Last day

Aug. 6th, 2015 10:50 pm
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We're back from supper with J&L, with whom we spent much of the day. We got a relatively late start, as there were several errands that had to be done before we could go into San Francisco one last time - mailing books (it turns out that media rate does not apply to boxes, so that was $87 - but paying for overweight luggage and having to check both trolley suitcases would probably have come to more), finally getting the unlock codes from t-Mobile, and returning the car to the rental agency.

We finally met J&L at noon, and went for a walk through Chinatown. L didn't grow up there, but her parents still have close connections and apparently her father takes two buses to go shopping there almost every day. She attempted to haggle with the seller at a jade shop where A bought a small elephant to add to his collection, but he was too quick and paid without question. We had lunch at a place whose name I didn't catch, and whose clientele seemly evenly divided between Chinese and non-Chinese. It was very good. especially the deep-fried salt and pepper eggplant we had as a starter and the garlicky pea shoots. After that, L had to go back to work, and J took us to City Lights, Lawrence Ferlinghetti's bookstore, still a mainstay of radical San Francisco. There were some interesting titles there, but this time we weren't buying ... Everyone humoured me and went in to Britex Fabrics, an entire building that is one of the West Coast's meccas for anyone who sews. There is a floor of silks and woollens, another of cotton, linen and more, an entire floor devoted to buttons and trimmings of all kinds, and the fourth floor (which we didn't reach) is remnants and novelty fabrics. I was overwhelmed - I don't know how you can go into a shop like that with the intent to buy without a sewing plan. There is so much choice ... A picked out a couple of silks that he would like me to make into shorts for him; I said I would aim at making him a cotton shirt by S's bar mitzvah in two years' time, and see how we went from there.

At 3:30 we went back to our Airbnb, finished packing except for what we still needed to use before packing up, and went to Dr Comics & Mr Games, the local comics shop, so that S could get one last fix before going home. At 7:00 J came to fetch us for supper. During supper, L asked what the highlights of the year had been. It was a surprisingly difficult question to answer, but in no particular order, my top five were meeting Patricia Crone, learning to sew, visiting Savannah, cultivated flowers (the Hoyt Arboretum, the bonsais at the National Arboretum, Portland Rose Garden and the cherry blossoms in Washington), and the Tenement Museum in New York. The list could continue, but I need more time to reflect. I'll revisit the question in a month's time, everything is too close now.

In less than eleven hours a taxi will come to take us to the airport ... next post will be from Israel. See you on the other side!
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Yesterday was a relatively restful day, in that we did not spend all of it on our feet. Instead, we went for a scenic drive (there's something we haven't done in a while :-)) through Golden Gate Park, over the Golden Gate bridge and along route 1 to Stinson Beach. We had a bit of a late start, and saw the toll change from $6 to $4 while in line at the Bay Bridge at 10 a.m. On the way to the Golden Gate Park we saw some very different SF neighbourhoods from the ones we had seen by foot, like the millionaires' haven of Sea Cliff, where we saw the kind of crescent that in Bath has 18th-century row houses adorned here with mansions, and Richmond, which looked rather like a place we would enjoy living in.

The day was chilly and overcast, so we didn't spend too long in the park, as A and S wanted to cross the bridge as soon as possible. We overheard an Irish guide giving instructions to a group of cyclists who were going to cycle over the bridge and A really regretted having to be stuck inside a car! The view from the bridge was as spectacular as promised, and so was the view from the vista point on route 1. I had a bad attack of car-sickness going around all the twists and turns, both coming and going, to the extent that I believe that I made the right decision to skip soft-serve ice-cream at Stinson Beach. Everyone was very sorry for me, and I'm not sure why I was so badly affected while the boys - who also tend to car sickness - seemed perfectly fine. Part of it, I think, was that somehow I was never at the right angle for the win to blow in my face. That aside, Stinson Beach was a lovely day out: we paddled a bit, despite the cold and even drizzle, but were amazed at the people actually swimming! The Pacific is so much colder than the MEd, and the posters warning of rip tides and sharks were quite alarming. We found a nice little book shop, and more importantly at the moment, I found a post office, where I picked up boxes so we can send at least some of our books home via media mail and hopefully avoid paying overweight on our flight.

