Walking Miles For Entertainment

Amazingly, it was not blazingly hot here over the July 4th weekend, and we decided to take advantage of this good fortune with a long walk.  We took the Mount Vernon trail from Arlington to Alexandra.

We saw some of the most recognizable monuments from a different angle than usual...

A monument we had never seen before (the Navy-Merchant Marine Memorial)...

Beautiful willow trees...

National Airport...

And boats, as we approached Alexandria.

We had what we thought was a well-deserved dinner in old town Alexandria and then took Metro back home.  An advantage to not using a car for these sorts of activities is that you don't have to return to your starting point--you can just go directly home when you feel like it.  When we got back to Silver Spring, we saw this wonderful shark display in honor of Shark Week.

It's much hotter this weekend, so I'm glad we took advantage of the unseasonably cool temperatures last weekend.  I love going on long walks, but I think from here on out, our walks may have to be shorter (or incorporate lots of cold drink breaks) until fall.

A Pocket Of Peace In My Balcony Garden

It's been another rough week for news, with horrific attacks in Turkey, Iraq, and Bangladesh, to name a few awful incidents.  I think terrible incidents seem more poignant to most of us when they happen in places where we've been.  I've been to the Istanbul airport a few times, most recently in August 2014, when Scott and I were en route to Kazakhstan for the first time.  I remember how exhausted I felt at the time, and how conflicted I was about our move overseas.  I remember trying to decide if I had enough energy to stand in line to buy a snack or bottle of water from one of the airport vendors.  The thoughts and misgivings I had at the time seemed like a big deal to me at the time, but they seem so inconsequential now.

I think we all need a measure of peace in our lives, and my tiny balcony garden provides some of that peace for me.  We didn't have a balcony in our apartment in Kazakhstan (or weather that was conducive to growing things for most of the year) so I was excited to have some plants when we came back.  The planter on the left has basil and mint.  It originally also had cilantro, but I made a tactical error in planting it between two plants with dreams of world domination.  It never got enough sunlight because the mint and basil shot up so quickly.  Eventually, I found it mostly uprooted between the two plants, perhaps as a victim of some sort of underground root warfare.  So, next year, I'll have to be sure not to crowd the cilantro.  I'm thrilled with the basil, though:  It's already provided us with two batches of pesto this summer.

The other planter contains zebra green tomatoes and eggplant.  As may or may not be visible in my photo, the tomato plant already has a couple of tomatoes.  The eggplant had a very pretty purple flower that I am hoping will turn into an actual eggplant at some point.

When I get home from work, checking on the plants is one of the first things I do.  I water them, pinch top leaves from the mint and basil, and check for new flowers on the tomato and eggplant.  On a nearly daily basis, I can observe the plants growing.  The plants give me something to look forward to, in the form of fresh food.  I'm already dreaming of a larger container garden for next summer, even though I'm not entirely sure where we will be living then.  This tiny garden, amazingly enough, is providing me with a routine, a feeling of accomplishment, and a goal in a very uncertain and troubled world.

Wishing my American friends and family a happy, peaceful Independence Day!

Theodore Roosevelt Island

We've been trying to prioritize fun on the weekends recently, and last weekend, we made a trip to Theodore Roosevelt Island. Scott in particular had been curious about it since the last time we lived in the DC area.

Theodore Roosevelt Island is an island in the Potomac River.  There is parking off the island and a short walk on a bridge to get there; no cars or bikes are allowed on the island itself.  We currently don't have a car, so we took the metro to Rosslyn and walked a little extra from there.

It was peaceful to take a walk away from all the urban traffic.  There is a memorial to Theodore Roosevelt on the island, as well as some water fountains and a restroom, but otherwise, it was just nature trails.  There were some mulberry trees, but alas, the ripe berries were too high for anyone but the birds to reach.

I love DC's more mainstream tourist attractions, and never tire of seeing the monuments that everyone knows and recognizes, but sometimes it's fun to veer off the usual beaten path and do something different.  I would certainly go back.  It would be fun to see the island in all the seasons.

View from the island

I think the filigree-like pattern on the leaves is probably due to bugs munching on them, but it's still pretty.

Theodore Roosevelt!

Contemplating Cane Toads, Just Like Everyone Does Sometimes

I wonder sometimes about the things I learned in school.  Some things were odd enough that I questioned them even at the time, but other things I've taken for granted until relatively recently.  One of those things is Chapel Hill, NC's proud cane toad documentary tradition.

I hadn't thought about cane toads in a long while, but I found a Washington Post article the other day about Australia's attempts to control their populations, and it took me back.  Back in high school, we all watched a documentary about Australia's cane toads.  The larger point of the documentary was to demonstrate the ecological damage that may ensue from bringing a new species into an area (in this case, importing cane toads to eat the cane beetles that were plaguing sugar cane crops).  The point that many of us took away was that there was some dude in Australia who swerved all over the road when he drove trying to run over as many cane toads as possible, and a little girl who had taken one as a pet and named it Dairy Queen.

I emailed the article to my sister, who, despite being ten years my junior and a graduate of a different high school in Chapel Hill, had also seen the cane toad documentary.  She reacted with incredulity, both because they were still such a problem in Australia after all this time and because I had seen an article about them.

So strong is the cane toad documentary tradition in my home town that I'm pretty sure I saw it mentioned on one of those "You know you grew up in Chapel Hill if..." lists some years ago.

