Posted by barb on Apr 5, 2003 in
Around DC We got up relatively early today to head into the District for the Cherry Blossom Parade. It started at 9:30 AM, so we wanted to be down there at least a half hour early, requiring us to leave the house by 8:00 AM. (Okay, so that’s not that early, but it’s a Saturday, so give me a break.) It was a miserable morning — cold (40s) and spittling — which might sound bad, but I think it kept some of the crowds away. We were able to get a plot of sidewalk right next to the street for a pretty good view.
There were marching bands from all over: Maine, Georgia, Indiana. The Navy band was near the front of the parade, and sounded pretty cool. They got a huge round of applause, too, as did all of the armed forces and police. That’s quite a switch from just a few years ago.
They also had some of the big balloons. Not as big as the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day balloons, I imagine, but still it was the first time I’d seen them in a parade. I mused with my mother about why we didn’t have them in Minneapolis, and she reminded me that they would have to navigate the downtown’s skyway system. That’s okay, the Minneapolis Aquatennial parade usually has a lawnmower brigade, and the Hollidazzle parade usually has a snowblower brigade — not many big cities can say that. (Can they?)
I don’t want to sound un-American, but does 9-11 have to be brought up at every big event from now until the end of eternity? I’m not saying that we should forget it — we absolutely can not. But there has to come a time when we can celebrate without throwing the pall of 9-11 over it. I bring this up because there was an old fire engine (very cool) in the parade that was blasting the Proud to be an American song sprinkled with speeches about “We’re going to get these terrorists”, etc. It would have been fine without the speeches sprinkled in — it might have evoked a feeling of patriotism, but as it was it seemed to be a cheap, sentimental trick.
Enough ranting.
After the parade, we went to the National Air & Space Museum for lunch and a bit of shopping. I also took my parents through the relatively new Explore the Universe exhibit. I was impressed with this exhibit because they include a bit on high energy astrophysics — they have a spare module from the EGRET instrument on the Compton Gamma-Ray Observatory; they also feature the Chandra and ROSAT X-ray missions. This is the first time I’ve seen much of anything on high energy astronomy in any museum.
(One rant about the exhibit, though. They had an astrophysicist design a stained glass window depicting the electromagnetic spectrum. However, he included cosmic rays!! Ugh. Cosmic rays are not light! They are particles and are completely separate from the electromagnetic spectrum. They are likely made in high energy parts of the Universe, like supernovae or supernovae remnants, but that does not make them light.)
Finally, we walked down to the tidal basin to see the cherry blossoms. Wow! They were at their peak bloom, and they were quite lovely. Hopefully some of my pictures turned out. It was very crowded, but worth it.
Posted by barb on Apr 4, 2003 in
Movies 2.5/5 stars
Ugh. I’d already seen this. Now I can’t remember if I’d rented it or actually gone to see it in the theater.
Not bad for a romantic comedy. Though J-Lo is still no Meg Ryan or Sandra Bullock. I think I enjoyed it more the first time around. Matthew McConaughey, of course, is very fine to look at and does a great job in an average film.
Posted by barb on Apr 2, 2003 in
Around DC The last time my parents visited in 1999 (?…I need to double-check that), they did many of the Smithsonian Museums and drove down the Maryland coast looking at lighthouses. This time, I decided that they needed to see a bit of Baltimore. The National Aquarium seemed like a good choice. Andrew also joined us, even though we’ve already been to the aquarium — we both enjoyed it the first time, so looked forward to our second visit.
The aquarium was much as we remembered, but the last time we went, it was on a federal holiday (i.e. schools were closed). It was probably just as busy as the last time, but today there were lots of school groups, so the adult-to-child ratio was much, much lower. It’s hard to pick a favorite thing at the aquarium — we enjoyed the dolphin show (and the little ones have grown quite a bit since the last time Andrew and I had gone), we also watched the sting rays for a long time, and I was creeped out (in a good way) by the sharks. Perhaps, though, the highlight was still the sea horses. My favorite was the leafy sea dragon, near the end of the exhibit.
I rediscovered the types of people I hate:
- Stupid people with cameras. There was one guy who would not look at any of the exhibits except through his camera. He was quite rude about it, too. One time he shoved the camera right between my mother and I.
The other type of “stupid people with camera” are the clueless ones with digital cameras. I have nothing against digital cameras, mind you; in fact, I’m thinking about getting one myself. However, there was one group crowded around one of the small tanks who waited several minutes to take “just the right picture”. Then, as if oblivious that they are not the center of the universe, they sat in front of the tank checking out all of the pictures they had taken that day. I started to shove the girl in the group, and they finally got a clue.
