World-Wide-Matel

I went down the Blue Ridge Parkway to pick up Alex in Harrisonburg. He wanted to come back to see his friend Colin, who is moving to Oregon, and to pick up his amp. I don’t driving down to get him. It is a pretty drive; we get good mileage on the hybrid and I can listen to NPR or my audio books. Gas is cheaper outside the Washington metro area. You get it for $2.39 a gallon in the Shenandoah Valley; the best you can do in Northern Virginia is $2.69. 

Lots of the turnouts are under construction with signs that our stimulus dollars are a work. I saw lots of such signs, lots of barriers and lots of port-a-johns, but no workers. I suppose it put people to work setting up the signs and port-a-johns, but we might have hoped for a little more actual construction.

The Blue Ridge is very pretty. You can see why they were called blue ridge. It is almost all secondary growth. They cut most of the trees off during the 19th Century  Some was done for agriculture, but a lot of the wood was used to make charcoal for small steel and lime production. There are still lots of place names in the hills with forge or furnace in their titles. Farming was not very profitable with the thin and soon eroded mountain soils and most of the farmsteads were abandoned. The hillsides reverted to the thick oak-maple & tulip poplar forests you see in the pictures. Actually, at the time they were oak and chestnut forests, but the chestnuts were wiped out by a blight that came in 1904. I am hoping GMOs can bring them back.

It was a little hazy when I took the pictures yesterday. They would have been better today, since the wind left over from Hurricane Earl cleared the air.  Today is beautiful weather. We are getting into the nice fall weather, IMO, the best time for Virginia weather. October is usually the best month.

Posted by Broadnax at 03:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I am at FSI for the PAO course that I never took. I figure that there are basic things that I just didn’t know and I hope to learn about them.

At FSI, I was greeted with an “improvement” around the bike racks. Look at the picture.  I bet these things cost the government a lot, because we never get anything cheap. What good are they? They won’t protect the bikes from the rain. The probably actually make it hotter around the bikes, since they face into the south and into the sun.  Worst of all, they eliminate at least two bike parking spots (on each end) and make it a lot harder to get at the bikes in the middle.

This is the kind of thing that someone who doesn't ride a bike much thinks is "bike friendly."

I figure that somebody will get an award for putting those things up. They will look better on somebody’s personal report than they do in real life. Maybe that same person will earn another award when they take them down, create more space and “save” the upkeep.

Class got out early enough for me to head down to Washington, go to Gold’s Gym and take the Metro home.  It is easier for me to go down to Washington and take the Metro than to go up hill home, although both are about the same distance. Actually, it was a bit farther, since I went the long way through Shirlington and along the Potomac. They connected the bike trail all the way. Sweet. You used to have to get off the trail and cross the freeway on a footbridge.

Above and below are pictures of East Potomac Park. I have been stopping here at the end of the day to kind of settle back into that peaceful, easy feeling.  It is another thing that is a little out of the way, but worth going.  I went down there today for around a half hour, listened to my audio books and watched the water flow. It is a pleasant place to be. The breeze blows off the water in the late afternoon, keeping the mosquitoes confused.

Posted by Broadnax at 08:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Boer goats were developed in South Africa.  They are bigger and more solidly built than most goat breeds, which makes them better as meat goats.  They are not as agile as other breeds, which is good since they are not as likely to climb onto structures and through fences.   They were really developed as land clearing machines.  They can climb steep hills and will eat almost everything in their paths, including thorny bushes and vines, such as multiflora rose, blueberries, kudzu and honeysuckle. That is why I am interested in them.

I want the goats to eat down all the brush that grows underneath my pine trees, especially after we do the thinning.  They would be well-adapted to that job, since they can and will eat all the common brush that vexes me.  In addition, they also fertilize as they go.   There is also a growing market for goat meat because of the growing immigrant populations from Central America and the Middle East.  It seems almost too good to be true.  They don’t need much care, but unfortunately, I don’t think I can give them that.

Since I was taking Alex back to school at JMU, I took the opportunity to visit the goat farm of Jeff and Loretta Whetzel in rural Rockingham County.   They are semi-retired.  Jeff joked that goats are his hobby and he is lucky to break even.   I enjoy the same situation with my forestry, so we understood each other.   The Whetzels started raising goats only a few years ago and are kind of easing into the business. 

The goat business is still mostly a small-farmer operation in Virginia.  Although goats have been resident on American farms since the first settlers landed in Virginia and founded Jamestown, they have never been a big business.   But the changing demographics might be creating business opportunities for goat farming.

Goats are fairly easy to take care of and do well in Virginia.  Goats are criticized as “desert makers” because of their voracious appetites and promiscuous eating habits.  But this is not a problem in Virginia, where we have enough rain and good soils to make the grass and brush grow.  Goats are browsers, not grazers.  That means they eat mostly leaves and brush, unlike cows that eat mostly grass, legumes and forbs.  (Of course, goats also eat grass and forbs; they just have a wider diet.)

Goats will eat pine needles and so you cannot put goats into a working pine forest until the trees are tall enough that goats cannot reach the tops or the vital branches of the crop trees. For practical purposes, this means the trees need to be about ten feet high (about five years old for a loblolly pine in Southern Virginia), since goats can reach up about five feet by standing on their hind legs. They will eat pine bark, but only if there is not other things to eat.  Presumably this would never become a problem if the goal was brush clearing. Jeff says that pine needles in the goat diet are beneficial, since something in the resin helps prevent worms.

The goats are very friendly. They are like dogs in that they follow you around. I can see the attraction of having them around.

But after talking to Jeff & Loretta, I realized that I cannot put goats on my lands unless and until I have to more time to devote. For one thing, I would need a lot of them to eat down 80 or 100 acres. I would also have to build electrified fences and dig some ponds or other water sources. My farms have flowing water, so that could be done. But you have to watch them. They require some grain supplements etc. And they need protection.

Coyotes are a problem.  Jeff and Loretta have a big dog called Yogi that chases them away. He is a Pyrenees sheep dog, very big and tougher than coyotes, developed by shepherds Spain to fight off the local predators.  He looks a lot like the podhale dog in Poland.  This is another reason why I cannot put the goats on our land and be there to watch.  The goats can be left more or less alone for a long time, but a dog cannot. We have coyotes, along with some bobcats and a few bears, in Southern Virginia too, so we need that protection.

Anyway, I have to put my goat plan on hold for at least the next couple of years when I am in Brazil.  We are thinning eighty-six acres this year. I plan to burn under those trees in 2012.  After that and after the brush grows in, maybe it will be time to deploy some Boer goats.

Links to some related posts are here and here.  

Posted by Broadnax at 04:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I used my new GPS to find the goat farm of Jeff & Loretta Whetzel (more on that in the next post).  I am a late adapter of the GPS for the car. I had one a long time ago that I used in my forestry, but it was not really good enough for precise measurement.  This one (see above) is nice and was much cheaper. It tells you when to turn etc.  I made it speak in Portuguese so that I can practice. Of course, vocabulary is limited. Also can play audio books.

Above you can see road work.  We had to wait around fifteen minutes while the cleared out the rocks.  They are widening the road.  The rock is shale, which is common in the Eastern Mountains.  It is very good for paving running trails as it breaks down into flattish chips and forms a springy surface. 

Below is kudzu growing along US 211 (also called Lee Highway, BTW, a continuation of the Lee Highway that runs near my house) and doing the one thing it is good at - holding a steep bank. The government encouraged Kudzu planting in the U.S. because of its extreme ability to grow. That was not an entirely wise idea. What makes it a great cover for everything also makes it a troubling invasive, since what grows over rocky hillsides also grows over trees and other plants, choking them off.

Most of the way after the mountains is the way home from Old Rag Mountain, so I have been driving this way for twenty-five years. The area up to Warrenton is very built up, and much of US 29 has become a big strip mall. This includes areas near the Manassas Battlefield. It kind of takes away from the historical feel.  But after Warrenton, it has not changed that much.  It is still very rural, green and pleasant. Fauquier and Rappahannock Counties are among the nicest in Virginia. It is a great pleasure to pass through them. 

Posted by Broadnax at 08:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I took Alex back up to school at James Madison.  He is in a new dorm right in the center of the campus.  I think he will be better.  He can more easily walk to the places he needs to go and will have more contact with other students.  The room is smaller than the one he had before & has no air conditioning.  This will be okay most of the school year, but it still can get hot in September.  His room is part of a suite with six guys, who share a kind of living space in the middle.  Above is his building and below is his room as it looked when he moved in. The tree is a river birch, the southern cousin in the birch family. In Wisconsin we can grow the paper birch or the white birch. They are pretties than this kind of brownish one, but you have to adapt to local conditions.  I wanted to get a picture of Alex too, but he refused and kept on moving in and out of the shot.

The campus was full of new freshmen, you can see the gaggle of them below. They are much better groomed than back in the 1970s when I started, but otherwise look similar. Speaking of gaggles, the geese just stroll across the road and most cars stop.  I didn’t.  I went slow enough that they could move out of the way, but I am not going to yield to geese.  They squawked a little but they cleared a path.  Up at the farm, a turkey stood in front of my car and stared at me.  I actually had to get out and shoo it away. Turkeys are dumb enough to be run over by a car going 3MPH; geese are not.

Posted by Broadnax at 07:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It was cool and overcast for my morning bike ride, but an easy trip because of the west wind.  I am glad that I don’t have to drive. Below you can see the cars backed up on Memorial Bridge.

Above is the stop light to cross near the Lincoln Memorial.  You have to push the button to get the walk light, at least you HAD to.  Somebody glued button down so that it just goes through the cycle continuously.  I think that is good.  I hate that idea that you have to push the button and always wait.  Of course, sometimes you can just nip through between the traffic.

Above & below are elm trees looking not good on Independence Avenue.  I have noticed that many of the elms around town are not looking good.  Some elm trees are resistant to Dutch elm disease, but none are completely immune.  I worry that something is going on with the trees.  It would be a shame if these big trees died.  I have been watching the media for reports re the elms.  So far I have found nothing.  I hope that my fears are unfounded.  It was a hot year. Maybe they are just stressed.

Posted by Broadnax at 09:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Chrissy and I went to visit Mariza in Baltimore. It really is a nice city, at least the parts we visit.  Espen and I once turned into a less nice area. It looked like the set for a cop drama; lots of people just hanging around, but these places are being renewed and redeveloped pretty well.

The pictures are from Fells Point, where we went to eat at a place called Kali’s Corner, a seafood restaurant. They had a special menu for restaurant week. I had sea bass; Chrissy got skate, evidently a sting ray & Mariza got the salmon. The Atmosphere was very good; food was okay.

Mariza is doing fine.  Business is picking up a little at Travelers.  Evidently they are at least hiring some new people this year. Above & below are pictures from the windows of Mariza's new apartment.

Posted by Broadnax at 09:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

There is talk about building a drain again in back of the houses. This drain would cost around $8000 and would not solve any problems. I am probably the only one who will actually stand out in the rain and watch the drainage and soak away characteristics and I see how it really works.

The problem is that the decks, board fences, houses and vegetation creates shade, enough shade that grass won’t grow.  In a heavy rain the water running off the rooftops can cause erosion.  The culprit is the lack of vegetation, not the water. 

Although grass won’t grow, lots of other things will. A couple years ago I planted some lily turf.   It cost me nothing, since I took the shoots from the front of the house. The only improvement that I had to make was to put in some timbers to stop the water in the short term.  I also knocked down the board fence at the end of our house, letting in more light.

Look at the pictures.  I took them from my deck today after a few hours of rain.  Notice how the mud starts exactly where the planting stops. If the problem was water or sunlight, it would not be like that. My plantation not only greened up my space; it also slows erosion up and downstream by slowing or stopping the water flow. Things will grow back there, just not grass.

The drains would not work because they address the wrong problem.  Beyond that, it would make everything worse by quickening runoff.  It is exactly what we don’t want to do to our local streams and Chesapeake Bay. So we would be spending $8000 to help break down stream beds downstream and ultimately dump more silt and pollution into Chesapeake Bay.

I am afraid such backward activities are common when we make collective decisions.

Posted by Broadnax at 12:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I made an unexpected trip to the farms yesterday. I wanted to look at a piece of land near the Nottoway River.  FM wants to buy the timber and wants me to buy the land. In other words, he gets the wood; I get land to grow new trees. It is a long-term proposition for me. I couldn’t even thin until around 2025. On the other hand, I can get the land cheaper and grow the trees later.  

The land would not be only for forestry. There is a lot of road frontage and the property is across from the Nottoway River, which you see in the picture. (It was a very foggy morning, as you can see and chilly. It later got hot and humid.) They would leave the trees near the streams etc, so it would remain wooded and attractive. There is a public boat launching place across from one corner of the property.  It was a very foggy morning, as you can see and chilly. It later got hot and humid. Under the right conditions, I could sell off some lots right at the corner with the river, where people could build “farmettes” or cabins. I have no idea how that works, but I bet I can figure it out. That would help pay for the land.

