Spring break

This week from Daytona, Florida.  We missed the big college spring break and a bigger bike week, but we just returned from a wonderful and wonderfully warm week with John and Marilyn in their new home outside Daytona.  It's a carefree, relaxed lifestyle they have built in a community with a pool and lots of stuff to do.  Free stuff too.  

We went down last Monday after Easter Sunday here with Annie and Dan Boyle.  We did our traditional Easter dinner at the Red Lion Inn (anyone want to join, come on up).  Annie had come up Thursday in a truck with Greg hauling furniture they were going to store for a while.  Greg left Saturday, and we took Annie to the train Sunday evening.  The Easter bunny came, ate some carrots and got into the Scotch before leaving a few goodies for Sunday morning.  Anyway it was a wonderful weekend, and nice to see Dan, who is teaching swimming in New London.  Mary also is volunteering to teach swimming, to non-swimmers.  Very rewarding to see people go from fear of the water to confidence.  

Since Mary had the week off from school, and my one class had been canceled, we decided to check out John and Marilyn's new digs.  We picked a great week, for the weather.  We never wore socks or long pants, shorts and tee-shirts the whole time.  We went to the beach three times and lost track of time on the boogie boards.  Great waves, long rides.  John and Marilyn were great hosts, taking us up to St. Augustine for one day to sight-see and showing us the local scene.  It was odd, being on vacation, since there we're retired, but we embraced being on vacation from retirement.  Mary went to the local YMCA to get in her laps a couple of times, and found it was the home pool for Ryan Lochey, the Olympic medal winner.  That's excitement.  

One of the reasons she went swimming was we kind of fell way off our diets, and happily so given our Lenten no-sweets fasting.  Marilyn even found a recipe for David Eyre's pancake and surprised us one morning.  We'll have to find it ourselves, cause it was a real treat.  Trivia - where did we live when we were making David Eyre's pancakes on Sunday evenings? 

We just go off the phone with Margaret who is in Lancaster PA with Andrew putting some final touches on their big day in a few weeks.  Joe was also traveling this past week, going back to St. Andrews for the first time since he graduated.  And, he has a new job, back in Washington n the China desk for Treasury.  He'll be returning in mid-June.  ​ 

Some of you may know that Paula has been taking painting classes. This Friday her work is going to be exhibited -- congratulations!  

I had to change the e-mail for posting since at least one of you noticed last week that our site had an unwelcome addition.  I'll send around the new e-mail for posting.

And happy birthday to Peter!  Wonderful.

That means it's almost the end of April and its showers, so we're looking forward to seeing a few flowers, without snow.

Love from over here.  

How do you know it's spring?

When it's not. So sad

You know spring is here when

There's so much to talk about that's related to the weather.  First, as much as I enjoy the other seasons, there's nothing like warm weather.  The photo this week is from Timmy in Mexico, who had gone camping with friends to a place called Mulege on the Pacific Ocean.  Looks nice.

You know spring is here when....

-- the lawn mower starts on the first try.

-- the barbecue starts up on the first try (burgers last night)

-- it's burn day (to burn all the brush from the previous year)

-- you clean out the garage.

-- you see the first crocuses

-- your friend in Maine says he still has a foot of snow on the ground.

All the above happened over the weekend.  How great is that?

How do you know spring is here?  Share on this blog by writing popsweeklyletter@blogger.com.

Some news: Joe ran into the London marathon this weekend; into, not in, as he was out for a morning run and ended up running into those hurting people running the marathon.  Margaret is finishing up some big projects for her coursework, as is Annie.  Annie has been arranging a bachelorette party for Margaret as well.  Mary swam in a meet yesterday, and has been helping the economy out, shopping for our trip to Florida to see John and Marilyn next week and for the wedding.  Me, I have crossed a couple of thresholds to finalize my thesis (defense and rough draft and revisions) but still can't say I am done.  Soon, I hope.  And, channeling John Boyle, if someone ever hears me talking about a PhD, I have a baseball bat that I want you to hit me over the head with.  Knock some sense into me.

This week we opened our website for our project to return to Gabon hopefully next January: encoredelapaix.org.  

Sports has been a big part of the past two weeks; heard from Andrew who was all over the March Madness with Daniel.  He almost won the Warren Buffet 1 billion dollars on his bracket, but I think he had Wisconsin beating UConn.  Go Huskies.  And baseball has started; it's too early to look at the standings, especially if you know your team is in last place.  Go Reds, please.

Here's a new one:  April 10 is officially Siblings Day.  Sorry David, Peter and Andrew, I totally missed that one, so happy belated siblings day.  

