melodyssister

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 d 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 second 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.

I can't believe that the spring break has been over for nearly two weeks already ... when we set out for West Virginia on the 6th, it was still wintry: very few trees had any kind of buds on them, and it was definitely cold. Since then, spring has sprung: I'm sitting outside to write this on our deck in a t-shirt and barefoot.

Our plan for the spring break was to return to Breath of Heaven B&B, which we had fled in a snowstorm, as you may remember, and to explore West Virginia in better weather. On the way there, we stopped at Antietam National Battlefield, the site of the bloodiest one day battle in US history. The battle took place in fields surrounding farmhouses, many of which are still the homes of the same families today. There is a self-guided drive around the battlefield, and we spent most of the day there, driving from site to site, going up an observation tower, and viewing the sycamore that also witnessed the Burnside's Bridge stage of the battle. For the first time, we also made use of A's GPS and looked for geocaches - finding one right next to the visitor centre. That turned out to be the only geocache we actually removed and replaced - all the other ones we found were on hiking trails and inaccessible.

Our hosts at the B&B greeted us very happily, and asked if French toast casserole would be a good breakfast next morning. As we were not planning on proper lunches, and we were not sure what we would find in the vicinity for supper, breakfast was a vital part of the day, and French toast casserole sounded excellent (I would have liked to have observed Pesach a bit more, but recognise that it is almost impossible to do so away from home). We started Tuesday with a visit to Blackwater Falls, which we had thought was a tributary of the north fork of the south branch of the Potomac (had gadya, had gadya...), but it actually on the other side of the watershed and drains into the Ohio, which joins the Mississippi and eventually reaches the Gulf of Mexico. The water is dark-coloured from the sediment it picks up along the way, and the falls were beautiful. A particularly impressive sight just by the waterfall was a sheet of ice along the canyon wall, slowly melting and dripping away. Had we come a week earlier, no doubt all the way would have been covered in ice. We had a very pleasant hike along a cross-country skiing path, where the ground was squishy beneath our feet, but it was not really muddy. At this point, everything was still hibernating, so we saw very few birds and no flowers that day.

We then continued to Canaan Valley Wildlife Refuge, where we hoped to see beaver lodges (this excited A very much. He has an unexplained obsession with beavers). Unfortunately, it had rained heavily in the previous few days, and the paths assumed that everyone was driving a 4x4 or pickup - that is, at the point where we decided that we could no longer go forward, there were other cars coming towards us. We tried our luck at another entrance and eventually were third time lucky: the rain which had begun, stopped, and we found a boardwalk with an interpretive trail, whose leaflet S was very happy to read with much drama and pathos. The leaflet was actually extremely informative (although meant more for later in the year), and I was particularly pleased to have the different kinds of moss pointed out. We don't have a guide to mosses and lichens (because birds, butterflies and flowers is our limit), so it always frustrates me to see them and not know what I am seeing.

Next day was our major hiking day, starting at Seneca Rocks. As we drove there, we were very surprised to see a long line of wind turbines, which had been completely invisible in the whiteout of our previous trip, although obviously the were there all along. We were still slightly off-season, so the visitor centre was closed, but as we were not planning mountaineering, there was in fact only one path to the top, which had us all taking off outer layers. I need hiking shorts! Once I finish sewing the skirt I am making at the moment (4 hours work so far, and no sewing, as I had to print and glue the PDF pattern from 30-odd A4 pages, and then cut out the pattern pieces and the fabric), I will try my hand at a longer version of the pyjama shorts. But I digress ... Seneca Rocks was really lovely, although it was amusing to read the signs about tree stumps that had long since rotted away. There was a geocache there, too, but it seemed that you needed to rappel to it, so we left it alone.

Seneca Rocks' outdated signs were better than those at Spruce Knob, where we drove to the top of the highest mountain in West Virginia, to an observation tower, and walked along another interpretative trail - but this time there was no leaflet, and actually no signs! We reached the peak and looked across rolling hills in every direction, and had no real idea of what we were seeing, beyond Pennsylvania on one side and the Shenandoah on the other. We also saw rainclouds coming closer, and decided not to continue to Spruce Knob Lake, but to take a scenic route back to Petersburg and eat at an Italian restaurant for a change. On the way down one mountainside and up another, between Ross Road and Judy Road, I saw a sign indicating "Road Not Taken". Spruce Knob is so called for the large number of balsam spruces, which are endemic to West Virginia, that grow there. We saw balsam spruces at Canaan Valley, too, where there is a program to preserve and re-introduce them.

Thursday morning continued rainy, so our plans to hike at Dolly Sods had to be cancelled. Instead, we went to Lost River State Park, which turned out to be an out-of-season holiday camp with a fitness trail - rather like a Keren Kayemet forest in Israel, up to and including the pine trees. It felt a bit post-apocalyptic in the light drizzle, being the only people around. I would have liked to have seen the Lee House, a summerhouse built by Lighthorse Harry, father of Robert E. Lee, but of course that was closed, too. I should back track a bit here to report one of the highlights of the trip: as we were leaving Breath of Heaven, A saw a bird's nest with eggs in it just at the edge of the driveway and warned ADC to be careful. As the car began to roll slowly forward, the mother bird (a killdeer) burst into the driveway and tried to distract the predator, going so far as to lie down and play dead in the missile of the road. Unfortunately, this is a tactic more likely to get her killed than anything else ...

