Full Moon

There's a full moon out.

It's hard to capture on my Canon digital camera in the low light conditions because I can't keep the camera steady enough.

But it's a striking sight regardless.

Enjoy.

Shoes and Rules

I saw my friend and former colleague Greg running by in the District last week and he stopped for a minute to chat.  He's a better runner than me and much more disciplined and I ask him for running advice sometimes.

I told him I had just finished an LSD of 5 miles as I was slowly getting back to running due to a long lay-off due to ankle and feet injuries and after a glance downwards he said, "I see you've got your best pair of running shoes on, with both little toes poking well through the fabric, and when you get injured again, Peter, I'm not going to have any sympathy."  I protested that the shoes were less than two years old and there was still plenty of tread left on them and lifted a foot to show him.

"Nope, smooth as an iron down there and with probably just as much cushioning," he pronounced disapprovingly.  So, when I got home I went across the street to Runners World and bought two pairs of stability (for over pronators) "gently used shoes" (returns) in my size on clearance for about $130, a pair by Saucony and a pair by Brooks.

My next run, wearing the "new" Sauconies, was like I'd been transported to heaven, with every step a cushiony foot strike that felt like I was wearing pillows, not boards, strapped to my feet.  When I got home, much against my frugal nature (I'm a child influenced by parents who lived as children through the desperate barter-economy of the Great Depression), I threw not one but two apparently worn-out pairs of running shoes out in spite of my iron-clad rule of only disposing of one pair of broken-down, treadless shoes each year, and only in January.

North America

It was my usual daily call with my friend who is mere weeks from her most beneficial retirement date from federal service who said, "Your example [of retirement] is no template or encouragement for me, because when you retire you die and you haven't shown me anything that leads me to want to retire."  Well, I retired involuntarily from federal service (yes Chris, I'm talking to you, BMOC) two years ago and I haven't died yet and I lamely said, "For six months I ran several miles every day until I got double hernia surgery and then suffered an achilles strain when I returned from that, and now in the last two months I'm back to trying to return to running, and I read every day and I can tell you with virtual certainty that the Allies are still looking like they're going to win WW2 no matter how bad it looks."

She scoffed and I told her my favorite humorous anecdote from my most recent book, Operation Sea Lion, "A nobleman was talking to Britain's defense minister in the summer of 1940, complaining that when the German paratroopers dropped into England in the coming invasion they'd be in London within 24 hours 'unless of course they tried to take the trains.'"  This droll inclusion in the book detailing the Brits' preparation for a likely Nazi invasion of their isle after the fall of France to me is hilarious, but not getting laughter in return to my sustained laughing as I related the passage confirmed to me the reason why I only got into the UVA law school oh-so-many-years-ago and she went to Stanford.

Anyway, retirement is a scary thing and there's never a good time to marry, have a child, buy a first home or retire.  It just happens when it does, and it works out because it has to.

Tomorrow I hope to run two miles, read from my three or four books for a few hours, manage my inadequate retirement account and plan towards my circumvention around North America by car later this year, a land I love.  I have never been outside of it.

All Caps

I learned to watch, and admire, hockey in the sixties when I was in high school and covered my school's hockey team for its press club and called in the results to  the failing fake-news NYT.  I didn't know anything about hockey but I soon gauged what a shot on goal was, and a save (the puck didn't go in), could note scores and penalties (those are pretty obvious) and got a general idea about hockey's rules (hockey has a much better offsides rule than soccer and thus is a much better game).

In the seventies, I enjoyed watching NHL games and could see that the game was dominated by shots, of any sort, on goal and saw pucks settled and bombed in from long or midrange or flicked in from closer in on rebounds off the goalie.  Lately I was confused by all the passing and the lack of bombing, until I read an article on how bigger goalies and equipment and defensive walls in front of the net have stifled shooters and now the puck is passed around and around in the offensive zone until a magical moment presents itself to the offense by puck movement when a goalie is momentarily out of position as he switches from pole to pole and a rocket is launched towards the goal off an unsettled pass that has about a one-in-five chance of going in.

NHL games, especially Stanley Cup playoff games that mean so much, are a joy to watch again now that I understand the deliberate choreography of all the puck movement and it doesn't matter that you still can't see the tiny blur of the whizzing puck actually go into the net in real time because the excited voice of the announcer alerts you to the fact that a goal has been scored and they'll show it to you again very shortly, in isolation or slow motion, on instant replay.  "Goal!" or "He scores!" is a much more exciting summons to the magnitude of the fast contest than the lame and hyperbolic cry of "Gooooooaaaaaaaaaalllllll!" that accompanies the infrequent soccer score (do you like watching 90 minutes of 1-0 ineptitude on the soccer pitch?).

