That Austin America

smaller than the ImpalaAs I was looking for pics of Mom, I found pictures of the Austin America (the one that I crunched). Something in the chronology is wrong here: the date on the edge of the print says 1970, but I would have been only 14 then. Did we really shoot pictures of me behind the wheel when I wasn’t legal? Also, I’m not sure when it was that we lived in the house on Roy Avenue, which you can see in the background. Was it 1970 or 1972? I remember hanging out in the semi-finished attic, reading David Copperfield for class, so maybe it was 1970.

Pics of Mom

I’ve been going through her old scrapbooks looking for interesting images of my mother. Her treatment of her prints was far from archival, so there’s a lot of noise in the scanned images.

happy gradThe tasteful sepia-toned photo was likely made for her high school yearbook. The soft gradient effect as the folds of her blouse shade into the background is something we haven’t seen for decades.

merry ChristmasThis was her last Christmas on her own before she was married. The sky’s the limit.

maybe in CaliforniaThis one is from 1983, with her father and sister-in-law. I’m not sure where it was taken; the background looks North Carolina-ish.

Looking to trade one of these

WATCH assignments for 2013 are out. I am scheduled for:

  • Shipwrecked, Margulies
  • Moon over Buffalo, Ludwig
  • A Streetcar Named Desire, Williams
  • Update: Cats, Webber and Eliot 9 to 5: The Musical, Parton and Resnick
  • Camelot, Lerner and Loewe
  • The Who’s Tommy, Townshend and McAnuff
  • Time Stands Still, Margulies
  • My Fair Lady, Lerner and Loewe and sort-of Shaw

and two TBDs.

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