On our hosts' recommendation, we continued to Winchester, where we started at the Museum of the Shenandoah Valley. The Museum has three components: a museum proper, with exhibitions about the social and cultural history of the Shenandoah Valley; an early-twentieth century millionaire's mansion, Glen Burnie, and the gardens of the house. The museum also holds a collection of miniature houses and rooms collected by Julian Wood Glass, who bequeathed Glen Burnie and its garden to the museum. We had not been expecting anything as interesting as what we found there. The miniature houses were amazingly detailed and lovely, and included a scale model of Tara, with portraits of Rhett Butler and Scarlett O'Hara. The house had a very beautiful exhibition of contemporary botanical drawings, which I personally found fascinating, and a good segue into the gardens. They were not at the best, of course, but the Chinese garden and the war garden were already charming. We still had some time before we needed to get to Joe's Steakhouse in Front Royal, so we went into Winchester historic centre, where we wandered around for a bit, and found an olive oil and balsamic vinegar emporium. We spent quite a bit of time tasting the different oils and vinegars, eventually buying three to take home. That kept us going until we reached the steakhouse where, as A said, "I had the best steak of my life last time I was here, and this time it was even better!"

As we drove east from West Virginia and came down from the mountains, we saw that spring had begun in Maryland, and on Saturday we went to see the cherry blossoms in the Tidal Basin, together with several thousands of other people. It felt like the Old City during Passover week (and this was without going to see the parade). The cherry blossoms are truly glorious. I hadn't realised that there were a number of varieties - with more added as the older trees die - and the different colours, shapes and scents came together in a very beautiful display. I got pollen on my nose smelling the blossoms; despite the similarity, they are far less scented than almond and apple blossoms. As we were already at the Mall, we also went to see the Vietnam War memorial, which we had missed on our previous visit, in the autumn. I remember reading a National Geographic article about it, so knew that the names were in chronological order, but I hadn't realised that the list began an ended in the middle of the monument, forming a loop. ADC took a picture of one of the names for a little old lady, as neither she nor her friends were tall enough to hold their phone in the right place.

The rest of the weekend was very musical: On Saturday we heard Bach's St John Passion at Strathmore Music Centre (where we saw the Chieftains), performed by the National Philharmonic and Chorale. Rather ridiculously, it reminded me of Jesus Christ Superstar (while of course the inspiration is the other way around). The program notes very earnestly discussed the anti-Semitism of the text. My feeling is that if your libretto is the Gospel according to John - which was written after the destruction of the Temple and Roman conquest of Judea - there is no way you can accuse the Romans of anything and of course the Jews will be blamed. I must say that following along (we were provided with the full German text with English translation), I was, on the one hand, very impressed that the Evangelist (narrator) knew his part well enough to not have any music at all in front of him, and on the other hand, even more confused about the timeline of the Passion. I had always thought that the Last Supper was a Seder, but from the wording, it appears that it was the day before the Seder? Anyway, clearly I am more interested in words than in music and I'm sure C would be horrified that this is how I am responding.

Sunday was of course the Battle of the Bands, in which ADC got to play bass live on stage in an Irish pub. ADC has been playing bass for about a year and a half now, partly self-taught, and when we arrived in DC he looked for a group to play with (bass players are always in demand). He plays every couple of weeks with DC Rockers, which is a fairly loose group of people who meet occasionally in varying combinations to play pre-agreed songs together. The group includes over 50 people, and there are anything between 5 and 10 people who show up for each session. A couple of months ago, the organizers of DC Rockers announced that we were going to have a live “Battle of the Bands” event at a local pub. Members of the group were invited to form ad-hoc bands, rehearse a set-list and then play live in front of their fellow rockers (and friends and families). Here is the link to his set. If you want to hear what the other bands sounded like (and have two hours to spare), you can click on the DC Rockers channel link there. I'll just say that I had a lot of fun, and my ears were ringing when we came out! A funny thing happened: when I was checking the bill, I saw that the waitressed had not charged me for the hot chocolate with Bailey's I had drunk. When I pointed this out to her, she was so impressed that she charged me only for a regular hot chocolate. I think this is a case of honesty being its own reward.

On Monday life went back to normal. The children received their third-quarter report cards on Tuesday, and happily these were as boringly good as usual. I started work on the material I had begun receiving during the break and ignored: I have two book manuscripts, an article and a grant proposal to edit before coming to Israel (this is why this letter has been delayed), with another article and a PhD dissertation in the pipeline. Today was a relatively quiet day: I stayed home and sewed (now I feel like a character in a nursery rhyme) while ADC went with the children to celebrate Record Store Day (they went to the comics shop, and also S had an eye test). In the afternoon we watched Some Like It Hot, which was enjoyed very much by all. The line about losing ponies playing water polo has been repeated ad nauseum by now, and the closing scene has lost nothing in the 56 years since it was first screened.

Part of the reason I haven't written in so long, I think, has been snow-induced depression. The second half of February was appalling, with the schools closed or starting late almost every other day, either due to active blizzards or due to extreme cold and ice. It was only when daylight saving began, and we had a thaw, that I realised how much better I felt with the sun shining. That being said, we did do a number of things ...

