Official-dom

It's official, the outdoor furniture is stored away, and we are expecting our first frost this week.  No complaining, though, as it's been a pretty spectacular fall, with glorious sunny days.  In fact, the weather has been so good, it's hard to sit in a dark office and do school work.  

It's also official that I am now a member of the Pittsfield Historical Commission, and I have my first meeting tonight.  Will Garrison, the curator I worked with at Arrowhead this summer, is the chair of the commission, so he nominated me.  Mary and I went to the city council meeting where they approved the nomination (by unanimous vote - or maybe pro forma) and then I was sworn in and passed the on-line ethics course.  I am not sure all it entails, but I do remember submitting our own demolition request to the commission for a waiver before we could start work on this house.  

What else is official?  Okay, I gotta say it. It's official, our government is dysfunctional.  The Red Sox and the Cardinals are in the World Series, that's pretty official.  

Joe is officially in London now.  He left at the beginning of the shutdown.  We spoke to him last night, after two weeks of work.  He's working for the U.S. representative of a European bank.  The work sounds hard, as it's multilateral, meaning that he has to find common ground with other countries to get anything accomplished.  It used to be easier when we ran the world.  Of course, running our own country used to be easier.

Margaret, as I write, is on her way back from a weekend in Mexico.  She and Andrew had gone down for the wedding of one of her high school amigas.  We got a couple of photos, and it looked like she was having and fun and visiting a few of our old haunts.  

Annie had a weekend course, and she is busy with homework.  She still finds time for catching up with friends from Hamilton and Pomfret.  A nice benefit to being back in the U.S.

Birthdays this time of year are for Claire, Billy and Kathleen.  Wonderful.  

Mary is enjoying her new job, and likes the part-time status.  She got a little bored with Mr. Gotta-read-all-the-time and went down for a girls' weekend with Marj in Rhode Island for a night of giggling, I think.  

We talked to David who says their bathroom project is done, very quickly as well.  And, best of all, it looks nice.  

Anyone else with leaves?  Anyone need a leaf blower?  I found in our basement Pop's old leaf blower, the subject of his famous story about having a discussion with Mom over whether to buy one or continue to use his trusty rake.  He wanted the rake, Mom the leaf blower, and he ended his story by telling us he'd let us know how much the leaf blower cost. He told it better.

We actually have a natural leaf blower, the wind, which moves all our leaves into the woods. Pop's line about leaves - the family that leaves together, stays together.   

And on that note, love from over here.    

Hello Auden

The world stops with the birth of a family member.  Cares, worries, jobs, to-do lists, errands, they all come to a screeching halt.   Even baseball.  Wow.  Wonderful.  Congratulations to the Illinois clan. Everyone looks so happy, and Miles looks so big.  When did he grow up?  And Auden is beautiful.  And Jen looks strong and ready to go!  

Unfortunately, the government also came to a screeching halt.  But I have yet to read that this was due to Auden.  Margaret kept working, as her contract was already on last year's budget.  Joe was furloughed, and that had huge implications as he was set to move to London.  He was told one day that he should go to London, put a downpayment on an apartment and that he would get reimbursed.  Oh, and by the way, he would still be furloughed.  I thought he should call up his old St. Andrews classmates (Andrew and Kate) and stay with them, for 50 years.  Well, eventually all got sorted out, and he was packed out on Thursday and left for London on Saturday.   We heard he had arrived safely.  A new chapter, at least for the next 6 months.  Margaret and Andrew threw him a going away party Saturday night.

Births also remind us of birthdays.  Happy birthday Johanna, Janet and Paula.  David and Paula came to Pittsfield to spend her big day.  And Peter and Janet came up from NJ to join the festivities.   Mary baked a birthday.....strawberry rhubarb pie, and Peter made dinner the following night.  Thanks!  We brought out Grandma and Pop's photo albums from high school and college, and I even found my old honor cards from Far Hills Country Day.  Peter was a good sport.  

