22 posts tagged “virginia”
Christmas? I guess? I think I'm done Christmas shopping, which is good, since I hate Christmas shopping. I love giving gifts, but I hate crowds and shopping and the mall, and we have no money. So, I didn't do too much buying this year. I am not yet, however, done making Christmas gifts, as that is what most people on our list are getting. And this weekend is the last chance I'm going to get to get stuff done, so the sewing machine is humming.
As usual, my niece makes out like a bandit. I made a frilly flannel Xmas dress for her, and a cape. A little red riding hood cape. Only pink and fleece, which I figure will be practical in New England.
And a fancy schmancy button...
And little arm holes....
In the meantime, I've been working my way through the black and white pictures from the Xmas burlesque show. Should have them all up soon....
On the way back from the latest work trip to the boonies* last night I stopped at the fabric store to get a zipper for the Christmas dress I'm making for my niece. At the cutting table the young lady working there declared to her co-workers that the next day is her 18th birthday and she was so excited because "only two more years and I can get a gun." I thought I had misheard her-- the fabric cutting table not really being my image of the bastion of the NRA. But then she confirmed it, saying, "I so want a gun!"
One of her coworkers then pointed out that one needs to be 21 in VA to get a handgun. The young lady didn't see the import of that piece of information. Actually, she said, "Yeah, I know." Coworker pointed out that that was three years, not two. Girl argued with her for a while, insisting that it was only two more years, not three. Eighteen, employed, almost armed, and 21-18=3 is beyond her grasp.
Guess she'll be disappointed on her twentieth birthday. I think I fear for the rest of us.
Of course, she also declared, loudly, in front of a large group of customers, that someone asked her if she had any kids yet, and that she had responded, pointing animatedly at her crotch, "nothing is coming out of THIS until I'm MARRIED." The other women working at the cutting table stood blinking for a moment. Then one asked if she could take the next customer.
Meanwhile, this trip I got my regular deer season experience of a six year old, after being bidden to draw a picture of something that makes him happy, rendering a scene of himself holding a rifle larger than the body he'd given himself, busily killing forest creatures. In this case a deer, which was rather well drawn-- a good sized buck with a nice rack of antlers. The kid wanted to tell me all about his picture, turning his face towards me, the light glinting off his coke bottle glasses, and happily describing his snuffing out of the animal. I'm thinking that I may want to think twice about hiking in the woods around here, as they appear to be populated by nearly blind, heavily armed six year olds, and potentially armed not terribly bright young women.
* I should point out that, while the Littlest Hunter was in the boonies, the fabric store vigilante was in a suburb of Richmond.
This morning while trying to get ready for me to go to my Letterpress class (yes, I'm taking a six week course in learning how to do Old Skool printing. With little type blocks. And an electric press from the thirties. I'm making Christmas gifts for people. Because I have geeky literary friends who will really dig a hand set, printed on nice paper, paragraph from À la recherche du temps perdu. Which will, sadly, be in English because they do not have diacritics in their type sets. Sad clown), and while Mr. P was running around trying to load up the car to take his things to DC to be hung in the gallery for his opening next week, that some jack. bastard. tried to break into Mr. P's studio/the garage sometime in the last day and a half or so. The person in question did this by bashing the crap out of the doorknob, thereby bending the cylinder, and ensuring that the door will be frozen in place forever more. On the upside, I believe that this may have discouraged the asshat (likely some stoopid tweaker) from continuing his mission. On the downside, the door is now stuck in place and will necessitate a repair we cannot afford (unless, that is, Mr. P's show sells out. Do you hear this, universe? We need a sold out show). On the upside, the key for the lock was bent and very near breaking in half, so this was going to be on the repair agenda in any case at some point. On the downside, I'm very unhappy that some freaking tweaker was in our backyard, bashing the hell out of the doorknob to the garage, which is about fifteen feet from the backdoor of the house.