Land is inexpensive these days because of the recession. It won’t stay that way forever and this may be a good time to buy. But the timing is always tricky and I don’t have that kind of money to just risk.  The forest land and its produce will essentially fund large chunks of my retirement, or not. In a rational market, this land would become more valuable. Markets are always rational … in the long run.  But as John Maynard Keynes said, “Markets can remain irrational a lot longer than you and I can remain solvent." 

Anybody want to come in on a forestry investment?  Or maybe buy a beautiful home site near an officially designative senic river? Well, I have to figure out the finances. I really just don't know.

Pictures

The first picture shows the boat landing on the Nottoway River. The picture under that is the part of the property I was looking at that was cut in 2001. This is natural regeneration and would remain on the land.  I would have to mange it a little, but the trees look healthy. As comparison, you can see my trees on the CP property (same day. The sun came out.) They are only six years old (planted 2004) but they are bigger by a couple feet and fuller because of better genetic stock and some management.  The second lastpicture shows the pines on our Freeman property.  They were planted in 1996 and will be thinned later this month (first thining). They need thinning. Light will reach the ground and it will be better for wildlife. The last picture is a dog that just wandered by. He has a tracking collar, so he is probably a hunting dog. I offered him a piece of ham from my sandwich.  He took it but remained a little spooked.

Posted by Broadnax at 03:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Northern Virginia has an interesting hitchhiking system called slugging.  Drivers who want to use the HOV lanes, but don’t have the required three passengers, pick up “slugs” at various lots south of DC.  The occupants allow the use of the HOV lane and get both drivers and passengers there much faster.  No money is exchanged and there are some simple rules, such as no talking unless the driver initiates it. 

Hunters are the backbone of rural society. People who live in cities and suburbs rarely appreciate that fact. I thought of this in relation to my own land and was reminded when Chrissy’s sister Diane visited a friend who lives in western Virginia. The friend owns some forest land in the Shenandoah.  Local hunters watch over it,  make improvements and generally take care of the place.  She was a little surprised at the role of local hunters. I used to be too, but not anymore.

The hunters on my land have been there for generations. Much of what I know about the land comes from them. They knew how long the roads had been in place. They remembered when the streams had flooded and when they had gone dry.  They had experience of fires and storms.  And they loved the land and understood the relationships with the animals on them.

Deer hunters are working to create better habitat for the animals they hunt and improve the herds.  They always have done this.  Much of the county’s wildlands were conserved by hunters.  Lately the equations have changed a bit.  The burgeoning wildlife and especially deer population has shifted emphasis from any deer to quality deer. Hunt clubs are actively managing the herds through selective  hunting, feed plots etc.  I get a magazine called “Quality Whitetails” from an organization by the same name that provides a place for the exchange of information and experience. It is very interesting the things hunters are doing in the conservation field, literally out in the field.

Another big factor is development and urban encroachment. A generation ago, there were a lot fewer deer and they were spread over a bigger area of undeveloped land. Today deer populations have grown to almost nuisance levels in some areas and this is exacerbated by the fragmentation of the forests.  This is another reason to emphasize quality of the herds over mere numbers.  The numbers problem is no longer a problem.

Hunting keeps people closer to the land.  One of my friends down in Southside Virginia spends most of his free time working on conservation projects on land his hunt club leases. He helps restore wetlands, makes wildlife corridors etc. He has helped a lot on my farm, at no cost to me since we work in our mutual interest. This guy doesn’t hunt very much anymore in the traditional sense.   He just really enjoys the conservation and wildlife management aspects of hunting.  Most of the hunters I know enjoy the sport more for the insights it gives them into nature than the actual shooting deer, which is only one part  of a full-year, multi-year effort.

The numbers of hunters has been declining over the past decades.  There still are enough, but if the trend continues, this will be a serious threat to the health of rural communities and the rural environment.  Somebody else – probably at taxpayer expense – will have to do what as work hunters do joyfully and for free. In fact, they actually pay to do it.

I am not a hunter myself, for the same reasons that the number of hunters has been declining.  I was a city kid, with no hunting tradition. I am also a terrible shot.  I support hunting by working with the hunt clubs  on my farms and supporting some hunting organizations, such as Quality Whitetails, that provide hunting education and advocacy.

Beyond the environmental benefits, hunting has a long tradition in American culture.  It is very different in the U.S. than it was in many parts of the world.  In Europe, hunting was a rich man’s sport.   When the ordinary people hunted, it was usually called “poaching,” especially when talking about bigger game, a crime that was severely punished by the aristocrats. Besides just wanting to keep the animals to themselves, aristocrats sensed the fundamental democratizing nature of hunting.  Besides giving the common man access to weapons and the training to use them, hunting allowed individuals a personal connection with nature, unfiltered by the hierarchy of the old world.  It also provides a means of support. One of the older hunters down near the farms told me that when he was young, hunting wasn’t just a hobby; it was needed to put meat on the table.  One of the things that impressed former-peasant immigrants to the early America was that they COULD hunt.  They were the owners of the land and didn’t have to kiss the ass of the local baron or “his” deer and elk untouched in the forest where only the fat-cats could hunt.  

So this is my paean to the pastoral pursuit of hunting in our great America, whether it is deer, turkey, geese, quail, ducks or bears (yes we have a few on the farms now).   We should appreciate what hunters and hunting have done for us.

Posted by Broadnax at 10:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We lived in the Oakwood Apartments across from Waterfront Mall when we lived in Washington in 1988 while studying Norwegian.  It was a dump back then, the failed experiment in 1960s urban renewal.  The Mall had few tenants, although I did appreciate the Blimpy and Roy Rogers. They went out of business a few years later until there was essentially nothing  left but a CVS, Safeway & some used music stores. Perhaps most poignant was an escalator that went up to a non-existent second floor. They had great expectations at some time ago. But they plunked the place down in the middle of a crappy neighborhood that really couldn’t support a Mall. We were afraid to go there after dark and apparently so were most other unarmed customers not engaging in pursuits of questionable prudence or legality. 

They tore it down a few years ago and started to build a new residential-commercial complex. Conditions have changed. There is now a metro-stop (Waterfront) and a more prosperous set of people has moved in around.  It is the classic gentrification of anyplace within reasonable walking distance from a metro. You can see the new Safeway up top. Notice that the buildings are medium tall. It is illegal to build anything higher than the top of the Capitol. This keeps Washington's skyline low.

They also have just about finished the Arena Stage that you see in the picture above. You can see pictures from a couple years ago, during construction here, here & here.

Posted by Broadnax at 12:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It has been really hot. The weatherman said that we have not had this kind of string of hot days since the 1930s. I remember that my father used to say, “It ain’t the heat; it’s the humidity.” He was right, but we have both. I still have been riding my bike to work and it has been about 80 degrees when I set off in the morning. I am soaking with sweat by the time I get to work and am more grateful than usual for the showers.

Yesterday I went to the Wilson Center to hear a talk on Brazilian biofuels. I will write notes later. I got to work and took my shower and then I decided to walk over to Wilson for the program that started at 9am.  It is only around a 15 minute walk, but the humidity made it really uncomfortable. Well, the really hot weather is supposed to be over in a couple of days. Then it will be merely hot.

I got a little spoiled last year when it was cool (by Washington standards) most of the summer. I understand that this is an "El Nino" year, which means it is hotter than usual. 

The funny thing is that it is an especially cold winter in South America. I have been watching Brazilian TV and they talk a lot about the “cold wave” hitting their country. Cold for them does not mean the same thing it does for us. When it gets down around freezing it is a very serious event. They just aren’t ready. There are reports of cattle just dropping dead from the cold in states like Mato Grosso do Sul and Parana. You can see it on TV. They evidently just drop down and are laying right where they stood in the fields. These are tropical breeds that just don’t make it through a cold (by Brazilian standards) night. They also tend not to have sheltering barns, since there is usually no need for them. Cattle raising is extensive instead of intensive and often what we would call "free range". Brazil has a lot of pasture land. I read that each cow has an average of a whole hectare of land.

The pictures up top are from my morning ride through Arlington Cemetery yesterday and the day before.  You can sort of see the humidity in the air.  

Posted by Broadnax at 05:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I was at FSI last week taking the seminar in new trends in public diplomacy.  I didn’t get that many new insights, but it is clear that some of the infatuation with the new media is wearing off, or maybe just becoming more routine.   The new media is an essential tool, but we all recognize that it is not the panacea that it seemed to be.   Most importantly, you still need something interesting to say.

It was a tough few days, since I took the seminar during the day but still had to do my promotion panel assessments.  I could work from home via computer (another great thing re technology) but it was like having two almost full time jobs.  But it was worth the time to get involved.  You never know how much you learn because very often once you hear something related to what you know you think you just knew it already.

I keep going longer on the bike trail when I ride my bike to FSI and this time I took the more round about way that I used to use before the built a kind of bike bypass.   They put up a new sign explaining that this particular part of the park had been a dairy farm until 1955.  It was the last working dairy farm in Arlington.  Some of the local homeowners have a sweet deal.  They live right up against the park, which gives them a really big backyard that they don’t have to mow or pay for.  I suppose the downside is you cannot kick people out.

Arlington is a pleasant area.   Above is one of the streets on the way to FSI. Below is the place where Chrissy & I lived when I first came into the FS. We lived in the downstairs apartment, one bedroom. We thought it was really luxurious, but it really wasn't.  The back is up against a park trail, so it was very nice.

Posted by Broadnax at 01:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Below are sunflowers planted near my bike trail.  The thing that is important to notice about them is that they are there at all.  Somebody planted them and nobody knocked them down, despite the fact that dozens of people pass each minute.   I think that says something about the neighborhood. 

There are some tip-offs about the quality of a neighborhood.  Flowers are an indicator on the plus side, as is general neatness and lack of litter.  It also is a good sign if you don’t see lots of security fences or signs warning about loitering or trespassing. The character of the dominant dog population also makes a difference.  Labradors, golden retrievers and terriers are good; pit bulls and Rottweilers not so much.  I am suspicious of places where there are bars or sliding screens on shops, especially liquor stores. Being able to see more than one liquor store from any one spot is also a red flag. Lots of advertisements for lottery tickets is a bad sign and a big clue that you have crossed into a less desirable part of town are those places that cash checks 24 hours a day or give payday loans.  If you see storefronts advertising bail bonds, get the heck away from that neighborhood.   But sunflowers are good.

Above are sprinklers near the Potomac.  I found a place right in the rain shadow of a couple trees so that the water didn’t get to me.  I sat there a few minutes enjoying the peaceful sound of the spraying water until it started to rain.  That evening we got more than an inch of rain.  If you sprinkle your lawn or wash your car it evidently increases the chances of rain.

Above it the Ripley Center at Smithsonian, where they often hold the lectures I attend. It is like the tip of an iceberg.  That little structure is the entrance to a vast underground complex of halls and museums. They didn't want to put lots of buildings up on the Mall, so they put them under.  

Posted by Broadnax at 09:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Despite my move to the new building, I still have to go down to the old area both to work out at Gold’s Gym and to make it possible to get on the Metro.  

As I think I have explained before, I ride only one way. It is 17 miles from my house to the my old USIA building by the route I have to take on my bike to avoid traffic. I used to ride both ways, but 34 miles a day is a lot and it is daunting to have to ride home after a long day’s work. Maybe I have just become wimpier in my old age, but I enjoy the ride to work most days, while the ride back was just a chore. I have developed several rationalizations, the foremost of which is that the one-way trip extends my biking season because I don’t have to worry about darkness in spring and fall.  I also don’t worry so much about the weather.  If it is not raining in the morning I am okay.  I don’t have to worry about late afternoon storms.  Finally, it is fairly comfortable in the early morning, but often enervatingly hot by the afternoon.

Besides all that, I think my Metro-bike combo helped get me promoted. I cannot get on the train with my bike until after 7pm, so I used to hang around work until then waiting.  Sometimes I actually did some useful work, but probably as importantly I was SEEN to be at work. I always told the truth; I told people that I was merely waiting for the train, but they didn’t believe me, so I got points for consistently “working” late.

Now I generally leave work around 6:30, which give me plenty of time for a leisurely ride along the Smithsonian Mall and my vigorous but short workout at Gold’s Gym. You can see the Smithsonian with the shades of evening on the longest day of the year.  Along the way I have observed traffic enforcement.  Cars can park along the main streets during non-rush hours and lots of people evidently don’t know when that period ends.   When rush-hour starts, tow trucks fan out to ticket the cars and pull them off the road and onto the grassy verges.  It must come as a bit of a surprise to hapless tourists. It is a little hard on the grass.  The tow truck below, BTW, is NOT doing the grass towing. I don't think it is ever legal to park on that part of 14th Street and we all pity the fool who parked there just before rush hour. His vehicle is going to a public impound in DC, from which it may never emerge.

BTW – my title “tow the line” is a variation on the saying, “toe the line.” I know the difference. The latter saying is based on conforming to a military line. The former is just wrong, but it does create an image that could make sense. A tow truck, I suppose, could tow a line.

Posted by Broadnax at 12:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Today was simply beautiful bike weather.   It is unusually fresh and cool for the season. It was around 60 degrees for my ride this morning, with a nice tail wind and beautiful blue skies and low humidity.  This is not the usual middle of June weather in Washington. 