The day ended with more ice-cream, this time at Fenton's Creamery (should I be adding an ice-cream tag?), and the welcome news that our flight time had been changed: instead of leaving SFO at 8:30 with a 6 hour layover at JFK before taking off for Tel Aviv, we are now leaving at 13:20 and have only 2 hours' layover, arriving in Tel Aviv at the same time, but hopefully less complete wrecks.

Today we went back into the city, entering and leaving from the Montgomery Street BART station. We began by visiting a tea and chocolate shop we had seen from the cable car, called Spicely. We spent much longer than expected there, and did not walk out empty handed (despite our luggage concerns). If Spicely opened a cafe in Powell's bookstore in Portland, I think we would move in permanently. After that, we resumed walking up Montgomery Street to the Coit Tower. We didn't go up it, but looked at the view. We then took all the steps down through Grace Marchand Garden to Battery Street and began looking for lunch. That took longer than expected, and we ended up at The Planet, an organic cafe where the men each had a different kind of sandwich and I had an interesting tomato and watermelon salad. ADC and I had juices (and I remembered why I actually prefer them without food), and A expanded his horizons and had a smoothie. We then went to the Ferry Building marketplace, and bought artisanal bread, cheese and salami for an early supper tonight - ADC and the boys went with J to see Ant-Man. A and S enjoyed themselves greatly, especially S; ADC was distracted by the bad science involved and its inner inconsistencies.

I stayed home, began packing, and tried to get T-Mobile to unlock our phones so we can use them in Israel but was defeated due to not being ADC (in whose names all the lines are). This was after we'd made a special detour to a T-Mobile shop in town, having understood that the unlocking could be done there on the spot. I did make some progress, though, and as I used the chat, the agent assured me that we wouldn't need to give all the information again. I think chat helplines are brilliant: I'd tried calling, first, and ended up unsure if the agent had understood me properly, or I him. With chat, everything is much clearer and you can go back and check what you said much more easily.

Cousins

Aug. 4th, 2015 05:32 pm
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Much of Sunday and Monday have been spent with cousins. We essentially spent all of Sunday with ADC's cousins - as BART was not working, we stayed in Oakland. We walked around Lake Merritt, ate pizza from Arizmendi (the original of the pizza place that serves only one flavour in Inside Out), and visited the Oakland Museum of California, which is free on the first Sunday of the month. We spent nearly two hours there, only in the History hall. I had known very little of the history of California previously, and it was good to get the Spaniards, Mexicans and Americans sorted out. It was also very useful to know a bit about the development of San Francisco before going there the next day. At the very end of the hall was a small historiographical exhibition, explaining how curators worked and derived history from material objects. Monday was our first day in San Francisco itself. We used three kinds of transport: BART, the cable car and a historic street car (made in 1948 and originally from Cincinnati, according to the posters inside it). Our first stop was in the Mission district, where we met my father's first cousin W and her family for brunch at their home. I last saw W when I was about seven, and didn't remember her at all. I am not sure we would have met so easily at the BART station if I had not said in advance that I would be wearing my purple skirt. W and her husband T were very welcoming. We talked about all kinds of things, and mer their daughter M and her boyfriend J. M is about to begin medical school and J is a chef; I think we persuaded him to seriously consider visiting Israel (he isn't Jewish) by telling him about the goat cheeses made in the desert just beyond Omer. When we left, S asked them to come for his bar mitzvah in two years' time. After over two hours' having brunch, T was very happy to walk us around the upper Mission district, taking us to see Dolores Park and Mark Zuckerberg's house, and pointing out particular architectural features. I must say that the so-called Victorian style in San Francisco is lovely. After we said goodbye to T, we continued down Valencia St, looking at all the weird and wonderful shops, of which the weirdest was surely the steampunk emporium of Paxton Gate. The boys really wanted to buy things there, but we restrained them by pointing out the restrictions on importing animal parts from one country to another. After moving from Valencia to Mission St., we caught another BART to Powell St., where we wanted to get the cable car to Fisherman's Wharf. The line there was incredibly long, but we noticed that the cars were not full when they left - indicating that there were additional stations along the way. We walked just a short way up Powell to the next station, and were able to catch the next but one car, instead of the fifth or sixth car. It's very interesting how people see a line and join it, and very few think of ways to shorten their wait time. We saw a similar phenomenon at Ghirardelli Square, where you could get sundaes either at the Ghirardelli Marketplace (half empty and no queue when you approached the counter after walking past the displays of chocolate bars) or at the Ghirardelli Fountain (queue coming out of the store and around the block, for the same over-priced sundaes). Fisherman's Wharf itself was pleasant to walk along. The boys went down to the beach and paddled for a bit - I also saw small children in puffy coats! We were a bit tired by the time we finished wandering around that area, and took a street car back to Market St., where we wandered more in search of supper. It turned out that Market Street is very like Soho in London, in that the restaurants and the sleazy places are very close to each other. After half an hour, I had a meltdown, and forced ADC to book a table in an Indian restaurant, just to be sure that we ate somewhere with decent food at reasonable prices. On the way there, we found a jazz bistro called Les Joulins, which is where we ended up eating supper: very good food and even better music. It later turned out that this is one of the premier spots for live jazz in the city; as we had missed hearing a jazz quartet E and IB like very much in Seattle, this more than made up for it.
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Today was a long day, which can be summed up in two words: driving and eating. As our motel did not include breakfast, we decided to eat a few remaining things that we had bought for hikes, and to stop after the Avenue of the Giants for brunch. We set off just before 9 a.m., stopped for brunch two and a half hours' later, and at 3 p.m. really needed another break. We stopped at the closest place Google Maps suggested, Frozen Art in Santa Rosa, where we had some of the best ice-cream I've ever had. The owners are Mexican, and there were some very interesting and unusual flavours - I had a scoop of honey and lavender ice-cream, and another of rose petal. ADC had corn ice-cream! They also had paletas, or home-made popsicles, and there the flavours were even more interesting: cucumber and melon, pico de gallo, and pine-nut were just a few.

