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D.C. Chronicles Volume 18

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D.C. Chronicles Volume 18

Hello Everyone, well another week has come and gone and here I sit and wait. I can’t believe it’s been 18 weeks since I got home and started writing these particular weekly posts to temporarily replace my This Week on the Road column. When I got home I was still hoping to be back to work guiding tours by the end of the summer and to be starting to think about what states I would spend the fall and winter in. Eighteen weeks later and my company has closed for good, my industry is basically dead and I don’t feel safe getting too far from home because the response to this pandemic has been horribly botched across the country. Cases and deaths continue to rise at ever increasing rates as states push ahead with reopening plans despite all evidence that we are making things worse instead of better. Meanwhile those who are complaining the loudest about reopening businesses are the ones who seem least likely to wear a mask which will let these same businesses stay open. I find myself frustrated because week in and week out I’m trying to keep from slithering into a pit of despair, and every week it’s nothing but more bad news with no end in sight. I find it more frustrating because my Facebook friends list stretches to all 7 continents (yes I have friends working in Antarctica), and everywhere seems to have done a better job of containing this pandemic than we have. While other countries are reopening safely and managing outbreaks properly, we push forward boldly and stupidly in a time when brashness and ignorance are costing lives. My patriotism lives strongest in my love of my countrymen and I wish everyone would think about others instead of only themselves. I’ve never seen America as a selfish place and have found kindness and generosity at every turn in my travels around the country and I hate to see the ugliness that plays out every day across the nation. I know in my heart that the people we are seeing on the news are outliers and most people are doing the best they can, but it’s still sad to watch.

Meanwhile I’m trying, as I have from the start, to keep going and keep looking towards that distant light on the horizon which will eventually come. I continue to treasure being able to spend this time with my family. I continue to work on my projects and myself with the hopes of coming out on the other side healthy, organized and ready to face the world again with an open heart and mind. In that new world I will set aside more time for reading, for international travel, for making music and for friends and family. If nothing else, I am coming to a better understanding of what matters most to me and remembering that time is precious.

I’ve continued to work on my book this week which is great, and it’s starting to gain some momentum. I’ve continued to play my violin and guitar and I’m actually playing full songs on my violin now which is pretty cool (it still sounds terrible, but it’s coming along). I’ve decided to try and double up on some of my walks each week despite the heat. I got up at 6:30 this morning and, with my Camelback loaded with water, set off on a two hour walk around the neighborhood. I miss the gym terribly, especially in the middle of summer, but I can’t keep carrying around this extra weight and I can’t wait until fall to get working on it. Waiting to go back to the gym is now officially over and I am moving ahead in my own direction for the sake of my fitness. And also this week I’ve continued to explore the area with my mom and continued to keep my folks somewhat entertained as we go. So on that front it’s been a good week.

Last week I wrote about a Gullah meal I was going to cook that night and it came out smashingly. A delicious shrimp gumbo…

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D.C. Chronicles Volume 17

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D.C. Chronicles Volume 17

Hello Everyone, well the dog days of summer are definitely in full effect here in Washington D.C. It’s been a while since I’ve been here in the middle of summer and I’m starting to remember why. With daytime temperatures nearing a hundred degrees and high humidity, it keeps me inside much of the day. I’m grateful to have an inside to be in during this pandemic, but I miss my outside life. I try and get up early and go for my morning walk and spend some time outside in the evening, but the heat of the day is pretty unbearable right now. But July is coming to a close and by this time next week August will be just over the horizon with fall hot on its heels. I’m looking forward to fall with its cooler temperatures and beautiful colors, and my camera and I are planning on taking full advantage of the foliage this year. But that’s getting ahead of myself and I’m still trying to make the most of the summer and my time here at home. I’ve been keeping up with my guitar and violin practice and they are bringing me joy and pleasure. I’ve been writing and actually making some progress on my book, although I’m still pushing through the first couple of weeks of the journey which were cold and painfully lonely, but also liberating and beautiful. And I’ve gotten out of the house this week despite the heat for a few good excursions.