I manage to fall off the bike yesterday. I tried to jump onto the path too precipitously after passing some pedestrians spread all across the path. I left a little skin on the pavement and today it hurts like mad.  I guess it is like a burn.  It is a scrape just deep enough to excite all the pain receptors but not deep enough to turn any of them off. The leg is a bit worse, but they are not the kinds of things that take too long to heal.   I had to wear short sleeves so as not to stain a good shirt, since some blood is still rubbing off.

Way back when I first came to DC, I had a spectacular fall near Arlington Cemetery.  I fell and slid on my back across the wet pavement.  It made a very conspicuous but not deep wounds, much like today's but all over my back. I washed it off when I got to work, but it wasn't finished and I ruined one of my shirts.  Lesson learned.

There is a sequel. I was discussing biking a couple years later with my colleague George Lannon in Brazil.  He said he would never ride to work because of the danger.  When I inquired further, he said that he had once seen “some a-hole” slide clear across the road on his back near Arlington Cemetery. That evidently put him off biking forever. Small world.

I ride past that place almost every day.  I haven’t fallen there for twenty-five years.

Posted by Broadnax at 08:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

When there is a big industrial accident these days, the lawyers come out and drain any of the real emotion or truth out of the event and displace it with cash.  In the old days, at least in the southern hills, they wrote a ballad.   So it was when a train with Joseph A. ("Steve") Broadey's hand on the throttle plunged into a ravine near Danville, VA in 1903.  Nine people were killed and seven injured in what the plaque called one of the worst railroad accidents in Virginia history.  This is what they mean when they say you are heading for a train wreck.

I heard the song as a kid. My father’s version was sung by Boxcar Willie (I think), although there is a Hank Snow rendition and Hank was my father’s favorite singer. I thought it was just a song, not a real historical event, but it had some very precise lyrics.  “They gave him his orders in Monroe Virginia saying ‘Steve you’re way behind time’” … “It’s a mighty rough road from Lynchburg to Danville and a line on a three mile grade.”

So in the wonderful world of Internet, I checked it out and found out it was true, so when I drove through Lynchburg I went looking for the place.  A couple people claimed to have written the lyrics.  It was first recorded in 1924 and you can listen to the original version at this link.

All that is left now is this easily overlooked historical marker along a seedy patch of Highway 58 just to the west of Danville.  There is nothing left of the trestle or the tracks and the ravine is overgrown with brush and vines.  It must have been really big news around here in 1903, but more than 100 years later only the song abides.  The picture of the train, BTW, is just a train crossing in Danville, unrelated to the Wreck of the Old 97, except that they are both trains.

Another thing about Danville is that it was the last capital of the Confederacy. This lasted literally only a matter of days, as Jeff Davis and his cabinet fled south, with Union troops in hot pursuit, after the defeat of Southern arms. Davis took up residence in the house of a prominent local man called William Sutherlin.  Sutherlin made his money in the tobacco business and was a successful and flexible businessman both before and after the Civil War.

Davis was a great man, according to his lights, but he was misguided. Robert E Lee and Joe Johnston did the right thing and in April 1865 contributed to saving the United States and making it the country whose freedom we love today. Davis wanted to keep on fighting, even after Appomattox. At some point, hanging on stops being noble and becomes stupid, pernicious and immoral.  I admire Lee & Johnston, Davis not so much. The guide treated Davis as a hero. I don't agree. 

Chrissy and I visited the house, an Italian style mansion. Pictures are above and below. The woman in the painting above fireplace is the Sutherlin's daughter on her wedding day. The house is restored to the period of around the Civil War. You really get the old South feeling there. The Daughters of the Confederacy use the place for their meetings. One of the rooms is deeded over to them.

Posted by Broadnax at 12:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Being able to cut through Fort Meyer has greatly improved my biking to work experience. I had almost forgotten that I have this blog to thank for this. One of my colleagues at State Department send me an email telling me that Fort Meyer was open again after reading this post.

Above is an interesting sign of the stimulus. It struck me as funny for a few of reasons, first because it is the Hoover Building. Hoover’s reputation on economic recovery is not that good. Second this renovation started a long time ago. Chrissy used to work in that building and they were already renovating it when she was working there back in 2007/8. Third, this building was one of the first big government buildings in Washington. It was the biggest office building in the world when it was completed in 1932. 

Above is new bigger home that replaced a little ones. This kind of "tear down" or "in filling" is still happening, as you can see, but has slowed down a lot because of the recession. People buy the smaller houses, like the one at the right, tear them down and rebuilt bigger, newer ones, like the one on the left, on the lot. This one is not as big as some and it seems to fit in well with the neighborhood. Sometimes people build huge houses that essentially cover the entire lot, often literally shading out their neighbors. 

Posted by Broadnax at 08:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It was a little early to go down to the farms. The trees haven’t quite started to grow yet and the clover is still small and not flowering. I will be back in a few weeks. But I wanted to check on flood damage now. Above are the trees near the clover field at the top of the hill. The truck gives perspective. The land was clear cut in 2003, so you can see how much the trees have grown since then. The biosolids helped them grow faster last year. Below is another truck comparison. There is an interesting detail. Look at the two trees behind the truck. The round top one is a "volunteer" i.e. natural regeneration. It was probably a little tree when the place was cut. The one next to it is a planted genetically "super tree." Because of their location at the crossroad, I have been paying attention to this place. The round top tree was twice as big as the ones around it when I first noticed. Today, you can see that the one next to it is a little bigger and I expect that after this growing season it will be significantly bigger. I will take another picture.

I saw clear evidence of heavy rain and lots of runoff, but no real damage. The places near the streams overflowed, but that doesn’t hurt the trees. The water is running UNDER one of the water pipes. I figure it will undercut the road, but I don't think there is much to do about it. I will put in a load of rocks and turn it into a ford when/if it collapses. I think it will be better for the water to run over instead of under. 

One of the little streams changed course last year. It went back to its older course. When I dig down, I find sand and gravel all over, indicating that the stream has changed course a lot. It creates wetlands until the mud piles up into natural levies, and then it moves again. You can see from the picture above that there have been times when the ground was dry for a long time.  The dead trees were alive when I got the place in 2005, when the stream shifted and evidently drown the roots in wetland. I suppose that now the stream has shifted again, it will be dryer, although the whole place is spongy.

I also think that runoff will decrease over time as the trees on the slopes get bigger and their roots absorb more of the water before it hits the streams. 

I want to get the trees on the Freeman tract thinned this year or next, before I get to Brazil.   Above you can see from the comparison with the truck that the trees are big enough and thick enough. They will be fourteen years old this year, which is a little early for thinning but within the range.  Below is the power line right-of-way. They replaced the wooden pylons with steel and kind of tore up the grass. I have eight acres under those things. I am looking into establishing quail habitat, since I cannot plant trees (or allow them to grow) that would interfere with the wires.  On the plus side, it provides a long area of forest edge and wildlife plot and the utility company maintains the road. 

Posted by Broadnax at 06:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Spring has arrived in Washington.  Some pictures are included. Above is the Capitol seen from the NE corner.  Below is the Jefferson Memorial.

Below is the Lincoln Memorial. Lots of people have come to see old Abe. 

Below is the Washington Monument through the cherry trees.

Below is the path along the Tidal Basin.

Posted by Broadnax at 09:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The cherry trees are in full bloom. It is hard to recall that snow was on the ground just a few weeks ago. Some pictures are included with the post.  The picture at the side shows the bread line from the FDR Memorial. I went down to the cherry trees and visited Roosevelt on the way back.

Posted by Broadnax at 07:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I drove with Frank Sherwood to the Virginia tree farm of the year and got a chance to talk to him as we walked around on the ground. Frank has been doing forestry in Virginia for thirty-five years and I got some good information on drive down from Winchester. 

This area of Virginia features a lot of mixed hardwoods and white pines. I was very familiar with white pines form Wisconsin, but I really had a lot to learn about them. For example, white pine wood is light and not as hard or strong as loblolly.  It is good for fence rails (it doesn’t twist) and it is used in log cabins, but it is not as much use as structural timber.  Frank lamented that there is not much of a market for white pine saw timber in the immediate area, besides in those two limited uses. A lot of the local white pine had not grown straight and un-branched.   The newer plantations are doing better.

White pines have not been developed genetically as well as loblolly and it is less likely to be planted, since natural regeneration works very well.   A white pine rotation is around fifty years (15-18 years longer than loblolly) with two possible thinning. 

Pulp prices have remained steady over the years, Frank told me.   Some people are a little concerned about biofuels, which would compete with pulp and drive the prices up (good for landowners), but there currently is not a biofuels market in the Winchester region.  You can make ethanol from cellulous, but it is not worth it with today’s technologies.   That means that effective biofuels for wood is to burn it directly and for that you need local facilities that burn it.   The alternative is to make wood pellets, but that industry is also not present locally.

Landowners have a couple options for timber selling.  The one you get the most money for is saw timber.  Saw timber will yield $150-400 per 1000 board feet.  Pulp is the cheapest, maybe biofuels in the near future.  Pulp yields $5-7 a ton for pine and $2-3 for hardwood.  In between is scragwood.  These are small diameter but straight trees that can be sawed into rough boards used in crates and pallets.

Frank feeds the mill in Luke, Maryland.  He says that the mill’s catchment area is getting bigger because it is harder to find wood in local areas.  Development and forest fragmentation are the causes.  You can do forestry on small tracts, but at some point it gets to be economically unviable.  You probably need around forty acres to do decent management. Development has been taking forestry out of business. Although the recent economic downturn has stopped much of it, development will resume when the good times roll again. Too bad.

Frank doesn’t know of anybody using biosolids or animal manure on forest lands in this part of the Shenandoah valley or around.  There are several chicken operations (we drove past a Perdue operation) that produce a fair amount of chickenshit, but Frank didn’t know what they did with it.  Chickenshit is a powerful fertilizer, high in potassium, but as I understand it, chickenshit has to be left to decompose a little otherwise it can burn out the crops.  IMO forest lands would be a good place to dispose of some of these farm wastes.  There is a lot of forest and they could absorb and use the nitrogen and phosphate w/o letting it slip into the Chesapeake Bay. Of course, the problem is transportation. Manure is bulky, heavy and stinky.

The problem is concentration.  These large animal operations concentrate the crap. That changes it from a valuable fertilizer into a potential pollution problem. The difference between a life-giving medicine and a deadly poison is often the dosage.

Anyway, those are some of the things I learned from Frank.  The biggest benefit of writing the tree farm of the year article is getting to talk to people like him while actually setting foot on the forests.

Posted by Broadnax at 12:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Noble Laesch, the father of the current owner Judith Gontis, bought this acreage in the late 1960s and it has been a certified tree farm for the last twenty-eight years. Laesch and Gontis did not live on the land and so for the last twenty-eight years it has been forester Frank Sherwood’s business and pleasure to look after these 927 acres of hilly mixed forest just inside the Rockingham County line.

It is a tree farm with great diversity in terms of species composition, topography, soils and microclimates. The ridges are still dominated by mixed hardwoods, although gradually white pines are taking over, both through natural processes and forestry practices. We looked at a logging operations and examined some of the recently cut stumps during a recent visit. The partially shade tolerant white pines had seeded in naturally under an older stand of mixed hardwood, mostly scarlet oak, but were suppressed until released by the forestry operation. 

 We counted 130 rings on a scarlet oak stump. For the first sixty years of life, the tree grew slowly and crookedly. It is clear that there were too many trees here competing for sun, nutrients and water. We have no record of how the neighboring trees were thinned, but the tree started to grow much faster at around sixty until it slowed in older age. Unfortunately, although very big, this scarlet oak, like most of the others in the stand, had begun to rot in the middle. It was past time to remove them and give the white pines their time in the sun. Within a few years this will be an almost pure stand of white pine.

Farther down the hill was a recently thinned plantation, a total of 126 acres of twenty-year-old white pine and a clear cut left to regenerate naturally in white pine. The trees were vigorous but widely spaced. The blueberries had come in very thickly and perhaps they just outran the pine seedlings.   The plantation was clearly better for timber production, but the naturally regenerated area had cost nothing to plant and the widely spaced trees were providing excellent openings for wildlife.   As with any management plan, it depends on what the landowner wants and it was interesting to see the side-by-side comparison of different choices.

The tulip-poplars that grow so profusely on the eastern slopes of the Blue Ridge do well here too, but only in coves or bowls that have deeper soil than the rocky and sometimes sandy slopes.   In these places you find towering tulip poplars that can be harvested at regular intervals and regenerated naturally.

The rest of the tree farm is mixed hardwoods, especially white and red oak, plus some maples, as well as white pine.  This is white pine country. Although loblolly can be grown here too, the white pines do it naturally. With Frank Sherwood’s advice, Mrs. Gontis, as her father before her, manages for pulp and saw timber mostly through selective cuttings.  

Like all well-managed tree farms, this one provides a home for wildlife, a place for recreation and protection for water resources. The farm is drained by Runion Creek, whose waters find their way into the Shenandoah and the Potomac and eventually into the Chesapeake Bay. Although there is some development in the region, it looks like this tree farm and its 927 acres will continue to provide these kinds of ecological services for years to come. 