We continued our exploration of the Smithsonian Museums with a visit to the National Museum of the American Indian. This had been highly recommended by DE, ADC's host, who also warned that this was a museum that aimed to celebrate the community,and thus was more activist and less strictly academic than the Natural History Museum, for example. All museums are political, I thought to myself, and thesis simply explicit about it. I must say that while I enjoyed the visit, and learned a great deal, I came away feeling rather depressed. In the end, museums dedicated to recording and preserving ways of life that are dying - if not dead and attempts at resurrection being made - are, in a way, an argument for white supremacy; or at least, for the supremacy of the Mediterranean basin, a region where teleological worldviews joined the Hellenistic scientific heritage (all shared by Judaism, Christianity and Islam) over the rest of the world, in which cyclical worldviews (shared by most "pagan" native religions) did not advance technologically (cause and effect here is hard to judge). The museum rather reminded me of the Khoi-San museum/cultural centre we visited in the Western Cape, and a Bedouin village we once visited: traditions that once were vital for survival are dying, because they are no longer necessary. And since they are based on oral traditions, once they are gone, they are gone. And even if they survive, they are partly a game: there was a video of the whale-killing ritual of an Eskimo group: not only was everyone wearing parkas made of technical material rather than sealskin, it is no longer the case that they will not survive the winter if they don't have a store of blubber - you could see the tins of Heinz baked beans on the shelves. I definitely felt sorry for the North American Indians - most of them really didn't have a chance: their surrounding were so harsh that their material culture (or what remains of it) is really pitiful compared even to pre-Columbian Central/South America, not to mention the Old World. The attempts to restore traditions were interesting, though: one group, from the Hupa Valley in California, were so Californian when they talked about being one with nature etc (wearing plaid shirts, that well-known item of Amerindian dress, as they spoke to the camera). In Chile there are indigenous professors of the languages, who are academics as well as activists, and a case of a Catholic priest who in old age left the Church and returned to his ancestral traditions, becoming a shaman. We bought a book on the world in 1491 at the museum giftshop, which is now in my TBR pile.

Due to the snow days, the testing regimen at Montgomery county schools has been severely disrupted, and it feels like the PARCC assessments have been going on forever (S has maths today, still). These are tests meant to assess the schools, rather than the pupils, as I understand it, and both boys reported that the English/literacy tests were quite easy. A said, though, that the maths segment included material that he had not covered at school ... I really hope he will not have too much of a shock when we get home. He is making quite good progress in Arabic, now that we have set up a definite time and day of the week. Once or twice he has "cancelled" due to the science project measuring the relative rates of freezing of water, apple juice and Gatorade, but then I have insisted on a make-up class on the weekend; the only advantage of having been housebound by snow has been Arabic lesson for A, ukulele lessons for S (he can play several songs now, but is not keen on performing on Skype), and watching movies. We had a Kurosawa weekend a few weeks ago, when ADC and I watched Rashomon on Friday night, and then we all watched Yojimbo together on Saturday. The boys enjoyed Yojimbo very much, and we are considering adding A Fistful of Dollars to the Netflix queue (my memory is that is a rather more graphic. I'm glad we didn't show Rashomon to the children, even though it is deservedly considered one of the greatest movies ever made - I think they are too young for it, still, despite A' belief that now that he is 13, he can see anything that is defined as PG-13 and above).

We have finally begun to take advantage of the cultural opportunities available in Washington (apart form ADC's Meetup group), and have booked three classical concerts and a play. Moreover, at the beginning of March we went to a performance of The Chieftains, a Dublin-based group who have been performing together for sixty years. We have one disc of theirs, The Long Black Veil (with Sting, Van Morrison, Mark Knopfler, Sinead O'Connor, Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithful (separately) on vocals), which is one of my and S's favourite albums. We had no idea what to expect, really, at the concert, but it was like being invited to a party where all the other guests could play an instrument and/or sing and/or dance. The other guests included an astronaut, who played the pipes - and had played the pipes at the space station - and the Leahy family, who all played the fiddle and danced. They came on one by one: a 15-year old girl, a 12-year old boy, a 10-year old boy, a 7-year old girl and a 4-year old girl. Every time we thought now, that was the youngest, and then another child came on - playing the fiddle. Then they danced while playing the fiddle (except for the youngest girl, who conducted!). There were also a couple of local children's groups: a choir and one of the Irish dancing schools (whose upper bodies were much stiffer and more motionless than the dancers who were part of the Chieftains backing group), and a local bagpipe band, who wore eyesearingly mismatched tartan kilts. It was great fun, and good preparation for the St Patrick's Day Parade last Sunday (the 15th). The parade was amazingly well-behaved on the part of the crowd (almost nobody stood in the road), much quieter than expected (there was music only when the actually marching bands and/or Irish dancing schools went by), and including a bewilderingly large number of vintage fire engines. We speculated that this was a trial run for the Fourth of July parades for the fire engines, since I'm not aware there's anything particularly Irish about the fire brigade in the US (on the other hand, the large number of marchers affiliated with the police seemed to be obvious. Even Richard Scarry's police man is Sergeant Murphy, with his daughter Bridget).

