Poem for Tuesday and USS Constitution

From the Aeneid Book 6 

By Virgil 

Translated by John Dryden 

The gates of hell are open night and day; 

Smooth the descent, and easy is the way: 

But to return, and view the cheerful skies, 

In this the task and mighty labour lies. 

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Tuesday had weather as beautiful as the weekend's, which I appreciated even more after talking to friends further east who have bitter cold and snow! We had gorgeous sunshine and both pairs of eagles in the trees between us and the park, plus lots of ducks and geese now that Idylwood Park has finally had the tree restoration company out to clean up the remains of the storm that knocked out our power for a week. I spent a lot of time on Facebook changing my settings to keep as much personal information away from Meta and the lunatics in DC, where the news keeps going from atrocious to hideous. My Voyager group watched the distasteful "Natural Law" before dinner. 

After Beyond Burgers, we watched Gladiator II on Paramount Plus. I had braced myself to dislike it despite the cast because nobody can be Russell Crowe in the original Gladiator, and indeed nobody was, but Mescal and Pascal are both impressive and Denzel Washington steals every scene he's in, though I found it impossible to root for his character. One arena fight has great visuals while another is terrible (though that one involves animals, so I was just as happy it looked fake). Nielsen should have had more to do in place of half an hour of gratuitous fighting, and two crazy emperors are not better than one. Sort of in Russell's honor, the USS Constitution last week:

Greetings from the Navy Yard

Our Sunday started with a group brunch at the hotel at which a lot of people came and went as their travel plans allowed -- Adam, Haley, Daniel and Cahaya, my parents, Haley's parents, sisters, and other relatives, several friends -- then many farewells, though a few friends came to visit while others headed out. I know I need to post lots more photos from the wedding yesterday, but I got to spend Sunday afternoon with the bride and groom along with two longtime friends at the USS Constitution and the Charlestown Navy Yard, and I wanted to share a few photos of that!

 

Adam and Haley drove to her parents' in the late afternoon to retrieve Pepper. The rest of us went to Dunkin for hot chocolate after the ship tour, visited the museum shop for souvenirs, and eventually came back to the hotel, where we ordered Area 4 pizza for dinner. Maddy came to join us for food and to say goodbye because she is flying out early tomorrow, back into the L.A. area which has a curfew because of the fires. My Boston-area friend also headed home and Cheryl and I watched The Mayfair Witches together before Paul and I watched the Commanders beat Bucs!

Greetings from the New England Aquarium

Back in Cambridge after a great afternoon at the New England Aquarium with Adam, Haley, and my parents, plus Kay and Chris whom we ran into by the penguins, Madeleine who met us in the gift shop, and Cheryl who joined us after she got cannoli. We started the day with breakfast at the coffee shop in our hotel, then drove into Boston and spent a couple of hours watching penguins porpoise and seeing sea turtles get fed. Plus we stopped at the USS Constitution because I insisted. 

Then we returned to the hotel, where we met Haley's uncles and some of their family members; they went out for pizza while we had dinner with Daniel, Cahaya, Maddy, Cheryl, Kay and Chris, and my parents went to meet Nicole's family downtown. We all ended up at our hotel where the uncles had brought ice cream cake and Adam's friends arriving for the wedding came to say hello. The ceremony is tomorrow afternoon, so the rest of the family is arriving after breakfast!

Greetings from Seafair

This will be yet another quickie because we're watching They Cloned Tyrone which is surprisingly great, like if Shaft turned out to be The Truman Show with a healthy dose of the best aspects of Get Out, Black Lightning, and Minority Report; it's mostly about racism in America, but it's also about how movies treat black and female bodies and who gets to tell whose stories. We spent most of the day downtown around Seafair and the Fleet Week events -- after waiting in line for over an hour to tour the Coast Guard ships and finding out it would be another hour before we got through security, we decided we were content to look at them from the outside, and visited the helicopter, Arctic vessel, and various divers, drones, and trucks on display by the water. 