Speaking of siblings, David has been in the news quoted on a major fraud report.  And thanks for the updates from Germany Peter; sounds like a great trip.  And on Sunday, we'll see another sibling as Dan comes up to join us for our traditional Red Lion Inn dinner (fourth year!) along with Annie.

So, happy Easter everyone.  We made it.  Love from up here.

  

Oh, and ...

Here's a picture of me with my "house" at Canford -- I'm in the front row at the left in the lighter suit:

http://www.oc-photos.com/proddetail.asp?prod=ELR6906

my roommate and still good friend Paul Mitchell is on my right.

Here's a picture of the "Second IV" rugby team:

http://www.oc-photos.com/proddetail.asp?prod=ELR6826

I am at the far left front. My friend John Hoole is the captain; he did a year at Lawrenceville when I was a freshman at Princeton.

About those Mesopotamian sculptures in John's London post ...

John's post about London mentions some Mesopotamian sculptures, and thereby hangs a tale.

The school I attended in England, Canford, was housed in part in an older English manor house designed by Sir Charles Barry, the architect of the Houses of Parliament and also Highclere Manor, the site of Downton Abbey. (If you go to the school's website, you will see that the highest part of the back of the house is an octagonal tower; my study was at the top of that tower.)

Set at the end of a long cloister was the "tuck shop," English slang for a place where students can buy snacks, drinks, etc. On the walls of the shop were a number of plaster casts of Mesopotamian and Babylonian bas-reliefs, copies of sculptures collected by Lord and Lady Wimborne in the nineteenth century. (In one Downton Abbey episode, mention is made of a party hosted by lady Wimborne!) As they are wont to do, students had scribbled various graffiti on these casts. None of us knew or cared a whit about them.

Well, a few years later, a young assistant professor from Yale came to the school at the beginning of a quest to try to find out what had happened to the originals. He took a look at the casts, and – they weren't casts at all, but the ancient originals! Needless to say, the tuck shop was promptly relocated elsewhere and the sculptures carefully cleaned by a team from the British Museum. Over a period of several years, they were auctioned off, some to the British Museum and some to the Metropolitan in New York, and the abundant proceeds were used to pay for a large capital expansion of Canford, including the construction of several dormitories to house newly admitted girls.

Germanophiles

I have long wanted to go to Berlin and it was surely worth it. It's also one place where both of my children had visited before I did. We had a lovely week of short or no lines, decent but chilly weather and did a great deal of walking. This is my fifth time in Germany and I enjoy this country a lot.

One thing that is very striking about the country and its capital city is that you are never far from its twentieth century history. While the reasons for this are mostly obvious, it is also noteworthy that in contrast to the other genocidal regimes of those times, the Germans are pretty much alone in memorializing their bad deeds for all to see and ponder. There is evidence all over the City of the Nazi era: the so-called Holocaust Memorial and the Judisches (Jewish) Museum (both designed by American architects), and the one remaining example of Nazi monstrosity architecture, the Luftwaffe Ministry, which is now (ironically?) home to the Finance and Tax Ministry. All over the City, and you have to look for them, are "stumble stones," small bronze cobblestone shaped markers which memorialize the names and life dates of Jewish victims of the Holocaust, set into the pavements at their former homes. One historical exhibit says that 92% of the buildings in the City were destroyed or badly damaged in the war, so there is a lot of newer architecture. We spent most of one day at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp about a half hour north of the city, a very moving memorial to those victims, but also used as a prison camp by the Soviets for several years after the end of WW II.

I was less aware of and prepared for the extraordinary suffering and dislocation caused by the Cold War divisions and the Berlin Wall. Huge swaths of the City – apartments, offices, churches, cemeteries – were demolished and removed to make way for the 100 yard wide path of wall, dead-man's land, and barbed wire put up to surround West Berlin to stop the exodus of East Germans – nearly two million by the time the wall went up. All over Berlin are strips of paving stones set into streets and sidewalks to mark the path of the wall. Life behind the wall was grim: one in six East Germans either worked for or informed for the secret police, the Stasi.

So it is in one sense a shame that this relatively short period is such a blot on an otherwise fascinating history and ample supply of marvelous architecture and culture. We saw lots of both, including a day trip to Potsdam to visit the lavish "summer palaces" of the Kings of Prussia and later the German Emperors. (Germany did not become a unified country until 1871.) We saw some extraordinary antiquities and art in several museums.

It's a nice place to visit. You can walk to much of what you want to see, the U-Bahn (mostly underground) and S-Bahn (mostly elevated) system covers the entire city and suburbs, the people are friendly and most speak excellent English, and there are lots of very good restaurants. We had great dinners. I don't know why, but in comparison to other major European capitols, especially London and Paris, Berlin is awfully cheap. That makes it all the more worthwhile.