Posted by Broadnax at 05:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I have been riding my bike to work again through Arlington Cemetery, as I wrote in yesterday’s post. Daily exposure to something can desensitize you to its details, but it can also help you see and appreciate it more. I am not sure which side I fall on most of the time. Maybe I see it new again each season. Anyway, I took a couple of pictures.  

Posted by Broadnax at 09:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Today I got all the way to work w/o getting a flat tire or crashing into anything.   It was a great first (well second) day for my bike-to-work season.  It is true that you never forget how to ride a bike.  The old muscle memories jump back into line – just not as efficiently as the end of last season.  I expect to be a little stiff tomorrow because I am already a little stiff today.

Below is the almost done building at Waterfront Mall.

There have been suggestions at State Department that we should subsidize bike riding.  It is a silly idea. Frankly, I don’t want to share my bike path with anybody who has to be paid to be there.  It is a joy to bike.  You just need bike friendly facilities.  My building is very good.  We have a locker room with showers.   You really don’t want to sit all day at work after riding an hour on a bike w/o a shower, nor do you want to sit next to anybody else who has done it.  Modern technology has made looking neat easy.  I bring along a wrinkle free shirt.  These things are great.  100% cotton, comfortable and always pressed.  Even if you stuff it into a bag, and I literally stuff it into a Ziploc freezer bag, all you need do to make them look a pressed as the best iron could made them is to put them on while you are still damp. 

I cut through Fort Meyer and Arlington Cemetery. I also ride past the Lincoln Memorial, in sight of the Washington Memorial and the Capitol.  It is a very patriotic bike ride.

Our operation at work is in stand down mode.  President Obama has postponed his trip to Indonesia, originally scheduled for March 19, then March 21 and now sometime in June. (He has to stick around for the heath care final act.) There were lots of plans and preparations and people had cleared their calendars for the visit. Now, for a brief time, there will be … nothing. It is like the scene in the movie “Cool Hand Luke” where everybody works at top speed and then they get to the end of the road and there is nothing left to do.  I wasn’t much involved with it, actually, but my colleagues were working full-out. They deserve the rest.

Our business is like that.  We spend a lot of our time in frenetic activity that is overtaken by later events. I guess life is like that sometimes in general, a tale, told by an idiot, fully of sound and fury, signifying nothing. But who cares if you can bike to work in the pleasant warm air and sunshine, preferably with a little tail wind. This is going to be a glorious spring. Spring is always nice around there, but usually we get a few flowers at a time. They kind of ration their beauty.  But atypical cold and snowy winter has held back the flowers, which will now burst forth at once in a rare display of unity.

Posted by Broadnax at 03:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I tried to start my bike season today and ended up with a flat tire. It was my own fault.  After many years of riding my bike, I still cannot properly change a tire. I "fixed" my bike yesterday and I think I just got the inner tube caught on the rim. It just needed a little pressure to blow out. I wasn’t too far from home, so I could walk back in around a half hour. It was not a complete loss. The walk was really nice and I had a chance to think about a few things.

What I thought about was Nash equilibrium. I can't say I am an expert on the details, but as I understand the simple version, Nash proved mathematically what we perceive intuitively but imperfectly. It is possible to have stability at a situation that is bad and everyone agrees is bad.  However, each person makes perfectly logical choices that lead to this outcome.    

The way that it works is that if almost everybody makes the “good” choice (call it choice A), they are all better off.   But if not enough people make that choice (they choose choice B), those that choose A suffer more than those who make the bad choice (B).  So everybody tries to figure out what the majority will do, while complaining about the stupidity of the herd. These sorts of equilibria have tipping points.  If enough people come to think others will choose outcome A, they all will pile on. The same goes for the other option.

Nash, BTW, is the guy played by Russell Crowe in the movie “A Beautiful Mind.” The real Nash won the Noble Prize for his work in mathematical economics. If you study game theory, you have to study Nash.

The example of a Nash equilibrium I thought about on my morning walk was traffic and blocked roads.  Northern Virginia has horrible traffic problems. Many of them result from the stupid way streets are laid out.  Unlike a logical grid layout you find in many cities, Northern Virginia’s road system looks more like a river drainage basin, with dead end tributaries flowing into larger and larger streets. There might be only one – usually winding – road that you can use to get where you want to go. Parallel streets, if they exist at all, are blocked or dead ended.

I think that the original road system was based on cow paths and Indian trails. We have Braddock Road, which is the course that General Braddock took to Pennsylvania during the French and Indian wars. Since he insisted on building a road, the French and Indians saw him coming and wiped him out.  George Washington saved some of the troops and it was the start of his good reputation.

Onto the cow path system was appended a system of cul-de-sacs and dead end streets.  This is where the Nash equilibrium starts to play. People prefer to live on quiet streets and the best way to ensure a quiet street it to make sure that it doesn’t go anywhere. So builders and planners create neighborhoods with no-through streets. This means that you might have to drive ten miles to travel one mile if you could go straight. It also throws all the traffic onto a few overcrowded roads.  

I walked home along Sandburg Street. It parallels Gallows Road, which is gridlocked at the time I was walking.But there were no cars on Sandburg. That is because you cannot get there from here in a car.  Sandburg has a dead end right in the middle. This is what you see on the picture. The wide and well paved road comes to an end in a patch of grass around five yards wide. It has been this way a long time, because some trees have grown in. Then it starts again. I am sure this was originally a real dead end.  Now they cannot make it grow through because the local residents will complain. There are lots of place like this in Northern Virginia.  Everybody agrees that we would all be better off if we could spread the traffic and drive the shorter distances. But nobody wants to give up his own quiet street.

BTW - Did you hear the story about the guy asking for directions? He asked an old man, "Does this road go to Chicago?" They old man replied, "No. I have lived here all my life and I have never seen it go anywhere."

So the State keeps on widening the roads. The irony is that they widen the empty roads too.  As you can see in the picture, Sandburg is a fairly wide road, considering it doesn’t really go anyplace.  At least this road has a place where pedestrians and bikes can get through. Most don’t even do that because everybody wants privacy.

There is no way out of this equilibrium. You might say that we have reached a dead end.

Posted by Broadnax at 10:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Espen’s professor told him that he could get a few extra credit points if he visited an exhibit on the history of computers at the Museum of American History, so we went down. It turns out the exhibit was no longer there. They took it away more than two years ago when they did renovations.  

We took a picture of Espen at the museum to prove that he went. I find interesting that the exhibit has been gone for two years. Obviously the professor hasn’t visited recently; I wonder how many of his students claimed to have gone in the meantime.

It reminds me of the sleazy journalist’s trick of writing about an event using only the press release.  I have seen stories reporting the comments of guests who never showed up or giving details of events that were canceled and never happened at all. Sometimes nobody really seems to care. The irony is that a bogus story is usually more interesting than the real thing.

I enjoyed the museum. I haven’t really been through it since the renovation. They restored the original “Star Spangled Banner” and put it in a nice exhibit hall and there were lots of nice examples of the machines and technologies that built our country. They had a big a special set of exhibits about electrical generation and a little hagiography for Thomas Edison, who deserves it.  Of course, it didn’t hurt that General Electric was a major sponsor.

Posted by Broadnax at 12:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Pardon the hyperbole, but the unusually hard (for Virginia) winter has kept me off the running trails and I have been feeling unconnected. This weekend the snow melted off. So I got out yesterday and today running, walking and stopping long enough to take some pictures at what I believe is the end of winter. It is hard to believe there is still this much snow on March 7.

Above is the W&OD full of runners and bikers on this nice spring day. Below are jet streams. I take a break at Navy Federal S&L park grounds. You can just lay on the bench and look at the sky.

The white pine below is a nightmare for foresters, but very interesting to have in your front yard.

Below is a building across from the Metro. 

Below is the bike trail along Gallows Road. Still not really in good form. All that sand and crud will make for an unpleasant ride. But a good rain or a sweeper will take care of it.

Below is one last look at my bike/running trail with snow, not always so crowded. I figure it will all melt off by tomorrow or the next day. The sun is high and the weather is warm. 

Posted by Broadnax at 08:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I was drove Alex back to Harrisonburg and dreaded making the return trip alone in the dark, but with the full moon providing just the right amount of softly silver light and a good audio program to listen to (I am finishing Donald Kagan’s Greek history series) , it was actually very pleasant.

Alex is doing well at college, but it is a tough transition for him. He started in the spring semester, as a junior and got stuck in the dorm farthest away from campus.  It is an overflow dorm.  It used to be a hotel and is not actually on the JMU campus at all.    These types of things make a big difference and he just had bad luck with all of them.   He is doing well in classes, however, and I think he will adapt all right.  I think what he really misses is his job at Home Depot.   That gave him contact with people and something useful to work on.   They really seemed to like him there.  I hope he can get the job back for the summer.  

The picture up top shows Alex at Cracker Barrel, where we stopped in Woodstock along I-81. They sell good old fashioned food. I had a good pot roast with mushrooms.  Alex had sirloin steak. It feels like home.  They had a wood fire burning in the fireplace.  It is a nice smell. They sell that old fashioned candy shown in the middle picture. 

At the bottom is the sushi shop at Tysons.  It is not related to the other pictures or text.  The conveyor is in constant motion.  I don't know how they can tell who takes what and how much they should pay.  It reminds me of those old cartoons portraying modern times.

Posted by Broadnax at 10:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The snow is melting, but more is expected tomorrow to replace it.  It is hard to believe that within a month the flowers will be blooming.   The picture above is from March 23 of last year - a month from now.   I will appreciate spring more after this especially snowy and cold winter.

Above is a protest on 22^nd St. outside the State Department. I think they are Eritreans. I was in a bit of a hurry so I just took the picture and kept on walking, so I don’t really know what was bothering them. About a hundred showed up to chant for passersby and a good time was had by all except the taxi drivers who were annoyed that the street was blocked.

Above are broken magnolia trees outside the Archives. The snow is hard on these sorts of southern trees and there are lots of broken branches & trees around here.  The snow weighs heavy on their leathery evergreen leaves. You can see why trees from colder climates would adapt strategies other than holding onto their broad leaves all winter.

Posted by Broadnax at 09:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Most private and all public universities were founded in part to help educate good citizens. They really aren’t doing a great job of it, if you assess what students learn about America’s government, business, institutions and society. Take this simple test. The questions are based on our citizenship exam. Lucky for most Americans that we were born here, because 71% of us probably couldn’t pass the test to become citizens.

College graduates do better than the general population (49% to 57%) but adjusting for demographic characteristics (income, age, region etc) college students get only 3.8% better over their four-year tenure & some big name universities managed to produce “negative knowledge.” Seniors at Cornell scored 4.95% lower than freshmen. Yale, Duke, Princeton, Rutgers & Berkeley also went negative. Harvard seniors scored best at 69.56%. Maybe it will stoke Yale-Harvard rivalries. Yale freshmen beat Harvard freshmen (68.94 to 63.59%), but after Yale’s loss and Harvard’s gain, Harvard won in the end.

Read the rest of the report here. You can see the discussion of the reports at this link

Of course, there is some debate as to how much civic knowledge a citizen really needs. Our democracy relies on the wisdom of crowds. Each person has some bits of knowledge, which are presumably aggregated to produce a good result. It is not necessary for everybody to know what the Scopes trial was about, be able to name the three parts of the Federal government or even be able to name the countries who were our enemies in World War II, as long as some people know important things and we are generally wise enough to know when when know and when we don't. The problem that I see is that sometimes the ignorant also have very high self-esteem. Recalling the lines from Yeats, "The best lack all conviction, while the worse are full of passionate intensity." Modern education may feed this.

There is an old saying that you are entitled to your own opinion but not your own facts. Not everybody believes that anymore. Some people think it is important to teach critical thinking and not pay much attention to the facts. But if you don’t have any facts, what are you thinking critically about?

IMO the more you know about American history and institutions, the more you appreciate them. Thomas Jefferson believed that an educated citizenry was crucial to the working of democracy, which is why he founded the University of Virginia. Building good citizens was one of the founding justifications for the public school system.

I got one wrong on the test and I will advance the lame excuse that I wasn’t paying attention. But when I thought about the questions, a lot of what I learned I didn’t learn directly in school. Education doesn’t/shouldn’t stop when you graduate from college and college isn’t/shouldn’t be the only place you get education, especially civic education. I think we need to emphasize our heritage, for everybody in our lives every day, lest it slip away. Knowledge lives only in living people, not locked in books we never read. And the person who doesn’t read is really no better off than the person who can’t.

It is not all locked in the written word, however. One of the places I learned some of these facts is from television – yes television. Much of television is indeed crap, but there is a lot of good too. There is a very good PBS series called The American Experience. The episodes about FDR were on last week. He was an amazing man with an amazing education. He came from what is as close to an American ruling class as we can get, but it is true that we Americans don’t have a ruling class. They are us. We are our own “rulers” and so we have to train a new set of them each generation. We produced truly great generations of leadership. Let’s hope that we are not just living off and using up the capital that they created for us and let’s work to make sure that is not the case.

Maybe we should take citizenship a little more seriously.

Posted by Broadnax at 10:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Chrissy & I went to the movies at the AMC at Tysons Corner today.   We saw “From Paris with Love” with John Travolta. It was one of those action thrillers where you have to suspend belief in human behaviors and the normal rules of physics. It was worth going but not real good.   I wouldn’t recommend it if you have other things to do. There were just not good options, even with multiple cinemas. I wanted to see that Jeff Bridges movie, “Crazy Heart” but it wasn’t showing.

Cinema tickets are getting expensive.  It was $18 for two.  I am still a cheapskate and I remember when they were a lot cheaper, but the “theater experience” is worth it once in a while.  We got popcorn and soda too. Everything is big.

We rarely go to the Mall anymore. When the kids were little, we were more frequent customers.  It was a form of entertainment as well as shopping. We bought a lot of useless crap. Malls are better avoided when possible. You are tempted to buy stuff you can't really use and food you don’t want. 

Today I had real trouble resisting Cinnabon. They have a fan that wafts the scent out into the Mall.   The funny thing is that I don’t like Cinnabon that much. They are too sticky and not worth the trouble of eating them. Nevertheless, the scent is enticing and difficult to resist.

Tysons is the biggest city in Virginia.  It is really a massive complex of malls and offices.   They are building the Metro out to Tysons, which is a little ironic but also positive.  Tysons was the ultimate car center, but that is becoming unsustainable.

Posted by Broadnax at 11:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Above is the Vietnam Memorial.  There was a bunch of grade school kids visiting the place and I heard them talking. They have no personal connection with a war that ended a quarter century before they were born.  It is almost as remote to them as World War I was to me.  It is not their war, nor even their fathers'. Vietnam is something their grandfathers may have experienced. Funny how fast time moves and how the defining events of your life are just history now. 

Above is the MIA booth.  They sell mementos, medals and patches.  Below is snow removal near the Memorials.

Below is the path along the reflecting pool going toward the Washington Memorial

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Above is the crowded subway car on the Orange Line. I usually get a seat, but lately they have the cars have been more crowded.  They are raising the price of fare by a dime, but will probably also still cut service. Below is the sidewalk on the way to the Metro stop.  They take care of the roads fairly well, but that means eight foot high banks of snow.

Posted by Broadnax at 12:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Washington is under more snow than any living person has seen and this has been the longest time ever when my running path were snow clogged.   But Washington is pretty in the snow, as the pictures show.  

It was warm and sunny today and the snow has the consistency of a snow cone.  It will take a few more warm days to melt it all off.

Above is the Lincoln Memorial.  Below Robert E. Lee's house and Arlington Cemetery from across the Potomac.

Below is the snow covered running path near the Vietnam Memorial

Posted by Broadnax at 11:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We are off from work again today and the government will be closed again tomorrow. They say that we got more snow this year than any time in recorded history. This is less impressive when you recall that they have kept detailed weather records for only a little more than 100 years. Nevertheless, it is a lot of snow and it has been a cold season.

There is a real blizzard today and I can see why nobody should be driving. Espen tried to drive the truck to visit one of his nearby friends. He got stuck in our complex. Fortunately, Chrissy and I could walk over and dig/push him out. Yesterday, however, wasn’t bad until around 5pm. In fact, the main roads were perfectly clear.  As I wrote in yesterday’s post, I drove down to the forestry conference in Keswick , near Charlottesville. It is a little more than a two hour drive.

I took a little different way than usual. I started down I66 to US29 as usual, but then I cut off on US15 through Culpepper and Orange. The drive takes you through a really beautiful countryside, full of horse farms and vineyards with the Blue Ridge Mountains as a backdrop.   James Madison’s estate is nearby and so is Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello. The soil is good and the climate is moderate. You can see what it looks like covered in snow. It is even prettier in springtime.

Posted by Broadnax at 08:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The big Washington blizzard didn’t make AEI cancel the session on new American demographics and the discussion of “The Next 100 Million: America in 2050” with the author Joel Kotkin and a panel of experts chaired by Michael Barone.

Decline overdone

Experts have been saying that America is in decline since - even before - we became an independent nation. Kotkin acknowledges that someday these critics will be correct, but not today, and he paints an optimistic picture of our American future. America has a lot of advantages going into the next generation. It starts with demographics.

Americans still remember how to have kids; it is evidently no longer a universal skill

The U.S. is unique among developed country since we have a positive rate of natural increase. It is not very much above replacement level, but that is more than others, some of which are almost in free fall. America is also an anomaly in that in some of our suburbs wealthy, well-educated women sometimes have three or more kids. (I recall reading an article about the big families in affluent Loudon County next door to us.)  

We also still get millions of immigrants. That means that the America is growing older slower than other developed countries and the American labor force will continue to grow through 2050, while others suffer greater or lesser proportional decline in their productive populations relative to their dependent ones. The interesting thing about his data was that it also shows that the world's most populous country - China - will begin to suffer labor shortages (at least for skilled labor) very soon.  The Chinese labor force will start to decline as early as 2015 (yes, five years from now) as a result of their perhaps necessary but draconian one-child policy. (Long term predictions are always tough, but by 2050 the U.S. labor force is projected to rise by 42%; China’s will drop by 10% and Japan’s labor force will decline by an astonishing 44%).

More old people, fewer young workers 

This labor force decline will be accompanied by a big growth in the elderly dependent population, both in relative and absolute terms. The world has never experienced anything like this before and our lack of models will require adaptions we cannot fully anticipate. We are truly going where no human societies have gone before.

But America will suffer these declines later and less severely than most others. In addition, the U.S. has a very robust & adaptive economic system. National power is based on economic strength, innovation and demographic clout. Among the great nations of the last generation, only the U.S. will still have these elements in abundance in the next generation.

Managing genteel decline not the same as planning robust growth

This U.S. outlook contributes to disagreements with old allies. For example, the Europeans can also make demographic projections. They see that their populations will decline and their economies will grow much slower than ours. When your population will get smaller and your economy won’t grow much, you don’t worry very much about promising cuts in CO2. You need different policies if you are managing a genteel decline than when you are planning for robust growth.

The U.S. will change internally too. The growth of the last fifty years went mostly to the coasts.   The next fifty years will see a return to the heartland. Kotkin doesn’t say that all the little praire towns will be back, but space and affordable housing will draw people away from the coasts. He says that the whole idea of suburbs has become meaningless. There is more a blending of suburbs, cities and rural areas. Kotkin foresees what he calls an archipelago of villages. More people would be connected by new media in greener and less crowded communities. It sounds a lot like the Loudoun County communities mentioned in the article I linked above.

Today's ethnic & racial categories will not mean much in 2050

Much has been said about the changing ethnic composition of the U.S. population and in 2050 the white native born population is  projected to drop to around 50% of the labor force.  But how significant will this be? Kotkin pointed out how foreign the large immigration of Irish seemed in the 19th Century.  We just forget how different earlier waves of immigrants had been and how completely they have been integrated into our society. When my grandfather and his brother Felix came to the U.S., they spoke no English and probably had never seen an American before. There is probably no population on earth today that is so "foreign." 

The younger generation doesn't really care very much about race, with vast majorities in favor of interracial marriage, so by 2050 today's categories will be as meaningless as some of the national and religious distinctions made in our grandparents' childhoods. In other words, by 2050 nobody will care. 

Still some challenges and skills mismatched

The road to this bright happy future is not necessarily certain. We have a challenge of education, not so much college but technical. We might, in fact, be pushing too many kids into college when the more appropriate skills might be technical. Our community and technical colleges should be given a bigger role as providers of final or working degrees rather than way-stations to four-year colleges. Kotkin thinks it is just a problem of incentives. We reward careers in finance and law more than we do those who actually make useful things. If that changes, so will our career paths.

We have been able to import skilled labor, but that might be slowing. We have some competition now.  Places like Canada & Australia are also pleasant and welcoming like the U.S. They are also "countries of aspiration" and they drawing in some of the skilled immigrants.  There are also now more opportunities in many source countries, as people around the world reap the benefits of market liberalization reforms of past decades. Indian engineers, for example, now may have good opportunities at home.

The general pool of attractive potential immigrants is also shrinking, as birth rates drop even in those place that traditionally had very high rates of growth, such at Mexico and parts of Asia. A good example of what this pattern can look like comes from South Korea, which a couple decades ago sent millions of immigrants to the U.S. and now absorbs its own population growth, which is now much lower than that of the U.S. 

We need more Engineers & plumbers and fewer leaf blowers & Lawyers

We Americans screw ourselves, however. Canada or Australia favor the skills their countries need.  An immigrant with skills has a better chance of getting into those places. Our immigration policies give too little weight to the skills and education we can use in our economy. We are too "fair". We don’t need to import any more unskilled labor or even worse - people who don’t plan to labor at all.  We have the right to ask potential immigrants what they will contribute to our country. Besides the relatively small numbers of bona-fides refugees, we have no moral duty to admit anybody. As long as we will limit total numbers and we have a choice, we should choose the best and the brightest, not people we need to train before they can operate a leaf blower.

Unfortunately, unskilled labor can create its own demand.  My personal complaint is against leaf blowing. That is usually a job that just need not be done at all and if unskilled labor wasn’t so cheap maybe we wouldn’t do it very often. You can learn to use a leaf blower in about thirty seconds.  We don’t need more of those things. We are better off with people with useful skills. Some jobs - such as leaf blowing - are worth less than zero. I have discussed the value of doing nothing (with specific reference to leaf blowing) here & here.

Anyway, the AEI event gave me something to think about.  I will have to buy the book and read the details. I have to say – once again – that we are really lucky to have these kinds of events offered free or cheaply to anybody with the inclination to listen. 

Posted by Broadnax at 02:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

This year has been especially cold and there has been more snow than usual. The snow in December filled and exceeded last year’s whole year averages. It looks like we are going to fill this year’s quota by the end of next week.

Northern Virginia does a good job of keeping the streets clear – too good, IMO.  The snow is supposed to start tomorrow morning, but the crews are out already “pre-treating” the roads with salt so that the initial snow falls will melt and there won’t be that crust when the plows go through.

Of course, Virginia has a kinder climate. The temperatures might drop below zero after a snowfall in Wisconsin or Minnesota.  This literally freezes in ice and snow. In Virginia you can be pretty sure that it will get fairly warm soon enough after even a heavy snowfall the warm sun will hit the road surface and melt off whatever the salt and plow missed.  

Nevertheless, the thought of snow fills Washingtonians with dread and makes them question their very survival.  I went to Safeway today for routine shopping. The place was packed and people were stocking up on necessities. One old guy scooped up a dozen packages of baloney.   Bread was gone.  As you can see in the picture, we managed temporarily to produce Soviet style conditions.

It is silly.In the worst case scenario the snow will tie us down for two days.Even then, the paralysis will not be complete. Who in our modern and prosperous society has a cupboard so bare that he cannot go for a day or two w/o shopping. You can actually go longer than that w/o eating at all and I have not seen many people these days who couldn't live off their fat for longer than that. 

The lines at the checkouts were long. I got into a line that was for the self-checkouts. I didn't want to use them because I had a fair amount but I also didn't want to get into another line, so I did my own.  It was a problem.  I use my own shopping bags. I got them ten years ago and they are still like new. They are much easier to pack and they are eco-friendly. As I recall they are made from recycled plastic from old bags. But they make life hard at the self checkout. The self checkout wants you to use their bags and gives you a hard time if you don't.  It also evidently weighs your purchases and when I put a new bag of my own on the scale, it thinks I am stealing something.  I felt sorry for the people behind me, but people were cheerful despite my ineptitude and the dread of snow. The clerk had to reset my counter a couple of times, but I got through.

Posted by Broadnax at 11:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It has been cold again this year but this year we are also getting more snow. They got a lot of snow in southern Virginia & North Carolina, so I wanted to go down and look at the snow on the farm.  Well, it wasn’t a lot of snow by Wisconsin standards and it will melt in a few days, but there was more than usual and it created a different look for the place. You really wouldn't guess that you were looking at southern Virginia.

I saw a couple cars in the ditch on the way down and I didn’t dare take the back roads, as I usually do.  Instead I went down I95 all the way down to Emporia and then went over on 58. I also didn’t dare drive down the dirt roads on the farm.  You can see that 623 was good in the spot above, but look near the bottom and you can see why I didn't want to drive up the farm road.  It is harder to walk through the snow but it is nice to feel it underfoot. There were a few animal track, but it was otherwise undisturbed. It is nice to have land.

It was a long trip to see it and it took longer because of the adverse weather conditions. I finished almost the entire audio-book Infotopia, which I found very interesting and useful (I hope) in my job.   This was one of the three audio downloads on Audible.com that Mariza gave me for Christmas.   It was a good gift.  Audio books make long drives bearable and even beneficial. I lose my NPR a few miles outside Washington.  I don’t like music radio or those silly talk shows that purport to give advice that will solve problems that I don’t have. Audio books do the job.

Another good audio program is “the Teaching Company”.   Alex likes them too because they are around forty-five minutes long, which fits his workout schedule.

Anyway, take a look at the nice pictures. 

Complete set of photos are at this link.

Posted by Broadnax at 09:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I have been watching the Institute of Peace building going up outside my office.  Most of the time it is pretty prosaic work, like the guys laying concrete in the picture above.   But sometimes there is something more unusual, such as the flying portable toilets, pictured below.

I imagined how it would be if some poor guy was using it when the crane picked it up.   I suppose the best course of action would be to lock the door, hunker down and hope for a soft landing.

As long as I am on construction, below are pictures from the hot lane construction along the I-495 beltway.  I wrote a post re the hot lanes last year.  I took the pictures from the rolling Metro, which accounts for some of the blur.

***

Posted by Broadnax at 10:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I went to Charlottesville for the meeting of the Virginia Tree Farm Committee.   Unfortunately, the meeting was in Richmond.  They alternate between those two places, and I just screwed it up.   I had actually written the correct place in my calendar, but went to the wrong one.   Well, I am not crucial to the meeting and It was not a total loss.  I got to visit Alex, since Harrisonburg is not far from Charlottesville.   In fact, I think that my desire to see Alex might have figured into my mental slip. Above is the main street in Waynesboro.  

Alex had classes until 3:30.  This was good when I had planned to attend the meeting, but now I had lots of time on my hands.   I thought I might drive up along the Blue Ridge Parkway but it was closed, evidently weather related.  So I went through Waynesboro.   I  was not seeing it on the best day but they did have an A&W.  I like the hamburgers and the root beer.  A&W fries are not good, however.

Above is the dining room. I had it to myself. Below is the outside.

I followed a little road north.  It was a charming rural area.  I wanted to stop off at Grand Caverns, but it was closed for the season.   Again, not the best time to come around.   Since I was still too early, I walked around Harrisonburg.   You can see pictures.

Alex likes his classes at JMU.  He has a couple of Asian history classes, symbolic logic and an anthropology class on North Americans native people.  He found the gyms and good running trails.  College life is good.  We had supper at “the Blue Nile” and Ethiopian restaurant.   Harrisonburg is well endowed with restaurants and services.

Rain mixed with snow scared me a little when I left Harrisonburg at around 6pm.   I don’t much like driving up I-81 because of all the trucks even in good weather.  The weather cleared up not too far into the trip and there wasn’t too much traffic on 66. I got 42 miles to the gallon on this trip, which is good for going through the mountains. I usually get good mileage on the way to Charlottesville along 29.  I think it is because of the slower speeds and the hybrid does particularly well on the rolling hills. I get a significantly better mileage at 50 MPH than I do at 65. 

Below is the city hall in Harrisonburg.

Posted by Broadnax at 10:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Brian (that is him above) has a plane and knows how to fly, so I got a chance to see the tree farms from the air.  This is something I have long wanted to do. I can get the pictures from Google earth, but they are not completely up to date, give only one angle and are just not the same as a live view.  I will included some pictures I took in the next post. They are a little hazy because I took them through the glass of the windows.

Above is take off and below is landing.

I have never flown so low over places I knew so well. We left from Leesburg Airport.  All the little planes are lined up and it is amazingly informal.  Flying out around Washington is highly regulated, but once you get outside the security zones, you can fly were you want. We had GPS, but actually found the farms by looking for landmarks on the ground. It is more fun that way. 

You notice a few things from the air that are less clearly evident to the terrestrially tied road denizens. There is a lot more empty space than we think. Most of our structures are near the roads, but roads make up only a small amount of the countryside. On the other hand, lots of very nice houses are hidden down long paths, away from the main roads, obscured by trees or topography. This seemed to be especially true in Loudon County.  Of course, my sample was skewed since I took off and landed there, but Loudon County is a classic wealthy exurban area, so I think this kind of settlement is indeed more common there.

Another thing I noticed was the large numbers of ponds and impounded water.  Natural lakes and ponds not associated with meandering river are uncommon south of the Mason-Dixon Line because they are largely gouged  out by glaciers and the most recent glaciations didn’t get that far south.  But people like lakes and they have created lots of them were they didn’t exist before.   You can tell the ponds because they tend to have at least one straight side from the dam that holds back the water.   Larger impounds have very irregular banks.  Water wears away the jagged banks over time, but not enough time has passed for these man-made bodies of water.

Below is Vulcan Quarry near Freeman. That is where my rip-rap comes from. The material is porphyritic granite. I am not sure exactly the significance of that, but the rock is kind of grayish with crystals and twenty tons of rip-rap cost around $500, delivered. It is good to have land near the source.  In time, I suppose that quarry could become a fairly deep lake.  Since it in not far from the Freeman forest tract, we may eventually have lakefront property.

Neither man-made nor natural lakes last very long in the great scheme of geological time, since they silt up.  Man-made lakes tend to silt up faster because they are often or river fed and they impound muddy floodwaters.

Posted by Broadnax at 12:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Alex is off.  I drove him up yesterday and left him at James Madison University today.   I am proud that he is becoming more independent but sad that he is pulling away. Above is Alex at the quad. Below is Alex next to James Madison.  It is life sized statue. He was a little guy.

I used to talk to the kids at bedtimes.  Sometimes I know that they allowed me to ramble on just to prolong the time before bed, but I enjoyed it and I know they learned some things because I hear them saying them.   I miss that.

Above and below are buildings on campus. 

James Madison is a good university and looks like a nice place.   It reminds me a little more of a Midwestern university than it does of Virginia.  Maybe the stone buildings on the hills remind me of some of the building at UW along the lake.  Maybe it is the spruce trees.  Spruce trees can and do grow in Tidewater and Piedmont Virginia, but they don’t  thrive.  They do better in the cooler, more continental climate of Western Virginia.

Above is Alex's dorm room.  Below is the TV lounge. 

We spent Saturday night at the Marriott Courtyard in Harrisonburg.   Alex wanted to get there first thing in the morning when the university opened.   We didn’t need to do that.   Alex was the first customer when the dorm opened.   The hall lights didn’t work, so we had to find his room by sense of touch.  Empty dorm rooms are vaguely depressing, but it literally brightened up when we opened the roll-up shades.   His room has a nice southern exposure.  Alex appreciates the sun too and since he was first in, he could claim the bed near the window.

Above is a view from the quad. Below are Norfolk and Southern RR tracks that run right through the center of campus. 

Alex hadn’t been able to make the orientation, so the second thing on our list was to get his ID. The place didn’t open until 1 pm.  We were second in line.   It went very efficiently once we got in.  The ID is the key to success.  Alex can now use the libraries, get into building and – perhaps most importantly – eat at the chow hall. Below is the lake at JMU.

I didn’t want to leave Alex but the time came and I went.   Alex will be fine.   He won’t be as close as Espen.  It is an exciting their lives, full of potential and contradictory emotions.

I drove home through the mountains of Shenandoah National Park and along Highway 211.  It is still rural much of the way with beautiful woods and fields.    There was not much traffic and it was a relaxing drive.   Back home, a little more lonely than before but hopeful, grateful and optimistic. Above is Sperryville, VA.

Posted by Broadnax at 08:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

My big boss Jeremy is retiring.  I will miss him.  The generation of great officers who were running the show when I came into the FS is passing.   Now I am among the old guys. 

We went out for the last breakfast at a downtown hotel and I walked back to work after.  Although I walked through an area near the State Department, I don’t usually go this way and I found some interesting things for pictures.

Above is the statue of Jose de San Martin the liberator of Argentina.  Below is  John Rawlins, a Civil War general and friend of US Grant.

Below is the Octagon, the headquarters of the American Architectural Society. 

Posted by Broadnax at 08:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Above is the U.S. Capitol from the back of the American Indian Museum.  Below is the Lincoln Memorial on the other end of the Mall.

The Federal government (although the Senate was at work late into the night) was closed because of the snow, but it really wasn't hard to get down to Washington.  I just caught the Metro.  I wanted to see Washington in the snow and quiet.  There was a lot of snow, but it wasn't quiet.  Lots of people seemed to have the same idea.  I took a long walk from the White House to the Capitol.  Some pictures are included.

Above is the Washington Monument.  Below is the frozen reflecting pool at the World War II Memorial.

Below is the Smithsonian Mall.

Below is the White House from Pennsylvania Avenue.

Posted by Broadnax at 08:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This was a record-breaking snow for December. They already announced that the Federal Government will be closed tomorrow.  Chrissy and I were able to drive around with the Honda and do some Christmas shopping.  The main roads were clear but the side streets were still sometimes bad. 

Above is the narrow path of the plow on our street.  It is actually better that way because the plows don't make such an impassible bank across the driveways. Below is the front of our complex.

It is useful to have big boys.  Below is Espen clearing the driveway.  He also did the same for our neighbor.  Good boy.

Below is the back of our house.  The red oak trees are getting big.

Posted by Broadnax at 10:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It has been a cool year so far and it looks like it might be a snowy winter. I don’t know if this will be any kind of record, but it is the earliest big snow I remember.

It is Saturday; otherwise government would be shut down and the whole city thrown into panic.  Washington doesn’t handle snow well. These are a few pictures from around the house. The blobs of light in the pictures are snowflakes reflecting the camera flash. I took some w/o the flash, but I kind of liked the effect with it.

Above shows our Honda covering in snow.  We don't plan to drive anywhere. The snow will stop tomorrow and the sun will come out again.  Snow doesn't last long in Virginia. I figure that the Lord put the snow there and he will remove it before I need the car again. 

Posted by Broadnax at 01:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

America has most of the world’s top universities, but what really stands out about our country is the depth and breadth of opportunity on offer.   You don’t have to be in a big city or an important capital to find a first-class education and you don’t even have to be in college to get started.  Community colleges are increasingly filling roles as not only technical trainers but also launching pads for academic careers.

There was a good article about it in the Washington Post.

I am biased.  Alex graduated from Northern Virginia Community College and will start as a junior at James Madison University next month.  But that also gives me some special insights into the subject.  I won’t say Alex is typical of all students, but let me tell a little about college and community college with him in mind.

Alex didn’t have a plan when he graduated from HS. He had not been an enthusiastic student and his mother and I made the hard decision NOT to push him right into college. I made that mistake myself long ago. All I did was drink beer (the drinking age was eighteen back then) and my 1.60 GPA in my first year at UWSP continues to haunt me to this day.

Alex avoided that.  After HS, he went to work at the local Multiplex.  It was a really crappy job, but he soon did better, moving to Home Depot, which treats its employees well. He has continued to work there and won the respect of his bosses and co-workers. This experience will serve him well in future.  It disturbs me that many college students have never actually done any real work.

After a few months, he decided to start community college while continuing to work part time.   Community college makes the transition from work to study easy.  Tuition is cheap and students can take a few courses at a time.  Alex eased in and started to get good grades.

Not everybody is ready to go to college at eighteen. I wasn't, neither was Alex. I think this is especially true of boys.   They tend to be less interested in academics and a little more rambunctious. They might need a little more time.  It is certainly out of style to say, “Boys will be boys” and it is not true of all boys, but it is indeed generally true.  They get clobbered when they are pushed too soon into some situations and sometimes they don’t recover.  Alex matured and after passage of time, he was ready to do well.  To everything there is a season and a time for every purpose under heaven.” The old wisdom makes sense.  Sometimes waiting is best, but it hard.

No size fits all. But I think we would be well served to rethink college entrance in general.  I don’t think it is possible to make a good admissions decisions when a kid is eighteen years old. An eighteen-year-old is largely the product of his/her parents.  A couple years later you get a better look at the adult.  AND the kids make better choices. A couple years make a big difference at this time.

It might be better to start most kids in community colleges and then let them move on to university as their demonstrated talents and now better informed choices indicate.    

Alex also saved me the big bucks.  Community college is about half the cost of State schools and Alex lived at home. 

Now let me shift to the other side. I am glad that Alex is going away to school.  I think it is important that kids NOT live at home the whole time.  They learn a lot from living with other young people and being away from home. And as I wrote a few paragraphs above, one size does not fit all. Mariza and Espen went right to college after HS and Mariza was only seventeen (she skipped second grade).

So I am glad that we have options. America is the land of opportunity because it is also the land of second and third chances.  There are many roads to success and lots of time to take them. 

Posted by Broadnax at 09:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Thomas Jefferson was a remarkable guy.  The thought deeply about almost everything and made the world a better place.  On his tombstone he wanted to be remembered for founding the University of Virginia and authoring the statutes of religious freedom of Virginia the Declaration of Independence.  Any one of those accomplishments would make him a great man.   He didn’t even mention being president of the United States.

We first visited here in 1985.  Chrissy was pregnant with Mariza and I remember thinking that it would be nice if our expected child could become part of this legacy by going to Thomas Jefferson’s university.  She did.   So besides his contributions to our freedom and prosperity, I have a very personal reason to thank Jefferson.

Monticello is owned and run by a private foundation that makes its money from ticket sales and donations.  The foundation supports historians, archeologists and researchers in addition to maintaining the house and grounds.  

Alex and I talked about the pros and cons of a private foundation.  It seems like a place like Monticello should be government owned, but why?  A private foundation is more flexible and can often do a better job.  Many of our best American universities are private and they are the best in the world. A foundation works out just fine for Mr. Jefferson's home.  

