Thursday, September 27, 2007
Matt's next installment of the trip. This was an episode when he went off by himself:
One night we returned from the back country and I left the family sleeping at
a campsite near the west gate of Glacier so that I could drive to a little town
called Polebridge, Montana, and play some tunes. Polebridge, which Paola and I
had passed through earlier, consists of a general store and a saloon, both run
by hippies. The general-store hippies play CDs of Punjabi music and bake
bread. The saloon hippies drink hooch and have a couple of tuned guitars with new
strings leaning against the wall. I was hoping to play those guitars with
someone, but, after arriving that night, wound up playing alone for new friends from
Utah who kept buying me drinks. The hour grew late. Someone fell off the front
porch and into the bushes and everybody laughed. Then someone else banged
through the swinging doors, raised his mug in a toast and announced that the Northern
Lights were visible.
The bar cleared out and everybody gathered on the dirt road as silently as
they had been rowdy. It was after midnight and there was no moon, and stars from
thousands of galaxies flickered overhead. Looking toward the northern horizon, I
saw a glow as if from a distant city, only emerald in color. The sight was
pretty but not dramatic. I asked a guy next to me if that glow was the Northern
Lights and he told me to just watch.
As we looked northward, the glow emitted a vague shaft of pale green light. It
looked like an illusion. Then other shafts rose from the earth¡¯s surface and
together they grew as strong and clear as beams. The northern sky was luminous
now as the phalanx of shafts reached upward toward Polaris. Some slowly faded
from sight while others emerged to take their place, giving the impression that
the emanations were dancing. This miracle filled the horizon for 45 minutes
and nobody spoke.
Eventually, the aurora faded and people talked about what we¡¯d seen.
Apparently, even that far north in Montana, the Northern Lights are visible only two
or three times a year. The man who had seen them first explained as best he
could what they were. ¡°There¡¯s nothing for three thousand miles in that
direction,¡± he said, nodding toward the lingering glow. (Calgary and Edmonton are
further west.) ¡°It has something to do with free electrons from the sun.¡±
(I later read that he was exactly right. The sun blows out streams of
particles called the Solar Wind. During a solar storm, these emissions are particularly
heavy. The particles reach the earth after three days of travel and glide down
the earth¡¯s magnetic field. When they reach the atmosphere, they knock
electrons loose from gasses in the air. Those free electrons eventually regroup into
atoms and release energy in the form of light, which continues moving
northward toward the pole. Why the light seems to climb up from the pole, I don¡¯t
know.)
I said good-night to my companions drove the borrowed Cherokee back toward the
campsite at two in the morning in a state of bliss. But the night was a little
spooky. There¡¯s not much humanity for a long way in any direction. It was
moonless and dark, and I had to pee but there were grizzlies out there. One of
them had walked through Polebridge that afternoon and all the dogs went nuts. For
distraction, I popped in a cassette that my brother-in-law, Tom, had left
jutting from the tape player. I was hoping for some Pink Floyd.
¡°Do you have any money?¡± asked a voice in Chinese.
¡°Do you have any money?¡± asked another voice in English. It was a Mandarin
study tape. As I listened, the series of interrogatives seemed to capture the
very soul of modern China.
¡°Do you have a lot of money?¡±
¡°Do you have any dollars?¡±
One night we returned from the back country and I left the family sleeping at
a campsite near the west gate of Glacier so that I could drive to a little town
called Polebridge, Montana, and play some tunes. Polebridge, which Paola and I
had passed through earlier, consists of a general store and a saloon, both run
by hippies. The general-store hippies play CDs of Punjabi music and bake
bread. The saloon hippies drink hooch and have a couple of tuned guitars with new
strings leaning against the wall. I was hoping to play those guitars with
someone, but, after arriving that night, wound up playing alone for new friends from
Utah who kept buying me drinks. The hour grew late. Someone fell off the front
porch and into the bushes and everybody laughed. Then someone else banged
through the swinging doors, raised his mug in a toast and announced that the Northern
Lights were visible.