This week I’ve had school reopening on my mind as the young man I’ve been tutoring this summer and his family are looking ahead at that issue. While the older I get, the more I realize I don’t know about many things, education is one of those things I’m still pretty comfortable discussing with some authority. While by no means an expert on the topic, I spent five years as a teacher, teaching in 12 different schools in 4 cities on 2 continents. I’ve taught 5 year olds and adults and I’ve taught in public, charter and private environments. As I look at school reopening, I wish it were being addressed everywhere in the old-school school-board setting (which thankfully it still is in many places). I think parents, teachers and community members all need their voices and concerns heard and their decisions respected. I’ve met very few teachers in my life who don’t want to teach and very few parents who didn’t want their kids in school or students who didn’t at least want to be at school. But these are extraordinary times with extraordinary consequences and as anyone who has ever seen how fast head-lice can spread in a school will tell you, things have a way of getting around in a school building pretty quick. I’ve seen some very well thought out plans, and the advice from the CDC on the topic is thorough and well-researched as well, but I also understand a host of reasons why you would want to keep your kids home until there is more known about this virus. I also sincerely hope that no school in the country will follow the model of so many towns reopening plans where people have just run out into the streets without distancing or masks under the delusion that none of this ever happened or was ever real to begin with. A school full of sick kids is a nightmare nobody wants. I will say here, and y’all know I don’t wade into politics here very much, but I truly wish the head of the Department of Education had any experience at all in public schools. I’m truly concerned for our nation’s children and I hope that each community will make these difficult decisions based on science, fact and input from those parties with the most at stake.

Also this week I enjoyed watching Chris Wallace interview the president. I’m not going to get into that interview, but I really like Chris Wallace, and knew him quite well many years ago. His son, Peter, was in my Boy Scout troop and was a friend of mine (and still is, though I haven’t seen him in years) so Mr. Wallace was around for many of our events and activities. Of course he was just a local newscaster back then, but he was well respected and seemed like a good guy. It makes me smile when I see him on national TV and I remember he always liked my peach cobbler when I made it on camping trips.

Anyways, enough of my rambling, I have done some cool things this week and am happy to share those with you here. Because we didn’t travel last Tuesday, we took a bit of a ramble on Thursday instead. We set off to explore the city a little bit and see the small handful of houses in Washington D.C. that were built around or before 1800. It was a fun jaunt around the city which took us to some cool neighborhoods we don’t get to a lot. I hope to publish the photos from that tour here this weekend. It was fun, and nice to drive around the city with a mission.

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D.C. Chronicles Volume 16

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D.C. Chronicles Volume 16

Hello everyone and welcome to another weekly installment of my stay-at-home journal from Washington DC. Another week into Pandemic 2020 and I’m actually feeling pretty good this week. As I mentioned last week, I’ve begun looking at a longer term plan to get through the pandemic. It’s not what I wanted to be doing this year, but my life is only half-lived and I want the second half to be just as good as the first half. In order for that to happen, I need to keep myself and my people healthy and safe. Since I’ve come this far without getting sick, I’m going to just keep doing what I’ve been doing until one of four things happens – we find an effective treatment against the virus, we find a vaccine, we find a cure or the numbers actually drop to the minimal levels much of the rest of the developed world is looking at. Until one of those four things happens, I’m staying right where I am and I’m going to just keep on keeping on. It really bothers me that so many Americans are disparaging Dr. Fauci and the Center for Disease Control because neither is telling them what they want to hear. Dr. Fauci is one of the top infectious disease experts in the world and the CDC is a public health organization charged with keeping us safe and educated about infectious diseases. The CDC is staffed with highly educated experts in the field and Dr. Fauci is one of the foremost experts in the field and has served for many years under both parties. Why people are now choosing to listen to people who are not experts and distrusting those who are is painfully ignorant and really upsetting. If a doctor tells you you have cancer, you can keep looking until you find someone, perhaps a fortune-teller, who tells you it’s just indigestion, but that’s not going to change the facts. And our numbers continue to rise, and someone always comes along to discredit those numbers. I’m just throwing my hands in the air about this at this point. I’m really sorry that so many of my fellow Americans are dying and will continue to die when they don’t have to. With a plan and some national leadership we could get this whole thing under control.