At 5 we finally reached our Airbnb in Oakland. This was our first time doing Airbnb, and we didn't really know what to expect - we were not expecting to get the run of an empty family home, including a hot tub! There are also two cats, that come with the house. The only downside is that there is almost no closet space: the family that lives here has gone on holiday for three weeks, and decided that this was better than getting a house sitter.

Finally, we went over to ADC's cousins for dinner. It was possibly the best Chinese takeout I've ever eaten - if all Chinese restaurants served food like Shan Dong does, I would have a better opinion of Chinese food for vegetarians.
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We reached California just before noon!

Today was yet another climate/vegetation zone - to the extent that ADC bought me a new plants and animals pamphlet, specifically for the redwood forests national and state parks. The size of the redwoods is truly amazing. Together with the enormous sword ferns growing on the forest floor, I felt as is I were Alice after drinking the "Drink Me" flask, as we walked along the Stout Grove loop (the grove was established as part of an effort prevent further logging of the redwoods in the 1920s and was named by Mrs Clara Stout in honour of her husband, a lumber baron).

We left Shady Coves this morning still in the throes of a heatwave, with added forest fires (the car was lightly coated with flakes of ash). When we reached Crescent City and the Pacific coast in the late afternoon, the temperature was 40 degrees Fahrenheit lower than they had been 24 hours earlier! No wonder there is constant fog flowing from the Pacific. To top the natural wonders of the day, we saw a small herd of elk - females and juvenile males - browsing at the side of the road just before leaving one of the sections of the state park.

Our original plan had been to stay at a motel in Eureka along US 101, but when we arrived, they were all very sleazy-looking, so we found a place a few blocks into town, where we got a suite, so we have our own room, and each boy has his own bed. We had dinner at a Mexican restaurant, the first good South American food we've had (the mediocre Salvadoran meal we had as our first lunch clearly had an long-term effect, albeit an unconscious one).
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We set off this morning for Crater Lake, hoping to escape the forecast heat. In fact, ADC was very worried that we might not be warmly enough dressed and told the children to expect to see snow on the ground (which they interpreted as "it might/will snow", it seems). In the event, there was no snow whatsoever - to the extent that the illustrated signs were false - and the weather was a pleasant low 20s Celsius. Once again, we were in a new plant zone, and on one walk ADC became quite frustrated by the number of birds he could hear, but not see, and was unable to identify. All the same, I filled over a page in my little notebook with flowers, birds, a rodent (golden-mantled squirrel) and a butterfly (variegated fritillary).

