More editing today. And then we went to a little birthday gathering for the owner of the local bike shop, a friend of ours was celebrating his birthday in his store with his friends and neighbors. It felt small town and happy and great. Do enough of those sorts of things and you’ll begin to feel like you fit in somewhere.
We talked to the bike shop owner, his wife and adult daughter. We saw a guy we run with and a graphic designer we know and a fellow who chatted us up about mountain bike riding.
Then we came home and I edited more stuff for my lovely bride. This one was a seven-page document. That puts the score for the week at 9 pages I’ve asked her to read for me, and 19 she’s asked me to read for her.
Hey, she made dinner. It evens out.
We learned some great news today. Something we worked on last year has led to something … impactful. I’m not sure if it’s something that’s public or not, yet, but it’s exciting.
Otherwise, worked through the day’s email, did a lot of reading, and spent a scant 38 minutes on the bike.
And that, somehow, has been the thrust of a low key day.
At Christmas a few years ago, my wife and I told our parents that we didn’t want presents, but to spend more time with them. And then the pandemic hit. So finally, a year ago, the stars lined up and we were able to take my mother on a trip. It was a lovely little week in Cozumel. We did some diving, we took it easy, ate some great food, did some more diving. It was a great trip. And a year ago, today, that trip was winding up. This was our last lunch there, before we set off for the airport. This was the view we enjoyed at lunch every day.
It was 84 degrees down there when we left that day. It was 32 degrees here today.
You shouldn’t judge one day over another, especially if one was a vacation and the other is most unremarkable, but, weather-wise, one was better than the other.
The thing I was writing yesterday, that I was trying to decide if it should be serious or silly or both? I chickened out and gave it a normal tone. It’s too real to be flip. And too absurd to be serious. So, here are roughly 1,400 words on gambling in sports. It begins:
Welcome to the wide world of losing it all, where you can experience the thrill of maybe and the agony of near certain defeat.
It’s just a matter of when, and how you lose it. And how easy they made it for you to do so. And, also, how much. And how.
If that doesn’t grip you, the rest is a meaty summation of links I’ve been hanging on to for a while. Now I know you’re hooked. I finally wrote the thing because I needed to clean out my inbox. And it’s important.
One of my colleagues wrote to say that he was going to include it in a class. Hopefully not in a “Don’t do it this way” sense.
I was looking up something not too long after this got published and was amazed at how much more stuff had come out, just today, that should go into the thing. The online gambling world moves so, so fast. One more reason to stay away.
Gambling is a thing I could never do — I will never have money that is that disposable — and thus there are many nuances that I don’t have firsthand experience with, but some of the people wrapped up in this have some heartbreaking tales. And it’s skewing younger and younger, as a habit, and, for some, an affliction. Scary stuff.
The snow has not melted. Mostly because it is extremely cold. We watched a neighbor try to blow snow off his driveway today, but it had frozen in spots, and so he was having a difficult time with it. I think my lovely bride pointed it out in the hopes that I would internalize the lesson. He’s a pretty industrious guy, our neighbor, but he must have been busy yesterday since he didn’t get to this chore until today. And so now he struggled because some of the snow had frozen into place. It was good that we cleared ours yesterday.
And it is even better that there’s no more in the forecast, at least until next weekend perhaps. Like all modern playfully superstitious people I will assume that it is because we have a snow blower at the ready.
In our last house, we had a driveway not much longer than the length of a car. A few shovel strokes and you were set. But, last winter, our first winter here, we returned from a trip and found that this driveway is much longer when you measure it in shovel lengths. We came back to a day-or-two old pile of snow six or eight inches deep. And so, we shoveled. Only it was so cold we just stayed cold as we cleared the drive. That was enough for my lovely bride to go buy a snowblower. A few weeks later snow returned to the forecast, I assembled the snowblower as best I could (it was missing four parts) and waited for the snow. I did not add the oil or gas because, I thought, Let’s just see what happens tomorrow. And when that tomorrow came around it was dry as a bone. That was the last threat of snow last winter. So, the blower went into the storage.
Last weekend I brought it out. And remembering that it needed a little extra assembly, we went to the hardware store. I was missing two bolts that held the handle together, and two that hold down the chute. (And, yes, I had to look that up just now.) If there’s one thing in the world I’d like to not do on a Saturday, it’s go to the same place twice. To prevent that, I decided to take the snowblower to the hardware store. Maybe someone there could help me find the appropriately sized hardware. What I’d been using were random bolts and screws I had, and also some bungee straps. But we had the time and opportunity to do this right, plus there’s this great old guy at the hardware store, the sort of fellow that’s done everything and wants to share his knowledge. And I am a sponge, particularly about snow blowers. This is my first one.