I started to wonder, though, after seeing the Washington Post article.  I had thought of watching this documentary as a Chapel Hill idiosyncrasy, but maybe that was just a sense of Chapel Hill exceptionalism.  Maybe other people had fond (?) memories of the cane toad documentary.

I did a Google search on "cane toad documentary."  I learned that the documentary is called Cane Toads: An Unnatural History.  It was released in 1988, before my sister was even born.  And, according to Wikipedia, it's considered a cult classic and has a sequel!  So, a good number of people who didn't even ever live in Chapel Hill must have seen it at some point.  Maybe this should be a point of small talk for me next time I'm at a social gathering and facing an awkward silence after the obligatory conversation about the weather has ended.

I don't currently know anybody attending high school in Chapel Hill, so I'll just have to wonder whether they're still watching this documentary.  Maybe they've upgraded to the sequel, or maybe the new generation is watching a documentary about another homely, not-widely-appreciated animal.

Troubling Times

Whenever possible, I like for life to be entertaining and humorous.  Looking for humor is a coping mechanism for me, so I indulge in a fair amount of dark humor, which I fear not everyone appreciates (to put it mildly).

Sometimes, though, there is nothing funny about a situation.

Like most people, I am shaken by the shooting at Pulse in Orlando.  I'm horrified by the number of dead and injured.  It is also chilling to reflect on the level of hatred some individuals harbor toward the LGBTQ community, in spite of all the progress that has occurred in the US.

My thoughts are first and foremost with the victims of this attack and their loved ones.  But I also worry about the ripple effects yet to come.  Hate often begets more hate, and I worry that more innocent people may suffer.  Because the attacker was Muslim--and particularly because we've been exposed to a very nasty stream of rhetoric from politicians recently--I fear that distrust and prejudice toward Muslims in the US will grow.  Syria, a country where I lived for one year and still care deeply about, has been embroiled in a civil war for five years now.  There has been much discussion in the US and elsewhere about what to do with the refugees from that conflict--where they should go, which countries should take how many in, etc.  I worry that our openness to helping others--including possibly admitting refugees--will suffer as a ripple effect from this horrible incident.  I hope that in the midst of our fear and anger that we can remember to view each person as an individual, and remember that there are sometimes very compelling reasons to extend compassion.

Here's hoping for healing for the people of Orlando and better, happier times for all.

I'm One Of Them...But I Don't Know Who They Are

This morning, I walked from our apartment to a local shopping center, purchased a few items at T.J. Maxx, and carried them home.  I got stuck behind a group of slow-moving people on the sidewalk on the way back.  After I successfully maneuvered around them, I overheard one of them remark that there were certainly a lot of strange people around here.

The timing of her comment made her think that she was probably referring to me, among other people.  I'm not going to deny being strange--though I may also question her normality--but I wondered what in particular tipped her off.  I'm also curious who the other strange people around here are.  It's entirely possible that I have a ready-made community of friends right in town, and I'm not even sure who they are.  The moment has probably passed to find out.

Arriving Late To The Frequent Flyer Mile Party

Before preparing to move to Kazakhstan, I had never really bothered with frequent flyer mile programs.  I think I signed up for one years ago, but never accrued enough miles to benefit, and just got bored with the whole thing.  But after we accepted our job offers in Kazakhstan, someone suggested that we look into frequent flyer miles, and it made sense to me, since we would be earning a lot of miles over a fairly short period of time.

So we signed up for a program with Star Alliance, and most of our flights home were with its member airlines.  I checked after every flight to make sure more miles were added to my total, but didn't really understand how to redeem them for anything.

Fast forward to our return to the US.  Two of our closest friends we made in Kazakhstan got married while they were planning their move out there, and planned to have a larger wedding party for this coming summer.  The celebration will be in England, where they are from.  We decided that if at least one of us had at least a job offer by that time that we would try to go.  I was fortunate to start working pretty quickly, but living in the DC area has a funny way of eating up income pretty quickly, so I decided it was time to figure out how to use our frequent flyer miles.

I checked my account, and, to my delight, found that I had (and by extension, Scott would have) enough miles for a one-way trip between North America and Europe.  But then how would I book the other half a round-trip ticket?  And how would I book for both of us?

I decided to experiment.  I started a booking to see if there was any way to input two account numbers so that I could combine our miles and book for both me and Scott at one time.  Nope.  I then tried to book a round-trip ticket just for myself, and was invited to purchase the additional miles I would need, to the tune of around $1,000.  Um, no thanks.

It looked like we would have to each book a one-way ticket separately in order to use our miles, and then book another one-way ticket together to pay with "real" money.  Scott had scoped out one-way ticket prices and found that return tickets were more expensive.  So we sat side by side with our laptops and booked the return trip tickets together.  We even managed to book seats next to each other.  I was surprised that we had to pay some money for those tickets even though we supposedly had enough miles to cover the tickets, but maybe I should have been, considering that airlines are stingy even with cheap snacks these days.

Then we booked our tickets to fly to England together.  Being a frequent flyer mile novice, I have no idea if the somewhat convoluted process we used to book our tickets was the best one. But we did save a considerable amount of money over what we would have paid to purchase round-trip tickets without any miles.  And frankly, flying between the US and Kazakhstan several times a year was very taxing, and I was glad to have a tangible benefit come from it.  I doubt we'll accrue this many miles again anytime soon, but I'll certainly keep any eye on how many miles we do earn, with the hope of more affordable travel in the future.