Crater Lake itself was an amazing sight - such deep blue water! It seems that even the geology in the New World is younger than what I am used to from Israel, measured in thousands rather than millions of years, but I know that that is an artefact of the volcanic Cascades range. We went on two shortish hikes - we are impossibly thorough in our nature observing, especially me when I'm not familiar with the flowers, so we didn't have time for more than that.

Once we left the park, we were in the middle of nowhere. We passed through a couple of motels at the side of the road just after 5 p.m., but it was two early to stop, and once we entered the Rogue River Gorge, there was nothing for more than an hour. We were just starting to get a bit concerned when we reached Shady Cove, where we found the Platonic ideal of an old-fashioned motel with a diner alongside it. The rooms were cheap enough that A and S could have a room to themselves (which turned out to have ants, so they were upgraded to s suite, thus they each have a room of their own), and at supper I had a butterscotch milkshake, which more than made up for the only vegetarian option being a mediocre garden burger.

It's still 32 degrees outside at 10 p.m. I am going to have a lovely cool shower then catch up on the SS/HG promptfest.
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Today was definitely a road trip. We set off quite early, heading for the Columbia River Gorge. Our first stop was at Vista House, built in the 1920s specifically for viewing the gorge at its finest. The very enthusiastic docent there gave us maps and lists of waterfalls to visit as we made our way along historic Route 30, one of the first roads ever built expressly to encourage motoring to natural beauty spots. ADC, who lived in Eugene for a year at the age of 10, remembered many of the names, and the description of the Bonneville fish hatchery, where the fish jump up a ladder ... he and his family probably made many short trips along the route we covered in a single day. We stopped at Bridal Veils to admire the waterfall, but were unable to stop anywhere else along Route 30 due to the lack of parking. And this was in the middle of the week!

As we drove along, we stopped at random places to look at the gorge and/or Mt Hood and for ADC to take pictures. Today was the beginning of a heatwave supposed to continue to the weekend, and we definitely felt temperatures we had not experienced since leaving the DC area. On the other hand, there was very little humidity, so we were able to spend nearly an hour walking in 36C heat. For the first time, it felt like summer should: neither the humidity of DC nor the chilliness of Washington. That was after we had crossed the Cascades into the rain shadow desert of central Oregon. The landscape changed dramatically almost immediately: from green to yellow, looking more and more like the Golan Heights with the basalt rocks and grazing beef cattle. As the temperatures rose, visibility improved, and when we came across a mountain identification plate at the crest of Mt Criterion, we were able to see, in addition to the easily identifiable Mt Hood, also Mt Adams - far away in Washington, Mt Jefferson and the Three Sisters.

We spent a lot of time in the car today, and heard a great deal of music, the "West Coast Playlist" that ADC had prepared in advance (including, as well as musicians from California and Seattle, anyone else who seemed to have been influenced/was mocking them). We are spending the night just beyond Bend in the kind of place that ADC has been looking for since our first trip in the USA: a small motel called Rodeway, cheap but clean, with very few frills, but with a room large enough for each boy to have his own bed. It is part of a chain, but not one we had come across before. We had supper at another place calling itself a tavern - much more of a drinking place than yesterday's, where the "small" pizzas were so big that neither boy could finish.

Portland

Jul. 28th, 2015 11:10 pm
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We had very high expectations of Portland, and it mostly lived up to them. Our vague plan back in DC was to go to Powell's bookshop, SockDreams' brick and mortar store and the Rose Garden. We managed to do two out of three, and several other things, too.