The weekend before last continued our cultural activities: in reparation for seeing Rosencrantz and Guildernstern are Dead at the Folger Theater in May, we watched Kenneth Branagh's version of Hamlet. We offered the boys the choice of Kenneth Branagh or Mel Gibson, and they immediately chose Kenneth Branagh, because they know him, both as Professor Lockhart and as Henry V. I suppose a completely uncut version is not the worst way of being introduced to Hamlet - we did split the viewing over two sessions - but I'm not sure this is my preferred interpretation of the play. Kenneth Branagh doesn't have enough self-doubt for Hamlet, in my opinion; he's too pleased with himself to consider suicide seriously. I think we will see the Zeffirelli version closer to the time, so that's what we have in mind when we see Rosencrantz and Guildernstern are Dead. Derek Jacobi as Claudius (yes, we got the joke) was very good, as was Richard Briers as Polonius. I'm not sure about Kate Winslet as Ophelia; again, I didn't like the interpretation particularly, so that's affecting my view of the acting. I'll have to see how Helena Bonham-Carter measures up ...

We have finally given in to homesickness and gone to see Jerusalem 3D at the IMAX theatre at the Natural History Museum (we also went to see the insect and non-dinosaur fossil galleries). It was so wonderful to see all the bird's eye views of so many places we miss, not just Jerusalem. I thought that it was very well done, not just Benedict Cumberbatch's narration and the chance to see the interior of the Dome of the Rock, but also the fact that they found three girls - Jewish, Christian and Muslim - who looked similar enough that at first glance you couldn't tell which was which. The Jewish girl had grandparents from Poland and Algeria, and the Christian girl had ancestors who came to the Holy Land from Greece. And everybody seemed to be eating the same food around big tables with large, noisy families. It was a good thing to see just before the elections, to remember why we want to go home.

We have new neighbours: T&S  moved to a condo in Bethesda, and have been replaced by AN &LN, and their children R (5) and T (3). We invited them over for tea the week before last, and had a lovely time (and this has already paid dividends in that we were able to find a connection from whom to borrow a travel cot for when JC and his family visit). AN is a lawyer, working for the appellate division of the Department of Justice, and L works for the Government Audit, where he writes guidelines (he has a graduate degree in philosophy). R had a wonderful time playing with A and S, although T was a little overwhelmed by all the newness, I think.

Of course, a high point of the past month for me was my birthday. A and S very sweetly bought a heart-shaped paperweight. My sewing machine arrived the day before, and ADC (who bought me sewing books) hid it so I would open it on the day, which I did. It took me an hour and a half to set it up for the first time, including winding thread from the spool to the bobbin (I love technical terms) and several attempts before I managed to get the thread through the eye of the needle. My machine is a Janome Magnolia 7318, which is highly recommended on the internet for beginning sewers. It has 25 different stitches, including a button hole, and I am very excited about using it. I've had one sewing lesson, so far, in which I learned a trick for threading the needle more efficiently, and made a drawstring bag. Sewing is definitely much more instant gratification than knitting - although I suspect that as soon as I try making something larger and more complex this will not be the case. I have bought fabric for the next lesson tomorrow, in which I will learn to make pyjama shorts, which I have washed but not yet ironed. I've also bought fabric for t-shirts and skirts, and I'm assuming that the first things I make will not really be wearable outside the house. But I'm having fun, and A and S have asked me to make them summer pyjamas already.

This has been a very busy couple of weeks. Among other things I did a ton of knitting and also went to Baltimore twice, so apologies again for the lateness of my update on Thanksgiving and the week before.

I'll actually start at the end, what we did today, because it is closely connected to what we did two weeks ago: We spent the day at the Spy Museum. This involved a bit of sticker shock, as up to now all the museums we have visited in Washington have been free, but the children had been very eager to go since we arrived, and especially after we visited the cryptology exhibition at the Folger Shakespeare Library two weeks ago. That exhibition was extremely well done, and had several activities for children that S really enjoyed. The connection to the library is that two of the parents of American cryptology, William and Elizabeth Friedman, also researched Shakespeare, and were frequently to be found at the Folger, since they lived in Washington. The exhibition covered the entire history of codes and ciphers, with particular emphasis on the Renaissance (lots of names familiar to me from my article on possible Arabic influences on the development of cryptology in Renaissance Italy) and the Friedmans' career - William headed the team that broke Purple, the Japanese cipher used during WWII, and he considered Francis Bacon's idea of the biliteral cipher, where anything can be made to mean anything, to be binary code.

The Spy Museum of course covered much more ground. As you go in, you are asked to choose one of 16 covers, and throughout the museum there are places where you are asked questions relating to the cover and its associated mission. There is a long and interesting section on how spies are trained, followed by a smaller exhibition on the history of espionage from an American point of view, so a lot of emphasis on the Civil War and the Cold War. The current special exhibition is on the villains in the James Bond movies (very amusingly, a lot of the voice-overs throughout the museum have British accents, and the briefing movie, which starts the self-guided tour, almost sounds like Judi Dench). In addition to a lot of props, the most fascinating parts of the exhibition for me were the interviews with various retired intelligence operatives, either giving their opinion of aspects of the movies (like the CIA's equivalent to Q) or describing their own James Bond moments.

