Musings

I’ve been feeling a bit more spry lately (yay!), and today we ventured to the BotGarden to check on the plants and have lunch out.

After eating, we checked out an area that’s been newly hardscaped. For years it had been very underused, to the point of seeming abandoned by the gardeners. As we approached the area, I could see that one of my favorite small beds of succulents and cacti was gone, replaced by a line of boring, identical shrubs.

Oh, no!

HOWEVER, when we got into the redesigned area, whew, the plants from That Very Bed had been planted in many new beds, with vastly expanded square footage.

Whew!

With great happiness, we headed to the orchid conservatory to see what might be in bloom, as OrchidDaze has just begun. [I do not subscribe to their spelling distortion.]

The orchid diversity is stunning. These are tiny and hang down from their vegetation, here perched on a branch.

Compare to this huge branch of many blossoms, all open at once.

And this one is a knock-out for its color…and that it’s the size of a saucer.

Posted at 7:28 PM | 1 Comment »

We loaded up and when The Guru fired up the beastie (complete with a full electrical charge (yay!)), it gave us this temp. Time to head south, we agreed. It even dropped another degree by the time we crossed the Potomac one last time east of Harpers Ferry. The water sparkled in the sun; we were southbound; life is good, we also agreed.

The landscape was mostly open and we saw a few “fancy” houses. I tried not to think about the ugly history of slavery in this former(?) tobacco-farming region. (We saw very few (surviving?) tobacco barns, unlike this latitude on our northbound leg.)

It was Sunday and perhaps that is partly why this was the only active farm vehicle we saw….

All the horses I remember seeing on the many mini-farms had lovely jackets. I don’t think they’re anything like the old-fashioned “horse blankets.” I suspect these are high-tech and perhaps even Goretex.

I loved the low sun angle at this, our last rest area of the journey.

Proof that home is not far ahead…the Gaffney peach. And attendant power lines….

Such a great trip; such a diversity of experiences! We especially enjoyed last night’s socializing with our friends from Venezuela* (presently in northern Maryland). Still smiling!

* And, yes, the terrible things you have heard about people starving to death, lack/absence of medicines (including for malaria), and brutality by…well, you get the idea of what’s happening in Venezuela…yes, what you’ve heard: true, true, true. Soooo, so sad. We are glad they are safe. For now….

Posted at 9:14 PM | Comments Off on Winter tour concludes

From the train, we could see fog wafting up from the Potomac and that the ice floes were visibly reduced compared to yesterday. By day’s-end we carried our heavy coats in temps that almost reached 70°F, and on our return trip there was still fog and the floes had become chips (almost).

Leaving the subway station, we walked by this Temperance Fountain. Am I the only one to find it ironic that the city cut off the water quite some time ago, so that the water sponsor Henry D. Cogswell hoped would slake the thirst of potential liquor-drinkers was no longer supplied? And when the monument was relocated in 1987, it still wasn’t reconnected. Of course, the overflow was no longer needed for a horse trough, either!

At one of my first stops in the Newseum, I discovered blooper-tiles in the ladies with headlines you probably don’t remember.

This one, however, you may well remember.

I also learned that this thrice-weekly got the scoop over the weeklies when the Declaration of Independence was signed. This was still two days after the signing…. Only nineteen copies of this historic front-page survive.

After lunch the overcast had thinned and we climbed Capitol Hill. And it is a hill. The visitor center is on the other side; we looped to the left, climbed, then descended to the VC entrance.

We took the next tour, which focused on frescoes by Constantino Brumidi (he began them in 1855). During the tour, we got a chance to see the views to the west, down the mall toward the Washington Monument.

We saw glorious Brumidi frescoes in Senate hallways, although his best-known work in the Capitol building is the ceiling of the rotunda. Brumidi was paid a substantial $10 per day, which covered his assistant and their supplies, with Brumidi taking about half. He augmented this salary by doing outside commissions. He did most of the ceilings, leaving the walls to his assistant, our guide said.

If you can tell the lower part of the left wall is darker, it is because restorers have left overpainting to show how the original work was obscured. The restoration was finished on this hallway about two years ago, and removed tobacco-smoke stains along with layers of added paint.

Leaving the Capitol we crossed to our enjoy the façade of the Supreme Court, also looming over DC on Capitol Hill. To help your eye with the scale, I’d estimate that the “normal” door opening is about 1/5th the height of the doorway in the stone.