The bar cleared out and everybody gathered on the dirt road as silently as
they had been rowdy. It was after midnight and there was no moon, and stars from
thousands of galaxies flickered overhead. Looking toward the northern horizon, I
saw a glow as if from a distant city, only emerald in color. The sight was
pretty but not dramatic. I asked a guy next to me if that glow was the Northern
Lights and he told me to just watch.
As we looked northward, the glow emitted a vague shaft of pale green light. It
looked like an illusion. Then other shafts rose from the earth¡¯s surface and
together they grew as strong and clear as beams. The northern sky was luminous
now as the phalanx of shafts reached upward toward Polaris. Some slowly faded
from sight while others emerged to take their place, giving the impression that
the emanations were dancing. This miracle filled the horizon for 45 minutes
and nobody spoke.
Eventually, the aurora faded and people talked about what we¡¯d seen.
Apparently, even that far north in Montana, the Northern Lights are visible only two
or three times a year. The man who had seen them first explained as best he
could what they were. ¡°There¡¯s nothing for three thousand miles in that
direction,¡± he said, nodding toward the lingering glow. (Calgary and Edmonton are
further west.) ¡°It has something to do with free electrons from the sun.¡±
(I later read that he was exactly right. The sun blows out streams of
particles called the Solar Wind. During a solar storm, these emissions are particularly
heavy. The particles reach the earth after three days of travel and glide down
the earth¡¯s magnetic field. When they reach the atmosphere, they knock
electrons loose from gasses in the air. Those free electrons eventually regroup into
atoms and release energy in the form of light, which continues moving
northward toward the pole. Why the light seems to climb up from the pole, I don¡¯t
know.)
I said good-night to my companions drove the borrowed Cherokee back toward the
campsite at two in the morning in a state of bliss. But the night was a little
spooky. There¡¯s not much humanity for a long way in any direction. It was
moonless and dark, and I had to pee but there were grizzlies out there. One of
them had walked through Polebridge that afternoon and all the dogs went nuts. For
distraction, I popped in a cassette that my brother-in-law, Tom, had left
jutting from the tape player. I was hoping for some Pink Floyd.
¡°Do you have any money?¡± asked a voice in Chinese.
¡°Do you have any money?¡± asked another voice in English. It was a Mandarin
study tape. As I listened, the series of interrogatives seemed to capture the
very soul of modern China.
¡°Do you have a lot of money?¡±
¡°Do you have any dollars?¡±
Tuesday, September 25, 2007
And here is the second installment of Matt's writing about our family vacation in Glacier and Yellowstone National Parks and the Pothole State Park in Washington:
I figured our first venture into the backwoods with the kids should be
unchallenging. I downloaded topographical maps and trail guides and phoned some of the most remote ranger stations in America trying to figure out exactly where we should hike, and finally settled on a glacier-scoured finger lake in Glacier National Park called Upper Quartz Lake. The hike covered three miles, and I figured we¡¯d stay there for two days, maybe explore a little, just kind of hang out in the wilderness. ¡°How far is three miles?¡± Paola wanted to know. I told her five kilometers. ¡°Five kilometers?¡± she asked again. ¡°Is that too much for Alice?¡± ¡°Too much? It¡¯s nothing! We should be walking fifteen in a day! Twenty! For 4-5 days! When I was a kid the priest would never let u
s take strolls like this.¡± So it was Paola who turned out to be the real taskmaster of the expedition. We blew past Upper Quartz Lake to Lower Quartz Lake, and she practically made me run along the 10-mile trail to Iceberg Lake. In following days we took the kids over Triple Divide Pass, where freshwater icebergs bob around in limpid ponds even in August and where the continental divide separates to the north as well, so that a third hypothetical raindrop landing at our feet would travel down the St. Lawrence River and empty into the Northern Atlantic. We hiked out to 
