly, the boys were not that keen - they preferred the new book shop we had gone to on Sunday. I think they lack the formative experience of second-hand bookshops being the only way to get books in English at a reasonable price. We are planning to visit what is supposed to be the biggest second-hand bookshop in North America, Powell's in Portland, on our road trip, so maybe that will help change their minds. 

On Wednesday, the highlight of the day was the ice cream social at the dining hall, where you could have all the ice-cream you wanted, with all kinds of toppings, while on Thursday, the highlight was the farewell party for the invertebrate embryology course where ADC had given two talks. A helped grill (on a gas grill), and a good time was had by all. On Friday, we finally got on the water, and when for a brief practise row in the immediate vicinity of the labs, which are across the bay from the town of Friday Harbor. It was a bit nerve-racking at first, and S in the bow and me at the stern was the wrong way around for balance (and I got very wet from the rowers), but all in all, ADC and A gained enough confidence to row all the way across this morning. It is indeed quicker than walking, just under half an hour rather than slightly over 45 minutes.

We started a bit later than we had intended, so instead of beginning at the Whale Museum and continuing to the farmers' market, we started at the farmers' market, went to the San Juan Cheese Shop and ended up at the San Juan Island Museum of Art - the Whale Museum will have to wait for another day. I had wanted to go to the SJIMA from the moment I saw an advertisement for one of the exhibitions there: a photographer at the Whiteley Centre (where ADC has his fellowship now) had taken pictures of the invertebrates studied at FHL and printed them on blank backgrounds - they looked absolutely gorgeous. My favourite was the stalk jelly, which looked like something from a kaleidoscope. A liked the curly-headed spaghetti worm, which he believes proves the existence of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. S's favourite was two starfishes touching each other, which he thought reminiscent of the Creation of Man from the Sistine Chapel. ADC refused to say which picture he liked best, claiming to be used to the animals. 

After getting home, we went out again in the late afternoon, very kindly being lent a car by one of our neighbours, who is teaching at the marine invertebrates course, and drove off to explore some of the south coast of the island, via geocaching. We also took the time to watch the tide coming in, as high tide was at 5:45. I will now quote A on geocaching: 
"Geocaches are small caches hidden on trails in various places. The person hiding the cache opens a cache page on a geocaching website with the coordinates for the cache and a brief description of the cache and hints how to find it. If you want to go geocaching somewhere you search the websites for caches in that place and choose caches that look interesting and send their coordinates to your GPS. When you make sure the coordinates are on your GPS you can go to the place you are going geocaching and start looking for the cache. The caches are usually small boxes hidden somewhere not obvious but findable after a search. Once you find the cache you open it and see what’s inside. Common things found in caches are marbles, stickers and travel bugs*. In every cache there are a few pieces of paper for writing your name and the date you found the cache. Once you sign the cache you leave something in the cache and take one of the things in side of the cache. When you get back home you log your visit and write you found the cache (or didn’t).
*Travel bugs are small discs with a code you move from place to place and write on the website where it was moved and then you can track its trip.

My personal experience of geocaching is very fun and extremely fulfilling. it’s a very enjoyable extra to add to every hike. It was very exciting to find my first geocache with S. While Mummy was in her knitting shop S and I went to look for an interesting geocache called “Quick Trail!”. We followed the directions in the description and what the GPS said was the right direction (it’s not a GPS like waze but a GPS for geocaching and tracking where you went and it has a compass and stuff) until we reached the middle of a short trail between two streets. After about 20 minutes of searching and S trying to persuade me the cache wasn’t there we found it between the bushes next to a broken cinder block (like the description said). When we opened the cache we signed our names, took a marble and put in a travel bug from a previous cache we didn’t actually find but just asked the people at the reception counter after looking for it outside and they pulled it out from under the table, so that’s not a real find after looking. S and I were very happy after finding “Quick Trail!” and kept talking about it until the end of the day."

I expect I will write again when we are back in Seattle, next weekend. 