One of the things I’ve been thinking about this week is an experience I’ve had more than once in Los Angeles. I’ve spent a lot of time in L.A. and especially in recent years they have experienced serious and severe droughts. And yet despite all the warnings and news stories, if you drive around you will still see people watering their lawns and washing their cars. In the middle of a drought. It occurred to me that the only way a drought will mean something to these people is if they go to turn on their faucet and nothing comes out. If they turn it on and water comes out then they must not be in a drought. When I see people washing their car in a drought, it makes me feel about how it makes me feel right now when people are crowding into bars and restaurants. Until you or someone you know gets sick and/or dies, apparently this won’t be real for you. I’ve had three close friends get sick with this disease, and a lot of people with an extra degree of separation (uncles of friends, parents of friends) who have died. Maybe that’s why I’m being cautious, but if everyone would come at this with the same sense of urgency, we, as a nation, would be doing better right now. As it is, we’re the laughing stock of the world, which I guess people are okay with. I hear people talk all the time about how we’re the “best country that’s ever existed on the face of the Earth” but we sure are proving otherwise. Remember when America was a leader and not just a bully with the biggest arsenal? We sure are Number 1 right now, but not in the way I would have hoped.

In big local news this week, my hometown Washington Redskins have officially dropped their name and logo and are hopefully going to announce a new one soon. I’ve seen many of the different suggestions and there are a few I would really love to see happen, Red Tails and Red Wolves being my two favorites.

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D.C. Chronicles Volume 15

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D.C. Chronicles Volume 15

Hello everyone, well another week has rolled by us and it has not been a bad one here on the homefront in Washington D.C. One of my friends got engaged this week, another announced a pregnancy and still another welcomed a new grandchild into the world so those were some real positive boosts. I’ve been getting some good walks in around the neighborhood despite mid-summer temperatures and high humidity levels and have been enjoying the podcast Civil War Talk Radio as I walk. It’s been great to hear some expert historians discuss some very specific issues of the war. I’ve been trying to keep myself hydrated which as silly as it sounds has been really helping me feel better. I’m usually really good at hydrating, but seem to have let it slip amidst all of the chaos of late. I’ve also been trying to keep a little further from the news and have been picking my guitar more and reading some less heavy material. I’ve started rereading Steinbeck’s Travels With Charley, one of my favorite American travel books of all time, as I start to gear up to get back to writing my own book. I had charged ahead with it when I first got home, but realized I needed to focus more and plan it out a little better to keep the story moving and make it more readable and interesting. That’s tough because every day I was out on the road was a new adventure and had an impact on the journey, but the book can’t be a thousand pages long, so I will need to map it out a little better. I hope to start putting pen to paper a little later this week.