We had spent the day at Hancock Shaker Village for their fall country fair.  It was a beautiful, sunny, fall day and there were lots of exhibiters - Quilts, Shaker boxes, timber frame construction workshops, furniture.  Special.   Peter and I went for a hike into the state forest across the street, and the ladies went to Stockbridge.  At least one the guys went home for a nap.  ME!

David and Paula stayed over Sunday night and met up the next day for my tour at Arrowhead before heading back to Rochester.  Thanks!  

Cliff and Sheila were here this weekend, and we also went through photos, this time from scotland, reliving our adventures this summer.  Cliff also brought his chain saw, and we cut down about ten trees, and we have firewood for next year.  I have been splitting wood this summer, and we're ready for this winter.  And it's coming.  We turned on the heat this week, but we still have not had a frost so the garden continues to produce.  

We had many nice photos we wanted to put in the weekly letter, of Johnny surfing in Florida, of Paula's birthday, of Margaret outside the Bengals' bar for the patriots game, the woodpile, but this space was reserved for Auden.   

Love from this corner.  

Welcome Auden Leigh Jones

Congratulations to Jen and Bill for a healthy, happy girl.  

About the previous post

John's post talks about the ongoing restoration of the Berkshire Athaneum, and how it was designed by an architect named William A. Potter (no relation to my partner), who also designed an auditorium named Alexander Hall at Princeton. It looks like a close cousin of the Athaneum based on the photo in John's post.

Well, when I was an undergrad, and I'm told the rumor still makes the rounds today, the story was that a student had submitted the design of Alexander Hall as his senior thesis in Architecture, and that he had been failed and flunked out. The story went on that he had gone on to become a wealthy something or other and then gave the University a pot of money on the condition that it be used to build an auditorium according to the donor's specs. The donor hired an architect to act as the "front" and the building was built according to his F-grade senior thesis, and only when it was done did he reveal the true provenance of the design. Not true but it fueled a few late night bull sessions.

Equinox and Full Moon

Look out.  Weird things happen.  So far, not yet.  Fall means we wake up in the dark, it means the first frost this week, it means leaves and apples, it means breaking out the long sleeve shirts and sweaters.  What it should mean as well is that the cat should let us sleep in a little, that the grass should stop growing, that the garden should be done.  None of that has happened yet.  We are getting a bumper crop of tomatoes, after good crops of lettuce, beans, zucchini and cucumbers.  We even have some small peppers, and potatoes and carrots.  

As I sit down writing, Mary is on her way back from a weekend in DC, with Joe, Margaret, Andrew and Annie.  It sounded like a great time and I am sorry to have missed it.  I heard there was pizza, brunch, a walk through of the Mexican Cultural Institute.  When Mary called I actually did hear a fair amount of laughter in the background.  That's all good.

The big news from down there is it looks like Joe is moving.  To London.  How cool is that!  Book your rooms now.  It could happen fairly fast, but with all the paperwork, and then the the threat of government shutdown, the timing is up in the air.

I was unable to go because the UMass history class was coming to Pittsfield and the Berkshires.  I showed them around Herman Melville's home and then we traveled to Edith Wharton's Mount and the WEB Dubois Homesite.  I had not been to either of the other two, so it was nice to take in two more places. Still a lot to go.

Here's a weird thing, but I am not sure it was connected to the full moon.  I have turned a request to document a restoration project in Pittsfield into a Masters thesis.  The building being restored is the old Berkshire Athenaeum, the library, right on Park Square in the center of town.  My initial exploring into the background was the discovery that the architect who did the library (in 1876) was the same one (William A. Potter) who designed the Chancellor Green Library at Princeton.  Some of us grew up with the lore of that building, where Pop first met Grandma.  So, how does something like that happen?  The architect also did a few other buildings on the Princeton Campus - Alexander Hall and Witherspoon Hall, among others.