On our way back to catch our return train, we passed in front of the Library of Congress, and saw more Classical-inspired artwork that was installed in 1898 beneath the monumental staircase leading to the main, formal building entrance. The central bronze is Neptune flanked by his two sons and accompanied by a large frog and coiling sea-snakes(?). This composition is in turn flanked by a pair of Naiads/Nereids—sea nymphs; only the south one shown here. You don’t have to look closely to observe that sculptor Roland Hinton Perry was inspired by the Trevi Fountain figures.

Another fantastic and fascinating DC day!

Posted at 6:49 PM | 1 Comment »

At the National Gallery this morning, we saw a buncha lovely paintings by Johannes Reijniersz Vermeer and those by (roughly) contemporaries/friends/competitors of his of similar subjects—very interesting comparative material from long ago in the mid- to late-1600s, also known as the Dutch Golden Age. One thing I found interesting: the painting titles did not generally name the person or persons portrayed (and they are usually unknown now), which seems to have been the original custom. I also learned that these painters sometimes used a tinted glaze over paint to achieve certain colors, and now that glaze has lost its ability to make that color shift; thus, a green parrot is now a nice grey-blue, beautiful, but quite different from a brilliant tropical green.

Moving on, we saw several paintings of famous dead white American men. Gilbert Stuart painted this famous 1821 portrait of George Washington from an earlier portrait he did when George was still alive. Washington paintings were a big business for Stuart—he painted over one hundred of them, most modeled on his 1796 original.

I had a textured print on cardboard copy of this painting in my room when I was growing up. I rested my foot (elevated) while gazing at this Renoir.

Totally different subject: Delacroix takes on tiger-and-snake relations (spats?).

In another room, Constant painted a Mediterranean babe.

Over at Air and Space, we saw this original Enterprise model, freshly updated with LEDs, which are turned on for ten minutes only three times each day…. It’s in a prized location in the lobby…

…next to a giant space mural, of which this is a small, yet impressive corner.

Over at NMAI we saw a special exhibit on the Inca. This is a silver alloy jar for chicha, a fermented drink (“beer”) usually made from maize, with lovely corncob-legs and a human face. Maybe it makes the rather thick chicha more palatable?

Of course, the Inca were masters of fibers, making rope bridges across sizable chasms…

…and creating delicate knotted cords to register transactions and generate administrative records.

Posted at 5:35 PM | Comments Off on Three museums, one day

Yesterday’s image was about absent leaves. Today’s images are foliage. MaNachur has decorated this decorative cabbage-family specimen with a single Acer palmatum specimen.

These desiccating hosta leaves provide quite the contrast, no? Their venation pattern creates all the texture, looking rather like the puffy zones created between lines of stitches on quilts.

Posted at 5:57 PM | Comments Off on Flip side

Happy and merry! We had a traditional Euro-walk between our Big Meal and our Big Dessert. And I just had Second Dessert to celebrate!

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The Guru pulled out the decorations and we created our (lately) traditional newsbox “tree”, standing in a forest of lights*.

In places of honor are a pair of elves, one red and one green, given to the Bro and I when we were tiny tots by a family friend who was a very successful Jewish lady-stockbroker in Detroit (verrah unusual in the 1960s, that combo).

* For some mysterious reason, only the green lights are powerful enough to make wee spotlights on the fireplace surround.

Posted at 10:25 PM | Comments Off on Pseudo-tree shines

Here, the solstice was…gloomy. So I give you recent photos (from Tuesday)…

…and from Monday.

Posted at 11:23 PM | Comments Off on Solstice substitutes

Is the dino a defender and intimidator? Is that why it was chosen to be a cookie-jar character?

Winter shadows…. These images are not quite real B&W, but there’s a lot of B&W essence…maybe I’m influenced by the snow day we had recently…and that’s why these were attractive today. When the colors are back in MaNachur-land.

Posted at 6:24 PM | Comments Off on In B&W

Yesterday we thought we’d do another excursion, maybe I’d get another 1K-step day. But, no. Autumn moisture descended. We are happy with the cool, yet wished for clear-overcast, or even partly cloudy conditions.

* This meaning of pine derives from a word meaning pain. [Tweak imaginary mustache, and murmur “interesting.”]

Posted at 8:41 PM | Comments Off on Pining*