Oh, I think I need to try me some of these: Unclutterer sings the praises of transparent Post-its.

(Link via Lifehacker.)

First hot day of the summer, so what better time for the ceremonial first seasonal exposure of my lower limbs to sunlight? I pointed my car west on I-66, heard the whine of the pavement as I headed for Prince William County and higher elevations beyond.

I hiked the easy-rated Lewis Falls-Blackrock circuit (#19 in the current PATC guide), 4-plus miles with side trips. My notes say that the last time I took this loop was July, 1998. I didn’t record a time then, but this time I went around in 2:15. I measured 900-foot elevation change, so I got my workout.

It’s a fairly popular hike for a summer holiday weekend. Like many of the hikes in the park, it’s deceptive in that you’re walking downhill to get to the attraction (in this case, the little gem of Lewis Falls with its tiny rainbow in the spray). You may be facing a tough climb to get back to your car, as one middle-aged urbanite whom I met on her way back had discovered, to her pain.

…Margaret realized the chaotic nature of our daily life, and its difference from the orderly sequence that has been fabricated by historians. Actual life is full of false clues and signposts that lead nowhere. With infinite effort we nerve ourselves for a crisis that never comes. The most successful career must show a waste of strength that might have removed mountains, and the most unsuccessful is not that of the man who is taken unprepared, but of him who has prepared and is never taken. On a tragedy of that kind our national morality is duly silent. It assumes that preparation against danger is in itself a good, and that men, like nations, are the better for staggering through life fully armed. The tragedy of preparedness has scarcely been handled, save by the Greeks. Life is indeed dangerous, but not in the way morality would have us believe. It is indeed unmanageable, but the essence of it is not a battle. It is unmanageable because it is a romance, and its essence is romantic beauty.

—E.M. Forster, Howards End, chap. 12

Tuesday evening, Leta and I took in the game at the Nationals’ new ballpark. A well-pitched game that ended, alas, with a 1-0 loss to the Phillies.

We hard fairly good seats, down the right field line, so I craned over my shoulder to see the new, very sharp scoreboard. Too bad that it wasn’t put to better use for some of the replays: many of us missed a good look at a close play at the plate.

The new stadium hasn’t acquired much local character yet, but I do like the formstone used for the backstop. Local materials, y’know. The main promenade around the park is at street level, which makes for easy circulation, and I like the local restaurants with food outlets at the park. Next time I’ll get there early enough to make it through the line for Ben’s Chili Bowl as well as to watch BP.

From David Remnick’s profile of jazz expert Phil Schaap, DJ for Columbia University’s WKCR:

“…I was out on a Hundred and Fourteenth Street and I could hear ["Scrapple from the Apple"] playing from the buildings, from the open windows. That was a turning point in the station’s history. The insight was that Charlie Parker was at least tolerable to all people who liked jazz. If you idolized King Oliver, you could tolerate Charlie Parker, and if you think jazz begins with John Coltrane playing ‘Ascension’ you can still listen to Bird, too.”

Artomatic 2008 is more spacious and generally comfortable than its predecessor events, spanning nine floors of Capital Plaza I, none of them built out. It was quite pleasant to use the office tower to get a 360° look at the burgeoning neighborhood around the New York Avenue Metro station. The entire block between the station and the tower is a hole in the ground right now.

Added corporate sponsorship provided for waystations on most of the floors—a needed rest for most of us, because there is a lot to see. A surprising amount of photography (well, maybe not, digital imaging is inexpensive), almost all of it worth a look.

There were several opportunities to step into a booth for a special experience: a camera obscura, a panorama of a Norway mountaintop, a documentary video installation from Galicia in western Ukraine, a nature-themed corner from Joanna Cornell promoting the Neighborhood Ecological Stewardship Training program.

I stopped the longest for a suite of introspective, biomorphic abstractions by Gail Vollrath. I also enjoyed a flock of crows well-observed and sculpted by Janet Gohres.

The brood of Tufted Titmouse has not left the nest in box #5 yet. The boxes along lower Barnyard Run continue to be the most popular: we have second clutches (all Wood Duck) started in three of the boxes, and all seven of them have been occupied at least once this year.


We had reports of Virginia Rail (Rallus limicola) at a certain spot along the boardwalk where the vegeation opens up and the birds have to break cover, so we stopped to check. About fifteen minutes of waiting and listening was rewarded with good looks at one of two birds. The speculation is that nesting is in progress.

Dr. Katharina (Katia) Engelhardt of the University of Maryland spoke to the Friends of Dyke Marsh about her research at the wetland and the prospects for its restoration. Dyke Marsh constitutes about 200 hectares of tidal freshwater marsh on the west bank of the Potomac River, just south of Alexandria, Va. and the Beltway. The marsh, as a wildlife preserve, is part of the George Washington Memorial Parkway lands, administered by the National Park Service. The NPS is considering acting on long-discussed restoration and management plans for Dyke Marsh.

Over the decades, parts of the marsh have been overtaken by the river. Some of the causes are global—worldwide sea level has been rising at the rate of 3.1mm/year and the Chesapeake Bay at twice that rate—and some are, we suspect, local. A bridge over Hunting Creek, just upstream of the marsh, as well as other development and urbanization, has changed siltation patterns, perhaps starving the marsh of sediment. Dr. Engelhardt stressed that very little good erosion data were available for the area, so we don’t really know how accretion nets out against sea level changes.

Dr. Engelhardt’s research turned up a couple of surprises. Though much of the ground lies in the range of elevations from 0.3m to 0.8m, there is much bumpiness in the terrain. Tidal channels, rather than following a hierarchical flow from lower to higher orders, instead form a complex web of cross-linked flows. Her focus on the botany was limited to the emergent herbaceous vegetation. Even though tidal freshwater wetlands tend to be species-poor, nevertheless she and her research students found representatives of eleven taxa, annual and perennial, including spatter dock, wild rice, and cattails. (Invasives tend to be more prevalent in relative upland of the woods, which was not the focus of her studies.)

Three restoration scenarios were outlined:

• Aggressive pumping and dredging to restore the marsh to its full extent from the first half of the twentieth century.
• Partial restoration, perhaps in a shallow area below Hog Island, which was designated as a demonstration area in a 1977 study, with the possibility of further efforts.
• Shoreline erosion control only.

Whatever we do, Dr. Engelhardt said, we must make sure that the effort is sustainable, that is, that future natural accretion is sufficient to maintain the marsh.

Leta and I have our seats reserved for this year’s Contemporary American Theater Festival, 9 July through 3 August. I’ll be posting reviews of that we see, but since our dates are late in the run, I’m posting now to spread the word. We’re especially looking forward to Neil LaBute’s monologue Wrecks and the completion of Richard Dresser’s Happiness Trilogy, A View from the Harbor.

Via Bookslut: a Chris Ware animation of a story from This American Life. How cool is that?!