The Washington Capitals have overachieved in the regular season for the last decade and stunk up the playoffs for the same period of time (the Washington Nationals have adopted their template).  Now down 0-1 in the playoffs to their nemesis the Pittsburgh Penguins and having thrown away the home ice advantage, we'll see what they're made of this year, when their superiority window is rapidly closing (just like the Nats).

Five miles

Yesterday I met a friend in the District for a 3 mile run around the Tidal Basin at noon, running from  Haines Point to L'Enfant Plaza for my meeting with her and then back to my car afterwards to add a couple of extra miles so I accomplished this week's LSD of five miles.  On Haines Point another friend of mine from my former workplace ran by so I spent a few minutes chatting with him, catching up on office goings-on.

The run at the Tidal Basin went past the Tulip Library so we spent a few moments drinking in the beauty of its floral beds.  Reds, whites, pinks, yellows and more colors rewarded our circumvention of the Tidal Basin.

My favorite sight is when a particular bed of one kind of tulips has an outlier or two in it of a tulip of another color.  Each bed seems to get encroached by another kind, maybe a wall, a big, beautiful see-through wall--not a fence--should be built around each bed to stop this kind of unlimited breeding and dangerous intermingling.

Taking the Francis Case Bridge back to my car afterwards, I looked down on the newly constructed Washington Waterfront and saw the old and the new side-by-side.  The modern waterfront seems to be killing the old, once-thriving fresh seafood business that it is encroaching upon.

More flox

The creeping phlox flowerbeds are much more robust this week, at their peak.

I run past them on my runs, sometimes stopping to photograph them, sometimes snapping them as I run by.

Virtual movement downstream, flowing, cascading.

Very beautiful.

Facebook

You might be wondering why I have been posting practically every day lately.  It's because I have been having philosophical issues with Facebook given their arrogance and in my opinion, callous lawlessness.

They are under order with the FTC, you know, an order they violated, in my opinion, at least 87 million times in the Cambridge Analytica scandal.  I used to post on my FB account almost every day because it was so easy and quick, and an easy way to post pictures.

But on March 27th, I posted on FB for the last time, for at least a month, in light of their contemporary attitudes and past actions.  This was my post:

"In the face of Facebook's, and Mark Zuckerberg's, arrogance, apparent lawlessness, contempt for complying with existing orders, disregard for its consumer users, venality, anti-democratic tendencies and disturbing lack of patriotism, I am leaving regular use of and posting on my FB account for now (taking a leave of absence from it), except for special circumstances as they may suit my needs. I can be found on my long-standing blog DC Spinster if anyone is interested."

I have a twitter account, I think, but that is totally stupid, in my view, posting garbage limited to 280 characters whenever a venomous or towering egotistical mood strikes you.  Just look at the puerile vitriol that spews forth from America's Poster-In-Chief every day with his tiresome threats of throwing all dissenters in jail.  

Sad!  We'll just have to wait and see if I go back to regularly posting on Facebook.

Flox?

The cascading phlox flowers flowed down the embankment and fell off the wall like a waterfall.

Colors sparkled on the sloping flowerbed, reminiscent of sun-dappled water.

This corner in my hometown is my favorite spot to run by at this time of the year.

The colors of spring.

A happy day

Recently I had a birthday, which I celebrated by doing a LSD of 5 miles, my longest run since last spring.  It left me sore and tired, but I feel that I'm making progress in my return from lingering injuries and as I shed weight, hopefully it'll go easier.

The weather was perfect and I ran by several splashy spring-color vignettes.  There are few things so great as a long run early on a beautiful day.

At noon I had lunch at the local gourmet pizza restaurant, treating myself on this "special" day to a brown ale draft and an Italian Pie.  As usual, I kept my eye on the door entrance outside the window table I was sitting at, but no one I knew, or at least nobody I recognized, came in.

Leaving a pizza slice symbolically for each of my estranged sons, I bid adieu to my dining companion of this past decade, the Empty Chair, and departed.  JJ&D, I'm sorry I failed to meet your unbelievable, out-of-this-world parenting expectations but I have no regrets and wish you to know that I love you.

"Now He Belongs to the Ages"

Abraham Lincoln died on this date in 1865 at the Petersen House in DC, after having been shot the night before across the street at Ford's Theatre.  He was attended at death by Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, who said famously as the greatest US president in history passed from this world, perhaps one of the ten or twenty greatest persons in world history, "Now he belongs to the ages."

Gobble gobble

I was stunned yesterday to pass by a wild turkey hiding in the scrub of the easement to the W&OD bike trail behind my house.  There's a feral cat that lives back there that I see occasionally, and a deer family that I have seen early in the morning, but I hadn't seen a wild turkey before.

It was not happy to be spotted and ran away.  As a matter of fact it ran into my yard to hide behind the evergreen tree in the corner of my front yard by the sidewalk.  The neighbors on one side of me asked if I had caught it and turned it into soup.