Sunday 12 July 2015

From Takoma Park to Friday Harbor

I last posted while we were waiting for the shippers to arrive. They arrived within the time slot they had promised and were done - inventorying, sealing and some re-packing - in under an hour. A few days later, we were told that the shipment had been containerised and came within 5 cubic feet of the estimate, so no need to adjust the payment. All that was left for us to do in Takoma Park was to have the house cleaned, on the 8th, and to sample restaurants we had not got around to previously, since the house was completely empty - anything M and D had left, was taken by our next-door neighbours. All of that was highly successful: both Middle Eastern Cuisine, where we had supper, and Mark's Kitchen, where we had brunch, were excellent, and the cleaners left the house spotless. I think that the kitchen sinks were cleaner than they had been when we arrived!

The first leg of our journey was uneventful, apart from two suitcases being overweight. In the end, we underestimated what we had left to pack, and everything was a very tight squeeze indeed. We bought another small suitcase in Seattle - which added the excitement of taking the Monorail to our day there - but we really should have bought it already in DC. Not only would that have saved us $50 in overweight fees, Washington State has a 9.5% sales tax!! The only place we could easily find suitcases was at Nordstrom Rack, where the prices were higher than ADC had paid for a large suitcase in DC. Nothing to do about that now, and another suitcase had made things more comfortable. 

Our day in Seattle was lovely. We woke up early, of course, and after breakfast made our way to the Chihuly Glass and Gardens Museum. After walking into Takoma Park mid-morning in the humidity and heat the day before, what Seattle considered to be a heatwave felt like perfect weather to us. ADC and I had been very unimpressed by the Chihuly in the Light of Jerusalem installation at the Tower of David in 1998 (it was hugely successful, with over a million visitors, but I don't think I've met anyone who actually thought it looked good), so we were eager to see what the glass sculptures looked like on their home ground. And they were magnificent. Some pieces were better than others, but they all "worked" much more than they had in Jerusalem. I have come to the conclusion that the Tower of David was not green enough. All the other installations outside of museums have been much further north than Jerusalem (Finland, Venice, Kew Gardens), in places with much more water - much more like Seattle, in fact. I think that the lack of green, the different light and the dust in Jerusalem, were what subverted the installation. Anyway, we all enjoyed the museum very much. A took a lot of pictures, and S is convinced that Chihuly is a genius. We spent about an hour and a half in a rather small museum before going on to the EMP, possibly the strangest-looking building I've ever been in. 

We spent most of the rest of the day at the EMP, which stands for Experience Music Project. The museum began as a collection of rock memorabilia, but has now expanded to all kinds of popular culture. We spent the morning at three exhibitions: First, we went to the special exhibition of costumes from the Star Wars trilogies. It was amazing to see the costume designer and her team of 60-100 people at work making all the varied costumes. So many different materials and skills were involved! It was rather funny to see a video of Natalie Portman enthusing about her exotic dresses while wearing a plaid shirt, too. And of course there were the costumes themselves, with swatches of the materials to feel, which was great. We then continued to an exhibition on science fiction and another on fantasy, where again we saw many props and costumes from movies. The children were particularly excited to see costumes from The Princess Bride. I feel that there was a typo in the note about David Bowie's costume from Labyrinth, which says "the legendary David Bowie in Jareth the Goblin King's costume" rather than "David Bowie in the legendary Jareth the Goblin King costume."

After lunch (hot dogs in the park - with a vegetarian option! The West Coast is clearly much better at catering to vegetarians), we went to the music side of the EMP, where we saw exhibitions on Jimi Hendrix, the development of the electric guitar and ended the day with learning to play drums and a jam session. After a brief detour to buy a suitcase, we met ADC's first cousin once removed, JG, for supper. He took us to a Cajun restaurant, although none of us ended up ordering things that were specifically Cajun. JG struck me as being something of a combination of my father-in-law and his older brother, although not as tall. He was very enthusiastic about Friday Harbor, and very unenthusiastic about Chihuly. 

