Post Script

Last night I showed our children the photos I had taken of the grotesquely large Eastern Hercules Beetle I’d found lurking around our front porch:

There goes the neighborhood.

I was fully expecting them to congratulate me for my incredible, heroic feat of bravery. I had managed to get so close to the beast as to even slide a quarter right next to its body for scale.

Instead of congratulations, I was subjected to a Greek chorus of reproach and bitter recriminations.

“Why didn’t you catch it in a jar for us so that we could keep it as a pet?”

“YEAH! It would have been so awesome!”

“I can’t believe you didn’t catch it for us…”

Next time, kids…next time.

City Kitty

The other day I was bragging to my coworker about my recent summer vacation to exotic Pittsburgh and glamorous Buffalo. For some reason she looked unimpressed.

“So do you have a fabulous summer vacation getaway planned?” I asked.

“I do! I’m going on a two week backpacking trip in Wyoming,” she announced gleefully.

“Ohhhh…wow!” I said, inwardly noting how her plans all of a sudden made schlepping around the mean streets of Pittsburgh and Buffalo in a zillion degree weather with a whole passel of kids seem all kinds of sexy and amazing.

“I hope you don’t get your period!” I blurted out loud. To cover for this gauche outburst, I explained to her that I’m not an outdoorsy kind of person…that I hate bugs and sweating and that I like cities and sidewalks and asphalt and air-conditioning and indoor plumbing.

“You’re an indoor cat!” she concluded.

By Reward (Photographer: Reward)

Indeed.

It wasn’t always this way. When I was little I would spend hours on my back in the grass, gazing up at the clouds. I loved digging in the dirt and exploring the woods near our house. It was only when I got a little older that I realized that my natural habitat is actually a bug-free, centrally air-conditioned interior.

Maybe the sad truth of the matter is that I always crave what I can’t have. When I lived in New York City I became obsessed with the idea of having a garden. I would check out towering stacks of gardening books from the public library and would look longingly at the flower porn. My hard-core fantasies revolved around pleached linden allées, garden follies, and pergolas. When we first moved to Charlottesville, it seemed like all my dreams were going to come true. I threw myself wholeheartedly into the project of gardening…despite the fact that instead of soil we have pure red clay studded with rocks…despite the fact that there are exactly two and a half days out of the year when it’s actually pleasant to be outdoors…despite the fact that I can’t stand bugs.

I have come to my senses once again. For me, “to thine own self be true” means retreating to the Great Indoors. These days I’ve just about given up on gardening, only venturing out when absolutely necessary. When I weeded for just one afternoon last month, I ended up having to be on a course of antibiotics for Lyme Disease for three weeks. I got off lightly. My son was seriously ill with Lyme Disease for months.

Enough is enough. It’s time to move out of the woods and get closer to civilization. I scheduled a meeting with a realtor. Before she came to assess our property, I thought I should try once again to tackle the thicket of weeds that has overtaken what was once my garden. Believe me, the motivation to move was the only possible thing that could lure me back out into the scary outdoors. The result of that one lousy half hour of weeding is that I now have weeping poison ivy pustules all over my body.

This weekend when my husband and I were swanning around the magnificent 1000 acre Trump Winery I jokingly said to him, “Just think of all the mowing you’d have to do if we lived here.”

“Oh no,” he gently corrected me, “You’d have your entire staff of minions to do your bidding. Yes, I can just see you now as the Lady of the Manor giving your orders. That’s really what you were born to do.”

I chose to pretend that for once in his life he wasn’t being sarcastic. See, it’s not that I don’t like the outdoors, really. It’s just that I don’t have the adequate staff to make it worth my while…

But is it air-conditioned?

Last night I didn’t have the heart to awaken the butler, who usually takes the dogs out for their last pee of the day. I took them out myself, and as I clutched myself uneasily, batting away gnats and listening to the toads croaking and the crickets chirping, I was startled by what sounded like someone knocking on our door. It turns out, it was a new neighbor dropping by to introduce himself:

There goes the neighborhood.

Yep. It’s definitely time for this city kitty to find some new digs.