The neighbors on the other side of me ignored me when I called over the fence line to ask if they'd seen the wild turkey.  They live in an internet cocoon and aren't much use for anything to anyone in their constant fixation on their cell phones and their ear buds which shield them from prying voices and other-human contact.

After following the wild turkey long enough to get a few pictures of it and shoo it out of my yard, I let it skulk back into the brush beyond my back fence line.  Wild turkeys that get too used to contact with people or which get fed can become aggressive and bothersome, so my preferred wild turkey is found at the ABC.

Scooter is back!

The news reports that the faux president is going to pardon Scooter Libby, the former chief of staff of VP Darth Vader in a presidency a long time ago in a galaxy far away from where we are now.  Oh, to be back in the happier and far more optimistic times of Dubya, with the "W" standing for the Worst president ever (before last year).

I have written about Scooter before and in my opinion he is a total scumbag, a man who outed CIA operative Valerie Plame last decade in a menacing revenge plot against her ambassador husband for speaking out truth-to-power things about the Decider's falsely-stated reasons for his calamitous blunder into the Iraq war.  Ruining Plame's assiduously crafted career and putting covert operatives and foreign assets worldwide at risk and, for all I know, getting faraway people killed in the process, obviously meant nothing to this swaggering man (you know the type) who was suffused with power, fame, money and influence, a Master of the Universe.

Libby was convicted at trial of lying to the FBI and obstruction of justice and sentenced to thirty months in prison but his sentence was commuted by Bush because, well, I don't know why (see the sentence directly above and assign it to the whole then-White House lot).  Already this felon has had his law license restored and his voting rights reinstated; this is what the Rich and Powerful can accomplish because of who they know and who they abetted along the way.

Cozy.  If you want a good read, read the failing, fake-news NYT Book Review about former-FBI Director James Comey's new book on the Trump presidency as he experienced it first-hand, a scathing excoriation of the mobster chieftain we now have running our country straight into perdition and perhaps oblivion.

Gods and Goddesses

Gargoyles abound in DC.  Some are at the National Botanical Garden, like Triton, the Greek messenger of the seas.

Then there is Flora, the Roman goddess of flowers and of spring.  She smiles from within her wreath of roses.

Horned Pan looks on, Greek god of the wild, mountains meadows, shepherds and flocks and rustic music.  He's the guy you want at your party, or maybe not.

And here is Pomona, the Roman goddess of fruitful abundance.  Her name comes from the Latin word pomum, which describes orchard fruit.

Broncos

A friend of mine who is into hockey brought me back a momento when she visited Lake Placid, a Miracle On Ice mini-hockey stick, because I had told her about the US Olympic hockey team winning the gold medal there in 1980, a team made up of rank amateurs who improbably beat the powerful professional national Soviet hockey team in the semifinals, an event which occurred before she was born.  It's the only hockey stick I own.

We are all Humboldt Broncos this week.  I placed it on my porch.

More Cherry Blossoms

It's just about over for the spectacular cherry blossom blooms.

Enjoy.

The beautiful colors of spring will still be ongoing even as these blooms fade.

Wait till next year for these special blossoms.

a long run

Sunday morning presented itself as cold and raw as I lay deep under the covers of my warm bed, not conducive in the least to my planned LSD of four miles in my slow return running after a ten-month lay-off due to injuries.  My cell phone told me it was 39 degrees and it felt like 32 degrees with the steady wind gusting to 15 mph, which I could hear blowing outside as it rattled my bedroom windows.

I got up and went downstairs and had breakfast instead of heading outdoors for my planned run.  Tomorrow, I told myself, I'll run tomorrow instead and take my third day off today in a row instead.

My sloth, induced by a desire not to be cold for an hour as I ran, bothered me all day as I basically did nothing all day except mostly fret about so easily returning to my lethargic ways of the past year as I healed from my achilles strain and put on several dozen pounds.  Pulling invasive tree-killing clinging vines from high up in the top branches of the holly and evergreen trees in my yard in the progressing afternoon, I determined that it had warmed up to about 48 degrees with very little wind and a steady sunny sky just like the weather forecast had predicted, so I decided to put my long run for the week behind me and go out for four slow miles before the sun got too low and caused chilling shadows on the bike trail behind my house.

I put on my running togs and ankle braces, did my bicep curls with my twenty-five pound dumbbell, stretched my ankles and feet on the curb and set out up the street to burn a local mile in the neighborhood before I hit the W&OD Trail for a three mile out-and-back shuffle.  Before I knew it, I was on the trail, starting to sweat despite my minimal short-sleeve shirt and the chilly environment, feeling good about being out there and feeling alive and running again.