Grebe Lake in Yellowstone, and then on to Observation Point, and after we evaded the bison on our path and returned to our Grebe Lake campsite it was pouring rain and the five of us, including my dad, had to eat our plates of spaghetti crouched inside a three-man tent. It¡¯s said that Albert Reynolds, the famous 19th-Century rambling ranger of Glacier, could ¡°walk a horse to death,¡± but Paola would win his title. (Fun camping pun: What¡¯s it like eating during a thunderstorm? In-tents.) During our forced marches, we saw bison, grizzly bears (never closer than 100 meters, a
lthough my dad, hiking with a different group, once had to yield the trail to a sow grizzly and two cubs coming in the other direction), wild swans, woodpeckers, a zippy little bird called the cedar waxwing, longhorn sheep, mountain goats, grouse, coyote and mule deer, to name a few. Dad saw a moose. The only animal we wanted to see but didn¡¯t were wolves. We asked a ranger where we had to hike to see them and he said they¡¯re too shy, they won¡¯t come out when we¡¯re around. I hoped we¡¯d at least hear them howling at night but we never did. I can say without reservation that the kids had a great time. Yellowstone allowed campfires even though there 
were 257 wildfires burning in and around the park, so Roy got to build a hearty blaze every night. He also wanted to pee on Triple Divide Pass to see if he could get his urine running in three directions. His greatest glory came when he somehow convinced Alice to bury a lump of coal that she¡¯d found in precisely the place where he¡¯d buried a turd. Alice made friends easily. We¡¯d generally pitch our tent in big campsites with lots of cars around until we got our bearings, then head into more remote areas. While at the Fish Creek Campsite in Glacier, Alice spent a few days palling around with a girl from Lincoln, Nebraska. The girl said she attended a school called Norris that is ¡°kind of famous.¡± Judging from the size of her family¡¯s RV, I figured Norris was some elite preparatory academy, the Andover of cornhuskers. Then she said it was famous because it was destroyed by a tornado. ¡°A lot of people know that,¡± she said. Unfortunately, Norris was destroyed during the summer holiday, but anyway the students got extra days off during the next school year, not because of the tornado but because other schools get more snow days than Norris and that¡¯s not fair. It all made sense to Alice, who knows about tornados from The Wizard of Oz.
I figured our first venture into the backwoods with the kids should be
unchallenging. I downloaded topographical maps and trail guides and phoned some of the most remote ranger stations in America trying to figure out exactly where we should hike, and finally settled on a glacier-scoured finger lake in Glacier National Park called Upper Quartz Lake. The hike covered three miles, and I figured we¡¯d stay there for two days, maybe explore a little, just kind of hang out in the wilderness. ¡°How far is three miles?¡± Paola wanted to know. I told her five kilometers. ¡°Five kilometers?¡± she asked again. ¡°Is that too much for Alice?¡± ¡°Too much? It¡¯s nothing! We should be walking fifteen in a day! Twenty! For 4-5 days! When I was a kid the priest would never let u
s take strolls like this.¡± So it was Paola who turned out to be the real taskmaster of the expedition. We blew past Upper Quartz Lake to Lower Quartz Lake, and she practically made me run along the 10-mile trail to Iceberg Lake. In following days we took the kids over Triple Divide Pass, where freshwater icebergs bob around in limpid ponds even in August and where the continental divide separates to the north as well, so that a third hypothetical raindrop landing at our feet would travel down the St. Lawrence River and empty into the Northern Atlantic. We hiked out to 
Grebe Lake in Yellowstone, and then on to Observation Point, and after we evaded the bison on our path and returned to our Grebe Lake campsite it was pouring rain and the five of us, including my dad, had to eat our plates of spaghetti crouched inside a three-man tent. It¡¯s said that Albert Reynolds, the famous 19th-Century rambling ranger of Glacier, could ¡°walk a horse to death,¡± but Paola would win his title. (Fun camping pun: What¡¯s it like eating during a thunderstorm? In-tents.) During our forced marches, we saw bison, grizzly bears (never closer than 100 meters, a
