Friday, May 21, 2010

Poem for Friday and Great Falls

Young and Old
By Charles Kingsley


When all the world is young, lad,
  And all the trees are green;
And every goose a swan, lad,
  And every lass a queen;
Then hey for boot and horse, lad,
  And round the world away;
Young blood must have its course, lad,
  And every dog his day.

When all the world is old, lad,
  And all the trees are brown;
And all the sport is stale, lad,
  And all the wheels run down:
Creep home, and take your place there,
  The spent and maimed among:
God grant you find one face there
  You loved when all was young.

--------

I'm boring this week, I know -- the highlights of my day were a trip to AC Moore for two $1.99 beads and taking younger son to tennis, for which we were almost late because both of us forgot it was Thursday and then we hit construction traffic right in front of the park where the tennis facility is. My only other excitement was having someone on Superpoke Pets trade me the Zoo Wonderland habitat, which has penguins! (Adam already had one, naturally.) In real zoo news, a lion cub has been born at the National Zoo, the first in more than two decades. And I found out from my in-laws that Bernard Cornwell was the commencement speaker at the graduation we missed last weekend, sigh!

We watched FlashForward, which I am going to miss, but these days when shows I like get axed, I actually think of it as a good thing; I would so much rather consider a show as never having reached its potential, like Journeyman or Pushing Daisies, than as having lasted a season or more too long while wrecking everything I liked about it, like Voyager or La Femme Nikita. (Someone will have to tell me whether Lost falls into that category.) I thought Joseph Fiennes had his best scene of the series with the girl who plays Charlie, but then the writers threw it out with the fight and the drinking scene -- spoilers -- for weeks his goal has been to change the destiny of the world even at the cost of his own happiness, all he had to do was throw the flask away. I do think Olivia will be happier with Lloyd.

Then we watched Next Gen's "Lessons," which is a tough episode for (speaking of Voyager) a recovered J/Cer -- this is the season when Trek decided to do relationships, but instead of pairing up the couples they'd teased all along, they threw Troi with Worf and Picard with someone he'd never met before. I have no objection to the former since I know Riker and Troi eventually find their way back to each other, and I never had any emotional investment in P/C -- I liked Beverly better without any "Jean-Luc, I have something to tell you" moments -- but it's so typically juvenile of the writers to think viewers wanted a one-shot LaForge femme fatale story and a there-and-gone Picard romance rather than something long-term and substantive. Not that I'm bitter about where things went on Voyager or anything.


A great blue heron on the rocks in the Potomac River at Great Falls last weekend.


We saw several of them fishing in and flying over the falls.


These turtles were in the C&O Canal nearby.


There's a new covered bridge for the Billy Goat Trail where it crosses the canal...


...and very old lockhouses still standing by the locks, though some of them are mostly ruins now.


We rescued two millipedes from the towpath and put them in the brush.


And I'm sure I mentioned that we saw goslings!


A great big gaggle of them, though only two adults seemed to be supervising.

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