Only, he wasn’t there. But a young guy pitched in to help. In fact, he took over the project. I just stood and nodded and thanked him. Maybe I look like the old guy to him. Maybe this getting old thing will have its advantages when I eventually do get old. Anyway, I bought four bolts and two knobs from him. We picked up some bird seed and left.
And this is where you know this story is about the snow blower, but also, Saturday. We left the hardware store and stopped by the drug store. My lovely bride had to pick up a prescription and I wondered around looking at the advancements in cat toys and sleep care. Then we went home. I pulled the snow blower from the back of the car and set out to add the new pieces.
One bolt was missing.
Now I’m going back to the hardware store for the second time, which is the thing I didn’t want to do twice on a Saturday. Only my car won’t start. It’s been cold. The battery was sluggish. I hadn’t driven it in several days. I tried again. It cranked. I drove to the hardware store, left it running, locked it up, went inside, and found the bolt I needed.
The guy saw me.
“Oh no! Did it not work?”
Just missing a part. He was sure he’d picked it out for me. I was ready to pay. He would have none of it. It’s a galvanized thing and costs about $.40 cents and so I didn’t mind. He surely did pick it out for me, it probably just got lost in transit. But he would have none of it, and he insisted I take the part. And maybe the hardware store, twice, isn’t such a bad thing.
Then I drove over to an auto parts store, to test my battery. The guy came out, shivered through the test, and suggested it was just the cold. That’s what I expected, but I figured I had the time and I could get ahead of this for once. It just needed to charge, he said. Keep it running for a while, he said, let the alternator do its work.
I continued the drive, and filled up the tank, and then slowly drove home the long way. It cranked just fine after that. We’ll try it again tomorrow, as part of another domestic tale that will most surely be worth your time.
Anyway, it did snow yesterday, but not enough to seem to need the snow blower, I thought. Later, I was reading posts and realized that is a value judgment people actually make. Maybe I had that one right.
But the snow blower is here. Ready. Ready to not be used. Because we’re playfully superstitious about this.
Ten years ago, today … and I’m not making this a regular feature, but I mentioned it in passing yesterday and it’s super cold here and this is a nice change of pace … we were in the south Caribbean. Specifically, here:
This is the famous California lighthouse in Aruba. It was built between 1914-1916. Topping out at 100 feet, the stone was quarried on the island. The lighthouse is named after this part of the island, which was named after a 1910 shipwreck. The SS California was traveling from Liverpool to Central America and people on board were having a party when the ship ran aground at midnight. The next day the locals saw the damage and waded out to pick up the vessel’s cargo: merchandise, furniture, clothes, and other provisions. They took it all down to Oranjestad to sell it.
We’d gotten there by bus, but the return bus did not return. We started walking. It’s an island, but it’s a long walk, about eight miles as I recall. Finally, a bus which seemed to have the business model of picking up stranded hitchhikers gave us a lift. And then we rented a cab from a lovely woman who was proud to give us a great tour of her home, full of history, demographic insights, and natural medicinal remedy tips. She took us to her brother’s house so we could see iguanas, because they were always in his yard.
We’d hired her for a 90-minute tour, but she turned into an almost three-hour experience.
Aruba is a desert island. And they have the cacti to prove it.
(Click to embiggen.)
She also took us to these picturesque places, like this inlet by the Bushiribana ruins — a gold smelter used to extract gold from the nearby hills for about a decade in the early part of the 19th century — on the eastern side of the island.
I just found her on Instagram. She’s still showing off her island home with that same incredibly warm, welcoming hospitality. I just uploaded a picture we took with her 10 years ago today and tagged her in it. I hope she’s doing well. That was a great trip, Aruba was just one day of it, and the time we spent riding around with her is a real standout moment in a trip that was, truly, filled with them.
I’m not going to do a reminiscence post about the whole trip or make a regular deal out of 10-years-ago today. (It’s all in the archives here, if you want it.) I only wrote all of that because there’s something like a 57-degree temperature swing between here and Oranjestad.
