Yesterday I walked instead of running, due to soreness. Today I made up for it by doing the 4.5 mile circuit in five minutes better time than my last attempt. My hope is that I can stick with this long enough to get a pace worthy of entering an 8K or 10K race at some point, which probably means under 12 minutes per mile. Right now I’m just under 14.5 minutes, so unless I hurt myself, it’s doable.
Wednesday I saw a beaver in the lake, swimming away with a mouthful of “stuff.” The day before, a couple of deer were grazing in the open field area adjacent to the lake. The bugs have been bad during the past few days, I think I got bit by something on my neck the other day, it left a small discolored area. I hope I don’t have some dreaded jungle disease spread by bug bites.
The girls and I went to Patriot Park this morning, and we can happily report that we have found all five letter boxes planted there. It’s a nice park, and every time we’ve been there so far, it’s been empty. Apparently not many people are aware of it yet.
From Bright Lights Film:
“Accidental crowd” could be applied to Delphine Kreuter’s debut feature 57,000 Kilometers Between Us. The whirling narrative centers on a family who mediates its malfunctioning through camcorders, blogs, the Internet, anything but facing each other. Nat (Marie Burgun) lives with her newly remarried mother, Margot (Florence Thomassin), and stepfather, Michel (Pascal Bongard), who is determined to record every moment of everyone in the household. Hidden away in her room, Nat tries to maintain a connection to her transsexual father, now Nicole (Stephanie Michelini) and husband Khaled (Mohamed Rouabhi). She has a budding online romance with fellow teenager Adrien (Hadrien Bouvier), isolated in a cancer ward, and a more troubled link with a man (Mathieu Amalric) happiest in diapers. The description brings to mind the contrived kinkiness of generically edgy movies, but photographer and video artist Kreuter never falls back on the merely quirky. Relying on hand-held cameras and alternating between digital video and film, she makes the viewer feel just as disoriented as the characters do. Often difficult to watch, 57,000 Kilometers Between Us is a bleak dispatch on where unchecked access to technology leads. Although Kreuter has concentrated several pathologies into one family, none of the situations particularly strains credulity: they’re on offer to anyone who cares to trawl the Internet. Perhaps most chilling is Adrien’s well-to-do mother who chooses to turn off her screen for her nightly camcorder dinners with her chemo-bald teenage son. Dressed up at formal place setting, she talks to the blank screen in an image worthy of Bunuel.
Last night, in addition to being First Friday, was the opening reception for Mirinda Reynolds at her new location at Libertytown Arts Studio. I like going to Libertytown, because I always get to see works from an artist I hadn’t seen before, and works I hadn’t seen by artists I like. Aside from viewing new works from Mirinda (photos coming soon), which is always a pleasure, there were two pieces by Brandon Newton that caught my eye — an oil painting of Rt 3 near Denny’s, but it wasn’t the subject matter that grabbed me, it was the visual properties of the painting. It looked a bit like I was looking through a windshield on a drizzly day. I’m no art critic, but it worked for me. And there was another piece by him, a dark painting of a woman, which was hanging on the wall facing the stairs, so that you’d see it on the way downstairs. I liked that one as well. Rob Landeck had some excellent guitar paintings that we found ourselves wanting to buy for the basement/bar/pool-room. And Bill Harris, well, I just wish I could afford paintings.
Afterwards we wandered through the misters at Kybecca to taste some very interesting Austrian wine, bought a couple of bottles and headed home. It was hot out, or we might have done more.
We sold our Tahoe the other day. After I got the new job, I first bought Eve’s brother’s motorcycle, a Honda VTX 1300. That was great, but impractical for a 60-mile commute. Perhaps if I had known about the alternate route I might have kept it. A short while later we sold that and bought a Prius, because it’s about the only thing that gets better gas mileage than a motorcycle.
Shortly after that, her brother was ready to let go of a 2000 Suburban, loaded and in great shape. We made the decision to pick that up as an upgrade to the Tahoe (1995, 305K miles). After one failed ebay sale, we relisted it and it was snapped up quickly. If you’ve ever wondered “What kind of an idiot buys a vehicle with over 300,000 miles on it?” I can now answer that for you. It was picked up buy a company that exports vehicles. Our Tahoe is on its way to South America.
I guess I’m becoming more in-shape. At least my stamina is improving. I’m doing 4.5 miles around a lake whenever possible, up to several times a week. At first I was just walking it, but the last couple of times I have been running for portions of the circuit. At some point I’d like to be perfectly fine with running the whole thing. It used to be that when I would run, my joints and muscles would complain, during and especially afterwards. Now, while I still feel a bit of complaining a day or two after I run, I’m not feeling joint and muscle pain during the run itself, so I’m able to run farther. Now my breathing seems to be my limiting factor. I stop running when I seem to be breathing too hard. At some point I expect that to mellow out some more, and that’ll probably be the point that I can run the whole circuit.
This morning I tried to pick up that turtle shell I found last week, but it fell apart when I picked it up, apparently it had become weak from soaking in the lake.
This morning I saw two women on the path, one of them was wearing a stocking on her right leg, I could see the seam going up the back of her leg. I wonder if that lends itself to support in the same way that a knee wrap would.
During the last period of time I was obsessing on letterboxing as a hobby, I actually took the time and effort to plant one. At the time I was working in Arlington, and I was reading a lot about the Vince Foster controversy. A lightbulb clicked on, and it was near the anniversary of his death (July 20, 1993) so I quickly carved a pretty decent stamp of his torso and face, and planted it near the place where his body was found (near the north Cannon at Fort Marcy Park, according to the published report).
I heard from a fellow letterboxer as late as last fall that the box was still in place, and remained a favorite among DC area letterboxers. This was very encouraging to me, and I hope to some day soon revisit the letterbox, and perhaps exchange the logbook for a fresh one.
One visitor said that on his last visit, he/she took a multicolored imprint of the stamp, gray for his hair, blue for his jacket, red for his tie, etc. I wrote and asked if I could have a photo of that stamp. He obliged:
If you read Sunday’s post, you’ll know that the girls and I went letterboxing at Alum Spring Park in Fredericksburg. The box we found was not far from a place called “Fat Annie’s Old Swimming Hole,” which we found interesting and decided to read up on after the trip.
Apparently this place has a ton of history. According to HistoryPoint,
- As the years passed, local boys headed out to Alum Spring to a deep pool upstream from the cliff area in the bed of Hazel Run. There they skinny-dipped, much to he distress of a large lady named Annie who lived nearby in the 1920s. She chased them away over and over, but they always came back and named the pool in their tormentor’s honor. Please note: there’s no swimming in Fat Annie’s Swimming Hole today.
Alum Spring was also a place known for violent conflict. From the same website:
- The narrow pathway between the Alum Spring rock and the mill pond was the Dueling Path. Robert A. Hodge, the person responsible for the present Alum Spring Park’s existence, tells its tragic story in this excerpt from his book, Alum Spring Park: A History: In or about March of 1790 the members of the Masonic Lodge No. 4 of Fredericksburg gave a large and brilliant ball. Among those in attendance were members William Glassell and Robert Ritchie. William Glassell, a native of Scotland, was a successful merchant and respected citizen who had married a sister of Anthony Buck, the latter a highly esteemed auctioneer of the town. Glassell had escorted to the ball a young, attractive and respected orphan girl who was living in his home. Mr. Ritchie was originally from Essex County down the river from Fredericksburg, but doing business in the town. He was not married. During the course of the evening at the Masonic Ball, and somewhat under the influence of wine, Ritchie offered a distinct insult to Glassell’s young guest, then refused to make a suitable apology when called upon to do so. Glassell sent a formal challenge which Ritchie accepted, choosing pistols as the weapons and Alum Spring as the place. Ritchie, knowing Glassell was an excellent marksman, was concerned enough over the event to make his will which was dated 27 March 1790 and if probated left all his legacy to his sister, Elenora. Glassell had second thoughts and, through friends, attempted to get Ritchie to reconsider. Ritchie refused and the duel took place on the pathway along the Alum Spring Rock in front of the clear mill pond. At first shot, Ritchie fell to the ground, mortally wounded. Glassell hurried to his side and asked forgiveness, which was refused. After Ritchie’s death, a murder warrant was issued. Glassell was taken before a magistrate, but was acquitted.
letterboxing this weekend. I decided to work some more letterboxing into my morning walk. I found one of the four boxes listed at Cassandra’s Pokemon Adventure. The other three must have been gathered together somewhere for an early morning swim.
Other interesting finds, a large (about 15″ long) turtle shell with bones in it, and a Sky Runner free-flight electric airplane, which looks as if it has been converted to RC. I left them there for someone else to find.
The girls each had a friend over for a sleepover yesterday. We took them to the pool in the afternoon, then had pizza for dinner, then I took all four girls out letterboxing. We searched for two (Battle Box and Paper Boy) and only found one (Paper Boy). But that single find got our guests hooked on letterboxing, so we went first thing this morning and searched for four more. We found Alum Springs Cliff Dweller and Pushing Up Daisies #41, but were unable to locate Train Station and Mary Washington Trail. All in all, though, finding three out of six in two days is not a bad score at all.