Also this week I decided to pick up a violin seriously for the first time in 30 years. When I was in Junior High School, I used to play violin and I was actually fairly decent at reading music. Unfortunately, I was not very interested in it because I didn’t know any of the songs my teacher wanted me to play. While she said I played them well, how could I know? I have always likened it to cooking a recipe for something you’ve never eaten before, you may think it tastes just fine, but if you don’t know how it’s supposed to taste, you’d never know. Anyways, in the intervening years, I’ve seen the violin played in very different styles of music in my travels around the country and around the world (although in these styles it’s often referred to as a “fiddle”, it’s the exact same instrument). I’ve seen lots of live bands playing traditional Irish music or country, mountain and folk music and I really enjoy it. About 2 years ago when I was in Nashville I went ahead and bought one thinking I’d give it a shot on the road – it’s a relatively small instrument and I found a place for it in my van. I had romantic images in my head of sitting in the back of my van at night and playing beautiful music before bed. Sadly, I realized that the violin actually takes some space to play with the bow going up and down and my van was too tight to really make it happen. And so it just sat there. I found the space for a guitar instead which takes more room to carry but less room to play. This week I pulled out that violin though and took it for a spin. I was pleasantly surprised that with a little refresher from a book and the internet I could remember how to read music and with some sheet music of songs I actually know I could actually play them that first night (not well, but recognizable). I was impressed and really enjoyed it. Sadly, when I pulled it out last night the bridge fell off and I spent an hour trying to restring it and it was generally a big frustrating mess. But I hope to get it fixed and continue playing with it. This was another big plus this week.

The news has, as always seems to be the case recently, been a big minus. Covid cases continue to grow at a rapid rate in the U.S. and people continue to ignore it. Although we have only about 4% of the world’s population, I believe we now have over a quarter of the world’s cases…

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Civil War Chronicles: Cold Harbor and Petersburg

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Civil War Chronicles: Cold Harbor and Petersburg

The photos below come from a recent visit to the battlefields of the greater Richmond/Petersburg Area. With the exception of the first few from Gaines Mill which was important to the Peninsula Campaign of 1862, most of these battles were part of the 1864 Overland Campaign. This long, brutal and bloody series of battles would eventually lead to the capture of Petersburg and the fall of Richmond which set the stage for the surrender of the Army of the Potomac at Appomattox. Civil War Chronicles will trace the major battles of the Eastern Theater of the war through photos and brief histories

Richmond was not the original capital of the Confederacy, but became the capital after Virginia seceded from the Union in April of 1861. Richmond and neighboring Petersburg were major industrial hubs with rail lines connecting to points near and far and the James River to further move supplies in and out of the area. The rivers surrounding the city made defending it somewhat easier as well. Because of the strategic importance of Richmond, it would be the focus of several major campaigns during the war.

Our visit started at Gaines Mill Farm which saw some of the worst fighting of the Seven Days Battle during the Peninsula Campaign of 1862. This battle was the first in which Robert E. Lee had command of the Army of Northern Virginia following the wounding of Joseph Johnston. Lee’s ability to hold off George McClellan and his Union forces would direct the war away from Richmond and back to Northern Virginia to Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville which we visited several weeks ago…

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D.C. Chronicles Volume 14

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D.C. Chronicles Volume 14

Hey y’all. How’s everyone doing out there? Another week has come and gone sheltered in place here in Washington D.C. It’s had its ups and downs, like every week has, but I’m feeling a lot more positive this week than I was last week. I’ve gotten out of the house more (though not as much as I need to be), and have gotten back to playing my guitar and avoiding the news as much as possible. As July begins, it continues to heat up here in our Nation’s Capital, and 90+ degree days with high humidity are prevalent in the forecast. I’m getting up earlier to get my walk in before the heat really takes hold of the day and trying to get outside in the evening as well when it cools off again. Meanwhile I’ve been eating a lot of watermelon because really is there anything better than cold watermelon in the middle of a heat wave? I can say that before this summer I only knew how to cut a watermelon into slices. Now I’ve watched some videos on the subject and can cut a whole one into chunks pretty easily (seriously, there are some fascinating methods out there). I’ve also found that making watermelon balls, covering them in vodka and freezing them are quite the treat! In short, despite the heat it’s been a decent week and watermelon is delicious.

Thursday was an interesting day. As a follow-up to our Tuesday trip to Monocacy Battlefield, we wanted to go and visit Fort Stevens, the site of the only Civil War battle fought inside Washington D.C. After the 1864 Battle of Monocacy, Confederate General Jubal Early trained his sights on the Nation’s Capital. Thankfully, the delay at Monocacy had allowed reinforcements to be brought north from Richmond in steamships and the Confederates were turned out. President Lincoln was there that day and it was the only time that a sitting president has come under enemy fire during a war.