On Friday we got up at the crack of dawn, missing breakfast, in order to be at the pier by 6:45 in order to catch the 7:45 Victoria Clipper to Friday Harbor (a catamaran that goes between Seattle and Friday Harbor once a day, and to Victoria in British Columbia several times a day). The idea had been to have the best view of seabirds and possibly whales, and to get to Friday Harbor fairly early from a conveniently central location. However, it was not to be. The clipper was cancelled due to mechanical problems (they had sent out an e-mail to that effect at 6:15, but considering that the shuttle had been canceled on Thursday as well, I think that they could have made the announcement earlier). We received a full refund, of course, and coupons for coffee, and they paid for a taxi to the Seattle convention centre, where we could get the 11:30 shuttle to Anacortes, where we could take the 2:00 p.m. ferry to Friday Harbor, arriving at 3:00 rather than at 11:00, as planned. We waited until the luggage storage opened, and then improved our mood by going to Pike Place market, where we bought excellent build-your-own sandwiches to eat on the way to the ferry. We arrived at the convention centre about half an hour before the shuttle was due to arrive, assuming that it would arrive early so as to allow luggage to be loaded. Wrong! It arrived 40 minutes late, with not a word of explanation or apology. When we discovered that we had to move to another minibus to actually get to the Anacortes ferry terminal, it was clear that we were not going to make the 2 o'clock boat - and the next one was at 4:45, arriving at Friday Harbor after six - seven hours and much irritation later. At that point, however, our luck began to change. As the ferry had been having its own problems, the 2:50 ferry to Sidney, BC, was making an unscheduled stop at Friday Harbor, and we were able to embark almost immediately. The voyage was very pleasant, we had a good enough view, and we got a taxi immediately as we walked off the dock. We were at Friday Harbor Labs before the office closed.

Once we arrived at FHL, we were able to book supper at the dining hall before we went to unpack at our cabin. The cabin is great. We were surprised at first to realise that there was no air conditioning, but since then we have realised that heatings and fans are all you need. The kitchen is about triple the size of the one we had in Takoma Park, with a table that seats 4-6 which is where we will be eating most of the time. The crockery, cutlery, pots and pans are a bit random, but sufficient. The children each have a single bed, and the pressure in the shower is good. In short, we have all we need. 

Once we had settled in, we went to the social hour and ate popcorn and met people. I am proud to say that I was able to ask people about their work and carry on an intelligent conversation, understanding almost everything (or at least, the words were familiar and I have a vague idea of what they mean). We had supper at the dining hall and then breakfast yesterday. We were advised that the best meal of the week is Sunday brunch, and we duly registered for that (which is why I am writing this in the morning rather than the evening, as we are still waiting for brunch).

Yesterday (Saturday) was largely spent shopping. We walked into the town of Friday Harbor - which is significantly further away than we had understood, 45 minutes rather than 20 minutes - and shopped both at the grocery store and at the farmers' market. The market is all local, and there was far less fruit available than we are used to, only berries - but they were some of the best raspberries and strawberries we've ever eaten. We planned well in having brought along a cooler bag and two shopping baskets, as we needed all of that as well as our backpacks to carry everything home. Of course, once we got back we realised we had forgotten some vital items, like serviettes, but the plan today is to go back into town after brunch today, to explore the town itself and visit an art fair. 

After lunch and a rest, the boys went back to the dining hall to play ping-pong, and ADC and I walked around FHL, identifying the trees (there weren't many birds around). We found ten different species in the short distance from our cabin to the Whiteley Centre where ADC has office space to the actual labs themselves. As we approached the labs, we met one of the people teaching there, who invited us to come and see the sea creatures. The boys turned up just then, and we had a very interesting half hour looking at the weird and wonderful invertebrates being studied. On one of the benches I saw a copy of Gerald Durrell's My Family and Other Animals, a particularly appropriate choice given the amount of time he spent investigating marine invertebrates with Theo. 

ADC then went to play pool with the boys, while I continued knitting. I may want to complete this cardigan as soon as possible and actually wear it - it is currently 15C outside, at 9:30 a.m. I am very glad that I insisted that we all bring two sets of long clothes, rather than shipping all the winter clothes. 

Tuesday 7 July 2015

Writing a letter while waiting for the shippers to arrive

Today is our penultimate day in Takoma Park. The house is almost empty - everything we are shipping is in boxes, waiting to be containerized by the shippers, the unsuccessful yard sale items were picked up half an hour ago by Purple Heart (the Salvation Army could schedule pick-ups only from the 15th), and almost all our clothes etc. for the West Coast are already in suitcases, with the final packing to be done after the shippers come in a couple of hours. Tomorrow the house will be professionally cleaned, and we will set off for the last leg of our American adventure. 

What have we been up to in the last two weeks? First of all, we celebrated A's fourteenth birthday. He and I awokened at 7 a.m., when SR and LR called him on Skype from Israel to wish him happy birthday. After waiting an hour or so for S to wake up (I used the time to make brown sugar cupcakes for our breakfast), I gave A the present I had made him: hand warmers for next winter. S gave A a birthday card. Much to A's disgust, ADC was away in Kansas at a conference. This often happens; very unfortunately for A, he was born at the height of conference season, and one of his parents is almost always away on his actual birthday. This was the the reason for the four-day birthday celebrations, and why he only got his real present on the solstice.  

Next stop in the birthday celebrations was spending the day at the National Zoo. Both boys were very excited to go, but at the end, as we were walking back to the Metro, in a burst of local patriotism, both declared that the Biblical Zoo in Jerusalem was better. Actually, they may be right - ADC says that the Biblical Zoo is in fact considered one of the best zoos in the world, and it certainly seemed to be bigger than the National Zoo. We began with the cheetahs, who are much smaller than one would think in real life. There was a volunteer docent there, who talked to us about the cheetahs for a bit. S asked her if there was a Noah's Ark at the zoo like there is at the Biblical Zoo; she was rather confused until I explained that Noah's Ark is the name of the visitor centre there! She laughed and told him that there were several visitor centres.  

It was very hot and humid in the Zoo, and I felt sorry for all the animals that had adapted to cooler climes. It turned out that many of them had strategies for copying with the weather: for example, the pandas. The pandas are undoubtedly the Zoo's strongest point, and the boys were very disappointed not to see them in the outside enclosures. I suggested that we might see them in the indoor viewing section, and indeed, each (air-conditioned) room there held a larger or smaller panda lying on the floor, clearly seeking relief from the heat. There was a lot of educational/informational material on the corridor wall that ran parallel to the pandas' rooms, and eventually we reached the behavioural observation station: two people in white coats behind a glass wall, looking at a wall full of screens showing the pandas from various angles. S asked why they were watching the pandas so closely, since they weren't doing anything, and had difficulty accepting my explanation that they were watching closely so as not to miss it if they did do something! We continued after the pandas to the bird house, which was a little underwhelming. I guess that seeing birds at Kruger Park spoils you for life. Or else the various birds - mostly South and North American - were just not that interesting, compared to birdwatching in nature anywhere. The latter was definitely A's opinion.  

The Zoo has a main drag, and after the bird house we went back to it, and basically walked along to to great cats. On the way we stopped to look at the American bison. The Zoo has a female, and she is immense. The mind boggles at the idea of the male being almost double in size! She was sitting in the shade looking shaggy and miserable, and I was glad to see that the elephant - next on our path - were Asian, i.e. used to humid climates. Only one of them was outside when we were at the enclosure and she was doing all the things that elephants are supposed to do: eating hay, brushing herself down with hay, squirting water on herself. The other elephants could be seen from inside the former Elephant House, now the Elephant Community Center. No wonder A loves elephants, they always look like they are smiling! He bought another elephant for his collection at the Zoo store: a turquoise soapstone one made in Kenya. 

We continued past the seals and sea lions, the otters and the grey wolves to the great cat display. Like the grey wolves, the Sumatran tiger was pacing - but he spent some of the time swimming back and forth in the moat that surrounded the enclosure. I think everyone who saw that envied the tiger in that moment, as it gradually became hotter and more oppressive. The lions and lionesses (in sex-segregated enclosures) were gnawing on bones at that time. One of the lions had an extremely impressive mane, and sat facing the lionesses and growling. I wonder what he was thinking. By that time we were starting to get a bit tired, so we went quickly to see the orangoutangs and gorillas. I always find great apes in zoos very sad, and this was no exception. At least they seem to be kept stimulated with daily visits to the Think Tank where they can play computer games, among other things. 

Rain had been forecast for most of the day, so we took raincoats to the zoo as a successful prophylactic measure. It began raining just before we reached the Takoma metro station on the way back, and there was a break while were walking homewards. No sooner had I closed the front door behind us and the heavens opened. It rained very very hard for nearly two hours, stopping just in time for us to eat the first birthday meal, pizza at Roscoe's, followed by gelato at Dolci. At Roscoe's we sat viewing the street, and saw the cook go out to pick herbs from the boxes outside. A and S found this very exciting. 

The weekend of A's birthday was overshadowed by a major event: the car battery died when I set out for the supermarket on Friday morning. I think it must have died immediately, but as our road is a slope, I was able to coast downhill until a red light. When I then tried to turn right, the car definitely died and I was stuck. After a while a police car came by, and they were able to push me to a side street so I no longer blocked the road, but they couldn't jump start the car "because of the electronics in their own one." In additional to my general freaking out at what had happened, I was really flabbergasted by that - if the police can't jump start you, who will?! Anyway, after calming down a bit, and a few unsuccessful phone calls to friends and acquaintances (everyone was at work), I realised that I could hear a lawn mower. I walked towards the sound and very luckily, the gardener was kind enough to jump start me and I managed to make my way home. I then sent the boys out to buy milk and eggs - we had just enough fruit and vegetables to keep us through to Sunday, when we could go to the farmer's market. All this happened while ADC, who is in charge of the car, was away, with his own problems - both his flight to Kansas and the flight back were delayed due to Tropical Storm/Tropical Depression Bill (a strangely innocuous name for such a disruptive piece of weather). I was too flustered at the time to understand when he told me that I just needed someone to come and change the car battery. I only worked this out at around midnight, at which point I e-mailed three companies. Only one responded overnight, I called them in the morning and at 10:30 on Saturday I had a functioning car again. It turned out that not only was the battery 3 years old and thus due to be replaced, but we had been doing everything possible to drain it passively: short infrequent trips, leaving outside in the cold and the heat ... All's well that ends well, and it didn't cost too much (at 4 p.m. on Saturday I got a quote from another of the companies that was $50 more). 

On returning from the supermarket, I embarked on more baking: ADC was going to arrive home much later than planned, so I baked A's birthday cake. I have never baked so much in my life: cupcakes on Thursday, corn bread on Friday night (instead of challah, as I am not up to coping with yeast), and now a chocolate cake. ADC insisted on icing it when he returned home, and A was very pleased. His second birthday meal was aglio-olio pasta with chopped zucchini flowers (we will not be here for the fruit) and birthday cake. He then received his main birthday present: a fancy hiking backpack, with integral water bag and air-flow back.

On Sunday, A had two birthday meals!! Breakfast was bacon and eggs, to general delight (except mine). As a vegetarian, I cannot understand my children's obsession with bacon. I personally gag at the smell of frying bacon (well, I dislike the smell of all frying meat, chicken and mince as well. I am fine with grilled/barbecued (in both senses) meat, though). Anyway, breakfast with bacon is a highlight of staying at hotels and B&Bs for them, and there was bacon in the freezer for some reason, that needed to be used. The fourth and final birthday meal was supper at DCNoodles, one of the first places we had eaten in Washington (before going to hear Ian Anderson at the Lincoln Theater back in October). A had asked for a Thai meal, and it was excellent. He had the same thing as he had the previous time, pad see eew with broccoli, while ADC had pad thai, S had drunken noodles (delicious but a bit too spicy, he said) and I had an excellent noodle soup, very similar to the bastard toom yum that we would make at home. After all that spicy food, we looked for an ice cream place and found Menchie's, one of growing number of self-serve frozen yogurt places. You begin by choosing up to four flavours of frozen yogurt, then there were a selection of of sweet crunchy things (like M&M's) to add, then a selection of fruit pies, and finally fudge/marshmallow/Reese's/Nutella topping. I tried to be as restrained as possible, but S really went to town. The price is by weight and his cup was more expensive than anyone else's. He did eat less of his main course than the rest of us, and he did finish it, so I can't really complain.