Trump Winery

This weekend I took my husband on a belated Father’s Day date to Taste of Ash Lawn Opera, which featured performances by the principal artists for this season’s opera: Susannah. The event was held at the Trump Winery, located on a thousand glorious acres, just a little past Monticello. The Trump Winery used to be the Kluge Estate Winery and Vineyard until it was seized by the bank for defaulted loans. At one point it was listed at 100 million. Donald Trump bought it for a snip – a mere 6.2 million.

As we drove up to the Pavilion at the Trump Winery we quickly realized that there was something that didn’t quite fit into the picture. That something was us. We are not young by any stretch of the imagination, but as we, from the safety of our minivan, contemplated the other attendees making their way out of their Mercedes and into the Pavilion, we felt like a couple of blastulas.

As soon as the performance was over, we slunk out to admire the gorgeous setting…

Something about the situation made us feel a little silly…

Seriously silly:

We decided to explore a beautiful winding road to see where it led. We got a little panicky when we realized we were heading straight to the grand estate itself with no easy turn around in sight. We kept expecting to be chased away by a baying pack of coursing hounds, or perhaps by Eric Trump himself, huffing and puffing out the front door with his floppy swoop of hair and ascot blowing in the wind. We managed to turn our dusty, dented jalopy around and headed back down to earth and this spectacular, $100,000,000 view:

Sweetest 16

Sixteen years ago my sister’s first child, and the first baby in our family was born. That summer we all gathered around her as she slept, staring in silent wonder at the miraculous, perfect little human being that had been sent to us as a gift…

She was so much more than we could have ever wished for. She has continued to enchant us as she has grown.

Cousins

When she was about six or so, she started to beg for a sibling: “Just one little sister, please!”

This happened:

TRIPLET BOYS!

Again….so much more than anyone could have ever wished for!

To her siblings and to her younger cousins, and to us all really – she is a rockstar:

Cousins at the beach

She has won all kinds of honors and awards:

including playing at Carnegie Hall after winning a piano competition:

Carnegie Hall

The accolades are impressive, of course, but we love her for the kind, sensitive, and generous human being she has become.

Although today is her birthday, we celebrated the event a few weeks ago:

The brothers sign the guest book.

The obligatory photo-fest:

The Girls

…which became a Cheese-Fest:

Cheese!

The reception:

Speeches:

And a rousing rendition of Happy Birthday to the sweetest 16 year old we know:

Happy birthday! We adore you and hope that all of your wishes (and more!) come true! xoxo

Buffalo

We continued our Grand Tour in Buffalo. Yes, Buffalo.

First stop? Why, the Buffalo and Erie County Naval and Military Park, of course!

The next day we went to Niagara Falls:

We rode the Maid of the Mist:

And pretended to be a family of serial killers:

My daughter was especially perky before the boat started heading towards the falls.

The serial killer get-ups can only do so much as you go through this:

Here’s that perky girl post-deluge:

There were rainbows everywhere:

We continued with the serial killer theme in the Cave of the Winds:

You have to admit, that’s one very stylish family right there.

The last place we visited was the Albright-Knox Art Gallery. This impressive building houses an eclectic collection of modern and contemporary art:

At the end of the week, we compared notes and discussed what our favorite part of the vacation was. For everyone, except me, it was seeing Niagara Falls.

“My favorite part was when we were driving in the car, taking turns picking songs, and singing them at the top of our lungs,” I said.

My husband looked at me as if I was crazy, and it’s very possible that I am. But for me, it wasn’t so much about the destination as the journey itself and the people I shared it with.

World Cup

We interrupt your regularly scheduled program (i.e. The Grand Tour du Nord) to bring you this World Cup update.

The World Cup has profoundly changed my life in so many ways…

When my oldest child was just a toddler, I signed him up for recreational soccer. He loved every second of it. As the ball dribbled past his legs, he would crouch low with keen focus to inspect the ants crawling around on the blades of grass. As the ball sailed past him, he would gaze up at the sky and find dragons in the clouds above him.

We gave up on soccer for a few years. In 2010 we went to England to visit my husband’s family in Manchester. Our stay happened to coincide with the World Cup. Our kids watched the games on their grandparents’ tiny television, mesmerized. Since that fateful summer, all three of them have been obsessed with soccer.

That fall my father-in-law made all of their dreams come true, by sending them these Manchester United jerseys:

They like DC United too:

My daughter wrote about her impressions of her first pro game for a school assignment:

This past year our son’s team got to greet the DC United players as they came onto the pitch for their first game of the season:

My husband and I, both unathletic couch jockeys, have even managed to be conscripted as assistant coaches at one time or another:

Every fall and spring, my weekends are spent driving from field to field, not only within our own hometown, but as far afield as Maryland and West Virginia.

Even our recent vacation schedule revolved around soccer and was dictated by what time we would need to get back to the hotel to watch the World Cup games:

For all of my grousing, soccer has taught my children some valuable lessons and skills. They have learned the importance of teamwork, dedication, and of course: sportsmanship.

Yesterday, I came home to this reenactment of the Italy vs. Uruguay game:

Oops! That shoulder came at me from out of nowhere!

It really is a “beautiful game.”

Tomorrow: Back to our regularly scheduled programming and: Buffalo. Yes, Buffalo.

Pittsburgh, Day 2

The next day we walked around downtown Pittsburgh. We saw University of Pittsburgh’s Cathedral of Learning, begun in 1926 and built over a decade. The building houses departments, classrooms, labs, a theater, food court, and lounge areas. The “Nationality Rooms” are classrooms sponsored and designed by different ethnic communities to represent their heritage. At 535 feet, the Cathedral of Learning is the tallest and perhaps the most distinctive educational building in the Western hemisphere.

Directly facing the Cathedral of Learning is the Heinz Memorial Chapel:

 

Just down the street is the Phipps Conservatory and Botanical Gardens:

 

We had lunch in the café:

 

and then walked through the many different rooms.

There are Chihuly pieces artfully tucked around the conservatory:

…and model trains, which run throughout the exhibits:

My favorite room was the Butterfly Forest in the Stove Room:

Someone’s not too thrilled…

It was quite amazing to see the chrysalises. Some of them hatched as we watched:

These ones looked like pieces of gilded jade:

The last place we visited was the Bayernhof Museum, open by appointment only. This 19,000 square foot museum is located in the middle of a residential neighborhood and was the house of Charles Brown, the founder and CEO of Gas-Lite Manufacturing:

Brown was a prankster and an eccentric who collected music boxes and other automatic musical instruments. The tour guide gave us many examples of the practical jokes Brown played during his lifetime, including introducing his longtime girlfriend to everyone as Adolf Hitler’s illegitimate daughter. Ostensibly, his house is a music museum. Throughout the tour, the guide plays select instruments, some of which are remarkable. In fact, the Bayernhof  is really a personal museum that enshrines one very wealthy man’s oddball taste. The house itself is full of jokes, including fake bats in an artificial cave, complete with stalactites and stalagmites. The tour takes you through hidden passageways, a cheesy indoor pool room decorated with a Sound of Music mural,

a game room with the dogs playing poker picture made even more tacky by the fact that it’s rendered as a tapestry, and room after room stuffed with icky collections ranging from Hummel figurines to beer steins.

A room with a lamp/victrola.

I think Brown’s greatest and final practical joke was specifying in his will that his house should be turned into a museum. A foundation now ensures that this monument to poor taste, which has frozen into perpetuity bad 70s interior design, is being run as a music museum. The trustees spend hundreds of thousands of dollars building up Brown’s collection of automatic musical instruments and in repairing problems that have arisen over the years due to slapdash building. It’s an odd place, but worth a visit if you happen to be in Pittsburgh.

Pittsburgh, Day 1

I was looking forward to a week of lazing about on the beach for our family vacation. At the last minute, my husband decided to change the plan. We cancelled our reservations at the beach and made new ones – in Pittsburgh.

I’ll admit I was pretty crabby about this turn of events. As we walked the streets of Pittsburgh, I collected photos just so that I could write up a snarky blog post about it along these lines…

So New York City has the Guggenheim? Well, Pittsburgh has this:

Parking garage

Parking garage

The Eiffel Tower in Paris? Big deal! Pittsburgh has this:

Radio tower?

