Captured a bit of symmetry at L’Enfant Plaza Metro Station lower platform while waiting for a train.
(Compare with this shot from the Baltimore Metro, 15 years ago.)
Christmas 2017
Back to NJ for Christmas! Ezra had a lot of fun being showered with toys and fawned over by relatives.
Amy gave me a ukulele, a simple fun instrument I’ve been wanting to learn for a while now.
Some highlights from the in-laws’ tree:
After Thanksgiving’s Turnpike backup we opted for the US-15/I-78 route up through Pennsylvania. Longer drive, but much better scenery, and almost no tolls. Ezra got to be King at a rest stop.
Thanksgiving 2017
Visited Amy’s folks in NJ for Thanksgiving, with a trip to Turtle Back Zoo over the weekend.
This is Ezra’s first Thanksgiving away (we stayed home last year as he was just 5 months old). He’s gotten past his stranger anxiety phase and had a lot of fun with everyone, even mistaking Amy’s cousin Dave for me a couple of times.
He also enjoyed the zoo, especially the penguins, goats, sheep, and dinosaur park.
Enjoy these closeups of a penguin and a ram.
Oh yeah, I’m skipping the NJ Turnpike next trip. Due to accidents, construction in Delaware, and a toll plaza bottleneck, we were stuck in traffic with this view for 2-3 hours.
LoC NAVCC
Work gave me an opportunity to tour the Library of Congress National Audio-Visual Conservation Center out in Culpeper VA a few months ago.
Also known as the Packard Campus — after its benefactor David Packard of Hewlett-Packard fame — the facility began as the Culpeper Switch, a cold war Federal Reserve bunker burrowed into a mountain.
Today the bunkers are now vaults and labs for film reels, cassette tapes, records, wax cylinders, photos, video games, and other artifacts of bygone eras of audio-visual media, all carefully restored, cataloged, and digitally archived by Library of Congress workers — with help from a few robots here and there.
I mentioned video games. They had a spread of various games across all kinds of on one table, which seemed a haphazard scatter at first, but I don’t think it was an accident that ET for Atari, CD-i Zelda, and Battletoads — some of the worst titles in the history of gaming — were clustered together.
Meanwhile, someone took severe umbrage with these.
For those wanting to visit, the Packard Campus also has a lovely theater with free events for the public, and yearly open houses with facilities tours. More photos in the full LoC NAVCC photoset.
Glasses
After decades of 20/20 vision I finally started having trouble reading small text close to my eyes, and an optometry appointment showed mild farsightedness and astigmatism, which means reading glasses.
I only need them for reading small text near my face, very important for Pokémon GO. I picked the thinnest frames possible so I wouldn’t scare our son, who’s failed to recognize his grandpa when he puts on his glasses. Good news is that a puff test showed no glaucoma. This is fine.
Halloween 2017
Ezra outgrew last year’s Star Trek: Next Generation outfit, so this year he was in Original Series Captain’s Command Gold. Meanwhile, Amy and I donned our red shirts as his security detail.
He’s still an unsteady walker and doesn’t have enough teeth to handle candy yet, so no walking around trick-or-treating, but he had fun staying out late and greeting the monsters and superheroes who showed up. Two bags of Costco candy — only one was finished up, which means now we have 150 pieces to ourselves.
First Haircut
Another milestone: Ezra’s first haircut. We brought him to a local Cartoon Cuts which specializes in first haircuts, and has TVs and toys for the kids. None of that mattered as Ezra wailed and struggled through the entire ordeal. Still, he looks a lot better after a trim.
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Oh, you know how you get a keepsake lock of hair in a baggie to remember a first haircut? Make sure the lock of hair is dry. Turns out wet hair in a sealed bag gets moldy.
Baby Steps
And suddenly our son Ezra has begun to walk. He was already cruising with some assistance earlier, but at 14 months came those wobbly first few steps at a time, and by 15 months he could cross a room.
Almost 16 months now, and he’s running around outdoors like a pro. He especially likes little footbridges, walking across them and turning around and recrossing them repeatedly.
New milestone crossed. Very proud of our little bridge-crosser, now technically a toddler rather than a baby.
Great Falls
Took a day trip to Great Falls for Labor Day: Maryland side, with trips down the Olmsted Island walk and Section B of the Billy Goat Trail. That latter part was a mistake: I’d forgotten how far a walk down the C&O towpath it was to get to the Billy Goat Trail, and just how much rock scrambling was involved — more than I remember from last time, when I may have taken a slightly different route due to flooding. (Less on Sec B than on Sec A, but still too much to do with a baby in a carrier.) Gonna wait till Ezra’s older to go back there.
Nice views, at least.
The Total Solar Eclipse of 2017
Washington DC did not see a total solar eclipse, but there was at least one small part of it in the path of totality on August 21st — in Nebraska.
These four sandstone columns were once part of the Department of the Treasury, until they were detached in 1908 and moved to Pioneers Park, Lincoln, Nebraska in 1916. It was to this artifact of historic Washington that I traveled, to watch the moon slide in front of the sun and shroud the area in darkness, above me a ring of silvery coronal fire piercing through darkened clouds.
I had read that the experience of totality produced a kind of primal fear in some viewers, an irrational sense of ominous doom; or in others, a sense of expanded cosmic awareness of the universe. I didn’t feel any of that, but I did get goose bumps of awe. (It’s entirely possible that I just live in a constant state of ominous doom and cosmic awareness.) Mostly I just stared at that silvery ring, mumbling to myself, “There’s the shadow, ooooh prominences, wooow” while letting the camera trigger run through exposure cycles.
Post-totality I also met Thomas, who didn’t just watch the eclipse, he was the eclipse. We talked a bunch about space and forklifts and Nebraska and DC, and he gave me a ride back to my parking spot.
This was a same-day round trip and sadly there wasn’t time to drive into Lincoln and see the sights before going to the airport. Instead I hiked around Pioneers Park a bit to see the Prairie and Nature Centers. There was an injured barn owl at the Nature Center who had gotten used to waking at daytime hours to interact with guests. Apparently she had fallen asleep during totality, thinking it was night, and was still sleeping when I got there.
It was a 22 hour journey, much of it spent aboard planes, in airports, or driving a rental Nissan Rogue around the Lincoln area, all for a minute and a half of cloudy celestial twilight above four grimy sandstone columns. It was worth the trip.
Full eclipse photoset here, and GoPro eclipse video here.
Next total solar eclipse on Earth will be 2 July 2019 over Chile and Argentina, and next total solar eclipse to cross North America will be 8 April 2024; so make your plans now, I guess?