We walked to the downtown Blazing Bagels for lunch, stopping in the Mariners stadium store and in the delightful Filson flagship store, which has displays of historic mining and manufacturing equipment, wooden carvings, and lots of lovely details. We knew the Blue Angels would be flying around 3:30, so we went to Krispy Kreme to kill some time before the show. We couldn't see much from the parking garage, but the planes were still in the air as we drove out of the city and onto the I-90 bridge, from which we had excellent views! When we got home, we saw most of the hilarious-terrible Guardians-White Sox game, in which Syndergaard's mediocre pitching will never be remembered because of the massive brawl when Ramirez TKOed Anderson, who started it! 

Poem for Wednesday and Queen Anne Waterside

The Carousel
By Zachary Schomburg

I’m in a carousel.
The kind that spins
people to the wall.
There is a woman
and a man and a man
inside of it too,
and a man operating it.
Everybody I love is
looking down at me,
laughing. When I die,
I’ll die alone.
I know that much,
held down by my
own shadow, wanting
to touch the woman,
the man, the man,
across the curvature.
I won’t be able to even
look. I’m on a train.
I’m a tiny spider.
A tiny star.
Or a giant spider.
When everything stops,
I’ll open the only door
to the carousel and
it’ll be the wrong one
I’ve forgotten entering.

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Tuesday was another uneventful day that started with me cleaning out some dresser drawers that hadn't been opened in years, where I found kippahs from every wedding and Bar Mitzvah we ever attended, pantyhose that I wore to all those events that now have useless elastic, and a bunch of ancient keychains, pocket mirrors, and movie ticket stubs from college. We had some more craigslist and freecycling pickups, and we took a walk in the park before eating the leftover Ethiopian food from this weekend. 

My Voyager group watched "Dark Frontier" which we didn't realize until we started didn't have a convenient break between parts one and two, so it was the full movie-length episode, which was fun. Then Paul and I watched This Is Where I Leave You, which has a fantastic cast with great chemistry and a sometimes great script though sometimes over the top (postmortem family comedies are always strange and everything Jewish is played for a joke). Some waterside views from Queen Anne in Seattle: 

Greetings from Home

Another quickie this evening because I got a flu shot at my checkup this morning, and between that and being jetlagged, my brain is not fully focused. Most of my day was post-trip chores anyway: three loads of laundry that are dry but not yet folded, toiletries and accessories mostly put away, jewelry mostly sorted. I talked to my high school friends after lunch, which is always lovely. 

We took a walk in the lovely cool before dinner (I could only manage soup). Evening TV included last week's She-Hulk (cute but I was expecting more superhero connections) and Lord of the Rings (the music! the Numenorean armor! Galadriel as Cate Blanchett in Elizabeth: The Golden Age! I love this show). The beach at Howarth Park in Everett, on Puget Sound, with its views of the naval base: 

 

Poem for Friday and Marines Museum

Totally Watching Television
By Ron Padgett

I don't know
I may not be much
Be a mess
Personality no good
All surface no inner strength
Poetry not any good
This poem not any good
I might die an old man
Scribbler of trash
Forgotten paper-scratcher
But I'll tell you this
I really love to lay around on my ass
Totally watching television

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Quickie, was chatting with fannish friends until late and then we caught up on Superman and Lois, which has extra minutes on the CW Roku channel and this episode was actually worth of an extended edition. The earlier part of my day was not exciting: I discovered on Tuesday while looking for my review of "Tuvix" that when I took my Voyager reviews offline several years ago to add the retro reviews, I never actually finished the index, and it took a couple of hours to get it updated and uploaded. 

We took a walk in the afternoon to see the local flowers and whatever birds were not on our deck fighting over the new suet, I got laundry folded, we had sausages and shells for dinner. Then we watched the end of Les Miserables (the Jackman-Crowe movie musical) which I'd started watching the night before in honor of Bastille Day (yes, I know, wrong revolution) before I got on Zoom to chat. Here are some more exhibits from the National Museum of the Marine Corps: