Monday, November 17, 2008

I just measured the length of my receipt that I got from Albertson's grocery store. I bought eleven items. About 5 inches of the receipt is dedicated to what I purchased including the subtotal, tax and total.

The receipt in its entirety measured 20 inches.

Twenty inches.

Over a foot of a strip of paper.

On this receipt is a wealth of information besides what I purchased including:

My "Great Deal Savings" amount.

The store director's name.

My eligibility to win two tickets to a Dallas Cowboys game complete with entry form blanks to fill out with instructions about where to place the completed form.

Albertson's website info.

Albertson's motto - "It means a great deal."

The number to call for questions.

Albertson's address.

A note encouraging me to sign up for an "Rx-tra Savings Card" because I can "save on branded and generic prescription medications. See pharmacy for details."

The date and time of my transaction.

Information about what each item did cost compared to what it cost me on this night at this time.

This particular store's identification number which in this case is #04193.

Saturday, November 15, 2008

Peggy Noonan, I think I have mentioned her here before, writes a regular opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal. She was also a speech writer for Ronald Reagan and has authored some books. I attempt to read her articles regularly because she is one of the best wordsmiths and consistently shows uncommon insight, a twist from the normal reactions and observations.

Her new book, "Patriotic Grace", I recommend. It is a small book, a political book, but don't let the politics put you off. It is mostly an American book. Give it a read and hear in your head what just the right words put in just the right order sound like. Thoughtful. Cogent.
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Leslie suggested a list edition to this blog. Maybe a restaurant list.

If I were going out to eat tonight, which I am not, these are the places I would go in order from first to fifth choice.

1. Baja Grill. Don't know if it is a chain. Sort of don't think so. Great fish tacos that I am craving.

2. Babe's. Fried chicken on a Saturday night with corn, mashed potatoes, salad, bread. If you don't like this, then I don't understand you.

3. Red Lobster. It is an old favorite. When Leslie and I were first married and living in College Station, if we really wanted to eat nice, and it was payday and we had some money, we would head to Red Lobster. Sometimes we would eat before pay day but close enough to pay day so that the check wouldn't clear before we got paid. Each would get a salad, share an entree. By the way, they have great bread, and I think it is sort of a secret. Those days were good days. When you had to share and eating at Red Lobster was considered the nicest place possible that we could eat. We didn't know that there were other places nicer than that. By the way, this is Saturday, but the best eating out night, I think, is Thursday.

4. Taco Diner. Part of the "Mi Cocina Family of Restaurants." Only one I know is in in Southlake. I order something called "Bistec."

5. I can't think of five.
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Mooresville, North Carolina. Who are you?

Thursday, November 13, 2008

The football season is over, and there was something great about the boys playing. Caleb, a 9th grader, played on our JV team which was made up of all freshman. There is quite a bit of anticipation as these guys grow together to see what they are like on the field in another couple of years.

Jeb played Upwards. We are sort of stunned by his ability. Yes, I know he is only eight, but I was eight once and not any good.

Caleb played defensive end and tight end, both ways all of the time. Jeb played quarterback, and they usually do not throw the ball in 2nd grade Upwards but our team threw the ball and threw it a lot. Scored a lot. Jeb is left-handed but does a lot right- handed. In baseball, he throws left, bats right. Basketball, he dribbles just as well left and right. I think that the right-handedness comes from just watching and wanting to do exactly what his older, right-handed brother did.

Caleb shined defensively and offensively. Great, beautiful catches. He and I would talk about how good receivers catch all of the balls they are supposed to catch and some they are not supposed to. He did this. We talked about how good players do not complain because it gets the attention of the coaches because coaches don't like whiners. He doesn't whine. Coaches like kids that look them in the eye and can take a good chewing, in other words can take instruction sometimes harshly given. This is Caleb.

It is a little sad that football season is over. He has chosen not to play basketball. His decision. And it was a good one. He wanted to not be as busy and he is sort of a homebody. The pace of our lives is slower already and that is a good thing as the holidays start. This week, we have all come home from school together and been around the house together.