When ADC went to the Pink Floyd meet-up, he dropped the rest of us at the metro station and we went to visit the National Archives. The security screening was the most severe I've seen here outside the airport (admittedly, I haven't visited the White House or Congress). We started on the entrance floor, where we saw one of the four extant 1297 copies of Magna Carta. We then went upstairs to the rotunda where the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights are displayed. We stood in line for just over half an hour (possibly the longest queue I've been in here; it felt like visiting the Sistine Chapel, because the rotunda has such a high and decorated ceiling), and spent less than 15 minutes actually inside, since we only wanted to look at the actual documents, not at the informational material alongside it. We finished our visit at the Public Vaults exhibition, which we agreed was the most interesting: each case held examples of the kinds of materials kept in the National Archives, ranging from treaties and laws to letters to the President from the public. Those were particularly moving, with a GI in 1944 asking Eleanor Roosevelt to be his child's godmother, one young boy asking President Nixon for funding as his mother had declared his bedroom a disaster zone, and another informing President Ford that he was half right and half wrong. They reminded me of the letters to Yitzhak Rabin that I used to answer as part of my job at the Prime Minister's Office from January 1992 to November 1995.  

The week after A's birthday was the last week with any sort of routine for a while, I think, since the second week of camp was cancelled. A and S were very disappointed, as they were looking forward to a marine biology camp - but I guess not enough people felt like paying that price for four days of camp. They thoroughly enjoyed Japanese art camp, though, coming home not only with manga booklets they had prepared themselves, but with papier-mâché Noh masks, origami animals, kimono designs and durga(sp?) heads. They also experienced a sushi workshop, and are now prepared to eat some kinds of vegetarian sushi, which is an improvement over refusing to eat sushi at all (they both reject still fish in any form). We spent three nights that week watching movies: two nights watching The Last Waltz on Netflix, while on Thursday, we went on a family outing to the cinema, for only the second time since coming to the US. We saw Inside Out, which deserves its rave reception. I won't go into the plot, so as not to spoil anything, but it was a complex and original story, with really fantastic animation and artwork. I thought that all the sweaters worn by the characters had really been knitted. Surprisingly, the traditional Pixar short before the main feature was terrible, in my opinion, by any standards, but especially considering how excellent Inside Out was. 

My own week was productive: I edited two articles and reviewed another. The article I reviewed was for Journal of Ethnopharmacology, and I am not sure I am really competent to review there. In this case, however, I thought the methodology sound and the information useful, but the English was so bad (the authors were Turkish) that the article was almost unreadable. I sent it back with an "Accept pending major revision / revise and resubmit", but ADC told me I should have rejected it. I'm not sure about that: the topic was certainly suited to the journal and really my only problem was with the language. I don't think the authors should be penalised totally for spending more time on their research than on their language skills. On Friday night M and D came over for supper - part of the campaign to finish everything in the pantry. As a result, we served meatballs, brown rice/wild rice/barley and succotash, with challah to start and brownies and biscotti to finish. We finished a bottle of wine (opened that evening) and a bottle of port (opened several weeks ago). They also came over for fireworks, and cleaned out everything that we couldn't donate to a food bank. 

