Rivers and planets

We always make a fuss when we drive over rivers. It makes life more exciting, and now that we're doing school it also counts as Doing Geography.
Me: "Hey, look, Meg! It's the Shenandoah River!"
Meg: "Hey, Shenandoah! Long time no see!"
Me, speaking as the river: "Hi, Meg!"
Meg, disapprovingly: "It doesn't talk."

We're learning about planets this week. I was telling Meg how Mercury doesn't have any atmosphere, so it gets really hot during the day and really cold at night. She observed, with great accuracy, "You would have to have a spacesuit or a pair of very wooly pajamas if you wanted to sleep there."

Also on that subject: "If you had a grown-up horse [on Mercury], you would have to take care of it and put a space suit on it."

Adventurous

We've had an adventuresome day. By noon, I'd sewn a skirt,* checked out a historical mill in Aldie, driven to Middleburg for the first time, locked my keys in the car, had a nice policeman come get my keys out of the car, visited a new library, discovered a town I'd never even heard of before, verified that Business 7 through Purcellville really does turn into Dry Mill Road in Leesburg, and heard from my mom that a friend of a friend who'd been kidnapped in Africa had just been rescued by Navy Seals! PRAISE GOD! Obviously, my day was not as adventurous as hers.

...I like Middleburg. It's very old-school and full of cute shops, apparently cute restaurants, and horses. But Meg's favorite movie right now is Ratatouille, and all her board books are full of the Eiffel Tower, and one of my pinterest friends is putting together a Paris board. I need to go to Paris now, please.


*Simplest skirt ever. I cut off an old shrunken sweater of Jonathan's, sewed one-seam pocket around the top, and threaded elastic through. Took 20 minutes, mostly threading elastic.

Dinogad's Smock

Heavenfield linked me to this rather neat piece of historical detective work. "Dinogad's Smock" is an old Welsh lullaby that got incorporated into the Y Gododdin, and linguists dated the lullaby to the 500s AD.

The poem specifies Dinogad's father went fishing in "Rhaeadr Derwennydd," or the Derwent Waterfall. There are several Derwents on the Isles, but only one with a waterfall. There's also a "Hog's Earth" woods nearby suitable for bringing back "a roe-buck, a boar, a stag," and a Castle Crag just uphill from the falls with a post-Roman settlement of suitable age. Bing!

Calculations

I just ran across a list I made soon after moving to Richmond. As of July 22, in the previous 25 days (which would start counting the day of our wedding rehearsal and end two days after Ben and Lisa's wedding) we had stayed ten different places ranging from New Mexico, to Scotland, back to New Mexico, and then scattered across the continental US, for an average of 2.5 nights per place. Our maximum stay in a single location was six nights. That honor was actually split between my parents' house, in two stints, and our bed-and-breakfast in Edinburgh, also in two stints. The second-longest stays, at three nights, was split between our bed-and-breakfast in Inverness and the cottage where Ben and Lisa's wedding was held. These 25 days also included packing up my things and having them shipped to our new location. And then we got to move into a new apartment and learn a new city, where we didn't even know where to find grocery stores.

No wonder I was so tired!

My parents' house - 1
Santa Fe - 2
Atlantic Ocean - 1
Edinburgh - 3
Inverness - 3
Edinburgh - 3
My parents' - 5
Oklahoma somewhere - 1
Memphis - 1
Pigeon Forge - 1
Cottage in Fairfax County - 3
Richmond - 1

We didn't mean to go to Leesburg

No, seriously. We didn't. We meant to come straight-ish back from New Jersey, where we'd been having Thanksgiving with Jonathan's family. We were on the Beltway, looking for the Route 7/Tyson's corner exit. But instead we were deceived by signage into taking the "straight road to Dulles Airport" exit, from which there are no exits until the airport itself, except for toll roads which we were just not motivated to take. I had not been aware there was a straight road from the Beltway to Dulles; but so there is. We'd been making really good time on the trip and had hoped to be home by two.

The Straight Road to Dulles was rather insult to injury, as it happens. It was the second time that trip we got stuck on roads with no exit for miles. Grr. The first time, we were nearing Jonathan's parents' house. We could almost reach it. Yours truly, Navigatrix, thoughtlessly told the Driver we wanted Exit 3 and settled down with an Anne book, when in fact we wanted Exit 2. The Driver actually believed the Navigatrix, which is sort of scary. We pass Exit 2 -- "We didn't want the Swedesboro exit, did we?" "Yes. OH NO!" --and call up his mother for directions home, as neither of us had the foggiest notion where the next exit might land us. Sigh. Fortunately it spat us out close to his old church, but still.

So there we were, at an entirely unnecessary airport. We figured, while we were so close, we might as well call up my sister and have lunch. So we met her and Danae and had a glorious time. We also tried to call Kay, but couldn't get a hold of her. But all good times must end, even barbecue, so we steeled ourselves for the three-hour jaunt south across Virginia.

It was all right. 15 and 17 were actually decent regarding traffic, and we had fudge sundaes around 3:30. But then we got onto 95 south. Whimper. I prayed for a spot to merge into, and it's a good thing, because the traffic was bumper-to-bumper. It cleared out a bit after Fredericksburg, enough that we could go the speed limit, but the traffic coming north was much worse. We had a solid ribbon of taillights going 65, and they had a solid ribbon of headlights going about zero.

We got home around five, and discovered a certain lack of milk and eggs and bread in the house. We seriously debated having Chinese leftovers for breakfast, but dismally concluded we ought to get groceries. So off we go. Again. They were nice to us at Ukrops, and we came away with the eggs and b.

And I checked my phone, to discover we'd missed a call from Ben and Lisa. They were driving up through town today from the Deep South and wondered if we were interested in company. We'd missed them by about half an hour. Argh! And I had another message from Kay calling back. She hadn't gotten my call because she spent today flying home from Italy.

Isn't this an amazing life we live? We can, literally, get from almost anywhere to anywhere in a day, and know people who do.

But some days the road seems really, really long....

Great moments in teaching

We "do maps" in Sunday School. Yesterday's map included the Sahara, or, as one young man put it, the "Sharia dessert."

Old map

Just take a look at this old map of New Mexico! If you'll notice, it includes Arizona and chunks of Colorado and Nevada. Wow.

The counties are so...long. And skinny. I don't know if you can even read Bernalillo county, there in the middle by Santa Fe; it look like a blamed nuisance to me.

The strangemaps post has a history and commentary regarding this map.

And here is a current county map, if you'd like to compare. :-)

When you put it like that...

"It's nice that we don't have any violent weather. My husband's sister and her husband in Alabama, they went to church one night--it was a Wednesday night--and when they came back, their house was gone. There was a tornado." Patient

I would say our weather is definitely better. We have nasty wind (especially now, in spring), but your house is generally still there when you come home from church.

You learn something new every day

So this beautiful Eilean Donan castle is actually in Scotland. And all this time I thought it was Irish; it was named "Eilean," after all!

Who knew?

Beware the Ides of March

I know it's still seven weeks out, but you can never start being ware too early. ("I am being good! I am being haive!") In any case, I have a more particular reason for this monition. I just bought my tickets to fly out to Virginia--on the Ides of March, as it happened. :-) It's a Saturday. And I'll be there, and thereabouts, and in Joisey, until the Monday after Easter.

See you all soon!

Reading, by Esolen

Somebody today asked me what I plan to do: meaning, whether I mean to be a receptionist my whole life. He had just finished telling me his adventures in Africa, in Asia, in Europe, in the Peace Corps. We were together looking at a reprint of a 1665 atlas, which Becca brought in today. It's a fascinating book.

I answered that I was getting married, which he accepted. And I dare say that will be an adventure--the working-up-to-it sure is! But this post spoke to my soul. I'm not very good at careers: I prefer old maps and the things a sensible child says to a critic.

Geography

This morning I was talking to a patient about his recent trip to Norway, and he surprised me by saying that Norway, since it's that whole north coast of Europe, actually goes farther east than Istanbul. Look at the map! It really does!

Tatars

This morning we sent a fax to Tatarstan, Russia. This, of course, led to the question: Where is Tatarstan? And is it where Tartars come from?

I inquired of the Oracle (Wikipedia) and discovered that Tatarstan is a semi-independent republic smack dab in the middle of Russia, with a Turkic language, right where the Russian and Greek and Arabic and Chinese and Mongol and Slavic Uralic languages all meet. The Tatars call themselves Tatars, more or less, but you'll get variations like Dada, Tatan, and Tataerzu. "Tartar" is an odd variation which Westerners invented, connecting the Mongol hordes to the Greek Tartarus. They object to being called Tartars these days.

The Kazan Tatars have the literary and common dialect, due to the pleasant circumstance that most of the other Tatars can understand them. (I gather it's somewhat like the distinction between classical versus regional Arabic.) They officially write with the Cyrillic script, but will often use the Latin or Arabic characters (partly, no doubt, due to the heavy Muslim influence). But the ethnic Tatars are a sprawling people-group.

In other news, the good doctor has gotten disinfectant-happy and wanders past my desk at intervals, squirting away. I attribute this to the presence of a new incubator, which reveals to us exactly what grows on my desk. Or would tell us what it was, if we had the machinery to analyze it. But it's definitely there.

Amelia just demonstrated to me that you can use tea-steam to show your fingerprint on a plastic spoon. This is really cool.

Also the rubber-band wars are hot and heavy. I retreated into the waiting room, and today Nikita declared a cease-fire. Unlike when the UN does that, we actually listened to her.