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

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

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

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

Tomorrow will be along day, as we set off to see the Columbia Gorge ...
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On Wednesday night, shortly after I wrote my last entry, once it became fully dark we went down to the docks. ASC and the boys went rowing, in the hopes of seeing bioluminescence, while I stayed on the docks and joined a group of students who were "night lighting": sending down an electric light into the water to see what might be attracted. I think that we were very lucky: a huge nereus worm swam around and around, there was a salmon migration and one swam into the net held by one of the students - I don't know who was more surprised, him or the salmon, and best of all, a harbor seal swam by really close: you could count each of his whiskers!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* Except for Romeo and Juliet, there Mercutio has the best lines.
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This has been an incredibly productive week - ADC even finished the first draft of his article, and only has the figures and drawings to do, so coming to Friday Harbor has been very worthwhile for him, and I have gone through half of the articles for the special issue on medicine that I am co-editing. While the two of us have been at work, the boys have done a lot of exploring and holiday homework: A has made a lot of progress catching up on geometry, while S has listened to an audiobook of White Fang (an abridged version, by OxfordOwl) and written a new ending of over 600 words. This was his summer homework from his school in Israel, so I'm pleased that's done.

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

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

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

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

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

My personal experience of geocaching is very fun and extremely fulfilling. it’s a very enjoyable extra to add to every hike. It was very exciting to find my first geocache with Shaul. While Mummy was in her knitting shop S and I went to look for an interesting geocache called “Quick Trail!”. We followed the directions in the description and what the GPS said was the right direction (it’s not a GPS like waze but a GPS for geocaching and tracking where you went and it has a compass and stuff) until we reached the middle of a short trail between two streets. After about 20 minutes of searching and S trying to persuade me the cache wasn’t there we found it between the bushes next to a broken cinder block (like the description said). When we opened the cache we signed our names, took a marble and put in a travel bug from a previous cache we didn’t actually find but just asked the people at the reception counter after looking for it outside and they pulled it out from under the table, so that’s not a real find after looking. S and I were very happy after finding “Quick Trail!” and kept talking about it until the end of the day.
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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.
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Today is our penultimate day in Takoma Park. The house is almost empty - everything we are shipping is in boxes, waiting to be containerized by the shippers, the unsuccessful yard sale items were picked up half an hour ago by Purple Heart (the Salvation Army could schedule pick-ups only from the 15th), and almost all our clothes etc. for the West Coast are already in suitcases, with the final packing to be done after the shippers come in a couple of hours. Tomorrow the house will be professionally cleaned, and we will set off for the last leg of our American adventure.

Yesterday we went to our last Smithsonian museum: the Museum of American History. It was a good choice for an afternoon's entertainment, but I think we were right to keep it low on our list of museums to go to. We went to three exhibitions, averaging an hour per exhibition: We started in the Food hall, where we saw Julia Child's kitchen, in which her TV shows were filmed. Ariel was very envious of all her copper pots. The description of how American food changed from 1950 to 2000 was very interesting, especially as it seems to me that many of the movements that took place in the US in the 1970s are now occurring in Israel. We continued to an exhibition on a house in Ipswich, MA, which was continuously occupied from its construction in the 1760s until 1963, which told the stories of four families that lived there - a Revolutionary merchant, an abolitionist and reformist family, an Irish washerwoman and her factory-worker daughter, and a grandmother and grandson during WWII. That last kitchen put the 1950s kitchens into a different perspective! We then moved to another wing of the museum, to exhibitions on transport. We started with maritime transport and the Atlantic world, and ended with the containerisation revolution of shipping in the 1960s and 70s, which moved the centre of West Coast shipping from San Francisco to Oakland.
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The Fourth of July fireworks, postponed from yesterday, were well worth the wait: nearly 20 minutes of some of the best fireworks I've ever seen. I don't know the names of all of them, but my favourites are the ones that explode in different colours, float down a bit, and then explode again in golden showers. I kept on thinking of the lines from Summer by Alice Low: "We like the things that summer brings. It brings fireworks, late at night, red and yellow, blue and white." It took me a long time to understand that the book was referring to the Fourth of July; as a little girl in South Africa, I didn't realise that the book was American.

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

Getting back to Harvey: I hadn't seen the movie before, but was familiar with the concept of a six-foot tall white rabbit from the story of the same name in the Winter 2011 SS/HG Exchange. I thought the movie was very sweet, and I particularly enjoyed the relationship between Mrs Simmons and Judge Gaffney. I also though that Elwood P. Dowd's line "Well, I've wrestled with reality for 35 years, Doctor, and I'm happy to state I finally won out over it" was absolutely brilliant.