To go back nearly two weeks ago: on November 22, I spent the day at the MESA conference. I haven't heard so much Arabic in a long time - and the second most common non-English language apart from that was Hebrew. I didn't attend any of the talks, since there was no option of a one-day pass, and spent my time meeting people, either planned or unplanned. I had a lot of fun, and added two invitations to give talks to my future plans: one at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton in January, the day after my postponed talk at Rutgers (since it is on the way back to DC anyway), and another, to be confirmed once I am back in Israel, at NYU-Abu Dhabi (since I have a non-Israeli passport).

Abu Dhabi seems almost as far away as the moon, actually, but it is very exciting to think that I might go there. We saw two movies involving space travel - Apollo 13 at home with the children, and ADC and I went by ourselves to see Interstellar at the Air and Space Museum, where it was shown on IMAX screens. We also saw another episode of Cosmos, which discussed, among other things, black holes and wormholes, which was good preparation for seeing Interstellar. On reflection, I enjoyed Apollo 13 more, as the science made more sense to me. I will not go into anymore details, in case anyone is planning on seeing it and has not yet done so. But I think I am beginning to approach sic-fi the same way I approach historical dramas. Let me just say that I was impressed by the way Anne Hathaway's character was apparently able to cut her own hair very nicely and keep it trim through decades of space-time travel.

On a more mundane level, we went to ADC's uncle and aunt in Boston for Thanksgiving. It was lovely to see them, as well as their son and his family. While Number 2 Cousin is still too young (not a year yet) to really interact with A and S (although S did read to him and that was appreciated - by his mother), Number 1 Cousin clearly was thrilled to have new friends to play with and the three of them got on very well together. Unfortunately, it was much too cold to spend any time outside, where I think they would have had even more fun.

We arrived in Boston on Thursday, and basically spent our free time with ADC's family. On Friday, we spent most of the day at the Museum of Fine Arts, which was half an hour's walk from our hotel. We had been at the MFA during our previous visit to Boston in 2012, so there was less pressure, and we tried to see things that we had not seen before. ADC's aunt and uncle very kindly lent us their member cards, so we went in for free, and also got a discount at lunch and at the museum shop (which had a 30% Black Friday discount in any case). We had thought we would go to the Goya exhibition, but the queue was so long that we gave that idea up, and instead went to a number of smaller exhibitions: one on model planes and trains (and then continued to the permanent exhibition on model ships), another on the gowns and jewels of 1930s Hollywood, and another on current representations of national feeling, where we watched and excellent piece of video art called English Magic. Of course, the main thing that the boys came away with was a work from the mid-century American gallery, in which Andy Warhol took Jackson Pollock's drip art (and Marcel Duchamps' urinal) a step further by urinating on a canvas treated with copper sulphate(?) ...

Saturday was absolutely one of the coldest days we have experienced so far - and we spent a lot of it walking around. I am very glad I bought thigh-high terrycloth socks, they kept me very warm over fleece-lined footless tights. We spent the morning walking and shopping in Brookline's independent stores - Brookline Booksmith (where A bought the book of The Princess Bride and S bought both I, Robot and The Graveyard Book - I can hear my siblings cheering); Eureka, a games store where I bought (for S) a puzzle in which 120 cubes create together one of six works of art. This is obviously much more difficult than an ordinary jigsaw puzzle, since there is no help from the different shapes. I think we will work on it tomorrow while A is at flag football and ADC is playing bass for Abbey Road with his musicians' Meetup group. We met my father's cousin M for lunch, which was very nice. It always surprises me a bit when distant relatives thank us for making time to see them, because to me it was so much killing two birds with one stone: we have to eat anyway, so why not also meet someone at the same time?

After lunch we walked to Brookline High, and from there to ACD's uncle's house via Tappan Street, and ADC showed us where he had lived in 1984. We had the surprising experience of seeing a flock of turkeys cross the road (literally: a USPS van came along, the driver stopped and put his head out the window to ask: Why did the turkey cross the road?). We wondered if the school playing fields were a kind of common, like the cows that grazed on Parker's Piece and Jesus Green in Cambridge, but we were later told that the turkeys were a Brookline "thing" and wandered around people's gardens, usually.

Our last day in Boston was much warmer, around 9 degrees, and we went into Boston itself, and walked the first part of the Freedom Trail, from Boston Common up to Paul Revere's house. We decided not to go into any of the museums along the way, but to stay in the streets. We did go into the Old Granary Burying Grounds, which was fascinating. The link is to a handout that we used, which added a lot to the experience, even though the cemetery itself is very well signposted. I also really enjoyed the Old Schoolhouse, with the picture of a small John Hancock practising writing, a tiny Sam Adams standing and orating, with Ben Franklin running with a kite in the background ... We went past the monument to the Irish Famine, which I remembered from 2012, and noticed a new memorial, the New England Holocaust Memorial, six granite and glass towers with steam rising from eternal embers. The contrast between the abstract form of that memorial and the two sets of statues - starving Irish and well-fed Americans, who were actually the same people - seemed to express the different scales of the disasters.