lthough my dad, hiking with a different group, once had to yield the trail to a sow grizzly and two cubs coming in the other direction), wild swans, woodpeckers, a zippy little bird called the cedar waxwing, longhorn sheep, mountain goats, grouse, coyote and mule deer, to name a few. Dad saw a moose. The only animal we wanted to see but didn¡¯t were wolves. We asked a ranger where we had to hike to see them and he said they¡¯re too shy, they won¡¯t come out when we¡¯re around. I hoped we¡¯d at least hear them howling at night but we never did. I can say without reservation that the kids had a great time. Yellowstone allowed campfires even though there 
were 257 wildfires burning in and around the park, so Roy got to build a hearty blaze every night. He also wanted to pee on Triple Divide Pass to see if he could get his urine running in three directions. His greatest glory came when he somehow convinced Alice to bury a lump of coal that she¡¯d found in precisely the place where he¡¯d buried a turd. Alice made friends easily. We¡¯d generally pitch our tent in big campsites with lots of cars around until we got our bearings, then head into more remote areas. While at the Fish Creek Campsite in Glacier, Alice spent a few days palling around with a girl from Lincoln, Nebraska. The girl said she attended a school called Norris that is ¡°kind of famous.¡± Judging from the size of her family¡¯s RV, I figured Norris was some elite preparatory academy, the Andover of cornhuskers. Then she said it was famous because it was destroyed by a tornado. ¡°A lot of people know that,¡± she said. Unfortunately, Norris was destroyed during the summer holiday, but anyway the students got extra days off during the next school year, not because of the tornado but because other schools get more snow days than Norris and that¡¯s not fair. It all made sense to Alice, who knows about tornados from The Wizard of Oz.Sunday, September 23, 2007
OK, I'll supply the photos from the August vacation, and let my son Matt supply the text. Looks like that will come in five or so emails, from time to time, that I will post here. The first one came today:
We had hiked barely a mile when Roy came nose-to-nose with his first bison.
Our family – Paola and me, Roy and Alice, and my dad -- were walking
single-file high into the back-country meadows of Yellowstone National Park. Roy was
marching point, came around a corner and stopped dead. The bison grunted. We stood
close enough to see its nostrils twitch.
Bull bisons do charge. A few days earlier, back in the relative civilization of the Bridge Bay camping area, a sign on a bathroom wall informed readers that bisons “have gored visitors” and will charge “without apparent provocation.” It bears emphasizing here that bisons are big. This one stood many hands taller than a horse and weighed hundreds of pounds more. His powerful rear legs, tight hips, massive shoulders and big round head gave him the exaggerated masculinity of a football player, while his curly beard and the shaggy mane flowing carelessly over one flank lent him the cuddly but fearsome look of a motorcycle outlaw.
Roy did everything right. He stood still and raised a hand to stop the rest of
us. The bison snorted but then raised a back hoof to scratch his chin, which
didn’t betray much interest in running us through. We detoured 25 yards around
him, snapped some pictures and continued our hike toward Crystal Lake as dark
thunderclouds blew toward us from the northern horizon.
This summer brought our first camping holiday since the kids became old enough
to carry their weight. We bought Alice and Roy, who are nine and twelve,
sturdy little backpacks and made them tote their own sleeping bags, bedrolls, and
canteens. They washed dishes and filtered our drinking water through a pump. We
taught them to yell and clap their hands to ward off predators. When the food
ran low we helped them survive on pine sap and grubs. Okay, we didn’t go that
far, but this summer was without doubt our most extreme outdoor experience to
date as we set out east from Seattle on our own little reverse Northwest Passage.