To be sure, several people passed me as I plodded along breathing heavily, but I didn't care because I was going to get my longest run since last spring done and it was going to go well, I could tell.  At the far end of my out-and-back I passed by my man Trevor, just coming off his duty soliciting money from passing motorists at the light on Lee Highway and the exit ramp from EB I-66 and we sat on a bench and talked for awhile while I cooled off and regained my breath and he waited for his Lyft ride to take him back to the homeless shelter for the night.

Our ketchup conversation over, I set out on the last mile and a half to finish my run and return home with a spring in my step, feeling rejuvenated by my ten-minute pause.  The period of ragged breathing as the first half-mile that passed under my feet came and went quickly, and the last mile thereupon of my four mile run went by quickly and easily, although I broke out in a sweat all over again.

I even started noticing the colorful vegetation along the trail, the native spring flowers along the paved pathway and the leaves starting to come out on trees lining the embankment.  I reflected wistfully on the many past running buddies I've had who have all moved away or moved on as mostly I run solo now, invisible mostly on the trail at my age, Rhea, Leah, David, John, Ashley, Markus and several others.   

It's a long trail to return to running after such a long layoff and so much weight gained as old as I have become, but I'm glad the first dreadful month of feeling like I'm dying every run is now behind me.  Eight pounds lighter and tons more determined to keep forging on, increasing my distance and pace slowly in a planned manner, things are definitely looking up as spring brings ever better weather for my return to health and running.

       

Springing forth

In addition to the splendor of the flowering Cherry Blossoms trees in the District this fortnight, there are many other flowers starting to burst forth this spring.  I have recently noted that the bulbs at the neatly tended beds at the National Tulip Library are poking their heads up; there are also a profusion of colorful and interesting looking flowers emerging around the grounds of the National Botanical Garden at the foot of Capital Hill.

Blue flowers.

Purple flowers.

Red flowers.  I don't know what these flowers are called but they're striking and beautiful.

Cherry Blossoms 2018 continued

The cherry blossoms in DC are still at their peak glory.  There's still time this year to see the glorious flowering of these special trees throughout the District, for a few more days.

Today's blossom-viewing trip took me and a friend to the Japanese American Memorial which is down the street a few blocks from Union Station towards the Capitol.  In this tiny, tranquil island of serenity and repose along busy Louisiana Avenue, two tethered cranes (by barbed wire, symbolizing the enclosures around the camps in hitherto uninhabited interior regions of the western states where Japanese American citizens from the west coast were interned during most of World War II) struggle to attain their former freedom.

The cherry blossom blooms on the trees surrounding the park, like all flowering petals, are very fragile, just like our democracy could be unless we are wise and ever-vigilant.  Never again, the country said in Reaganesque proclamations in the 1980s, or maybe going forward we should say, It couldn't happen here.  Right?

Many parts of DC are always noteworthy, often striking and sometimes beautiful.

Cherry Blossom Run 2018

Yesterday the cherry blossoms around the Tidal Basin in DC were reportedly at peak bloom, so I met a friend and former colleague from work outside my old shop and we ran 2018's version of the Cherry Blossom run.  Driving to Haines Point amidst all the traffic going to see the blooms and parking there was adventuresome but I accomplished it, being rewarded along the way by being surrounded by the beautiful blooming trees as I jockeyed for a parking space and finally meeting my running buddy, DiDi, only 15 minutes late.

This 3-mile sightseeing jaunt was going to be my long run for the week and fortunately we had plenty of stops due to the crowded walkways along the waterfront and so I could take pictures of the flowering trees.  The run itself showed me I'm still woefully out of shape as I labored mightily to keep up with my far more fit friend, she of the five half-marathon races run last year, but with the forced stops and slowdowns, it went pretty well despite my poor conditioning.

The day was deceptively cool.  Although sunny, it was windy and raw along the wide-open waterway.

There were unusual sights along the way in addition to the bustling crowds, like the artist painting the trees in their bloom.  I mentioned to her that she needed to start adding some pink to her canvas to go with the blue of the sky and water, the brown of the tree trunks and limbs and the green of the grass, and she politely smiled at my smart-alecky suggestion, pulled her gloves on ever tighter to ward off the cold and went on with her passion.

This is an example of the splendor she was hoping to capture in her painting when she started adding the pink of the blossoms.  It is a sight well worth a visit to the District despite the bother of the crowds, traffic and lack of parking.

Alongside the Tidal Basin is the National Flower Library which reveals its location each spring on an otherwise grassy field by the first sign of the perennial tulips poking up.  Just last week there were only a few green shoots poking up, by next week there will be a plethora of different colored flowers in neatly set beds.

Last year's Cherry Blossom run produced one of my favorite animal pictures, a goose sailing along serenely with blown away petals bejeweling its back.  Last year the blossoms were more scrawny and blew down much sooner than this year.

Here's another picture from last year's run.  Each spring I make an effort to run around the Tidal Basin, with friends preferably, to see these world-renowned blooms at or near their peak.