Tuesday, November 11, 2008

Harvard

The teachers were incredible. You think they should be because of the expense of the conference, but often college professors are not that interesting, though of great intelligence not necessarily able to communicate effectively. That was not the case with these. Even in a couple of presentations where the actual topic was not terribly applicable to my particular situation, the teacher made it interesting, and they worked to make it applicable. These are teachers of teachers so I guess I shouldn't be surprised that they are good at their craft. They were engaging, entertaining, knowledgeable but not to a "nerdy" level, and stayed to talk and visit casually during breaks and our receptions.

Harvard itself was beautiful. There is the old part that circles Harvard's "Old Yard" which is a big lawn crisscrossed by intersecting sidewalks, and there is the "New Yard" which is simply newer but with the same look. The "New" one I think was established, or built up, during the 1700's. Harvard started in 1636, I think.
The architecture was consistent and stately. All of the freshman dorms circle the Old Yard area.

Though November, many of the trees still clung to their colored leaves, a lot of reds. The weather was not particular cool, sort of rainy, until the last day when it was perfectly crisp. What I wanted in a fall day, that was the last day.

The campus has spread out considerably from the "yard's" but there are now many more of these green spaces between buildings and in the center of squares.

Encircling the older parts of campus is a wall with several gated entrances. The gates are named after famous people who attended HU. There are quotes engraved into walls, doors, gates, sidewalks.

Harvard Square is the hub of the area and also a convenient stop on the subway line. The "square" is a convergence of several roads into one large area in front of the campus and it contains restaurants, most with seating outside, the aforementioned bookstores, a couple of unique shops that just sell magazines and daily editions of many, many newspapers including newspapers from other countries. They both also sell Diet Coke. There was a stationary store, the Harvard Coop which sold all things Harvard, a store that sold beads, an old timey movie theatre, coffee shops, and other places enticing one to linger.

From the square center, the roads lead to other quaint parts of the university and historical sights like a cemetery with gravestones from the 1600's and the church attended by Washington at the start of the revolution and the tree, an elm, under which he assumed command and surveyed his troops, at this time a tattered bunch.

It was a great place to walk, and I did much of that at night since the Inn at Harvard, where I stayed was adjacent to the Harvard Square. I didn't have to waste time getting to the school since I was there and could explore.

For the most part I ate at one of a kind, unique places except one late evening the smell of pancakes and maple syrup drug me into an IHOP as I walked past the Charles River, a bus stop, and a house-turned-computer shop. There, I sat next to five college girls talking about guys and food and the football game against Columbia and the volleyball game against Princeton and a girl who dressed cute but was otherwise not very popular, apparently. I am sure I appeared to them just what I was, a tourist, since I had three maps out, my Harvard Square map, the subway map, and my plastic fold up map of Boston and vicinity. I am a map nerd.

M.I.T - Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Sits on Massachusetts Avenue about two miles north of Harvard. Architecture is imposing granite with a lot of columns. OK, so I only drove past MIT and didn't walk it, but the one drive through the campus provided my best view of beautiful trees of yellow with an understory of smaller trees with red leaves. This I saw on the last day, the best fall day, so that magnified the beauty of it - leaves blowing, people sitting on the lawns, riding bikes, working on their graphing calculators.

That is enough for tonight.




Monday, November 10, 2008

Boston

Last Wednesday, I flew to Boston for a conference that was being held at Harvard. It was a joint presentation of the National Association of Independent Schools and Harvard's Graduate School of Education. It is rather expensive - conference, hotel, flight -so FWC, so far, has sent one person a year for the last three years. It was my year. So, with the help of some meds, I enjoyed the flight immensely. In fact, I slept and remember very little of it.

The conference started on Thursday, but I arrived Wednesday, at noon, by design. With a little bit of time, I could stop by some sights that I wanted to see or revisit.

I wished I had taken my computer with me so that this would be easier, but I didn't so I am writing in hindsight since I arrived back home last night close to midnight, more drugs and more sleep.

Places I Went/Saw:

Portsmouth, New Hampshire. I had heard it was pretty and it was just an hours drive north. Got there and will go back. In fact, L and I are planning a trip to this area in March to celebrate our 20th anniversary. We went to Vermont on our honeymoon.