I guess another weird thing did happen.  We've been a little late renewing the registration of our cars.  Both had emission issues, and we had to get those fixed before the inspections.  When Mary finally took the Mitsubishi to the inspection, they told her she was driving a dangerous car, that the wheels could fall off, due to faulty "Tie-rods"?  Well, that happened the day before Mary was to drive to DC, so fortunately Johnny let us borrow his car (he's in Florida) and we got through the weekend.  Thank you!

Next weekend looks to be a fun one.  David called to say he and Paula were coming over for the Hancock Shaker Village fall fair.  Spontaneity is alive and well, as Peter and Janet  are also coming up.  More grist for the weekly letter!  David and Paula had been in NYC, for meetings but also went to see Jersey Boys which they report is well worth it.

Unfortunately, Andrew was unable to come, but they thought about it.  The good news is that next weekend is Bill and Jen's due date.  So, they are going to stay put.  Other news from Dundee comes by way of Facebook, with a photo of Daniel looking a little like a movie star.  

We love the change of seasons.  But we also love summer, and we'll be happy when you return.  Fast forward, and we can imagine all kinds of changes before then.  Wonderful.

Love from up here.  

Deja Vu all over again

Sunday we took Annie to New York City, and it seemed like a long time since we had been there.  In fact, it was just one month.  A lot happened in that interval, but driving into the city reminded us of heading down the first time to take Annie and a little worried about Johanna.  (She's on the rebound, back to work.)  Annie moved out of her apartment and into her dorm room, but grateful for Johanna putting her up for the month.  Annie took the train home Friday before Labor Day to pick up the rest of her stuff, and that explains our second trip down in a month.  Annie's dorm is new and very nice.  Greg came by to help unload the car, and then we went out for lunch before heading home.

Joe is back from Manila, and seems not to recommend that city for anyone's list of places to go.  Other places in the Philippines, perhaps, but he did not have time to go there.  Anyway, it took him a while to get over jet lag, but not that long to host a welcome home party for himself (we hear.)  

We got a message from Margaret this weekend from her perch at the Wolf Trap stage, where she and Andrew had gone for the Sound of Music sing-a-long.   Sounds like fun.  

Fun is also how we spent a couple of days in an off-the-grid part of Vermont for a few days this week.  I must say it feels very odd to be unreachable, even if for a couple of days.  Our friend Charlie has a rustic cabin on a lake about 10 minutes from Canada.  The only cell service is through Canada, actually.  We hiked and biked and canoed and swam, took naps, read and even pack in a nap or two.  Out canoeing one day I saw the biggest bird I have even seen, probably because it was perched on a tree fairly close to the ground.  We looked it up and it seems it was a young bald eagle.

Last weekend, Mary had stepped in to host her girl cousins for a picnic lunch.  As usual for these kinds of events, there are photos passed around, and the one here came with the assurance it was of Mary.  Her reaction?  "I have the same haircut!"  However, we later learned it was not of Mary at all, but of her brother Johnny!

One of Mary's games is to dream about what she wants to be i her next life.  This week she asked me after we dropped off Annie, if I were to go back to school, what would I want to take.  I reminded her I AM BACK IN SCHOOL!  Ugh!  And it starts this week.  But not just for me, as a few Dicksons are back in college: Annie, Margaret, Sean and Claire.  If I remember correctly, I will be coming up for air, probably around mid-December.    

We talked to David, who was coming over to Albany for a little work.  Unfortunately, that was when we were headed to Vermont.

The days are getting shorter, and we see leaves changing colors, and not just in northern Vermont.  We love the change of seasons, but we will miss summer.

Love from up here.  

It was a great trip

I'm a little overdue on passing along some observations about our trip to the Pacific Northwest, which remains one of my favorite regions. Now that the Johanna episode has largely passed, here they are.

First and foremost, many thanks to John and Mary and Janet's brother John and Roseanna and especially Sean for looking after Johanna while we debated whether to end the trip early.