The past week has gone by very fast. A has learned how to write a business letter (the assignment was to persuade the Board of Education that sports should be made compulsory in high school), and S has started a unit on swimming. ADC and I are trying to complete our self-imposed hobby-related tasks so that we can go back to reading and watching movies. We did watch the first half of Kurasawa's Seven Samurai this afternoon as a family, but we were too tired to watch anything by ourselves last night.

Our guest room continued to be used one more time before Halloween: My friend NN was in Washington for a conference, and had an extra night before she continued to another conference in Indianapolis. It was really a flying visit, but I was glad to see her, and she brought tons of stuff that she had missed during her own post-doc in Berkeley: za'atar, ptitim, couscous and halva. Well, she had to make room in her suitcase for all the American goodies she was bringing back for her kids ...

NN slept over on Wednesday night, and on Thursday S's school had a Fall Festival and parade. No scary costumes allowed (what?!), so S decided that his character Rorschach was in fact Moo, the spirit of cows. I went along to help get the children ready for the parade and ended up staying for the whole thing, as what parents were actually needed for was putting the Fall Feast out on the classroom tables. The amount of food brought was incredible, and there'd been no coordination, so we ended up with a dozen doughnuts for 28 children and more grapes than could reasonably be eaten, to say nothing of about 3 Capri-Sun juice boxes a head. Anyway, they all had fun and I met a couple of mothers I had not met before.

Halloween itself was something of a letdown in the end. S went trick or treating with some other children, A had to go out alone (it seems that at his age trick or treating is no longer done) and I think he mainly enjoyed carving a jack-o-lantern. To our surprise, not a single trick or treater knocked on our door - and as I had bought a 100-piece bag of Hershey fun-sized treats, after nearly having a nervous breakdown in the supermarket, this was a disappointment. Both boys returned with good hauls, and they have been very cooperative in sharing nicely. We have allowed them to eat up to three treats a day since Halloween, and they still haven't finished. ADC eventually made chocolate chunk cookies this past weekend to get rid of some the plain Hershey chocolate bars, which are almost inedible in their natural state.

Last Saturday, we went to another Smithsonian Museum, the National Portrait Gallery and American Art Museum, which share a building. We did not have very high expectations, and were pleasantly surprised by how much there was to see and how enjoyable it was. This time we concentrated on the portraits, which at the moment have an emphasis on the Civil War, and we'll go back to see more of the art. There was one fantastic stained glass window made in the 1880s that we walked past on our way to an exhibition of Time Magazine covers from the Sixties, that you just had to stop and stare at, though. The boys did us proud - we were there for about four hours, not counting lunch, and I don't think there are many 10- and 13-year-olds who can spend as long as that in any art museum (a good sign for visiting the Met this weekend when we go to New York).

Sunday both last week and this past one were quiet days, going to the market and buying some of the 20 different varieties of apples in throning and A going to flag football in the afternoon. His team is not doing very well, so the season will not be extended into the play-offs, but he seems to be enjoying himself very much. S is having fun with his ukelele, and has learned his first actual tune: Swing Low Sweet Chariot. I have asked ADC to concentrate on the relevant tunes so that at the next Seder, we can be accompanied when we sing at the end.

Both boys received excellent reports at the end of the first quarter - A is a straight A student, including English! I am very happy that they are doing so well. S regaled us last night with the pecking order in the lunchroom, and while he is not particularly high on it, he seems happy where he is, and points out that because he is "new", he can't be at the top anyway. We hear less details from A, but he seems to be doing fine socially as well. Not that they have much time to go to friends or have them over in the afternoon, with homework and capoeira. S is going to the monthly comics jam at the library later today.

We continue to be more social here than in Jerusalem: On Friday we went to IP and HP for supper, and it turned out that all their family was there, to predictable chaotic results. It's nice having an adopted family, to provide us with a substitute for Friday night in Kfar Saba and Omer. On Sunday night we had M's ex RM who also lives in Takoma Park, over for supper. RMl lives on the other side of Takoma Park, and considering the detailed rundown of markets and other food shopping options she gave me before we arrived, I had been surprised that we had not yet run into each other at the weekly farmer's market. We had a very pleasant evening, and it was interesting hearing about the school system from a data analyst at an education NGO who doesn't herself have children in the system. It's rather sad how deeply the differences between blacks and whites have become ingrained - even middle-class black people seem to to visit museums.

On Saturday there was the first real cold snap. Luckily, we have all already for our winter coats - ADC and S at REI, and I at Land's End. ADC is very taken with Land's End, he has now bought three flannel shirts and two fleece sweaters, and has two pairs of flannel-lined pants on the way at the moment. I am experimenting with fleece-lined tights and boots under skirts, as I think that this will be warmer than just trousers, and have ordered very long socks from Sock Dreams for the depth of winter.

Despite the cold, it was very bright and sunny. We went to Georgetown, and wandered around - a practice run for Manhattan next week in a way, as the forecast is for much the same weather there. We started by walking along the towpath of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal (the canal that was beaten by the railway in reaching Harpers Ferry), and then reached a busy shopping street, where people were standing in line up the block outside particularly trendy eateries.