I saw a bridge in Portsmouth. I crossed it and a sign tells me that I am entering Maine. That is a highlight because I had never been to ME. I drove through town, Kittery(?), and decided to visit Maine means that I must do something other than drive across a bridge and meander through a city. So, I stopped at Chef's Cove Cafe and ate a sandwich, some chips, and a Diet Coke.

Exeter, New Hampshire. After leaving ME, I drove west through New Hampshire to Exeter. A town known, if it is known, by Philips Exeter School. They themselves, and many others, consider them to be the elitist of the elite independent, private, boarding high schools. Nice campus, like a college.

Then. Then. Then, to Derry, New Hampshire. This was a great treat for me. Derry, NH, is where Robert Frost spent several years farming, writing poetry - some of the best known of his, and teaching at Pinkerton Academy. His house is there and while it and the barn were closed that didn't keep me from parking and walking through the farm. There were trails leading through the woods and next to a stream that I believe was partly the basis for the poem "Hyla Brook." There was a perfect rock wall circling a meadow in the farm, a wall that he partly built. There was a marker for a tree that he referred to a couple of times because he looked out a window in his home and could see it.

Concord, NH. This is where I spent the night after finding a hotel and going into town to eat at Helen's. Another sandwich. Best Western was the hotel. I found it in the rain after getting lost in the blackness of country roads that were made darker by the trees hanging over the asphalt. The next morning I visited the Old North Bridge, where "the shot heard round the world" was fired. "Old Manse" which was a house built by Ralph Waldo Emerson's parents, lived in by RWE and Henry David Thoreau at different times and then given to Nathaniel Hawthorne and his new bride along with a garden planted by Thoreau as a wedding gift, is right next to the bridge and part of the Minuteman National Historical Park and maintained by the National Park Service. Then, I stopped by Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, the cemetery mentioned in the "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" by Washington Irving. There on "author's ridge", Thoreau, Emerson, Hawthorne, and Louisa May Alcott, who wrote Little Women, are buried.

Walden Pond. Another treat. Walden is where H.D.Thoreau spent several years in a small cabin that he built himself. Though the cabin isn't there, an exact replica is. They can build an exact replica because he was exact in his description in "Walden Pond". The pond is there with the location of his house near a small sandbar that was there when he lived, and is still there. It was very rainy here so I will have to go back when I can spend a little more time.

I walked the Freedom Trail on the last day. There are 15, 16 or so sites on this 2.5 walking trail through the Boston. Boston Massacre sight, Old North Church, couple of cemeteries, churches, Paul Revere's home, Boston Commons, other places.

Rode the subway into Boston a couple of times. Got wonderfully lost. Started to take the subway to the Boston College/Notre Dame game but decided on a bookstore instead. Oh, in Cambridge, where Harvard is, there are many bookstores. Stores for popular books, just poetry, just banned books, just almost banned books. just used books or "experienced" books as they would say. I came back with a lot of books.

Had a Cambridge police officer pull up next to me. We rolled our windows down in unison. He says, "Whad is tha matta wid ya? Do ya know how to use ya directionals?" At this, I had a slight moment of panic because I thought I was going to have to have him repeat himself and he looked the type to make a southerner just sort of disappear into the Charles River. I didn't get the "directionals" part. But, then I thought of the blinkers and apologized. He sped off.

Fenway Park close up (when I was lost) and Gillette Stadium from far away when I was walking on a cobble stone street near Revere's house.

Harvard and M.I.T. Saw them both but will write about that tomorrow.

One disappointment. The Globe Corner Bookstore was, and is, a stop on the Freedom Trail. It was a gathering place of sort during the revolution. When Leslie and I flew here on our way to Vermont twenty years ago, we walked the trail, stopped into the store, made a purchase, a couple of small books that I still have. I hoped to do the same thing. I almost missed it this time but then sadly realized that the building was right, I was looking at it, and the historical marker was there, but now it was a gaudy jewelry store. I don't get that. Another example from the trail. The first City Hall for Boston is a pretty building. On the trail it sits next to the sight of the first public school in America, the school is simply a marker. The City Hall building, though, an old building, historical, stately, now has a Ruths(sp) Chris Steakhouse in the lower level. I don't get that either.