The weekend after that was slightly schizophrenic. For the first time in a while, the rain began in the early hours of the morning on Saturday, rather than in the afternoon, and continued almost without a break until late at night. As a result, we switched around our plans, and spent the day at home. We did a bit more packing (mainly ADCs clothes) and had quality family time: playing games together (and choosing which ones to ship and which ones to take to the West Coast), and watching To Have and Have Not. As I remembered, the plot suffers from comparison with Casablanca, but Lauren Bacall holds her own when compared to Ingrid Bergman. Both are incredibly lovely, but with a very different sort of beauty. It is hard to believe that Bacall was only 19 when she made that movie.

On Sunday, we got up early and went to the farmers' market for the last time. Of course, it was the best it has been for a long time - everything is starting now (hence why we ate pasta with zucchini flowers again). We then continued to Mt Vernon, where S had been on a school trip, but which the rest of us had not seen. It was a very different experience from Monticello, which we visited off-season on a foggy day, so that we only got to see the house. At Mt Vernon we saw the two-part movie overview (part 1: advertorial for the site; part 2: hagiography for Washington), took the timed-entry tour of the house, and spent most of our time exploring the garden. The differences between Jefferson and Washington are expressed amazingly well in the differences between the estates. Washington was a farmer and a soldier, while Jefferson was an intellectual as well as a politician. Monticello is much more interesting as a house than Mt Vernon. Admittedly, the interpretation at Monticello was much better - we had a proper guided tour, rather than being herded in line with people repeating the same spiel in every room. Even so, there was something much more ordinary about Mt Vernon. Washington described it as "pleasant," and that is what it is - pleasant and unexciting. I also found the Jefferson family cemetery more moving than Washington's tomb. On the other hand, the gardens and grounds - which we could not properly experience at Monticello, due to the fog and the winter - at Mt Vernon are wonderful. The upper gardens, with their combination of flowers, vegetables and parterres, were what I had expected the National Arboretum to be like. The pioneer farm, where eighteenth-century American farming is reenacted, had a lot of potential, but when we asked the interpreters questions, they had difficulty getting away from their set speeches, which was disappointing. We had just missed, by a couple of weeks, the hand-harvesting and threshing of the wheat grown there in a system devised by Washington himself. We did see the harvested grain in what had been stables and it was fascinating to touch the kernels, still soft (one always thinks of the dry wheat, forgetting that it would begin as soft as sweetcorn kernels). 

We then continued to Huntley Meadows Park. Compared to our visit almost exactly two months earlier, we saw far fewer birds. We did, however, see an osprey with fish in its claws, being beaten about by a much-smaller redwinged blackbird, clearly evicting a predator. We also saw a rather huge turtle, possibly an alligator turtle, in addition to the common red-eared sliders. We ended the weekend with our last Southern barbecue, at a local branch of Famous Dave's, where we had eaten in Chattanooga. This branch did not have the grilled pineapple I remembered fondly, but both the chips and the broccoli were excellent, from my point of view, and the others all enjoyed the ribs very much.

Our final full week went by very fast. Not as much time was taken up with packing as I thought - but we did sort out a lot of stuff. The Lupus Foundation  took away four big bags of old clothes and shoes - amazing, considering how much we got rid of just over a year ago, when we left Israel. The boys and I had haircuts on Wednesday. S and I are quite happy, A not so much. He has a very clear idea of what he wants, but isn't able to communicate it quite so clearly to hairdressers, it seems ... The rest of us think he looks good, though. I spent a lot of time sewing - I completed a second pair of shorts that I began last week, and made a pair of pants from start to finish - with perfect seam matching at the crotch, if I say so myself. It was an interesting experience to sew with linen rather than cotton. I'm planning to wear these pants on the flight to Seattle, and I hope I don't discover that I should have lined them. I'll see what another round of laundering does, though. 

We saw people and said good-bye to them three evenings this week: on Monday we had dessert with our new next-door neighbours. S continued to win the heart of their five-year old daughter by reading aloud to her for over an hour. On Wednesday, we went to our old next-door neighbours, to their condo in Bethesda, for supper. I continued the mission of finishing what's in the pantry by baking a cake. I used a recipe I found on the internet "closely adapted from Nigella Lawson", that used canola oil, brown sugar and melted dark chocolate, as I didn't have butter, granulated sugar or cocoa left. On Friday, we went to SG and HG for the last time. It was lovely, as always. I'm glad we got to know them. 