- Clueless parents. Ugh. We got behind one mother and daughter walking down the stairs in the rain forest exhibit at the top of the main building. We just needed to get down about ten steps, but that took forever because the mother was letting her 2-year-old daughter walk down the stairs with her hand-in-hand. This meant that the entire width of the stairs was taken up by the pair, and we were going at a snails pace. Come on lady…pick up your daughter. She can practice going down stairs in a place where there aren’t already ten people behind you.
After the aquarium and lunch at The Cheesecake Factory (yum), we went to the USS Constitution, since Dad really wanted to go through the ship. They are still restoring the lowest deck, but there is still plenty to see and learn. After we had finished the audio tour, one of the “sailors” was giving a talk on food on a ship in the American Civil War. It was a good talk — featuring hard tack, salted junk, coffee and ale. I, however, started to get seasick during the talk, and had to run out as soon as he had finished. As a result, I don’t think I really heard the last half of the talk. My parents and Andrew claimed that they couldn’t feel the ship moving much, since it was docked, but I assured them that it was, indeed, moving.
We parted ways with my parents at that point. They were staying at a bed and breakfast in the Federal Hill area of Baltimore, while Andrew and I needed to head home so we could get to work tomorrow. Before going back to the car, though, we did stop at the big Barnes & Noble near the Hard Rock.
Posted by barb on Apr 1, 2003 in
Around DC This is the first day that Andrew has joined us. He decided not to take Monday off, since he was at the Python conference last Thursday and Friday. He thought he should make at least an appearance at work. Over the weekend, he wasn’t really interested in our activities (and with the cost of the Figure Skating show, I was kind of glad he didn’t want to go…)
We started the morning with the requisite vacation bad-breakfast at IHOP. Too bad we don’t have Waffle Houses around, or we would have taken Mom and Dad there. At least one breakfast on a vacation has to be the kind that leaves your stomach feeling like you’ve just swallowed a tub of grease. As a kid, we would often make the mistake of having that breakfast on the same day that we were going to an amusement park like Six Flags over Georgia.
After that, we drove down to Mount Vernon. It is about 10 miles outside of Alexandria. The drive, down the George Washington Parkway (affectionately called the G-W Parkway by those of us who live here), was quite nice. I can only imagine how lovely it would be with the trees in full leaves, or in the fall when the leaves start to turn.
I’m a bit surprised that the Ladies of Mount Vernon have been able to first of all keep the estate and restore it without the encroachment of “society” and secondly been able to keep the view of the Potomac fairly pristine.
We first toured the mansion. There were seven guest bedrooms to accommodate the over 700 overnight guests per year the Washingtons saw. My favorite room, though, was Washington’s study. It would have been fun to peruse the books on the shelves to see what kind of things Washington read. Of course I drooled over the lovely secretary he had, as well.
From there we went down to the old tomb, stopping to see the horse barn and sheep along the way. The pioneer farmer exhibit was running today, so we walked down to that. There, they had replicated one of the seven (?) farms that Washington had. There were several crops that were rotated according to a fairly complicated-looking schedule. In addition, there was a replica of a 16-sided barn that Washington had invented to take care of the wheat.
We walked back up toward the Mansion, through the forest trail. This was a beautiful walk, even without leaves on the trees. I got a bit nervous walking over the bridge above the creek bed, but that’s just because I’m a bit afraid of heights. We stopped at the new tomb on the way.
Finally we went to the gift shop (of course), and headed to the Inn for lunch.
We had thought about doing a walking tour of Alexandria afterwards, but we were all a bit tired (myself most of all, I think). Instead we stopped at A Likely Story, a children’s bookstore in Alexandria, and then went back home.
Dad fixed our oven in the evening. (The oven has needed a new circuit board for several months, but the repair guy wasn’t able to get it out from the wall. We could have hired a handyman, but were too lazy. Then when we heard my parents were visiting, we decided to see if Dad could help out. It took a bit of work, and I heard several “What the…?” and “Hee hee hee”s, but he got it done. Yay!)
Posted by barb on Mar 31, 2003 in
Around DC Today I took my parents to see the National Cathedral and the National Zoo in Washington, DC. I’ve been to both before, so I knew that they would enjoy them. Hopefully pictures will follow soon.
The Cathedral was built in a gothic style. I feel very small inside the main worship area. The Cathedral, as all gothic cathedrals, is built in the shape of a cross, and the distance along from one end to another along the longer length is one tenth of a mile! Construction started in 1907, but because it was constructed using the same tried and true techniques of the classic cathedrals, it took 83 years to finish. The last brick was installed in 1990. Although, the cathedral was in use since the first chapel was finished in 1912 (? or 1913).
One of my two favorite parts of the Cathedral are the “Science and Technology” stained glass window. This window has a moon-like shape, with a dashed line showing how the Apollo missions flew around the moon. In the center of the moon-shape is an actual piece of moon-rock.