Our cousin Hope Dean. If you don't get yourself out to Anacortes and the San Juan Islands with Hope as your elaborately prepared guide and teacher, you are definitely missing out on one of life's great experiences. She booked a ferry, drove to the ferry, drove all over San Juan Island and showed us the place, packed a great lunch of local berries, which we ate overlooking a harbor, and took us to two great dinner places. While I wish we all lived closer, this was certainly an unmatched experience. Did you know? British and American garrisons stationed on different parts of San Juan Island once got into a war in which the only casualty was a pig.

Our Canadian friends Bob and Merrilyn Mason, who live on a farm about an hour east of Vancouver. We stayed there for three days, our first visit since they hosted us at the 2010 Olympics. One night we had turkey and the next steaks, all raised on the premises.

Janet's cousin Christine Robbins and her husband Ed, with whom we had dinner near her house in Olympia one evening.

As you can tell, I like traveling where you get to see cousins and friends you don't get to see all that often. We did the same in Texas last spring.

Ferries. I could go out to this region for two weeks and spend the whole time riding ferries around all the bays and islands. It's as beautiful as any region can get. We had spectacular weather, almost all sunny and pleasantly warm.

Food. One problem when you travel is the frequent difficulty of finding healthy food. Not in the Pacific Northwest with its ample supplies of salmon and halibut. Janet gets the prize for the quip of the trip, one evening at a seafood dinner: "You don't see much tilapia around here."

On our last two visits to the Seattle-Tacoma Airport, we had delightful seafood dinners at a restaurant named Anthony's, which is a small chain of sorts. We had dinner at three of the restaurants in the area – Anacortes, with Hope, Olympia, with Christine, and the airport again.

Dickson family lore features another seafood restaurant named Ivar's Fish House. It's now a chain called Ivar's House Of Salmon. It gets pretty awful reviews. The only time we had anything at an Ivar's was waiting for a ferry: we got ice cream cones at an outdoor snack bar attached to the restaurant.

One reason for the plentiful supply of salmon is an extensive system of fish hatcheries. We visited one and it was fascinating; the salmon live for eighteen months to two years in tanks fed by water from the nearby stream before being released to go down to the ocean. Their sense of something like smell of the water brings them back to the same hatchery to spawn. While less than ten percent of naturally hatched salmon survive, ninety percent of those from the hatcheries survive.

Serendipity. Twice we decided to just drive out of our way into the mountains and got rewarded both times with stunning alpine panoramas. One drive to a high meadow (with plenty of snow still around) featured hair-raising hairpin turns with no guard rails. Janet just put her head in her lap.

Seattle. Great town, pretty compact to get around in. But homeless people abounded. And we had one miserable day trying to drive from Canada down to Olympia, through Seattle, which meant taking the only decent route, I-5, which was a parking lot. Six hours for a trip that was supposed to take three.

It was fun to reprise some of our old trip to the World's Fair. We rode the monorail out to the Space Needle. We went to the top. We saw perhaps the very finest movie I have ever seen, an IMAX production called The Flight Of The Butterflies, about the discovery that monarchs over the course of three generations every year, migrate to a remote part of Mexico and back, in what was the US Pavilion at that fair.

Despite Seattle's obvious prosperity, the region as a whole seems a bit down. In nearly every town of any size there are at least one and usually more than one (1) pawnshop, (2) payday loan shop and check cashing shop and (3) Goodwill store. For one memorable town, called Concrete for some reason not known to us, the most impressive thing was the elaborate and fancy sign at the town entrance, which belied the very downtrodden look of the place.

Driving around the Olympia Peninsula, we had decided to drive down to the Pacific coast and spend one night in a coastal town. At Cape Flattery, we saw a seal catch a fish and head for a cave to eat it. Farther down the coast, the area became fogged in. Over the course of five minutes driving from sun into fog, the thermometer on our rental car registered a drop of ten degrees; and then a rise of twelve degrees going back. Ocean Shores, the coastal town where we stayed, was a foggy, depressing town without a single decent restaurant.

Sometimes if seems as if airlines and car rental companies have a secret plan to make travel as supremely miserable and senseless as possible. It's too long to recount here why this trip reinforces this suspicion, but if it's true, they are doing a very fine job indeed.