I have been invited to give a talk at Rutgers, in New Jersey, in the first week of December, so am finally starting to work on research and not just editing. I will be giving a talk on the reception of Galen in medieval Arabic and Hebrew texts, and will have to make this as broad as possible, since I will be talking to the Medieval Studies Program and possibly the Classics Department, too. I can't be too philological, but will have to explain why this is an interesting and significant thing to be studying. (At the same time, further expanding my horizons, I am editing the dissertation of an archaeozoologist who did her MSc with ADC's late PhD supervisor, on the remains of equids [horses, asses and mules] found in Israeli medieval sites).

We spent Saturday at the Maryland Renaissance Festival and Sunday at the Takoma Park Folk Festival, two very different experiences.

Yesterday was incredibly hot and humid - 36 degrees and 70% humidity at midday. I wore my Keen sandals for their first extended outdoor excursion, and they held up very well (ADC doesn't like his Keens so much, and he wore shoes and socks). The Rennfest is a completely different kettle of fish to the reenactments we saw in England. As befits the homeland of the Society for Creative Anachronism, there was less emphasis on authenticity and more on fun. I think that this was epitomised by the bellydancing girl accompanied by bagpipes, played by men in kilts and woad on their faces. Apart from the fact that it is only in Braveheart that woad and kilts are worn together, she would have died of exposure in the average Scottish castle. Actually, I have never seen so many men in kilts at once, nor so many women in corsets and off-the-shoulder bodices. The festival runs through September and October in a large site outside Annapolis, and is a mixture of Hutzot ha-Yotzer, junk food, and fantasy-styled theatre and reenactment. The crafts shops all accepted Master Card and Lady Visa, and many had a fantasy/dragons theme. We saw a glassblowing demonstration and bought a butter dish sized for American sticks of butter. Our search for a stopper for wine bottles remains unsuccessful.

The most historical accuracy could be found - unsurprisingly for the USA, I suppose - in the weapons. A and S each bought a wooden dagger, made of hickory from Arkansas, with a lifetime guarantee. The carpenter discussed the different kinds of swords and crossbows he had there with us and in another place a bowyer who made longbows explained how those were made. This was just before the long-awaited joust. Jousting is the state sport of Maryland, so we were told, so our expectations (or at least mine), were quite high. Here, if nowhere else, I expected authenticity. Well, I should cut both horses and riders some slack due to adverse weather conditions, but I was disappointed. I don't know if health and safety regulations got in the way, but one of my favourite exercises - man cleaves a cabbage in half at full gallop - was nowhere to be seen. Instead, four knights knocked a piece of Lego (at least, that's what it looked it) off a pole at a canter. The quintain was not in fact a quintain - yes, they had to put the tip of their sword through a ring, but the counterweight never moved! A proper quintain moves regardless and you have to avoid being punched by it whether or not you got the ring! But apart from that, everything else we saw was excellent. Even the Celtic bellydancer was good (she was a good bellydancer, and the music was good of itself.) A particularly good performance was the Barely Balanced acrobats - two men and a woman - who defied the laws of human physiology (I'm sure they took physics and gravity very much into account) to balance on each other and juggle swords. As well as being amazing acrobats,they kept up a constant patter which was actually funny.

We have subscribed to Netflix, and the first DVD we ordered was Kenneth Branagh's Henry V. It seemed very appropriate to end a medieval-themed day by watching that. Just in case the children had difficulty with the text, we watched using the closed captions for the hard of hearing (the alternative subtitles were French or Spanish, which we felt would not really be helpful). We had to stop once or twice to clarify plot points, but basically they were able to follow. S particularly enjoyed the Chorus (Derek Jacobi) and the set pieces (Harfleur and the St Crispin's Day speeches, because Henry "excited and encouraged" the ordinary soldiers). A liked everything, he said.

There was a thunderstorm Saturday night, and the next day was glorious. We spent almost the entire day at the Folk Festival, and I enjoyed "live whatsapping" to family back home (thank you for explaining how to take pictures, I was usually not close enough to the stage and/or there was a mix of sunlight and shade making photographs impossible). There were seven stages, playing various kinds of folk, country, roots rock, blues and world music, from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. (we arrived at 10:30 and left at 5; we could hear one of the stages through the open window when we got home). Here too there were food trucks - with much healthier options than at the Rennfest, to say nothing of much tastier ones - crafts stalls (I bought earrings) and information stands for everything going on in Takoma Park. There was a whole row of religious stands, with the Quakers, Unitarians and some other denomination I didn't recognise but clearly mainly black, separated by the Movement for Secular Humanistic Judaism (I took their brochure), Tiferet Israel, the Farbrangen Cheder and Shirat Hanefesh. The Ps go to Adas Yisrael in DC, which have free services on Rosh Hashana and Kol Nidre, and that is where I think I will be going. Another stall was House of Musical Traditions, a local music store, and S - who has been resisting resuming guitar lessons - decided that he wanted to learn the ukelele. I am in favour, it's much more mobile, and definitely for playing music to sing too. That's a birthday present sorted, I should think.

Back to the Folk Festival - we wandered fairly randomly, hearing some urban folk, very good country/roots rock/Americana with a sense of humour, excellent Appalachian ballads. I skipped the Indian/jazz fusion in order to look at earrings, then heard a Pete Seeger tribute with Andy Wallace, a banjoist who played with Seeger himself, a bluegrass trio that did *not* have a sense of humour, and finally rock again. The festival is co-sponsored by the Folklore Society of Greater Washington, so I took a copy of their newsletter and joined their mailing list. It looks like they have a lot going on in Takoma Park, which is nice.