The other fun thing about the building is the plethora of gargoyles. Unfortunately, today was cold (high of 48 degrees F) and windy. Dad and I did spend some time looking at the gargoyles, and Dad snapped some pictures for me with his zoom lens. However, even his expensive camera may not have been enough to capture the Darth Vader gargoyle. From the ground, Darth Vader is about 270 feet up! We’ll see in a couple days how his pictures turned out.
After that we drove over to the zoo. It’s been a weird spring so far, with nearly 80’s weather two days last week, and then snow yesterday. Today it was cold, but the zoo is fairly well protected from the wind, so it wasn’t too bad, especially when we were in the sun. However, a lot of the animals seemed to be inside their houses or hiding in some warmer spots, so there were several we couldn’t see. However, we did get to see our favorites: the tiger, lion, seal and zebras. We also got to see the pandas! They were cute, of course. But just as we were walking to their enclosure, we started seeing flurries. Ugh. I hate DC springs. We still stayed and watched for a bit, and oddly enough, as we were heading to the gift shop ten minutes later, half the sky was blue, but snow was still falling.
Posted by barb on Mar 30, 2003 in
Concerts My parents are in town for the next week, which worked out very nicely since the World Figure Skating Championships were last week. My mom has always been a bit figure skating fan, so I got us tickets to the exhibition show today. Andrew didn’t come with us, since he’s not much for ice skating (or any sport, for that matter), so it was just Mom, Dad and me.
It was a great show! I usually watch the exhibitions when they air them on ABC, and it’s in some ways more fun than the competition. The skaters are much more relaxed, so that even if they are skating one of the programs they used for competition, they usually do a much better (or at least less tense) performance.
Notable performances:
- Michael Weiss skated to a montage of Rolling Stone songs, and his first jump is his tornado — back flip with a full twist. Wow!
- Elena Sokolova did a program that was memorable merely because neither my mother or I understand it at all. I think it might have helped if we’d known what the music was from, because it was obvious that she was skating some kind of story. She started out in a monk-like robe with a cross on the back. She shed the robe about half-way through.
- Evgeni Plushenko had fun with his program — he came out in a comical, oversized mask, reminiscent of the life-sized puppets I’ve seen at the Minnesota Renaissance Festival. He was dressed in bold colors — orange and bright purple. He had an “I Love You” heart-shaped balloon in one gloved hand. During the program, he went to the sideline to give the balloon to a woman, but it floated to the ceiling instead. A bit later, he pulled out a flower to give to another woman, but as she reached for it, it wilted. About half-way through the program, he took off the mask and top, and things got a bit more serious, with a couple triple jumps and foot work. Very fun performance. Unfortunately, I can’t remember the music he skated to.
- Michelle Kwan, of course, was the highlight of the afternoon. She did the same program she did after the 2002 Olympics, to “Fields of Gold”. I was moved again by it, remembering her tears during the performance after losing the gold at the Olympics. This time she was all smiles.
Of course there were other great performances, but they are all running together in my head. I may have more to say if I watch the show on ABC next weekend.
One embarrassing “highlight” of the afternoon. After Sasha Cohen skated, Mom and I decided to go to the ladies’ room, to avoid the rush at intermission. We started leaving while the lights were on, but they had gone down again by the time we got to the stairs down to the exit. I missed the first step, falling face-first down the steps. Fortunately the stairs turned after the top two, so that I was able to catch myself instead of going headlong down all of them. As I was falling, I heard the section above me do a collecting “oohh” at my misstep. This, perhaps, was the worst part. I stood up, smiled sheepishly, and told them all that I was alright. Then I limped off to down the remaining stairs and off to the ladies’ room. I so wanted to just crawl home without facing the crowd again. I now have a bruise and scrape on each of my legs — my left knee and my right shin — which will serve as a short-term souvenir of my trip to the 2003 World Figure Skating Championships. Sigh.
Posted by barb on Mar 30, 2003 in
Saxophone I started my lessons with Fred about two months ago, in mid-January. I already feel like I’ve made some good progress, though it may just be that I finally have some feedback.
Currently I’m working on two pieces — “Kiss the Girl” from The Little Mermaid and the “William Tell Overture”. The WTO is fun because it makes me work on my tonguing. So far I’ve been a bit lax in my tonguing, and I need to work on being more precise, more quick. KTG is my own choice of piece, because I’m a Disney geek (to some degree), and it was the only piece in my Disney book that was in a key I know how to play (so far I only know C and G).
At my last lesson, Fred played my horn, which is an old 1920s silver horn. Apparently the old horns are notorious for playing out of tune, which is usually corrected by subtle changes in the embouchure. Fred said that mine could be in-tune (or at least close) if I play more “open”. Hmmm…I didn’t ask about that, and I’m not sure exactly what he meant, so I’ll need to remember next time.
Things to remember about embouchure: flat chin, teeth in line, relax the mouth a bit.