We camped, trekked and climbed in Wyoming, Montana and Idaho. In particular,
we spent three weeks in two American wonders, Glacier and Yellowstone National
Parks. Glacier, which borders Canada, is known as the “Crown of the
Continent.” It straddles the continental divide, meaning two raindrops could fall next
to each other and one would flow east through the Mississippi and into the Gulf
of Mexico while the other would flow west through the Columbia and into the
Pacific. The park is called Glacier not because it has glaciers, although it
does, but because its mountains were carved by glaciers. The river valleys there
dead-end in colossal box canyons.
America’s oldest national park, Yellowstone, is most famous for its geysers and mudpots, including Old Faithful, which visitors quickly learn to call “hydrothermal features.” Before the 1980s, Yellowstone was known for grizzly bears that lined the roads begging for candy wrappers and rooted through the garbage bins behind the Yellowstone Lodge. So many people gatheredto watch these scavenger bears that at one point rangers even built grandstands above the lodge’s rubbish pile and charged admission. The park’s successful don’t-feed-the-bears campaign has since made the bears wary of 
humans, a process called
“de-habituation.” After a few weeks in the parks, you start talking like a
biologist.
As usual, I did most of the holiday planning. This has become something of an albatross to me. The smooth and well-planned vacations we’ve enjoyed in America over the past ten years have thrown into relief my lack of planning in areas like, say, personal finance and home ownership. Our holidays have become like the great leap of Neil Armstrong, whose maiden step onto the moon became the counterp
oint to every human failing ever since. (Can put man on moon / Can’t make crumb-free Twinkie.)
Fortunately, this year I ditched the albatross by messing up right at the
beginning. We sent the kid to summer camp on Puget Sound for two weeks before leaving on our camping trip, and I wrote down the wrong date to pick up them up. The camp director called after all the other kids were gone and Paola and I had to jump into my brother-in-law’s car in Seattle and race for three hours to pick them up. That was a fun drive; Paola was very understanding. The valuable lesson: blow something important early in a trip to make all other plans look efficient by comparison. Neil Armstrong might be a happier man today if he’d hit the moon face first.
Our family – Paola and me, Roy and Alice, and my dad -- were walking
single-file high into the back-country meadows of Yellowstone National Park. Roy was
marching point, came around a corner and stopped dead. The bison grunted. We stood
close enough to see its nostrils twitch.
Bull bisons do charge. A few days earlier, back in the relative civilization of the Bridge Bay camping area, a sign on a bathroom wall informed readers that bisons “have gored visitors” and will charge “without apparent provocation.” It bears emphasizing here that bisons are big. This one stood many hands taller than a horse and weighed hundreds of pounds more. His powerful rear legs, tight hips, massive shoulders and big round head gave him the exaggerated masculinity of a football player, while his curly beard and the shaggy mane flowing carelessly over one flank lent him the cuddly but fearsome look of a motorcycle outlaw.Roy did everything right. He stood still and raised a hand to stop the rest of
us. The bison snorted but then raised a back hoof to scratch his chin, which
didn’t betray much interest in running us through. We detoured 25 yards around
him, snapped some pictures and continued our hike toward Crystal Lake as dark
thunderclouds blew toward us from the northern horizon.
This summer brought our first camping holiday since the kids became old enough
to carry their weight. We bought Alice and Roy, who are nine and twelve,
sturdy little backpacks and made them tote their own sleeping bags, bedrolls, and
canteens. They washed dishes and filtered our drinking water through a pump. We
taught them to yell and clap their hands to ward off predators. When the food
ran low we helped them survive on pine sap and grubs. Okay, we didn’t go that
far, but this summer was without doubt our most extreme outdoor experience to
date as we set out east from Seattle on our own little reverse Northwest Passage.