Needless to say, this is not in any way raising my somewhat anemic affection for our current home city. I lived in three different developing countries for almost five years, including one that had no rule of law, and the sum total of my encounters with crime were the loss of two cheap bicycles and a shirt stolen from a laundry line. Almost ten years in New York City and I once had someone take two subway tokens and two dollars out of the pocket of a jacket I'd left unattended on a couch at a club. Four years in Washington, D.C. and once someone broke into the building where I lived (but not my apartment) and stole cash from my landlady's purse. We've been in this house a year and a half and we've got tweakers in the backyard wielding 4x4s. Makes me long for those halcyon Phnom Penh days....
Went to the Richmond Varietease Halloween show, and fiiiiinally got the film back.
Virginia is one of those states that has a gubernatorial race in odd years, so we're gearing up for an election, again, here in the Old Dominion. Conventional Wisdom tells us that on the seldom occasions when VA has gone blue in the national race, they go red in the following gubernatorial, and vice versa (par example, they voted W in twice, but our current governor is Tim Kaine, who is also now the chairman of the Democratic National Committee).
So. Earlier this year, the Republicans offered up exactly one candidate for the GOP ticket for governor: Bob McDonnell. He has been the state's AG, and a state legislator, both pretty garden variety qualifications for the office. Not so garden variety background piece, however, is his degree from Regent University (Pat Robertson's answer to Jerry Falwell's Liberty University at the other end of the state). In an article from the WaPo, the issue of his master's thesis from his time at Regent is discussed.
In many ways, the content is not exactly surprising-- McDonnell proposed a number of rather extreme bills while a legislator-- and not out of line with what you would expect from a Regent graduate. However, he has been trying very hard to sell himself as a, ahem, "moderate republican." Does this sound particularly moderate?
"Robert F. McDonnell submitted a master's thesis to the evangelical school he was attending in Virginia Beach in which he described working women and feminists as "detrimental" to the family. He said government policy should favor married couples over "cohabitators, homosexuals or fornicators." He described as "illogical" a 1972 Supreme Court decision legalizing the use of contraception by unmarried couples."
Uhm. Yeah. Look, anyone who uses the word "fornicators" in earnest is just not a moderate. Okay? Just no. He's doing a lot of backpedalling at this point, noting that the thesis is 20 years old (it was submitted in 1989) and that many of his views have "changed." But he is not refuting or condemning his words of 20 years ago, just trying to distance himself. And his actions of more recent years do not indicate that he has really changed at all: while in the legislature he voted against equal pay for women in 2001. He uses his daughters to "show" that he is no longer opposed to women working outside the house (at least one is in the armed services), but, again, this doesn't really tell us much. His daughters are adults, so he can't control what they do. And, furthermore, I think we often find that things that we believe in the abstract-- and that we are happy to force other people to conform to-- often do not fall out quite like that in reality when it is their lives or families in question. How many folks under the evangelical tent have railed against, ahem, "fornication," only to find themselves being told by their daughter, who may or may not be named Bristol, that there has been fornication going on and they'd better get the bassinet ready? I would bet that far more parents confronted with evidence of their child's fornicating do not, in fact, say, "out! out, fornicator! You burn my eyes! You are dead to me!", but actually express their disappointment in their child's choices and then go get the bassinet. Does this mean that they are okay with "fornication"? No, it means they are okay with thier children.
There is, actually, not a whole lot of evidence that McDonnell's views have changed substantively. And his rhetoric has only changed recently, when he realized that he would need to not get wiped in Northern Virginia to win (26% of the state's population is located in NoVA-- Fairfax Co., Loudoun Co., City of Arlington, City of Alexandria. Over the last two decades the area has been trending bluer and bluer, and went with a pretty fair spread for Obama last year. It is doubtful that McDonnell would ever win there, but if he carries his own Tidewater area, the more rural areas,-- both of which are expected-- and is not trounced in NoVA, he'll likely win). I find his claims that, according to the WaPo article, "(w)hat he wrote in the thesis on women in the workplace, he said, "was simply an academic exercise and clearly does not reflect my views." " to be, to put it politely, suspect. The WaPo has pulled the following quote from the thesis:
"Leaders must correct the conventional folklore about the separation of church and state," he wrote. "Historically, the religious liberty guarantees of the First Amendment were intended to prevent government encroachment upon the free church, not eliminate the impact of religion on society."