In order to finish our subscription to Netflix DVDs, ADC and I watched another two films over the past few nights. Last night we watched The Last Wave and the previous two nights we watched Boyhood. It would be hard to find two more different films, I think. The Last Wave, directed by Peter Wier (whose surname is missing a D, I always feel), is a very creepy tale of how a white Australian lawyer become drawn into the Dreamtime when he agrees to help a group of Aborigines accused of murdering another in a drunken brawl - which turns out to be a ritual killing due to the latter committing sacrilege. Boyhood, on the other hand, is a slice-of-life filmed over twelve years with the same actors, which despite having ups and downs (particularly the mother's relationships), ends on a positive note. The conceit of the actors naturally aging, rather than being made up or using different actors for different ages, was very well executed, and everything was entirely believable.
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This week has gone by very fast. Not as much time was taken up with packing as I thought - but we did sort out a lot of stuff. The Lupus Foundation came this morning and took away four big bags of old clothes and shoes - amazing, considering how much we got rid of just over a year ago, when we left Israel.

What else happened this week? The boys and I had haircuts on Wednesday. S and I are quite happy, A not so much. He has a very clear idea of what he wants, but isn't able to communicate it quite so clearly to hairdressers, it seems ... The rest of us think he looks good, though. I spent a lot of time sewing - I completed a second pair of Tofino shorts that I began last week, and made a pair of pants from start to finish - with perfect seam matching at the crotch, if I say so myself. It was an interesting experience to sew with linen rather than cotton. I'm planning to wear these pants on the flight to Seattle next week, and I hope I don't discover that I should have lined them. I'll see what another round of laundering does, though.

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

Happy 4th of July to all American friends - I'm looking forward to seeing my first parade and fireworks.
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Today A had two birthday meals!! Breakfast was bacon and eggs, to general delight (except mine). As a vegetarian, I cannot understand my children's obsession with bacon. I personally gag at the smell of frying bacon (well, I dislike the smell of all frying meat, chicken and mince as well. I am fine with grilled/barbecued (in both senses) meat, though), but this is possibly a learned response due to my parents' dislike of it. They don't keep kosher and are quite happy to eat shellfish, but draw the line at pig products. Anyway, breakfast with bacon is a highlight of staying at hotels and B&Bs for them, and there was bacon in the freezer for some reason, that needed to be used.

On a relatively tight schedule as ADC had to get to a Pink Floyd meet-up, we set off for the farmer's market, making at detour for a final visit to House of Musical Traditions. ADC bought a pig (intending to use it during Animals, but unfortunately he was in such a hurry that he forgot to take it with him) and a gong (for use when we get home), and also two books for S's ukulele. Everything will be packed and sent, as the ukulele is not coming to the West Coast with us. By the time we finished there, I decided to go home and start getting lunch ready while the others went onto the market.

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

The fourth and final birthday meal was supper at DCNoodles, one of the first places we had eaten in Washington (before going to hear Ian Anderson at the Lincoln Theater back in October). A had asked for a Thai meal, and it was excellent. He had the same thing as he had the previous time, pad see eew with broccoli, while ADC had pad thai, S had drunken noodles (delicious but a bit too spicy, he said) and I had an excellent noodle soup, very similar to the bastard toom yum that we would make at home. After all that spicy food, we looked for an ice cream place and found Menchie's, one of growing number of self-serve frozen yogurt places. You begin by choosing up to four flavours of frozen yogurt, then there were a selection of of sweet crunchy things (like M&M's) to add, then a selection of fruit pies, and finally fudge/marshmallow/Reese's/Nutella topping. I tried to be as restrained as possible, but S really went to town. The price is by weight and his cup was more expensive than anyone else's. He did eat less of his main course than the rest of us, and he did finish it, so I can't really complain.
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I'm going to talk about Friday and Saturday together, because both were overshadowed by a major event: the car battery died when I set out for the supermarket on Friday morning. I think it must have died immediately, but as our road is a slope, I was able to coast downhill until a red light. When I then tried to turn right, the car definitely died and I was stuck. After a while a police car came by, and they were able to push me to a side street so I no longer blocked the road, but they couldn't jump start the car "because of the electronics in their own one." In additional to my general freaking out at what had happened, I was really flabbergasted by that - if the police can't jump start you, who will?! Anyway, after calming down a bit, and a few unsuccessful phone calls to friends and acquaintances (everyone was at work), I realised that I could hear a lawn mower. I walked towards the sound and very luckily, the gardener was kind enough to jump start me and I managed to make my way home. I then sent the boys out to buy milk and eggs - we had just enough fruit and vegetables to keep us through to Sunday, when we could go to the farmer's market.