This evening, after an afternoon of profitable work — emails were answered, a syllabus was formatted, etc. — I went downstairs to give my bike a try. I did a 15-mile sprint session in Neokyo. Three spring segments at about 30 miles per hour (so it is confirmed, I am getting slower), but one PR and … what the heck is that?!?!?
Then I rode another 15-mile segment elsewhere, and passed 95 other people along the way. They didn’t know that we were racing, but that’s more of their concern than mine.
So it was that I got back on the bike, for the third time of the new year, and felt much better about it. Time off is a good thing.
But now I’m behind on the mileage spreadsheet … so time off has drawbacks?
Not that you’d doubt it, because you’re trusting souls. And I, being forthright with the readers here, have given no reason for you to not believe me. But maybe you haven’t seen snow in a while. Here is a bit of hastily gather evidence from this morning.
We enjoyed chocolate chip pancakes for breakfast, as is the snowy tradition.
By last night, we were hoping for snow just to have the pancakes.
It was a pleasant sight, and not nearly as bad as anticipated. The birds are out eating seeds. The roads are more quiet. Much of everything is closed for the day. The power never blinked. My kind of terror dome.
This afternoon, when the snow had finally exhausted itself, we went out to shovel the driveway.
Oh, I prepared the snow blower, but we only had three, maybe four inches of snow. That didn’t seem worth putting oil and gas in the blower, honestly. So I shoveled the sidewalk before my lovely bride realized it, and had gotten started on the driveway when she came outside. So we did that.
Then I looked over at our elderly neighbor’s driveway. It was cleaned. And then I thought, you know, another of our neighbors is out of town right now. Won’t be back until tomorrow, and has two or three new joints. Maybe that person shouldn’t be out there shoveling day old snow after a week of transnational travel. So we shoveled that driveway, too.
I thought it’d be a nice surprise. A nice mystery. But I looked up, and they have a camera covering the driveway, of course. Technology.
Once again in our yard, I did a quick inspection for snow related issues and noted the patio table, with some delight.
For some reason I want waffle fries now, though.
And that’s been today. Tomorrow will be different.
Ten years ago today, we were doing this …
Reading as we lazily sailed to the south Caribbean.
We might have been smarter in 2015 than we are today.
For a grading break, and before an afternoon and early evening meeting, we went to the Museum of the American Revolution. It’s one of those things you wonder why I waited so long to do. And it’s one of those days where my lovely bride braced herself when she said, “What time should we go?” There was that meeting we had to attend, so we were backtiming the day.
I said I’d found that if you want to read things you could spend a three hours there.
And this is where it pays off to do things with a person who knows what’s in your heart, but are afraid to say out loud. This incredible woman bought tickets for 10 a.m., which would give us more than four hours at the museum.
Worth it. And we didn’t even get to see one of the rooms. But here’s a quick look at some of what we saw.
Outside, because of course you must start outside, there are modern brick walls, nondescript, but for this sculpture.
(This is the first of three panoramas in this post. And it’s beautiful. Click to embiggen.)
This is a really, really fine museum. But there are a few silly things. For tactile people, like me, there are a few things you can touch. You remember reading about the Stamp Act. Here’s an oversized stamp you can touch. It is made of plastic.
There are a few areas where they’re trying to create an immersive experience. You walk under a recreation of a Liberty Tree, where you can touch a bit of wood salvaged (and preserved) from an actual Liberty Tree, the last surviving Liberty Tree, which was felled by a hurricane in 1999 in Maryland.
Pasted up in some of those areas are reproductions of handbills that the revolutionary-era people might have seen. This one was printed by E. Russell, who notes his shop is set up “next the Cornfield, Union-street.”
E. Russell was Ezekiel Russell, a printer of minor importance. He apprenticed under his brother, and then bounced around New England trying to make his business work. For a time he dabbled in auctioneering, but he returned to slinging the lead. He wrote a royalist publication for a time, but history seems to think that he just needed the money. Most of his work is remembered as small pamphlets. His wife, Sarah Russell worked in the print shop, and took over the business after he died in 1796. She’s remembered as a pioneer of female publishing.
And before we get too far into this, let me direct you to Museum’s site, for a look at what they consider the crown jewel of the collection, which they don’t let allow you to photograph, George Washington’s war tent. It’s a living piece of history, lived in during war and well documented in peace, it is a piece of linen that’s 250 years old, so there’s no flashes or bright lights allowed.
You’ll see a few glimpses of it, and the mini-doc that visitors watch before seeing the tent, in this video.