Having been rebuilt by the Civilian Conservation Corps during the New Deal and now administered by the National Park Service, Fort Stevens is the only one of our many forts which actually looks like a fort as most have been turned into parks and receded into the landscape. There isn’t much to it, but it’s only 10 minutes from our house so it was an easy place to visit. After wandering around the fort, we headed up Georgia Avenue to Battlefield National Cemetery, where 40 of the Union soldiers who had been killed during the battle are buried. With just an acre of property in the heart of the city, it is one of the smallest National Cemeteries in the country, and is really quite interesting to visit…

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Civil War Chronicles: Monocacy

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Civil War Chronicles: Monocacy

The photos below come from a recent visit to Monocacy National Battlefield Park just south of Frederick Maryland - site of the “Battle that Saved Washington”. Civil War Chronicles will trace the major battles of the Eastern Theater of the war through photos and brief histories.

The Battle of Monocacy is a bit of an outlier in that it wasn’t really a major battle of the Eastern Theater of the Civil War, but a minor one with major implications. While Generals Grant and Lee were engaged in the final grappling of the war around Petersburg, south of Richmond, Lee wanted a distraction to pull some of Grant’s army away. He attempted this by sending General Jubal Early to go on the offensive and attack into Union territory, the third Confederate invasion of the North during the war. Early was sent with 15,000 men to threaten Washington D.C. and, if possible, to raid the prison camp at Point Lookout and free the Confederate soldiers being held there. Lee also knew that a presidential election was looming and he hoped that another invasion of the North might bring about the defeat of Lincoln and a favorable end to the long and brutal war.

Early’s army crossed the Potomac River into Maryland on the 4th of July, 1864 and marched past Sharpsburg, the site of the Battle of Antietam two years earlier. You can’t march 15,000 infantry troops across a state without anyone noticing, and word quickly got to General Lew Wallace who was then the Union commander in Baltimore. Wallace gathered what men he could muster and quickly set off towards the west. Thinking quickly, Wallace decided to head towards Monocacy Junction, just south of Frederick, Maryland. He didn’t know where the Confederates were headed, but this point would allow his troops to defend the Georgetown Pike to Washington, the National Road to Baltimore and the Baltimore and Ohio Rail Line. If he got there first, he could strategically place his men along the Monocacy River and defend all three of those routes which crossed the river at that point. He arrived in time to dig in and establish a line of defense.

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D.C. Chronicles Volume 13

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D.C. Chronicles Volume 13

Hey y’all, I’m not going to lie, it’s been a tough week for me personally. I think this whole process has brought waves of emotion for us all, and I’m grateful that I have had peaks in the midst of it, but this week was definitely more of a valley. And don’t get me wrong, valleys can be beautiful places, you just don’t see the sun as often when you’re in them.

Last week I wrote about the permanent closure of the tour company I’ve worked for through much of my adult life. It’s a company which was founded three years before I was born and which I guess I expected to be there, in one form or another, indefinitely into the future. The company and I had found a good rhythm, one which worked really well for us both. For me, it allowed me to do something which I enjoy and which I’m good at and which allowed me to travel to beautiful places, hike often and practice my photography. In return, my company got a true professional career guide who could work independently and be gone for months at a time with minimal supervision while still producing high quality tours and satisfied customers. I could make enough money in a few months to pursue my other interests during the rest of the year and I think it’s been a pretty fair and balanced relationship. While there are other companies out there and I know that my experience will land me a job in the future, it won’t have the same shared history for me. Couple that with the uncertainty of the when’s and where’s and it has left me less upbeat about the future than I usually am. And that, for me, is a problem. If you’ve been following this blog long enough, you know that I suffer from depression and anxiety and that travel helps me cope with both. In the past, when things have gotten bad for me, I’ve inevitably been able to look optimistically towards the future and find some point in my mind where things are okay and things are better. And even when I didn’t necessarily think I would be going back to guiding, it was always there as an option and thinking about a fresh season in a new van could always bring me out of a funk. While I know that somewhere out there is a new season with a new company or perhaps a better option which I haven’t even considered before because I haven’t been forced to look for it, it’s taken a few days of mourning to reach that point.