Yesterday (Thursday) was possibly the most boring day I have had in a long time, so naturally I fell asleep before writing to you when I got home. I'll start by saying that Wednesday was great - we all enjoyed a day at the Smithsonian, in our different ways. It turned out that it was lucky that we went then, as on Thursday the public part of the museum was closed to mend storm damage before the weekend and its attendant hordes (the rain on Tuesday was apparently the second heaviest rain form recorded since scientific recording began. When we arrived in Cambridge in 2001, a similar occurrence took place; unfortunately, ADC and I do not seem to be similar rain-bringers when we return to Israel).

Anyway, on Thursday I went to Baltimore to check in at the Office for International Students and Scholars. As ADC had to take the children for a TB test and hoped to buy a car, I braved public transport. Incredibly, there is no reasonable way of getting to Baltimore from DC in under two hours (at the right time of day; at most times it takes close to three). I walked to the Metro station, and went into DC. At Union station, I changed to the commuter (mainline) rail, and waited 40 minutes for my train. The train took over an hour to get to Baltimore, stopping everywhere - including Baltimore airport, where very excitingly, a woman and her two children did not get off the train with their luggage in time, and had to continue to the next stop. This is a phobia of mine that has never actually happened to me, and probably never will, since I would have started getting ready to disembark long before this unfortunate woman did.

On arrival at Baltimore Penn Station, I spent a long time finding the bus stop I needed. I was indeed the only white person on the bus - which took a detour just before the stop I wanted to get off at. Thankfully, I was already in possession of a smartphone, which helped me walk to John Hopkins campus. The campus is huge, and the maps are very confusing, so it took me half an hour to reach the building I needed. Door-to-door: 7:45-11:00 a.m.

I will not bore you further with precise details of the administrivia I had to battle, I will only say that I was delayed by a lunch break at OISS, and every time I left a building I lost my way going to the next one, even when it was the third time I needed to go to the same building but to a different office. I finished everything and began my way home at 2:30 p.m. Once again, I lost my way trying to get off campus, and once I reached the street where I was supposed to catch a bus, I seriously considered just walking down the street back to Penn Station, just so as not to spend more time hanging around. As I began doing so, I saw what looked like - and in fact was - a university shuttle stop. Now that I had a JHU ID card, I had a number of free public transport options that had not been available on my way in! I caught the shuttle, immediately caught a train to DC, and then immediately caught a Metro back to Takoma Park. I walked back home, and arrived at 5 p.m. Door-to-door on the way back was a mere two and a half hours ... I will have to drive to JHU in the future, the departmental seminar is Mondays from 4 p.m., no way I am leaving Baltimore around six to come home at nine!

Today (Friday) is a quiet day at home. ADC has gone to the Smithsonian, and on the way home will hopefully buy a car (he test drove one yesterday, but needed additional documents for financing to be approved. The entire banking system here seems to the opposite of Israel's, where a credit card is the best security, while here it is the worst). I have just edited an article for a client, and shortly the children and I will plan a walk. I'm not going to the library yet, as I will need our lease to prove residency in order to take out library cards, and Ariel has that with him for the car buying. The children went to the comics shop yesterday and are quite happy not to be doing anything at the moment.

Today we had what must have been a very boring day for the boys (although Sl said "It wan't a terrible day" when I apologised). We started by splitting up - ADC went to apply for a Social Security number, and the rest of us went to Target. The boys were quite interested at first, but by three hours' later, they were very ready to leave. I had fun choosing towels and cereal bowls and cups, and at some point S asked permission to go to the books' section. A stayed with me most of the time, pushing the increasingly-loaded trolley, and was able to find a number of items that I hadn't seen (in retrospect, of course the bread board would be in the same aisle as the knives ...).

Once ADC joined us, we descended on the food court where the boys happily sampled a variety of Asian versions of chicken pieces, before deciding on Thai food. A is getting quite adventurous (he enjoyed Salvadorean food yesterday), while S still has to be convinced to try. Anyway, they liked what they chose, and on the way out of the mall, we stopped at a T-mobile store, as ADC wanted to change the Sim card in his iPad. We ended up discussing a possible plan for all four of us, as the iPad could be considered an extra phone line for the purposes of the plan: unlimited talk+text+data for $100 a month for 5 lines. That seems like a good price; we just have to decide on the actual models.

After getting home and a bit of unpacking, we walked in Takoma Park, past S's school, which is about twice as far away as his previous school was, but still within walking distance. We went past a number of interesting shops, including a bike shop - although the landlady left a number of bikes, one of which will suit A, none was tall enough for ADC - and eventually reached a branch of Bank of America. Opening an account was quite simple, although a very lengthy and tedious process. We rewarded ourselves with excellent gelato before walking home via the Metro station, so as to time the distance there taking the most direct route (20 minutes uphill, so probably a little less when going to the Metro).

Tomorrow afternoon is the boys' interview with the Montgomery County school board, at the unit for international pupils. They are looking forward to it, as are we, because then we can finally organise the major part of their lives. I will try to take them to join the local library tomorrow morning, unless it continues to rain, in which case we will relax at home and play games.