Hiking yesterday in the Shenandoah Valley I discovered that I was on
part of “Morgans Road”, which is a road George Washington had built into the
hills to allow his army to retreat from the British in case things got
really bad. “George Washington Planned To Sleep Here If Things Got
Really Bad”. That was enough at the time of the bicentennial (1976)
to put up another George Washington marker.
This includes a longish list of Washington sites I’ve run across,
including a couple with family connections.
From Eagles Rock you can look back east and see the Massanutten range
and pretty much all of Shenandoah National Park. From Tibbets Knob
there is a nice view of a valley and “Big Schloss” which is a rock
formation and the destination of another popular local hike.
Harpers Ferry: a quaint little town, vegan restaurants, a national
park, Appalachian Trail headquarters, great place to hop a train to DC
or Pittsburgh, a Kansas album cover or a great place to start a civil
war? It’s all in how you look at it, who’s looking, and when.
This is a picture I took on a hike above the town on Loudoun Heights
Saturday and the painting of John Brown in the John Brown museum.
I’ve been reading a lot of poetry lately. A snatch of a poem my grandmother used to quote about finding meaning in work came to mind:
Oh, you gotta get a glory In the work you do; A hallelujah chorus In the heart of you. Paint, or tell a story, Sing, or shovel coal, But you gotta get a glory Or the job lacks soul. Berton Baley Even Google and Duck-Duck Go don’t know much about it, so here it is in my grandmothers handwriting.
I watched the Super Bowl last night, in which a second Ohio team just
missed a national championship in a year. There is no joy in
Porkopolis. I don’t know any good football poems, but…
The Iliad and Dr Seuss have nothing to say to us today. “One fish, two
fish”? Really. Recent translations of liner-A tablets reveal that it
was a faceBOOK post that launched 1000 ships.
Today was the day I made the choice to live for an entire work-day on
an IPv6-only network. And it worked. I’ve been watching this slow
train comin’ for 30 years. Now I’m holding my breath for CNLP :-)
Why I hike. A picture is worth 1000 words
Figure 1: “Sun behind ice on tree” by George Jones is licenced under CC SA 4.0 I went hiking in Shenandoah national park Satuday. Pictures here https://pixelfed.social/p/eludom/396268280449793695
I had not been out much lately (winter, cold), but this reminded why I hike. You get to the top (in this case, of “Mary’s Rock”) and have breathtaking views (often when you are already out of breath :-).
This may be obvious to people who are fluent in several languages, but
communicating in different languages does not have to be like working a proof in
geometry. The Latin I learned focused on being able to consciously understand
all 144 different inflected forms (yes, 144) of any standard Latin
verb. Pretty sure most children in antiquity could not separate a
genitive geurnd from a supine from a plural perfect passive
participle. But they could talk.