The Fourth of July celebrations took place over two days: the parade was on Saturday, the real date, and was very amusing. We were much better positioned than we had been for the St Patrick's Day parade. The fireworks, postponed to Sunday due to rain, were well worth the wait: nearly 20 minutes of some of the best fireworks I've ever seen. I don't know the names of all of them, but my favourites are the ones that explode in different colours, float down a bit, and then explode again in golden showers. I kept on thinking of the lines from Summer by Alice Low: "We like the things that summer brings. It brings fireworks, late at night, red and yellow, blue and white." It took me a long time to understand that the book was referring to the Fourth of July; as a little girl in South Africa, I didn't realise that the book was American.

We spent the first part of the day packing the suitcases we are taking to the West Coast, to be sure that we had enough space and didn't need to ship even more clothes. Thankfully, it looks like we are OK. In the afternoon, we watched Harvey before ADC erased our user profile, as he sold the computer and it was collected tonight. He also sold his bike back to the shop, and tomorrow he is sleight car back to the dealers. So far, he is the only one to have any luck - we set out the small number of items (mainly kitchen appliances of which we have doubles with the right voltage back home in Israel) on the front lawn and tried to attract passers-by from 4 p.m. until after the fireworks, i.e. around 10, with absolutely no success. Yesterday Ariel took all the remaining closed packages to the Takoma Park Food Pantry on his way to the car dealers. 

Getting back to Harvey: I hadn't seen the movie before, but was familiar with the concept of a six-foot tall invisible white rabbit, I'm not sure how. I thought the movie was very sweet, and I particularly enjoyed the relationship between Mrs Simmons and Judge Gaffney. I also though that Elwood P. Dowd's line "Well, I've wrestled with reality for 35 years, Doctor, and I'm happy to state I finally won out over it" was absolutely brilliant. In order to finish our subscription to Netflix DVDs, Ariel and I watched another two films over the past few nights. Last night we watched The Last Waveand the previous two nights we watched Boyhood. It would be hard to find two more different films, I think. The Last Wave, directed by Peter Wier (whose surname is missing a D, I always feel), is a very creepy tale of how a white Australian lawyer become drawn into the Dreamtime when he agrees to help a group of Aborigines accused of murdering another in a drunken brawl - which turns out to be a ritual killing due to the latter committing sacrilege. Boyhood, on the other hand, is a slice-of-life filmed over twelve years with the same actors, which despite having ups and downs (particularly the mother's relationships), ends on a positive note. The conceit of the actors naturally aging, rather than being made up or using different actors for different ages, was very well executed, and everything was entirely believable.

Yesterday we went to our last Smithsonian museum: the Museum of American History. It was a good choice for an afternoon's entertainment, but I think we were right to keep it low on our list of museums to go to. We went to three exhibitions, averaging an hour per exhibition: We started in the Food hall, where we saw Julia Child's kitchen, in which her TV shows were filmed. ADC was very envious of all her copper pots. The description of how American food changed from 1950 to 2000 was very interesting, especially as it seems to me that many of the movements that took place in the US in the 1970s are now occurring in Israel. We continued to an exhibition on a house in Ipswich, MA, which was continuously occupied from its construction in the 1760s until 1963, which told the stories of four families that lived there - a Revolutionary merchant, an abolitionist and reformist family, an Irish washerwoman and her factory-worker daughter, and a grandmother and grandson during WWII. That last kitchen put the 1950s kitchens into a different perspective! We then moved to another wing of the museum, to exhibitions on transport. We started with maritime transport and the Atlantic world, and ended with the containerisation revolution of shipping in the 1960s and 70s, which moved the centre of West Coast shipping from San Francisco to Oakland.

That brings me full circle to the beginning of the letter ... Next letter will be from San Juan Island or Seattle.