We camped, trekked and climbed in Wyoming, Montana and Idaho. In particular,
we spent three weeks in two American wonders, Glacier and Yellowstone National
Parks. Glacier, which borders Canada, is known as the “Crown of the
Continent.” It straddles the continental divide, meaning two raindrops could fall next
to each other and one would flow east through the Mississippi and into the Gulf
of Mexico while the other would flow west through the Columbia and into the
Pacific. The park is called Glacier not because it has glaciers, although it
does, but because its mountains were carved by glaciers. The river valleys there
dead-end in colossal box canyons.
America’s oldest national park, Yellowstone, is most famous for its geysers and mudpots, including Old Faithful, which visitors quickly learn to call “hydrothermal features.” Before the 1980s, Yellowstone was known for grizzly bears that lined the roads begging for candy wrappers and rooted through the garbage bins behind the Yellowstone Lodge. So many people gatheredto watch these scavenger bears that at one point rangers even built grandstands above the lodge’s rubbish pile and charged admission. The park’s successful don’t-feed-the-bears campaign has since made the bears wary of 
humans, a process called“de-habituation.” After a few weeks in the parks, you start talking like a
biologist.
As usual, I did most of the holiday planning. This has become something of an albatross to me. The smooth and well-planned vacations we’ve enjoyed in America over the past ten years have thrown into relief my lack of planning in areas like, say, personal finance and home ownership. Our holidays have become like the great leap of Neil Armstrong, whose maiden step onto the moon became the counterp
oint to every human failing ever since. (Can put man on moon / Can’t make crumb-free Twinkie.)Fortunately, this year I ditched the albatross by messing up right at the
beginning. We sent the kid to summer camp on Puget Sound for two weeks before leaving on our camping trip, and I wrote down the wrong date to pick up them up. The camp director called after all the other kids were gone and Paola and I had to jump into my brother-in-law’s car in Seattle and race for three hours to pick them up. That was a fun drive; Paola was very understanding. The valuable lesson: blow something important early in a trip to make all other plans look efficient by comparison. Neil Armstrong might be a happier man today if he’d hit the moon face first.
Saturday, September 22, 2007
It is a rainy Saturday morning, so I have been trying to see just what the problem is with loading photos to my blog. As usual with such things, there really wasn't a problem other than my not knowing which tab to activate. So here come some belated pictures taken last month with my clan from China, during our trip to Glacier (would you have guessed, from the sign?) and Yellowstone. Those are my grandkids, Alice and Roy.
You can enlarge any of these pictures by clicking on them, by the way.As they had told us, the parks really are much more interesting and rewarding when you get away from the drive-by tourist centers. We went to beautiful Bowen Lake, and from there backpacked in to Quartz Lake where we pitched our 
tents for the night. A Bald Eagle flew low over us, its wings making whoosh-whoosh-whoosh sounds as it flew along, and we watched it dive for a fish.
tents for the night. A Bald Eagle flew low over us, its wings making whoosh-whoosh-whoosh sounds as it flew along, and we watched it dive for a fish.The Longpole Pine is by far the major tree in this area. Majestic, but they apparently burn rather easily. Most of the park seemed to have been burned over sometime in the last 50 years, leaving lots of blackened tree trunks. This would have felt tragic if the Ranger programs were not so diligent in explaining the necessity of periodic natural fires for the forest life cycle, re-growth, and animal diversity. This has been another dry year, and smoke from forest fires was a nearly constant presence, on some days obscuring the views like a fog.
When we were camping at the Many Glaciers site, this view greeted us right outside our tents every morning. Very red in the morning, its color changed throughout the day. We are on the western side of 
the park here, and the topography and feeling is quite different than it is on the eastern side.
the park here, and the topography and feeling is quite different than it is on the eastern side.The rest of the clan took off for a two-day backpack, while I stayed at Many Glaciers, and drove the car to pick them up at the far end of their jaunt. That's Paola, Roy, Alice and Matt in the photo. Left to myself, I joined a Ranger guided hike to Iceberg Lake, one of the sites that is featured for its beauty. It was the first day the trail was open, as it had been closed for ten days because there were too many bears in the area.