Jefferson always considered himself a farmer.  He grew tobacco and wheat as cash crops and produced vegetables, apples and other fruit for consumption on the farm.  Like other plantations, Monticello was self-sufficient when possible.  They made their own bricks from local clays. Carpenters from the estate made furniture from the wood of the local forests.  Jefferson owned 5000 acres, which gave him a diverse landscape to draw from.  Below is Jefferson's vegetable garden.  It is set up to take advantage of warming winter sun.

Jefferson was an active manager of his estate. Washington's Mt Vernon actually turned a profit, not so Jefferson's Monticello.  The difference was top management.  Washington didn't have Jefferson's intellect, but he had practical abilities.  Jefferson was an idea man.   And his house - and our country - is full of his ideas, but he was not a good businessman. He died deep in debt and his heirs had to sell Monticello.

Of course, Jefferson didn't do much of the real work. The paradox of Jefferson the hero of freedom is Jefferson the slave owner.  Slavery had existed since the beginning of history, but by Jefferson's time the Western world was beginning to see the moral contradictions of the practice.  Jefferson shared the revulsion of slavery in theory, but couldn't bring himself to take the practical and personal steps against it.  I guess he was just a true intellectual in that respect and unfortunately remained a man of his times. 

In any case, Jefferson's contributions far outweigh the negatives of his personal life. All human being are flawed.  They make their contributions based on what they do best, not what they do poorly.  

We Americans were truly blessed during our founders generation.  Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Adams, Hamilton & Madison all were greats.  But the remarkable thing is how their skills and even their personalities complemented each other, even when they fought and hated each other. Their differences created harmony and their joint efforts filled in for some serious individual flaws.

The American revolution is one of the few in world history that actually worked (i.e. didn't end in a bloodbath followed by despotism). We can thank good luck & favorable geography.  But the biggest factor was the moral authority, courage and intellect of our first leaders.  We are still living off their legacy. 

Above is the visitor's center that opened last year. In the spirit of Thomas Jefferson, it takes advantage of natural forces and uses appropriate technology.  This is a green building, earth sheltered, energy efficient and heated & cooled to a large extent by geotheromal energy.  The wood and natural stone construction is simple, but elegant.  I like it.

Posted by Broadnax at 08:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We got to Appomattox too late yesterday, so we had to go this morning.  It is not the big tourist season, so we had the place largely to ourselves. 

I like these kinds of communities, with the old fashioned houses and the open spaces.  Alex thought the houses were “lame.”   But it is interesting to stand at the cross roads of history.   They have done a good job of preserving and restoring the historical area, but I think they should get some animals.   The community of the time would have featured horses, pigs, cows and chickens.  Well … probably not exactly in April 1865, when the starving soldiers of the Army of Northern Virginia would have made short work of such rations on the hoof, but in normal times a community like this w/o animals would not be normal.   I bet the Park Service could get some farm hobbyists to do it for nothing. 

I thought back to April 1865 and the starving ragged Confederates up against Union forces that were better off but still not properly rationed.   Both armies were exhausted.   Robert E. Lee made the horrendous decision to surrender and the enlightened decision not to keep the fighting going on by guerilla tactics, as President Jefferson Davis wanted.   The South was finished.  No reason for more men to die and the country to be torn up even more for a lost cause.   Grant and the Union made it as easy as it could be in such circumstances.  

There was generosity, nobility and honor on both sides.   April 9, 1865 was truly a day when humanity showed its better side amidst terrible suffering and hatred.    As I wrote before, this is a even unique in human history.  

There is no such thing as destiny.  People make history. If Grant, Lee or Lincoln had been lesser men - ordinary men - blood would have continued to flow and our great nation may have never recovered.  But it could have been different.

Lincoln was there in spirit and he was a motivating force behind the generosity that Grant was able to give, but within a few days Lincoln would be dead, shot by that cowardly actor John Wilkes Booth. Had Booth struck a week earlier it is not likely that Grant could have offered such terms to Lee.  The conflict might have continued as a desperate war of extermination. 

Grant’s close friend William T Sherman would soon be similarly generous with General Joe Johnston, who would also prove as honorable as Robert E. Lee. 

We all remember Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, but the Second Inaugural is my favorite.   It is not very long, so I copied it entire.  I especially like the last paragraph.

Posted by Broadnax at 06:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Tim Receveur got tickets for the Hispanic Caucus Awards Gala and shared one with me.  He got them from a band IIP works with called Ozomatli.  Tim has been one of their biggest supporters.  They are a multicultural band, which goes well with our programs and very easy to work with, which makes our PAOs overseas happier.  Their music was very good.

President Obama was there and gave a speech.  It was mostly about health care, but he added a Latino twist.  Evidently a significant number of the uninsured are Latinos, especially if “undocumented workers” are included.  The President’s speech didn’t go into much detail, but he did repeat “todos somos Americanos” on several occasions, which was a crowd pleaser.  

Unfortunately, he went the other way as he left the building, so I didn’t get to shake his hand.   I was figuring that a close encounter might cure the minor arthritis in my left knee, but no such luck.

I had a good time, even if I didn’t get to meet the big man personally.  The night started off with a mariachi band.   I am fond of that music.   It has down-home sounds. The old man listened to a lot of country and western music and a lot of his cowboy music shared the southwest roots.   Marty Robbins, Gene Autry and the great Bob Wills all played on the familiar themes, often with Spanish speaking musicians or even lyrics.  Another familiar aspect was the recent immigrant vigor you could feel.   The American dream is still alive and people come from all around to take part in it.

Sonia Sotamayer was there, so were Marc Anthony and Jenifer Lopez. Soladad O'Brien won an award.  I always wondered re her unusual name combination.   Her mother is Cuban.  Her father is Irish-Australian.   In America they met and married.

What I noticed was a lot of old fashioned assimilation.   It is not fashionable to call our country a melting pot anymore, but it is nevertheless.  The crowd was a lot like I remember immigrant families from Poland or Italy in Milwaukee. The older people maintain their ties of the home country.   The younger people have a second-hand connection but a lot less real feeling for the place.  And when they marry out of the community, the children don’t think much at all about ethnicity.  The difference in the Hispanic community had been that immigration renewed the ties constantly. This may be changing now, as birth rates are dropping in Mexico and Central America.  

The process is best illustrated by a simple statistic.   It was repeated a couple of times that Hispanics are America’s largest ethnic group, with something like 47 million. This is not entirely accurate.   Germans are the largest ethnic group in the U.S. 58 million Americans claimed German ancestry on the 1990 census, which is the last time I think they asked the question. This is significant because it is NOT significant, i.e. nobody really cares.  Germans have enriched America with their cultural contributions (decent beer, kindergarten, hot dogs & sauerkraut) and their hard work, but they are so thoroughly American now that it passes completely w/o notice.  When I mention it, people roll their eyes and discount it. They say that it doesn’t really count and they are right.  It made a big difference in 1909.  Who cares today?  The same will happen with Hispanics. At some point they may indeed become a quarter of the U.S. population, as the Germans were 100 years ago.  But nobody will really pay attention by the time that happens. This is America. Todos somos Americanos.  That is how we roll.

Anyway, it was an interesting event.   Everybody had to wear tuxedos.   This made for an elegant evening, but it presented an unexpected problem.    When everybody has a black tuxedo, you cannot tell who is the waiter.   When people come around with plates of food, you might just be stealing somebody’s snacks.

BTW – Tim’s wife April took the pictures, if you notice the better quality.  She does this professionally.  You can find her other work at this link.

Posted by Broadnax at 06:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I like to sit in my chair and look out the window.   This time of year, the sun comes in low at the edge of the house and paints the leaves of the plants and trees by the window.  The pictures don't do it justice.  I am not sure which I like best, now when everything is still green or a few weeks from now when the leaves on the bigger tree will be yellow and those of the Japanese maple will be crimson. 

The tree fills with birds in the evening this time of year.  They sing so loudly you cannot hear the TV if you leave the door open.  I like it, although they do crap all over.   We don't need to fertilize around that tree.  

The picture below is parking under the freeway.   It is a brutal scene, but maybe so ugly that it is interesting.   I always kind of liked Chicago under those El Tracks, ugly, but gritty.   I think that is why I liked “The Blues Brothers,” because of Chicago.

Posted by Broadnax at 10:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Chrissy and I went down to watch the tea party protest today in Washington. I like to watch protests. I got in the habit when I lived in Madison.  The crowd filled the lawn from the Capitol down past 4th St. None of the anti-war marches were as big.

The demography was the interesting part.  I bet the median age was around forty or fifty and I thought about what I said in Revenge of the Geezers a couple days ago.  It has usually been hard to get a crowd of people over thirty-years-old to come out to protest. Most of the other protests I have seen are staffed by the young and unemployed. This protest was unusual in that included mostly people who probably actually pay taxes and I think it was largely organized online.  This might be the harbinger of political activism of the future.

Once you get a full time job and other responsibilities, you don’t have as much time or inclination to march, chant and protest.  This explains why youth has driven protest movements.  There is no mystery to it.  They have extra energy and time on their hands.  Beyond that, they are vaguely bored and a little bit resentful because they think others don’t pay enough attention to them.  As the older population becomes healthier and retirement stretches on for many more years, this is increasingly a description that applies to old people.

The other thing interesting about this crowd was its lack of professionalism. Most protests I have seen have their core of bused-in experienced protesters, with well constructed signs and organized chants. This one had almost all hand lettered signs.  There was very little unity among the messages. Most clearly didn’t like the President but most of the anger seemed directed at congress.  One of the most original signs had pictures of members of congress and said, “Don’t give your cash to these clunkers”

The crowd was very well behaved, but not very well organized. Most were probably first-time protesters and I got the feeling that many would be taking their children or grandchildren to see the monuments in Washington after they wandered off when the protesting was done.  Some brought lawn chairs.  If someone had fired up a grill, it would have seemed a lot like a July 4th picnic.  Of course we didn’t stay long.  Maybe it got more intense later, but I doubt it.

Posted by Broadnax at 10:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I took Espen to his new dorm today. It was an easy move. He didn’t take much with him.  I have been bragging that when I went to college I had to hitchhike up and could have only what I could carry in my duffle bag.  I think that helped make him want to show his own capacity for simplicity.  Anyway, he is not very far from home, so he can come back and forth.  The dorms are simple, cinderblock.  The kids share toilets and showers. Small rooms are good because they don't hold as much stuff.   Kids today have too much stuff. 

Espen actually could commute to school, but we think it is useful for him to be immersed in the college environment.   The place is very young and lively, with gyms and basketball courts nearby.   He will be studying computer engineering, which is tough program, so I figure it will not be all fun … but I hope he will have some.   College is a magical time and I want that for him but I will miss him.

I was reminded of the void his absence will create when I stopped at the grocery store on the way home.   I will have to buy less food and it made me sad to think that I would now not need to buy some of his favorite foods.  We had a little ritual putting the food away. I would toss it to him and he would put it where it belonged (or not).    We started doing it when he was little and not really a very good catch.  As he got older, he often complained that I made him do it and said it was silly, but he did it.  The tossing was one part of the game and the complaining was another.   Little things, but important.

I still have Alex for a couple more months, but he will be leaving and going to James Madison University this spring.   Alex was unenthusiastic about education when he graduated from HS and I think we made a wise decision to give him the space to make his own decision.  Soon he decided to go to Nova, where he started to study and his grades got better and better.   He will be a junior next year when he starts at JMU, so he is essentially on the track I would have wished /planned for him, but he made his own decisions and along the way saved me a lot of money.  Nova tuition is only about 1/3 as much and Alex lived at home.  But he  deserves the college experience too.  JMU is in Harrisonburg in the Shenandoah Valley.  It has a good reputation and the kids who go there all seem to love it.  I think it is great that he will be going, but I will miss him.

There is an ironic imbalance in the parent-child relationship. When they are little, they follow you around and you have to watch them all the time.   You look forward to when your time will again be your own, when you can read when you want, eat where you want (i.e. not only Happy Meal providers), and watch the television programs you want.   Then they transition and by the time you have the freedom you think you wanted, it is not as sweet as you thought. I have been enjoying my time with the kids and I will enjoy the visits with them, but the time is passed when we are really together. So sad.

Posted by Broadnax at 06:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The boys and I went down to the woods today and saw some thinning operations.  I will write more about that tomorrow.   But when I was loading the pictures from the forestry, I found these above and below from Arlington Cemetery that I took yesterday.  

They open the gates at 8am, and I took the pictures as I was waiting for them to open on my way to work.   The pictures have an interesting play of light.  I don’t know where it came from, since I didn’t see it when I took the pictures. I would guess it was something on the lens, but you will notice, especially on the lower picture, that it is in back of the truck coming in the gate.

Posted by Broadnax at 09:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

They closed the gates of Ft Meyer after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.   I didn’t know they were reopened.  Actually they are not open to through automobile traffic, but bikes can use the bike route that goes through Ft Meyer and Arlington Cemetery. 

Going this way saves me around ten minutes riding and it lets me avoid ten minutes worth of the least pleasant and most dangerous part of the ride.  To transit Ft Meyer, I need only show my government ID and be polite to the guards. As you can see in the picture above, Ft Meyer is nice to with well kept period architecture.  After riding along the quiet streets of the base, you come out into Arlington Cemetery and it is all downhill from there. 