Washington didn’t sleep in it every night during the war, but that tent got it’s share of use. It makes sense that this is well protected, but you still want to walk under those flaps when you see it. You want to stand there, and try to understand the sense of the size of the space, and the great men — scared, cold, hungry, determined — that stood there.
This is the second panorama in the post, and this is thought to be George Washington’s sword. And, remarkably, it’s just … sitting there.
(Click to embiggen.)
When they read the Declaration of Independence in New York City on July 9, 1776, some of the soldiers and sailors tore down symbols of the king. British flags, tavern signs, the royal insignia, were all removed. Including a statue of George III, that had been sculpted in London. Much of the statue — he’d been riding a horse, wearing a Roman-style toga — was carried off to Connecticut and melted into musket balls, some 42,000 in all. A few fragments of the statue survived.
They’ve dug some musket balls out of a few battlefields that matched the composition of lead and tin here, so historians think some of this statue was sent back to the British in anger.
The Declaration of Independence was distributed, by design and format, as a fragile thing. John Dunlap was the original printer, in Philadelphia. It is thought that he printed about 200, some of them in great haste. Just 26 copies of the Dunlap broadsides are known to survive. (Including one that was found behind a painting picked up for $4 at a flea market in 1989!) The Library of Congress has two of the Dunlap originals, and only one of those is complete.
I got to see one of the Dunlap broadsides in a museum exhibit in 2003. No photographs allowed.
This is not a Dunlap broadside.
John Gill, Edward E. Powars, and Nathaniel Willis printed the first copies of the Declaration in Boston, both in newspapers and in this broadside. This is a second printing of the Gill and Powars broadside. (The bottom line is the differentiating clue.)
Historians don’t know how many of their broadsides were made or survive. But you can still go to the print shop when you’re in Boston. (I’m going there.) A master printer, Gary Gregory, does historical reproductions in the traditional style. (I’m going to talk him into letting me print a copy.)
Ssshhhhh … I think this one is a reproduction, but it is historically faithful version of that second printing. It even has the Gill and Powars errors off the Dunlap original. I wonder how much thought the museum or other experts give to the amount of creases and wear should be worked into reproductions.
General Hugh Mercer fought and was killed at the Battle of Princeton. Born in Scotland, Mercer was a surgeon during the Jacobin uprising in his homeland. He fled to Pennsylvania, in 1747, after the Jacobites were put down. He worked as an apothecary, and then served in the French and Indian War in the 1750s. He was wounded twice, once badly, and he became George Washington’s lifelong friend, moving to Virginia to dispense medicine there, and then came the American Revolution, where he quickly was appointed as a general in the Pennsylvania militia.
He and his men, a vanguard of some 350 soldiers, ran across two British regiments and some attached cavalry. Mercer’s horse was shot from under him. The British thought he was Washington, and so they moved in and demanded he surrender. Mercer, instead, drew his sword. He was bayoneted seven times and left for dead.
You’ve seen the painting that commemorates his death. And maybe history is like that sometimes. A high profile person was killed, and he was well-liked enough to become the centerpiece of John Turnbull’s first war painting. (When you look at the painting, you see Washington arriving on horseback. In the foreground Mercer was wounded. But you don’t see Hugh’s face. Turnbull used Mercer’s son, Hugh Jr., as a model.)
Mercer survived the battlefield. He lived, in agony, for a little more than a week. He gave this sword to his friend and adjutant, a Welshman named Jacob Morgan, and it stayed in their family for two generations. The photo above, the sword is paired with a bayonet that belonged to one of the units that Mercer ran across on that fateful day.
This is the hilt of his sword, posthumously engraved.
“Sword of General Hugh Mercer of the Revolutionary Army born in Aberdeen Scotland 1725 He came to Philadelphia from Scotland in 1746. Died January 12 1777 of wounds received at the Battle of Princeton, N.J.”
A handsome, large weapons display. Touch the screens to learn about each of the items in this giant case.
On the left you see weapons that were commonly in action from 1775 to 1777. Some, the display notes, were local, some captured, some left over from previous conflicts. On the right are weapons that show up later in the war, including some standardized French weapons were so important in the fighting.
I wonder if historians and docents got a little giddy putting all of those things on display.
And why is this humble little canteen just as intriguing?
The UStates branding suggests it belonged to the Continental Army, somewhere around 1777. The other initials might be people who carried the thing.
The every day items are just as fascinating as all of the big ticket items here.