Radio tower.

Rome’s Ponte Milvio covered in love padlocks? Yawn! Pittsburgh has this:

We spent a couple of days wandering around the city, and while it will never be one of my favorite spots in the world, I have to admit we did do some interesting things…

On our first day in Pittsburgh, we checked out a couple of the numerous inclines:

At the top, you get a commanding view of the city:

Heading back down:

We walked over to Point State Park to cool off by the fountain:

 

CSI-Charlottesville

I’ve been away longer than I expected…We got back home this evening after a weeklong road trip through America’s hinterland. It was not a soft landing.

We discovered that in our absence, another grisly murder had taken place in our home. Who knew hermit crabs were such thugs? We had already buried one, posthumously named Abel, before we left for our trip. This time, Cain, the murderer who had torn Abel limb from limb got his comeuppance. This time it was Cain’s legs that were strewn about the sand. When my son tried to move his lifeless body a whole demonic host of tiny winged insects flew out of its shell. It was like something out of a horror movie. My poor son is scarred for life.

We did our own crime scene analysis. My son wouldn’t accept the fact that the last crab standing (the one I insisted he name after me) could have committed such a heinous crime.

“But she would never do such a thing. She’s a goody two-shoes!” he insisted.

“Yeah, but she could only be pushed so far. Remember, she had just witnessed Cain murdering Abel in cold blood. I bet Cain stupidly thought he could take her on too, even though she was twice his size and when he got up in her face she was all, ‘Don’t mess with me, you little punk.’ Or maybe she was avenging Abel’s death.”

Cain is now buried in our garden and my namesake now has the entire tank all to her murderous self. She seems to have lost a limb or two in the fight…

"You talking' to me?"

“You talkin’ to me?”

but she’s a tough chick. We’re hoping she pulls through.

And the moral of the story is: Don’t mess with Adrienne. She’ll get real crabby on your @$$.

Hangin’ with the Harpies in Minneapolis

Unaccountably, our beautiful new baby niece was not given the name my fellow Harpy sisters and I had gently suggested to her parents. Though we were disappointed by the fact that she will not bear the name “Ameliabelledrienne,” we decided to fly to Minneapolis this weekend to pay her a visit:

My Harpy sisters Amelia, Annabelle, and the baby NOT named “Ameliabelledrienne”

The weather forecast called for clear and sunny skies, but powerful thunderstorms rolled in as soon as we Harpies arrived. High winds recorded at over 68 miles per hour brought stately old trees crashing down all over Minneapolis and St. Paul. The weatherman called the storms a “freak occurrence” and said he had never seen anything like it in all his time in the Twin Cities. We call it “making an entrance.”

We got to see our nephew Dandelion and his mama:

And we got to spend some time with our beloved brother:

It turns out that the little kid with whom I used to roll around in the back of our old station wagon on long car trips singing songs and playing games…the kid with whom I fought pitched battles and whom I banished from my room countless times…the kid who was the closest companion of my childhood…has grown up to become an amazing father.

To be able to witness this with one’s own eyes has to be one of the sweetest privileges of adulthood.

Unfortunately, we Harpies cannot always control our own strength, and our presence can sometimes bring unintended mayhem. Poor Dandelion and his mother came down with a stomach bug and we weren’t able to see them for the rest of our short stay.

We were, however, able to gloat over our new niece and impart our blessings upon her. She hung on our every word:

By the end of our visit, she was cackling with the Harpies:

I think she liked us:

The feeling was mutual:

The Harpies had wreaked enough havoc upon the good people of Minneapolis. It was time to fly back home. As we boarded our plane to go home, the sun started shining for the first time since we’d arrived:

Sorry, Minneapolis. We’ll try to reign it in next time…

Twelve years ago today another baby was born during a ferocious thunderstorm that caused the hospital delivery room lights to flicker on and off throughout his birth.

Since that dark and stormy night, this boy has been the calm in the eye of the storm and the blue skies after the rain. Happy birthday! xoxoxo