In addition, it’s been a tough few weeks of watching the news and social media with everything which has been happening in the U.S. I find myself, as usual, torn when it comes to so many things. Over the last 20 years, I’ve traveled to all corners of the U.S. and met wonderful people everywhere I went of all shapes, sizes, shades, ages and backgrounds. Americans, generally speaking, are kind, hardworking people struggling to find a path forward and doing the best they can.

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Civil War Chronicles: The Wilderness and Spotsylvania

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Civil War Chronicles: The Wilderness and Spotsylvania

The photos below come from a recent visit to Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Battlefield Park, which also includes the Battles of Chancelorsville and The Wilderness. Civil War Chronicles will trace the major battles of the Eastern Theater through photos and brief histories.

It had been almost a year since the horrific battle of Gettysburg, and in the interim President Lincoln had turned command of the Union Army over to General Ulysses S. Grant. Grant would lay out a plan to attack the confederacy on many fronts including Sherman’s march towards Atlanta and an attack on Mobile, and Grant himself would ride with General George Meade’s Army of the Potomac. Their goal was to bring the war back to Virginia and keep the pressure on General Lee and his Army of Northern Virginia. This Overland Campaign would be a war of attrition and would bring the war to new levels of horror but ultimately lead to Lee’s surrender at Appomattox.

On May 4th, 1864 the Army of the Potomac crossed the Rapidan River and engaged Lee’s army in an area called The Wilderness. Apparently the area today bears little resemblance to what it did at the time when new growth underbrush made movement difficult, artillery less effective and confusion the norm. Fierce fighting took place on the scattered farms in the area which allowed for some open space in which to maneuver, but most of the battle took place in the dense forest. On May 6th, the Union Army had taken the upper hand and Lee’s men were in grave danger of being overrun on the widow Tapp’s farm. In a scene from the movies, Longstreet’s reinforcements arrived at just the right moment and Lee was prepared to lead them into battle himself, but the Confederates wouldn’t allow it and moved him quickly to the rear. After two days of heavy fighting neither side had gained a decisive victory. Unlike his predecessors, Grant didn’t pull back but rather pushed forward, ordering a night march towards the town of Spotsylvania Court House. His plan was to get between Lee and the Confederate Capital at Richmond. Sensing this move, Lee ordered his men to move that night as well.

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1000 Words: Otherness

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1000 Words: Otherness

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, and this series focuses on a single picture and what it brings into my mind. In this particular post I’ve chosen two photos (and written closer to 2000 words) on the topic of “otherness”. One picture is me at a work party with the other teachers I worked with in Japan and the other is of me and my students when I taught in New Orleans.

There have been a lot of times in my life where I have been the “other”. In fact, most of my adult life has been dominated my some form or other of “otherness”. Some have been more pronounced while others have been more subtle. Since this idea of “otherness” has captured the national attention recently, and for very good reason, I thought I’d offer my own perspective.

After High School, I went to Penn State, a state university in central Pennsylvania. I didn’t realize at the time nor think much about the fact that the vast majority of people there were obviously going to be from Pennsylvania. There were always sports team loyalties and conversations about differences in accents and dialect that mostly went over my head. It wasn’t until much later, having spent a fair amount of time driving through rural parts of the state and recognizing town names from people I went to school with that I realized how different their upbringing was from mine. When I think of my time there though, I think mostly about our school spirit and camaraderie – how our “sameness” around our love of Penn State, our obsession with wearing blue and white clothing and our never-ending conversations about the football team overshadowed, for me at least, that sense of “otherness”.