These buttons adorned soldiers’ coats. They also date to 1777.
The museum then, note that gunpowder casks in 1776 also were stamped with USA, but these coat buttons, 25 per coat, were the first widespread use.
Archeologists found these all over the place at Valley Forge and other camps.
There’s a naval section. More pamphlets set the scene.
Here, friend, learn this MANLY SONG, and then join the American fleet. “A privateering we will go my boys, a privateering we will go!”
I wonder when they had time to do much sailing, singing 10 verses of this MANLY SONG. You know it’s MANLY because of all of the bravely dying and cheerfully dying going on in this song. Between this, and my 2009 experience learning about what life was like aboard the U.S.S. Constitution I don’t think the sailor’s life would have been for me.
That exhibit tells of 14-year-old free African American James Forten who volunteered aboard a privateer ship. He survived the war, became a prominent abolitionist, a wealthy Philadelphia businessman and the head of a hugely prominent regional family name.
This is the flag of the 2nd Spartan Regiment of South Carolina. The sign says that this is the first time it has been displayed since it flew over arms.
This sword belonged to Maj. Gen. Benjamin Lincoln, Washington’s second-in-command at Yorktown. Yorktown was where the British surrendered, you might recall. When General Cornwallis sent his second-in-command to surrender, Washington sent Lincoln to receive him.
This is a panorama.
(Click to embiggen.)
One of my ancestors, a great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather according to online genealogy, was at Yorktown. He was born in 1751 in colonial Virginia, served twice in the militia and helped guard an estimated 500 British prisoners after they quit the field in Yorktown.
There’s also an ax head on display with Lincoln’s sword. The continental soldiers used axes like that to chop their way through British fortifications at Yorktown. (If you were wondering, Benjamin Lincoln was apparently the fourth cousin, three times removed, of Abraham Lincoln through his mother’s side.)
These beautiful buttons, the sign says, were sold as souvenirs of George Washington’s 1789 inauguration as president. They were sewn onto clothing.
Don’t you want a copy of each of those? (Real ones, of course. Not repros. Never repros.)
Just read the text on this sign. Go ahead and read it. I’ll be waiting on the other side of the photo.
“Charges spread through the partisan press that the state’s inclusive voter laws encouraged election fraud.”
We’ve been fighting this same stupid “Can’t let ’em vote, that’s how cheating happens” battle for more than 200 years. We’ve been fighting it because it is powerfully effective rhetoric. It’s nothing more than that, but still we are fighting it
At the end of the part of the museum we saw — because we didn’t get to see everything today, despite four hours! — there was a section of digitized reproductions of photographs of Revolutionary War era Americans. (Much later in life, obviously.)
Jonathan Harrington had seem some things. (And if I knew this story beforehand I would taken a more careful photo.) Harrington was, at 16, a fifer in a company at the battles of Lexington and Concord. His uncle and namesake was killed at Lexington, the boy escaped, only to rally and reengage the enemy soon after.
And, lastly, Daniel Bakeman, at a remarkable 109, was the last survivor receiving a veteran’s pension for service in the American Revolutionary War. If you believe his story, that is. It seems he might have served in some militia units. And then was a teamster for the military, then became a farmer in New York.
He had difficulty proving his service, but was eventually judged credible for pension purposes. Congress, on February 14, 1867, passed a special act which granted Bakeman a pension of $500 a year. Presumably he collected that twice before dying in 1869. Two other men were his last contemporaries to be pensioned for the Revolutionary War. By that point in the late 1860s the government was busy fending off requests from Civil War soldiers. (We have a history of treating our patriots poorly.)
My (apparently) great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather was not on the photo display. Of course I looked. But here he is.
He is buried in Illinois, in some woods between two fields, an all-but-forgotten family plot, I’d guess. He was laid to rest in a place that, even now, is quite rural. That photo, if it is indeed the man, would have been taken sometime in the first five years of the Daguerreotype style of photographs, and he would have been between 89 and 93 there.
Since it falls on Sunday this year, I’ll just go ahead and acknowledge the date today. Sixteen years ago, Sunday, this happened.
It took place right under this tree. That’s Our Tree, in Savannah. Every time we go there, we go back to the park and sit right there, beneath it’s beautiful branches.
(Click to embiggen.)
I hope Our Tree is having a season of it. I hope we go back soon, and the sun is warm, the breeze is a delight and the ground is dry enough to lay upon all day.
