Greetings from BWI

I was expecting to have a pretty miserable Saturday -- I don't love flying even under the best of circumstances, when I'm traveling somewhere I've always wanted to go -- but an unexpectedly nice thing happened when we arrived at SeaTac for our flight east for Paul's mother's funeral: we discovered that we were on an Honor Flight with veterans from all the US armed forces being flown to see the memorials in DC. The oldest was a female World War II veteran in her late 90s, and there were veterans from the wars in Korea and Vietnam too, as well as family members and more recent military officers escorting them. 

This came with some perks for everyone on the plane, since Alaska provided cheese and fruit plates plus drinks (even alcohol) free to all of us, and we got to enjoy the plane decorations, the water cannon salute, and the applause when we disembarked. But it would have been wonderful just to witness the gathering before we boarded, the camaraderie among the soldiers and sailors, and the flight attendants -- some of whom were veterans as well -- dressed in retro uniforms and reading history chapters over the plane's PA system. We landed on time at BWI and now we're at a hotel in Hanover, watching the Maryland-Virginia game.

Greetings from Baltimore

Saturday night quickie after a lovely day in Baltimore! We started at the Rawlings Conservatory, which is having its annual poinsettia show and also has a train display with a Jurassic Park section. Then we went to Denise's house, ate some of her neighbor's vegan Christmas cookies, and went with her to the Inner Harbor's German Christmas Market. There was a long line to get into the paid section of the market, so we just shopped at the outside kiosks, where we found everything from Turkish lanterns to New Age candles to homemade dog treats to imported mittens and hats, plus lots of food. 

We hung out at Denise's house for another hour and caught Community Day Pokemon before heading to the Maryland Zoo's Zoo Lights, which had everything from historic cages with light animals to live music and carolers to a train ride past more light displays. Very few animals were out in the dark and the cold -- some of the penguins hadn't gone inside, and the pelicans and cormorants (plus the Canada geese and deer that sneak into the zoo) -- but Santa Claus was, and there was free hot chocolate. When we got home, we watched the Buffalo-Miami game that started with a snowball fight and ended in a snowstorm! 

 

Greetings from Google

Google Drive has spent the entire evening making me uninstall Backup & Sync in favor of the new Google Drive, which does not sync the same way or with the same folders as before, and it has made both my desktop and laptop work at a crawl, so I am behind on everything and shall keep this brief. It was a quiet day though that is not a complaint: the weather was gorgeous, my arm and armpit are a little sore, the Chauvin verdict was a monumental relief though the whole situation is also unspeakably sad. 

We took a late walk after watching the verdict and some of the initial reaction, had enchiladas for dinner, and watched Supergirl and an episode of The Irregulars in between baseball innings. Here are some photos from around Baltimore on the way to and from the zoo, including a St. Vincent de Paul Church (of which I am fond because I taught at DePaul in Chicago), a George Washington statue with public commentary, and some crab apples and gulls around the reservoir in Druid Hill Park: 

Poem for Tuesday and Meadowside Raptors

The Eagle
By Alfred, Lord Tennyson

He clasps the crag with crooked hands;
Close to the sun in lonely lands,
Ring'd with the azure world, he stands.

The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;
He watches from his mountain walls,
And like a thunderbolt he falls.

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Monday was very hot and fairly uneventful. There was lightning in the area but we got no storm here, so we took a long walk in the evening when it finally cooled off. There was a terrible gas explosion in Baltimore, so I watched the news for a while as I did various chores. As I post old photos, I keep finding things I need to look up, so today it was Newport geography and history.

We watched two episodes of Antiques Roadshow (I don't think I have any valuable treasures in this house) and some of the Nationals' big victory over the Mets (which was a relief to me after the Orioles games, though I'm worried about Doolittle). Here are some of the raptors at Meadowside Nature Center, though we couldn't get very close since the enclosures are closed because of coronavirus:

Poem for Saturday and Baltimore Harbor

Spoiled Child
By Pages Matam

English is your fourth language

the baby of the family

the one your mouth spoils

favorite by default

who may one day be sold off by its siblings

in hopes to never return

all of your other tongues have grown jealous


your country has over 200 dialects

that's over 200 ways

to say Love

to say family

to say I am a song

to say I belong to something

that does not want to kill me

& does not want to siphon the gold from my

blood or the stories from my bones

--------

"English is one of five languages I hold fluently in reading and writing, and...I thought to myself, how can I reconcile the traditions and culture as a Cameroonian born and raised writer in the current wave of immigration and oppression of those who are not 'American'?" Matam told Poets.org.