Does this sound like an academic exercise? No. This is the voice of advocacy (and a rather self-serving reading of the First Amendment). More enlightening on that point is a read of the thesis itself, which is available as a PDF from the WaPo. In the very abstract for the paper he is analyzing these issues in order to determine why the GOP has not been "successful" in pushing through its ideas regarding the traditional family. His determination? "The paper concludes that Republicans must stay consistently committed to their principles, communicate more effectively with the American public, and take bold action to restore the family to a position of strength in modern society." Again, academic exercise? Again, not so much. He makes it clear that the "restoration" of the family to its "position of strength" is his purpose. In the body of the text he makes it clear that his conception of a family is limited: it means one man, one woman, preferrably in a covenant marriage, with a gaggle of children, man working full time, woman at home baking pies and babies and never thinking of anything other than her gratitude to God for sending her a Real Man. Feminists, Cohabitators, Fornicators, and Homosexuals need not apply. It is a plan for which he is advocating, not an abstract exercise.
So sorry, Bob, it just isn't passing the smell test. These are clearly the candidate's views. He's spent the last 18 years trying to get many of the things he's advocated for in his thesis made law in VA (covenant marriage, for example), and doing his best to break down the separation of church and state. He says that we should look at his record rather than his thesis, but his record and his thesis bear a striking resemblence to each other. And I happen to like the First Amendment-- all of it.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Particularly the not folklore part up there that states categorically that Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion. And besides, everyone I care about is either a feminist, a cohabitator, a fornicator, or a homosexual, or some combination thereof, so I don't see that he has much to offer. It would be nice if he could offer up the truth in his campaign, though. I mean, hey, isn't the "success" of your party predicated on your "stay(ing) consistently committed to (your) principles"? Unless it's politically expedient, right Bob?
More prictures! As promised!
We headed up towards the Shenandoahs last weekend for camping and hiking. I was the one who reserved the camping spaces, and clearly I need to learn to look more closely at where we are going when I do such things, because I failed to note two important facts: 1) this was a hike in campground; 2) that is the first state park with camping that one hits off of I-66 headed west out of D.C. Number one wasn't really a problem, just that we hadn't packed for hiking in, so we had to do some readjusting. Number 2, however, would explain the prevelence of fellow-campers who were boisterous and not appropriately packed for the hike in location. Or the woods, really, for that matter. Our much too close neighbors were a large group who sang Hindi songs well into the wee hours. They were set up in an ancient tent with giant poles holding it up that was meant for far fewer people than were inside it. They also brought EVERYTHING THEY OWNED. They had chairs. They had appliances. THEY HAD LAPTOPS. IN THE WOODS. At one point we heard a terrible dragging sound and turned to find one of them dragging a rollie suitcase up the hill. Who brings wheeled luggage on a camping trip?
This was only one of several groups that brought an enormous amount of stuff, most of it not so useful. There was another group that involved several annoyed looking young women who seem to be very angry at having discovered exactly what their boyfriends meant when they said "let's go camping!"
I believe that when looking at the website of the park I so fixated on the park's being an entrance to the Appalachian Trail, which in my mind conjured up images of lonely woodsy forests faaaaar from civilization, that I simply failed to really look at the map to see where it was in relation to, you know, NoVA. I also failed to process that we were in the descent path for planes coming in to Dulles from any and all points west. The park was pretty, and the hikes were nice, but it was like living in Flushing Meadows. yyyyyyeeeeeEEEAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRROOOOOOOOOWWWWWWW, all night long, one after another.