All this happened while ADC, who is in charge of the car, was away, with his own problems - both his flight to Kansas and the flight back were delayed due to Tropical Storm/Tropical Depression Bill (a strangely innocuous name for such a disruptive piece of weather). I was too flustered at the time to understand when he told me that I just needed someone to come and change the car battery. I only worked this out at around midnight, at which point I e-mailed three companies. Only one responded overnight, I called them in the morning and at 10:30 on Saturday I had a functioning car again. It turned out that not only was the battery 3 years old and thus due to be replaced, but we had been doing everything possible to drain it passively: short infrequent trips, leaving outside in the cold and the heat ... All's well that ends well, and it didn't cost too much (at 4 p.m. on Saturday I got a quote from another of the companies that was $50 more).

On returning from the supermarket, I embarked on more baking: ADC was going to arrive home much later than planned, so I baked A's birthday cake. I have never baked so much in my life: cupcakes on Thursday, corn bread on Friday night (instead of challah, as I am not up to coping with yeast), and now a chocolate cake. ADC insisted on icing it when he returned home, and A was very pleased. His second birthday meal was aglio-olio pasta with chopped zucchini flowers (we will not be here for the fruit) and birthday cake. At that time he also got his main birthday present: a fancy hiking backpack, with integral water bag and air-flow back.
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On Thursday it was A's fourteenth birthday. He and I awokened at 7 a.m., when SR and LR called him from Israel on Skype to wish him happy birthday. After waiting an hour or so for S to wake up (I used the time to make brown sugar cupcakes for our breakfast), I gave A the present I had made him: hand warmers for next winter. S gave A a birthday card. Much to A's disgust, ADC was away in Kansas at a conference. This often happens; very unfortunately for A, he was born at the height of conference season, and one of his parents is almost always away on his actual birthday. This was the the reason for the four-day birthday celebrations, and why he only got his real present on the solstice.

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

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

We continued after the pandas to the bird house, which was a little underwhelming. I guess that seeing birds at Kruger Park spoils you for life. Or else the various birds - mostly South and North American - were just not that interesting, compared to birdwatching in nature anywhere. The latter was definitely A's opinion.

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

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

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

As they say at the end of the TV programmes the boys watch on Netflix, to be continued ...
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The weekend has been boiling hot, and spending Saturday on the Shenandoah River was a very good idea. We reached the rafting company at Front Royal around 10:30, and were on the river just after 11:00. We floated along until 15:30 - the Shenandoah was much wider and slower than the Jordan was when we went rafting there, and we got stuck at every "riffle" - places where rocks are high enough to cause very mildly choppy water, but it was still great fun. ADC and A did most of the rowing, and every so often we stopped at an island and had a dip in the lovely cool water. I am still trying to get the algae out of my shorts - admittedly I made them for this kind of activity, but still, I'd like them to look newish after only one wearing. You can float so well when wearing a life jacket! The boys insisted on racing the other people who had been in the shuttle to the rivers with us - two men who were camping with their six-year-old sons. Unsurprisingly, we reached our end point - 7 miles from the start - before them. On the way back, we decided to take a scenic detour along the Skyline Drive, in the Shenandoah Valley National Park. We had been there before, in early October, and this was our last chance to be there again. Unfortunately, I think we were too tired to appreciate it properly - and also the view, when we stopped at overlooks, was quite hazy.