I like the idea of going through and past all the monuments.   My ride now takes me through Arlington Cemetery, across Memorial Bridge, past the Lincoln Memorial to the Washington Monument and then down the Smithsonian Mall in sight of the Capitol.   I often stop to read the plaques and later look them up on the Internet.  The whole idea of a memorial is to remind visitors of the event or concept.   Daily exposure to history really does work, at least for me. 

A good example is the statue above.  It is Phil Kearny.  I knew about Ft Phil Kearny, which guarded to Bozman Trail in Wyoming.  The Bozman trail is essentially I-90 these days and we stopped off at the fort on one of our cross country trips.  But I never knew much of anything about its namesake.  After seeing the statue, I did a little reading.  Phil Kearny was a respected professional soldier and Union officer killed in the Battle of Chantilly, not long after uttering the ominous words, "The Rebel bullet that can kill me has not yet been molded."

Posted by Broadnax at 07:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The webpage for my webchat on forestry and carbon is now available at this link.   I made a PowerPoint as an intro, so please take a look.   You can just sign in as a guest under whatever name you please.

I visited Fort Christiana on the way home from the farm.  It is one of those places worth seeing, but not worth going to see.  You have to go down a gravel road and then you find … nothing.   The fort is long gone.    All that is left is the outline of the fort, a little toilet and some markers.  You can see the gravel outline in this picture below.

If you Google Fort Christiana you will find the wrong place.  There is a fort in Delaware by almost the same name.    That was not a very important place and this place is even less.   So if you want to know about Fort Christiana in Brunswick County, I am your lasts, best hope.

According to the signs, Virginia Royal Governor Alexander Spotswood built a five sided wooden fort near the Meherrin River in 1714.   (Spotsylvania County VA is named for the governor.)   It was an outpost on the edge of the Virginia Colony at that time designed to trade with the friendly Indians.   Inside the Fort was an Indian school, with about 100 students.  The Indian students inside the fort helped ensure continued good behavior of the local tribes.   

The British withdrew support for the fort in 1718 and when William Byrd (an early member of that very prominent Virginia family and the ancestor of the current W. Virginia Senator Robert Byrd ... or given how long that guy has been around, maybe it was him) passed through the region in 1728 he reported that the fort was abandoned.   Not much of a history.    There have been nearby roads that have been under construction for a longer time.

I don’t know why the picture of the sign turned out so green.    That is not the real color.  I must have had it on a strange setting.

The picture that I took of the monument was even worse, so I didn't include it.  The funny thing is that it was erected by the colonial dames.  I know that dames is an old title of respect for ladies, but I can't stop thinking of Frank Sinatra, "Guys and Dolls" or "South Pacific."  There's nothing like a dame. 

Posted by Broadnax at 08:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I spent the day with Alex in Washington showing him what a great place it is to be. He is finishing with NOVA this summer but will not start JMU until spring semester and worries that his brain will atrophy, so we are working up a work-study-exercise regime.  I think he is beginning to understand how lucky he is to have this opportunity. I don’t think there is any place better than Washington to pursue this kind of self-education, since we have all the free museums around the Smithsonian, think tanks, parks, monuments … But you have to do it deliberately.

We started off at AEI with panel discussion on regulation of greenhouse gases.  Alex thought the guy from the Sierra Club made the best presentation. You can read about it here. I agree. He was mostly talking about the problems of coal. Coal is cheap but dirty from start to finish. In Appalachia, they remove whole mountains and dump them into the valleys.   We can reclaim these lands with good forestry, but we all probably better off not doing it in the first place. 

After that, we just blended in with the tourists.   Our first stop was the wax museum.   You can see some of the pictures.    You really feel like you are standing with the person.   They are very careful to get the heights and shapes close to the real person.  

We next went through the aquarium.   The National Aquarium in Washington is not nearly as good as the one in Baltimore, but it is worth going if you are in the neighborhood.     This is the first time that I saw a living snakehead.   These are terrible invasive species that can wipe out the native fish.  They are very tough and hard to get rid of.   They are semi-amphibious and can literally walk from one pond to another.    The take-away is that if you see one of these things crush it with a rock or cut it with a shovel, but do not let it survive. 

Finally, we went over to the Natural History Museum. We have been there many times before, but I learned a few things. Alex pointed out that the Eocene period was warmer than most of the time during the Mesozoic and, of course, much warmer than today.  According to what I read, the earth was free of permanent ice and forests covered all the moist parts of the earth, all the way to the poles.  It is interesting how trees adapted to living inside the Arctic Circle, where it is dark part of the year and always light in summers, but the sun is never overhead and always comes as a low angle, so trees needed to orient their branches more toward the sides. 

Alex rolled his eyes when I was excited by a new (I think temporary) exhibit on soils.  I didn’t learn much new, but I like looking at the actual exhibits.  Soil is really nothing more than rock fragments and decaying shit, but very few things are more complex, more crucial and more often ignored.

Anyway, we had a good day and "met" lots of celebrities like Johnny Depp above.  We had lunch at a place called “the Bottom Line” on I Street.  I had a very good mushroom cheese burger.   Alex has the Philly cheese steak sandwich.

The skeleton above is a giant sloth.  I don't know how that thing could have survived.  Must have been one big tree that thing hung from.

Posted by Broadnax at 08:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I thought it was a joke, but it true.  The State Department now has a bike lending program. You can borrow a bike at State and peddle to your meetings around town, at least until 4:45, when you have to bring it back.  The bikes on offer seem a little lame, but I like the idea. I hope it catches on and I also hope that it provokes a bit of culture change at the Department and in the wider community.

I have been using my bike to get to work since my very first real job,  when I rode clean across Milwaukee to get from the South Side to Mellowes' Washer Co on Keefe Street.  That means I have been commuting by bicycle since 1973 – around thirty-six years, so I know something about bike commuting. Overall, it has gotten better, at least in Washington. They have built some good bike trails and put some bike lanes on the road. I can ride the 17 +/- miles to work almost completely on bike trails or lightly traveled roads.  (Of course, that required some planning. When we bought our house in 1997 we made sure we were near both a Metro Stop and a bike trail. The W&OD bike trail is a mile from our door.) But we still get no respect when we mix with traffic.  

For example, part of my bike ride to work goes down a city street – Clarendon Boulevard – in Arlington.   There is a nicely marked bike trail along the road, which is a one-way street most of the way I go.  It is also mostly downhill on the way to work, which would make it a nice ride except for the cars.  People treat the bike lane like a drop off zone.  They pull in front of me and then abruptly stop and sometimes pass me and then make a right turn right in front of me into a side street or parking lot.  Since they just passed me, I assume they should be able to see me, but they don’t seem to care. They know that I have few options.  I don’t get as upset about this as I used to, but these clowns endanger my safety. I especially hate the people who talk on cell phones. 

There really is no such thing as multi-tasking when driving.  There is just driving poorly.     

I have had a few close calls and one bona fide bike & bone crunching accident -  in Norway where I got seriously hurt and had the pleasure of experiencing socialized medicine - but I really cannot complain when I consider how many miles I have logged. Most people apologize and lamely claim they didn’t see me.  Sometimes they are aggressive and tell me that I should not be on the road.  I would caution drivers that it is probably not a good idea to do this when the bike is at the side of your car, since we have metal pedals and can easily  scratch the paint on the side of the car door with those pedals “by accident” w/o anybody noticing until later. That is what I used to do … in my younger days of course.

The daily practical problem with biking is lack of showers. I am lucky because Gold’s Gym is across the street & I keep clothes in the office to change into. Otherwise you cannot really ride if you work near other people.  You will get sweaty even on a short ride, especially in a climate like ours in Washington. You also sometimes get rained on and spattered with dirt. State Department, like most other big organizations, talks a good game about bikes, but does not provide showers and changing areas.

I figure the State Department's bike lending program is mostly a PR gesture, but it is good if it gets people thinking about riding bikes to work and appointments. The world has become friendlier to bike commuters.  Thirty years ago, almost everybody thought I was crazy; today only about half think so.

Posted by Broadnax at 09:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The weather has been great this year.  This evening it is actually chilly.   It will get down to 60 degrees tonight.   I don’t remember it ever being so cool in Washington in July.   I read that last month was the coolest June since 1958 and one of the coolest since they started to keep records.   It has also been usually rainy, so everything is very green and robust.

Below are a few pictures from around SW Washington.  

This is our shredder truck.  We are moving to our new building nearer the Main State.  Some stuff needs to be shredded.   This truck brings us the industrial strength shredding power.

Below is a very big Japanese Zelkova.   The green picture is from today.  The leafless one is from January looking in the other direction.

Below is construction near Waterfront metro stop.  The first is today, the other is from January.

Below is construction on the Arena Stage.  I really cannot picture how this is going to look when it is done. 

Posted by Broadnax at 09:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The redevelopment around the Dunn Loring Metro and the Merrifield Town Center is moving slowly but inexorably along.   The plan has been in place since before we bought our house in 1997.  Basically, the plan is for something like a metro transit-oriented development like in Arlington from Ballston to Roslyn.   We are a little farther out and this area will be more car friendly.  For example, they are widening Gallows Road,  so they had to tear down various fast food places (Taco Bell, Pizza Hut etc).  There is still nothing in those places, but farther down they have started to build condominiums and planning the town center too.

The economic downturn slowed some of the plans, but is not stopping them.  Above is the old multiplex cinema.  It is shut down now.  They owned a really big area of parking lots.  Originally, it was a drive in.  Anyway, much of the parking area will eventually be developed into condos and retail space.  Parking will be in multistory parking garages.   Below is the old surface parking lot.  There is a series on History Channel called "Life Without People".  It shows how fast nature returns when people leave.  You can something of that here and it has only been a year.

Below used to be a Pizza Hut.  It is always amazing to me how small the footprint of a building looks when the structure is gone.  

Below are shops in the new Merrifield Town Center.  It is a good example of mixed use.  There is residential on top, parking below and retail on street level, all within walking distance of the metro.  I am glad they are building, if slowly.  The shops are a little yuppified.  I got a ice cream cone that cost $5.23.  It was a fancy cone, but that is a little too much to pay, IMO.  It reminds me of the old story about the horse who walks into a bar.   The bartender says, "We don't get many horses in here."  The horse replies, "With these prices, I am not surprised." 

Below are dawn redwoods.  Chrissy had them planted at our complex when she was home-owner association president.  They will be one of her lasting contributions.  Dawn redwoods are related to our redwoods and sequoias as well as baldcypress.  Like baldcypress, they are deciduous and they look like baldcypress, except dawn redwoods are more pyramidal.  In their native forests in Sichuan and Hubei Provinces in China, they grow rapidly to around 90 feet.  They were thought to be extinct until  groves were discovered in the Chinese mountains in 1948. Since they are recent introductions to Virginia, nobody is sure how big they will get here, but they are growing very fast and strong.   Sometimes trees grow better away from their native ranges.   California redwoods, for example,  were introduced to New Zealand.  There are some growing there that are around 150 years old and doing even better than they do in California.  Experts expect that within a few years the tallest redwoods, so the tallest trees in the world, will be in New Zealand. Redwoods may live 2000 years, but they do most of their growing early in their lives.

One more joke - A horse walks into a bar.  The bartender asks, "Why the long face?"

Below - neglect can be a good thing.  This is one of those drainage holes that they usually keep mowed.  Evidently, they lost control of this one and it is more distinct.  I like the cattails. 

Posted by Broadnax at 03:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

We took Espen to his orientation at George Mason.   It is a fast growing up-and-coming place and the orientation reflected that.   Mariza’s orientation at the University of Virginia was all about tradition.  In case anybody didn’t know, they reminded us that Thomas Jefferson founded the place and we heard a lot about the famous things and people associated with the University of Virginia.  Not so George Mason.  It is a young institution with more future than past.

George Mason University was founded in 1957 as a branch of the University of Virginia, designed to soak up some of the students in growing Northern Virginia and was mostly a commuter and part timer school for a long time.   It became an independent institution in 1972 and was named after George Mason because he lived in the neighborhood a couple hundred years ago; there is no other connection besides the statue below and the name.   

It has improved a lot and benefits from its primo location in the Washington metro area. Today it is is strong in applied science, economics and law with more than 30,000 students.

Espen is majoring in computer engineering.  The dean made a very good presentation, but he had an easy hand to play.    Evidently the graduates of the engineering school don’t have very much trouble in the job market and there are lots of opportunities with local firms.   The current economic downturn will probably be over by the time Espen graduates.  

One of his colleagues in the department is called Phuc Dang. Tough name to have, but I suppose it is memorable and maybe useful for a guy who works with computers. You don't have to tell people which technician to call.  When your computer crashes, just say "Phuc!" followed if you want by "Dang" and help is on the way. 

Above is one of the original boundary stones of the District of Columbia.    It is now well into Virginia.  I don’t know the exact sequence of events, but evidently the Feds weren’t using the land so Virginia got it back.  The City of Arlington more or less encompasses the old Federal district in Virginia.

Posted by Broadnax at 07:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)