The hiking was really nice, though, and I really enjoyed it. And, planes be damned, the cacophony of insects singing and singing all night long was cool. The lightening storm that went on and on was a little hairy, though it didn't start raining until about seven the next morning while P and I were quickly striking camp. We spent the rest of the trip imaginging the pandemonium that must have ensued when our neighbors woke to find water dripping on their laptops.
The next day it rained and rained and rained, but, undaunted, we visited that amazing site....
FOAMHENGE!
If you haven't gone, you should.
On Sunday we discovered why it is that you should always go to a state park on a Sunday.
We were blissfully alone, the only people in the entire primitive camping section of the James River State Park, which was pointedly not the first state park on I-66. We hiked a whole lot, all over the park, and saw lots and lots of bugs and animals and snakes and fish and birds. Lots of wild rabbits, a big spider with a crazy coned web that probably could have caught a chipmunk, quail running across the road, and several deer, including a huge buck with a giant rack of antlers. (Sadly, I am almost positive that we also saw several Emerald Ash Borers).
We rounded up a faaaaaabulous weekend with a little canoeing on the James, which was great.
Sigh. wish there was more trips like this coming up.....
But in the meantime it's back to work....
Three days of driving, hiking, camping, hiking, canoeing, listening to Hindi karaoke, and hiking, and we're home. Major accomplishment for the day: showering. Also, we did not get eaten by a bear-- yeay!
Dear Residents of Virginia,
I am writing with regards to an important matter that I would like to bring to your attention. Please allow me to introduce a feature available on your automobile with which you may yet be unacquainted. Namely, the turn signal. I realize that you have likely spent hours puzzling over that strange little lever sticking out of the left side of the steering column. I am here to tell you the wonderful, miraculous things that that little lever can do. It can prevent accidents from occurring. Did I not say that it was miraculous? Just think-- a little lever can actually help you to avoid getting caught up in a terrible traffic accident, leaving you trapped inside a crunched up hunk of metal that was once your SUV. How, you may ask, how can such a small thing do so very much? Huzzah! It is truly magical! When you move it ever so slightly up and down, it warns people around you that you are going to change lanes. This may not seem so important, and you may dismiss this the way that you dismiss the power of the Red Light, however, you would be surprised at how useful it is to those in the cars behind you to know that you really are going to suddenly drift across four lanes of traffic. Or perhaps that you plan to slot in and out of spaces in traffic only three inches larger than your automobile, as though you were playing Frogger while doing crank.
So please, give it try!
Sincerely,
That Yankee Lady
So, on Monday, we got a snow day.
Anyhoodle, in these parts, this is like Armageddon. As a result, I got the day off. wheeeeeeee! I spent the day doing crafty stuff and laundry, which was very good, as I've been home so little lately that we were out of clean clothes. Schools around here were canceled for two days-- and in some places three days. Let me repeat that-- seven inches of snow in central VA = three days of no school. In Massachusetts 7 inches wouldn't have gotten you a two hour delay. I have one word, people: WIMPS. All right, all right. I admit, part of the problem is that there are like two plows for the whole area. They never did plow our neighborhood. We have a sharp hill of a driveway, and then a hill to go up to get out of the 'hood, and we spent Monday watching idiots slipping and sliding up and down that hill, almost losing it in the lady across the street's yard more than once. Also, people around here apparently believe that the best way to deal with packed snow over ice while in a vehicle is to race over it at quickly as possible. SIGH.
Now, this is the first real winter weather we had this season. Today, this is being wiped clean with predictions of temps this afternoon in the high 70s. It's meant to hit 80 tomorrow. From 9 degrees to 79 degrees in three days. The snow is gone, all melted.
WEIRD.
I can't decide whether I should do anything in the yard or not. I almost did last weekend... and then was glad I never got around to it with the snow. Maybe I should just take a nap.
Also, I get to go back out to the boonies all next week for work. Oh, joy!
Soooo, I got to do a photo gig over the weekend, which was a nice change of pace, shooting part of an event in Crystal City that will be going on every day through the 28th of this month-- all fashion related events.
This week's discovery: models are very tall. No, whatever you are thinking, they are taller than that.