After such an exhausting day, we had a much quieter time yesterday. ADC finally went to buy bagels for Sunday breakfast. He said that he was one of the few male customers not wearing a kippa, and that all the staff were clearly Orthodox Jews - which to my mind seemed a good indication of quality control, and indeed the bagels were delicious. I wonder why American bagels are so much softer than the ones Granny and Grandpa used to make - a difference between Polish and Lithuanian traditions, perhaps? We then slowly wended our way to the weekly farmers' market and listened to a few acts at the Takoma Park Jazz Festival. It was incredibly hot and humid - Tel Aviv seemed cool and dry in comparison - so we didn't stay as long as we might have. We ended the day by watching Flash Gordon, which A had been very eager to watch due to the soundtrack being by Queen. I saw sometime in my childhood, but remembered very little of it. It was quite hilariously campy and bad, with enough woodenness to furnish a carpenter in every scene with Flash and Dale Arden, on the one hand, and Brian Blessed chewing all scenery he came within point blank range of: "Hand me the remote control!!" sounded just like "Release the Kraken!!"
Today was the first day of the summer holidays. The boys and I have begun packing - in the sense that they went through all their school stuff, and there is now a pile of paper almost 23 cm high waiting to be recycled - and I began inventorying which of the things we bought for the house we plan to send in a lift and which we plan to leave behind as it's not worth sending them, when you factor in the cost of shipping and customs. Tomorrow a rep of one of the shipping companies I contacted is coming to do an in-home survey; another company estimated (based on my very preliminary listing) that we had about 5 cubic metres to ship. I think the cost of shipping will come to almost equal the value of the things that we are shipping, and that's before customs is calculated. The state really wants you to buy things in Israel, rather than importing them personally!
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Today was the last day of elementary and middle school in Mayland. Since A has finished 8th grade and S has finished 5th grade, today was devoted to their promotion ceremonies - a new usage to me, BTW. I had not previously run across "promotion" in this sense. I would have just said "finished primary school" and/or "finished junior high".

Anyway, we split up, with ADC attending A's ceremony (12:30-14:00) and me attending S's (11:30-12:30, clap-out at 15:15). It sounds as if both ceremonies were very similar: the children marched in, speeches by the principal and student representatives, a musical number, prizes, names of each student read by homeroom teacher. A's ceremony, from his report, was of course more elaborate, with a PowerPoint with pictures of all the children and a short film with all the teachers wishing them luck. The TPMS principal apparently spent her day going to various promotion ceremonies, elementary schools in the morning and the middle school in the afternoon. S received his certificate in his classroom. While everyone was milling around before the children had a picnic lunch (parents were sent home and returned to clap the mortarboard-wearing children out of school at the end of the day), I took pictures of S and his teacher and best friends on my cell phone. I hope they are viewable. ADC said the same for his pictures of A's ceremony, taken on a real camera and by a far better photographer.

On another note entirely, I spent my free minutes today and yesterday crafting: I finally finished my Tofino shorts, which I decided to lengthen by adding a cuff (just in time to go rafting tomorrow), and I swatched my next Miette cardigan. It seemed oddly appropriate to be knitting while watching Brazil. Very excitingly, when I logged into Ravelry, I saw I had a message from the designer of the baby blanket I knitted for my latest neice, asking permission to feature my project on the pattern's main page. Admittedly, I knitted the blanket in December, but only added the pictures (again, ADC must be credited) a few days ago. What a compliment! 
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First thing Sunday morning, ADC mowed the lawn. He did a much better job than A does, a combination of greater weight and power brought to bear when pushing (although it is an electric lawnmower) and greater motivation (I think no one could be less motivated than A: he liked the idea of mowing the lawn - similarly to the idea of shoveling snow - much more than he did the reality). This set the stage for a horticulturally-focused day.

Our first visit to the National Arboretum was the day after a snowstorm, and we decided already then to returm in the spring. As we are now almost at the summer solstice, and running out of time left to visit, we decided to go yesterday, after a rainy week that ended in sunshine and humidity. Sadly, once again many flowers were not yet blooming - although many other were already past their peak. It seemed as if what would have been the best areas to look at are now out of bounds due to the nesting bald eagles, which is a great pity, to my mind. However, we did see the late-blooming satsuki azaleas, and found a Japanese-style pond, with godfish, water-lilies in bloom, and most excitingly, several frogs, one of them almost on a lily-pad, in best Princess and the Frog style. The herb garden was at one of its peaks, too, and I really enjoyed that: there was a whole row of mints in pots, and you could rub the leaves and smell the differences as you walked along. It was fun seeing all the familar names and shapes in the industrial and colonial sections, as well as noting which plants appeared again and again: seasonings and bases for alcoholic drinks :)

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