I've been dreading today, since it means winter is coming and summer is over. But today we went on a hike to an old granite quarry in Becket and saw the early glimpses of color, and it was wonderful. Another place to check out on your next visit to the Berkshires. Fall is nice too, especially when the weather hits the mid 70s. Unfortunately, we had to turn on the heat this past week, when it dipped down into the 30s at night. On the other hand, still no frost, so our garden continues to produce - zucchini, cucumbers, tomatoes, potatoes, carrots. We bought our first lettuce since July this past week, and our bumper crop of beans this summer is now officially over.
We realized today that this has been our first weekend without visitors or travel since we went to see Andrew and Lur at Green Lake in June. (That was fun, by the way.) Exhale. We miss you all, though.
Last weekend we went to New York to fulfill a birthday gift to Mary to go see the play Wicked. It was superior. The last couple of musicals we had seen (Newsies and Avenue Q) were good, but not great. Wicked is. Highly recommended.
We drove down with a car load of stuff for Annie that she had stored here over the summer. We saw her new place (very nice) and then went out with her and Greg and Greg's mother at a Mexican restaurant that evening. The next morning we went to St. John the Divine for church, but also to see the Xu-Bing sculptures of Phoenix suspended from the cathedral ceiling. Those sculptures had been at MassMoca and they are magnificent. We're kind of Xu-Bing groupies now. But, we're also groupies of the Hungarian pastry shop across the street from the cathedral. Should I mention that the church service was as long as the one that Joe, Margaret and Annie remember, and we didn't quite make it to the end. We heard voices; they were the pastries calling us.
We understand that David was also in New York this week, for his long awaited hearing on insurance fraud - do I have that right? Hope it went well. The big news up in Fairport is the new cat/kitty.
Joe and Margaret helped each other move into their new places last weekend. No fun, but it sounds like everything went well and now they just have to unpack everything. By the way, rumor has it that Margaret and Andrew have a guest bedroom - without a bed, but soon to be remedied. We talked with them both a couple of times, gearing up for the end of October bash.
Speaking of gearing up, Mary and I have been busy getting ready for our trip to Gabon in January. Lots of activity and lots of hurdles still to cross. Not as much activity as my class I started teaching last week at Berkshire Community College for the local chapter of the life-long learning institute. It's on history and foreign relations.
Mary has started her tutoring of the Ghanaian high school boys, and has lots of stories, about their adaptation adventures here in Pittsfield. She still has the best stories from her teaching. And one more achievement for her - she found out this week she is the 11th best in the nation in breast stroke for her age group. OMG - and who knew that when I married her?
One last funny story. Last night, we went to the movies (Most Wanted Man, with Philip Seymour Hoffman, recommended) and afterwards we went to Baba Louie's for pizza dinner. We were on our way to our table when the waiter told us to go back since the table wasn't quite ready. In the door walks another couple, roughly our age. Mary asked them if they had just come from the movies, because she wanted to chat about the movie we just saw. They had, but they saw a different one, and as we talked the guy looked awfully familiar. I said to him, you're not from Pittsfield, are you? He admitted as much, and then I asked him if he was Peter DeShazo, a foreign service colleague of mine. I didn't know what I would say if he said he wasn't the guy, but it was Peter! He and his partner were out in Lenox for the weekend from Boston, and we ended up sharing a table and getting reacquainted. Not sure whether to put this in the small world category or the what would have happened if our table had been ready category.
One more funny story - Joe wrote this week, and said he saw a guy at the Department of Treasury with a Black Panthers t-shirt. Think about that for a minute.
Let's end with another photo from Cincinnati. Love from up here.
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