Friday was my least eventful day of the week, mostly because I ended up spending too much of it fighting with computers -- first my desktop, which has an awesome replacement keyboard but decided that I wanted adaptive screen lighting no matter how many times I turned it off and kept dimming my screen, refusing to let me use the hardware buttons to brighten it again, then my old laptop, which has decided that it's own power cord is not a Dell power cord and keeps demanding that I get it one. (It will use my new Dell power cord, so it's definitely a cord issue, not a laptop issue.) It was pretty hot, at least, so I didn't mind spending a lot of the day indoors.

We had dinner with my parents, came home and watched some baseball and college football, then I put on A Simple Favor, which was quite enjoyable and not predictable -- every time I thought I knew where it was going, Anna Kendrick's character would say something like, "Are you trying to Diabolique me?", which is both funny and a pointed comment on expectations of women in film noir (this one starts out meeting one set of expectations, then does a big amazing flip, and while I wouldn't call it a feminist masterpiece, it doesn't offer good-and-evil judgement on women who make some very unconventional sexual choices). Around Baltimore's harbor earlier this month:

Greetings from Baltimore

We spent most of Saturday in Baltimore with Paul's parents plus his brother Jon, wife Brooke, and their twins, which was very nice since we haven't seen them in a couple of years. We met at the Indian buffet Kumari, which is down the street from the Baltimore Museum of Industry, which I'd never visited before and really enjoyed -- I had no idea Head tennis rackets were from Baltimore, nor the linotype machine, and they had a blacksmith working and Congresswoman Helen Delich Bentley's maritime reporting videos. Plus we got to build catapults out of popsicle sticks and spoons.

From the museum we went to the Inner Harbor, where my in-laws wanted to sit for a while, so they went to have drinks at Barnes & Noble, while my nephews did some shopping and we walked around to Harborplace with their parents (and I did a couple of Suicune raids during the three-hour event). The boys really wanted Shake Shack for dinner, so we went there, and I have now had cheese fries two weekends in a row after not having had them for years! We're seeing them all again Tuesday for dinner, so we came home afterward and watched the first episode of On Becoming a God in Central Florida.

Greetings from Baltimore

We had a nice day Saturday though we were out almost the whole day, starting by driving to Thurmont to meet Paul's parents for lunch at Simply Asia so they could see Adam before he moves to San Francisco. We sent them home with our leftovers because we were headed from there to Baltimore to see the Orioles play, though we started by going to Denise's house because she also had a ticket to the game and said we could park in her neighborhood, since a sinkhole had closed some of the lots around the stadium after last week's floods.

We hung out at her place for a bit waiting for the first half of the double-header to end, then we all walked to the stadium, which had Dimitrius Graham performing on the roof deck before the game and we all got free Hawaiian Orioles shirts! Unfortunately the Orioles lost 12-4, though we left before the final runs to walk back to get our car at Denise's. When we got home, we had ice cream and watched Men in Black 3 -- why exactly do people think the new MIB is overstuffed compared to 2 and 3? Anyway, here are some photos from the game and lunch earlier:

Poem for Friday and Penguin Encounter

Penguin Love
By Nerys Williams

A strike on air with a visor's cast
stationed shoe-gazing others siphoning mist

a community of sextants, angled at constellations,
limpets on a row of fish skulls.

Jostling for conversation, their answer
a tight wire hammered at intervals.

Full of the disappointments
of fairy tales, the grey ones quiver waiting

for the first breach of yellow and pull-balled chests.
Or, the story of making smooth.

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We had ambitious July 4th plans, some of which got set aside because of thunderstorms, but it was still a really good day although we did absolutely nothing patriotic besides watch some of the Dodgers-Padres game that's still going -- no way was I going downtown or even watching A Capitol Fourth and ruining my holiday thinking about the thing in the White House. Instead I had brunch with four friends from high school, two of whom I have hardly seen since early in college and another I primarily talk to on Facebook who was in town from California. It was so nice to see them all and catch up on their lives and families.

Then I went with my family to the Maryland Zoo in Baltimore, primarily so that Adam could visit their penguins once more before he moves out west. We used to do Breakfast with the Penguins and their various penguin tours at least once a year for his birthday, so this time we did the new Penguin Encounter in their new, much larger penguin facility. We got to meet all the ambassador penguins, and unlike before where we were lucky if we got to pet one penguin, we were allowed to pet any penguin who approached. I had one in my lap, another chewing on my purse strap, and another untying my shoe all at once!

We visited much of the zoo before the rain that had been falling all afternoon turned into a serious thunderstorm. We'd been thinking about going to the aquarium and staying in the Inner Harbor for the fireworks, but it was close to closing time and Paul didn't want to walk around in the rain for another four hours, so instead we came home and watched the over-the-top Skyscraper, which mashes up Die Hard, The Towering Inferno, several Asian action movies, and several other films with The Rock. Here are some pics from the penguin encounter, plus one from penguin feeding time at the much larger breeding facility: