Month: December 2012

Family albums

I’ve been trying to bring a little order to the scattered family history notes and photo albums that my mother had pulled together. She had done some good work, assembling scrapbooks with clippings and ephemera (she has my grandfather’s draft card and her own press passes) and neatly typewriting captions for the images. Unfortunately, more recently, she started reworking some of her materials, generally not for the better. Sometimes I trust her research on how this Boyer was related to that one, and sometimes I recognize her newer handwriting and discount those notes.

Friends and WilliamsesThis photo, which I can date on internal evidence to about 1918, of her mother’s side of the family, is fairly sound. In that year, my grandmother Bessie Williams (second from the left) was 14. I don’t know whether cousin Vernon Friend (in doughboy uniform) was about to deploy to Europe or whether he had returned for this picture. Mom’s notes say that he married a Lula, and that’s all I know about him. The smallest child, in the low-maintenance pinafore, is great uncle Wilson. Great2 grandfather John Childers Friend, with the impressive beard, is first on the left.

some SullenbergersEven more valuable is this image from about 1909 of my maternal grandfather’s family. The Sullenbergers were somewhat camera shy, and didn’t get together for family reunions the way the Williamses did. Grandpa was born in the Josie Hill neighborhood of Piqua, so perhaps the unpainted house behind them was located there. The patriarch is Phillip Henry Sheridan Sullenberger, born in 1865 and no doubt named for the Civil War general who grew up in Somerset, Ohio and commanded cavalry in the Army of the Potomac. I’m glad that I inherited Phillip’s nose rather than his male pattern baldness. The other adults are Phillip’s wife, Clara Bagley Sullenberger (at right) and Phillip’s mother Mary (we don’t have a maiden name for her). My grandfather is the towheaded lad between his father and mother; maybe he’s scowling because of the cigar that Phillip has taken out his mouth long enough to pose for the photographer.

The year in review, 2012

Posts were a bit sparser this year.

The first sentence (more or less) of the first post of each month from this blog:

  • 1 January: Skunk Cabbage (Symplocarpus foetidus) is emerging from the wet spots along the Glade in Reston.
  • 4 February: I’ve been intending to do a more thorough job of documenting the various bus stop signs around the area from the numerous jurisdictions and authorities.
  • 4 March: Both of the new boxes that we mounted in mid-February are home to clutches of Hooded Merganser eggs.
  • 1 April: I do expect that this will be the only series of posts with three colons in the title.
  • 1 May: Genie Baskir gives the thumbs-up for August: Osage County at ShowBizRadio.
  • 7 June: What is this? we ask ourselves ten minutes into Mr. Burns, a post-electric play.
  • 4 July: Hey, Leta, you’re on the TV!
  • 6 August: “Above all, the student should cultivate the scientific attitude of mind, and he should never believe in his infallibility.”
  • 3 September: Kathleen Akerley premieres another of her enjoyable head-scratchers.
  • 3 October: Almost ideal weather conditions (Friday’s passing cold front with storms, Saturday’s northwest winds) set up a great weekend birding in Cape May with a group led by Mark Garland.
  • 6 November: Leta and I took a quick road trip to Ohio last week.
  • 1 December: Sonja Ahlers <3 Heart.

The year in review, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, and 2007.

My year in hikes and field trips, 2012

The trips were fairly close to home this year, but I checked Dolly Sods off my bucket list.

Lots of activity at Huntley Meadows Park this year, mounting, pulling, and planting.

2011’s list. 2010’s list. 2009’s list. 2008’s list.

Good causes, one and all

These are the organizations and projects to which I gave coin (generally tax-deductible), property, and/or effort in 2012. Please join me in supporting their work.

My year in cities, 2012

Yet more traveling this year, visiting family and plants. Overnight stays in 2012:

2011’s list. 2010’s list. 2009’s list. 2008’s list. 2007’s list. 2006’s list. 2005’s list.

Actors behaving badly: 1

Shame on Miriam Margolyes, touring a one-woman show of women from Dickens, who publicly berated an audience member for not joining the standing ovation at her curtain call at a performance in Vancouver. Ms. M., where I grew up, a standing ovation has to be earned—indeed, applause has to be earned—and it’s the height of hamminess to expect it just for showing up and doing your show.

ᔥ ArtsJournal

At the park: 52

getting readyI made two trips to Huntley Meadows Park last weekend. On Sunday, I worked with the RMV team to plant (mostly) trees and shrubs (mostly) around the new outdoor classroom, just across the entrance trail from the visitors’ center. I planted two viburnums, two beeches, a blueberry bush, and a Christmas Fern.

Saturday I got an update from park staff on the planned wetland restoration project, which has been scheduled to start construction Real Soon Now for several seasons. The new plans call for a composite design for the dam, anchored by interlocking panels of vinyl sheet piling, with riprap on the downsteam face and a gentle earthen slope on the upstream face. This idea was suggested by National Wildlife Refuge managers, who know something about engineering water impoundments. To deceive the beavers (a beaver never met a course of running water that he didn’t want to dam), the design uses Clemson water levelers to collect the water that will flow through the structure.

Soil science word of the day: it’s the lean clay layer (clay with low plasticity) lying just under the surface that is responsible for keeping the wetland a wetland. If this layer were to be disrupted, it wouldn’t matter how clever the design of the dam was.

And no props

David Shulman attends a performance of Drama of the Ring, a work in the repertory of the ancient and endangered Kudiyattam theater of Kerala. Each performance is a giga-marathon of drumming, dance, music, and improvisation.

As in other Kudiyattam performaces, the opening moments of the Drama of the Ring are taken up by the purappadu, or “setting out,” in which the solitary actor—to the accompaniment of Sanskrit verses of benediction sung by the Nangyar—uses an abstract progression of pure, stylized movements to generate an entire world, complete in all its parts, from Brahma the Creator down to the tiniest ants and blades of grass. It can take a few hours.

ᔥ languagehat

Postcards from Ohio: 6

Our last stop in the Dayton metro was at Oakwood High School, a rather fine institution from which I was graduated in 1974.

There is nothing new under the sun, and a young person with access to an automobile will find a way to use it for mischief. And so it came to pass in those days, that after an evening with my nerdy friends of playing Risk and usually intoxicated by nothing stronger than diet soda, we would find ourselves on the streets of this lovely, leafy suburb in my mother’s blue Austin America (an underpowered MG with a singularly peculiar suspension system).

one endAnd lo, the people saw that the faculty parking lot along the south side of the high school gave onto a sidewalk with no curb.

the other endAnd my friends said, behold, the other end of this sidewalk ends with a curb cut on the Avenue of Schantz, near the playing fields. Let us rejoice in this attractive nuisance, and drive your vehicle from the parking lot directly into the Avenue of Schantz, without impediment.

And so it was done, and we drove the America down the sidewalk (think of Jason Bourne being chased through the streets of Paris in his Mini Cooper, but at vastly reduced speeds), and it was good.

That is, until some obstacle loomed on the passenger’s side and put a big crimp in the door. (Was it that big red oak that you can see in the first image? I seem to remember some sort of stanchion.) I achieved a new level of creative prevarication when I explained to my mother that the damage wasn’t my fault. (It was only last year, when she was zonked on hospital sedatives, that I came clean to my mother. But I think she’d figured it out a long time ago.)

Mom drove the America for another year or so, into my first year of college at least, until the hydrolastic suspension leaked and the car developed a severe list.

In any event, the sidewalk connection and the curb cut are still there, almost 40 years later. The ADA-compliant bumpy bits are the only change.