In my professional career as a tour guide, I have taken hundreds of people from around the globe on cross country tours of the United States. While it is obviously my home country, I have spent much of the last 20 years surrounded by international guests.

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D.C. Chronicles Volume 12

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D.C. Chronicles Volume 12

Hello Everyone,

Another week has come and gone here in Washington D.C. Time has taken on a different quality for me here. I’m very used variety in my life, so when I get a chance to stop and catch my breath, it’s actually kind of nice. Now I’m through the “catching my breath” phase and into a routine phase which I know is how most people’s lives simply are. It has its ups and downs, but more than anything the time just seems to slip away. I hope every week to at least have something to show for that week, but even if there isn’t anything tangible it’s another week of keeping myself safe and sane and another week of helping who I can do the same. Sometimes it’s the little things that can make a difference too. This week I saw my first lightning bugs of the summer and it reminded me of how magical these little critters are. How cool is it that they can just glow like that in the dark? When I used to guide night snorkel tours in the islands, I used to try and show people some phosphorescence in the water, but lightning bugs are way cooler than that. They fly and they glow. In my next life, it wouldn’t be a bad choice. On a completely unrelated note, my mother set a new personal record for rabbits seen on her morning walk this week with 16. Like I said, sometimes it’s the little things.

My week started with a relaxing Thursday. I’m sure I did things, but I can’t remember what they were. There are more of those kinds of days recently too. I did have a nice Zoom chat with some of my friends from college and it felt really good to laugh for a while. Friday was exciting because we tapped our recently brewed homebrew and I have to say it was pretty tasty. We sampled it alongside other beers of the same kind (Kolsch), and ours held up okay. We also brewed a fresh batch on Friday as well, an American Cream Ale this time, so we’ll see how that works out in a couple of weeks. It’s been bubbling away in the fermenter, so that’s a good sign. After all of the beer excitement, we enjoyed some nice weather outside on the patio with some snacks and an exciting game of Skip-Bo, one of our go-to pandemic card games. It wasn’t a bad Friday at all.

Saturday I met up with a friend for a nice walk down in Rock Creek Park, a wonderful National Park unit which splits the city down the middle along the natural valley formed by the creek. It was a beautiful day for a walk, and hence was a little more crowded than I would have liked, but we did okay. My friend brought her dog along and he seemed to enjoy the exercise as well. We sat for a while by the water and chatted away the morning and for a minute, it almost felt like normalcy.

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1000 Words: Losing Our Heroes

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1000 Words: Losing Our Heroes

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. Here’s a picture of me, Anthony Bourdain and Eric Ripert at the Warner Theater in D.C. and the story of how I came to meet these guys that night in 2010.

I’ve never been much on celebrity heroes. I’ve always thought it was a little strange that people will idolize a musician or an actor because it always feels to me like they are idolizing a character, not a person. Most rock stars and movie stars are playing a role and are very different when they are off camera, so to me it’s a bit like looking up to a character in a book like Atticus Finch or Tom Joad. On the other hand, there are people you come across at times in your life when you really need a hero and maybe their songs or their movies are the things that keep you going. Anthony Bourdain was that person for me.

After spending my twenties guiding multi-week tours of the U.S. all summer and spending my winters traveling the world, I finally gave in to the pressure to “grow up” and “get a real job”. Coupled with that was my desire to help out in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans which is how I found myself wearing a tie and teaching junior high school math. The times were tough as was the job itself, but it was the dramatic lifestyle change that affected me the most. After so many years on the road, I was all of a sudden faced with rent and bills and trying to make the most of my weekends. I’m not going to lie, “the real world” wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. I found myself struggling from paycheck to paycheck and from one week to the next. Going from my tour guide salary to a teacher’s salary seemed like a big jump, but after all of my bills it really didn’t leave much and I ended up getting a second job working three nights a week waiting tables. It was all a bit much.

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