Still, we had to off the path at one point for a bear and her cub to stroll by. The Ranger was disturbed because the bears weren't spooked by us. That makes them more dangerous, and often bears who have become too habituated to being around humans have to be killed.
Iceberg Lake is in this deep bowl, with gigantic sheer rock faces on three sides. As a true glacier lake, it is this miraculously luminous green color from the minerals that the glaciers have ground out of the underlying rocks. Those white patches really are residual glaciers - they used to be much larger and many more not long ago. Global warming is very apparent here, where all the glaciers will be gone in a few more decades, or less.
Now, I'd set up this page so that the script nicely matches the photos. But I suspect that the dimensions of page are going to change when it gets posted and it will all become discombubulated. If so, sorry about that.
Friday, September 07, 2007
Well, I had the appointment with my oncologist/hematologist yesterday, and it seemed rather anticlimactic. Probably couldn’t have been any other way I guess, given that this was really the focus of everything my being in Philadelphia is about. So for me, it felt like it should be an Event, and I was showered, shaved and had on my Sunday-go-to-Meetin clothes and all. But it was just a normal day.
Afterwards, I felt kind-of at a loss, like not much had happened and there was really no new information to digest and consider. Here I've turned my life upside down to get established in Philadelphia, and the whole disease and its treatment all seems somehow abstract. Apart from my considerably reduced physical stamina, I have no real symptoms or effects to deal with. Even my arthritic knee that gave me so much trouble in the northwest has come back to almost normal. So what do I do with myself now, after I finally get the new apartment appointed and myself settled in?
So I stopped to buy a bottle of Wild Turkey on the way home, medicated myself with it, and watched some incredibly boring sex webcams for the evening until I couldn’t stand them any longer. Even on a bad day, how long can you take “Oh baby I am so hot for you I’ll do anything you want so go to this other website and pay some money so you can see me actually take off the rest of my clothes?” Yawn.
Afterwards, I felt kind-of at a loss, like not much had happened and there was really no new information to digest and consider. Here I've turned my life upside down to get established in Philadelphia, and the whole disease and its treatment all seems somehow abstract. Apart from my considerably reduced physical stamina, I have no real symptoms or effects to deal with. Even my arthritic knee that gave me so much trouble in the northwest has come back to almost normal. So what do I do with myself now, after I finally get the new apartment appointed and myself settled in?
So I stopped to buy a bottle of Wild Turkey on the way home, medicated myself with it, and watched some incredibly boring sex webcams for the evening until I couldn’t stand them any longer. Even on a bad day, how long can you take “Oh baby I am so hot for you I’ll do anything you want so go to this other website and pay some money so you can see me actually take off the rest of my clothes?” Yawn.
Monday, September 03, 2007
It scalds me, but I have lost the capability to upload photos. I REALLY wanted to post photos from Glacier and Yellowstone, and now photos of my new apartment and community. Meanwhile, all I can do is give you more words.
***********************************************
You know, it kind of sinks in slowly. Here I am, sitting on the sidewalk in front of my Philadelphia. Yes, it is picturesque – leafy street with colonial houses that are not yet swamped out by the larger, newer Colonial-Style apartments and condos. The street lights are electric, but they are made to look like gas lights, and they have nice flowering petunia pots hanging on them. The horse drawn carriages stop in front of the house so the driver can point out the historic plaques on the buildings and the “Mother-in-law mirrors” on the upper floors that allowed one to see what was happening on the street in both directions without having to open the window. Independence Hall is only about four blocks away for god’s sake, and a raft of other historic buildings! Matt wrote to say that Lewis and Clark sent Pres. Jefferson seeds of previously unknown trees from west of the Mississippi, and they were planted right here at 4th and Spruce. Don’t think they are growing here any longer, but it makes another nice story.
There is a courtyard-passage in the middle of the block, and the Society Hill Synagogue is on the other side of it. The Synagogue was built as a Baptist Church in 1830, and the sign in front of it informs us that: “It was in Philadelphia alone of America’s colonial cities that Quakers, Jews, Catholics and Protestants experienced the difficulties and discovered the possibilities of fruitful coexistence that American democracy was to offer. Philadelphia is a city that not only tolerated but welcomed diverse modes of religious practice from its beginning.”
I like that. Indeed, William Penn’s 1701 Charter of Privileges for Pennsylvanians stated the importance of tolerance “Because noe people can be truly happy though under the Greatest Enjoyments of Civil Liberties if Abridged of Freedom of theire Consciences as to theire Religious Profession and Worship.”
While sitting here I have met my first neighbors in my building – Carlos, and Camille I think she said her name was, and then Jason from the top floor. Then Trish from the other side of the street, whose sister? is hoping to enroll at Moore College of Art, who wanted to see my apartment because she is looking for new digs herself. She liked my fireplace. And I met Mike from next door, going in to his place with a beautiful young woman that he did not introduce.
I am definitely not feeling any buyer’s remorse. With all the shops and cafes and markets and groceries that are within just a few blocks of my apartment, this seems to provide just what I was hoping to find in center city living, and in spades. On top of it, I really feel that this is one of the most historic areas of our country. It retains its colonial feel without being a Disneyland-style reconstruction for tourism. Where else can you find that, except maybe to some extent in the Beacon Hill section of Boston?
Not a bad place to land.
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You know, it kind of sinks in slowly. Here I am, sitting on the sidewalk in front of my Philadelphia. Yes, it is picturesque – leafy street with colonial houses that are not yet swamped out by the larger, newer Colonial-Style apartments and condos. The street lights are electric, but they are made to look like gas lights, and they have nice flowering petunia pots hanging on them. The horse drawn carriages stop in front of the house so the driver can point out the historic plaques on the buildings and the “Mother-in-law mirrors” on the upper floors that allowed one to see what was happening on the street in both directions without having to open the window. Independence Hall is only about four blocks away for god’s sake, and a raft of other historic buildings! Matt wrote to say that Lewis and Clark sent Pres. Jefferson seeds of previously unknown trees from west of the Mississippi, and they were planted right here at 4th and Spruce. Don’t think they are growing here any longer, but it makes another nice story.
There is a courtyard-passage in the middle of the block, and the Society Hill Synagogue is on the other side of it. The Synagogue was built as a Baptist Church in 1830, and the sign in front of it informs us that: “It was in Philadelphia alone of America’s colonial cities that Quakers, Jews, Catholics and Protestants experienced the difficulties and discovered the possibilities of fruitful coexistence that American democracy was to offer. Philadelphia is a city that not only tolerated but welcomed diverse modes of religious practice from its beginning.”
I like that. Indeed, William Penn’s 1701 Charter of Privileges for Pennsylvanians stated the importance of tolerance “Because noe people can be truly happy though under the Greatest Enjoyments of Civil Liberties if Abridged of Freedom of theire Consciences as to theire Religious Profession and Worship.”
While sitting here I have met my first neighbors in my building – Carlos, and Camille I think she said her name was, and then Jason from the top floor. Then Trish from the other side of the street, whose sister? is hoping to enroll at Moore College of Art, who wanted to see my apartment because she is looking for new digs herself. She liked my fireplace. And I met Mike from next door, going in to his place with a beautiful young woman that he did not introduce.
I am definitely not feeling any buyer’s remorse. With all the shops and cafes and markets and groceries that are within just a few blocks of my apartment, this seems to provide just what I was hoping to find in center city living, and in spades. On top of it, I really feel that this is one of the most historic areas of our country. It retains its colonial feel without being a Disneyland-style reconstruction for tourism. Where else can you find that, except maybe to some extent in the Beacon Hill section of Boston?
Not a bad place to land.
