Category: My life

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In the underground castle

I want to brag that I have an office in the Smithsonian castle. In fact, my office is three stories below ground. It is not so bad, as you can see from the picture. It is kind of like a mall. The sunlight filters in. Much of the Smithsonian is underground. They didn’t want to build up too much and change the look of the Capitol Mall, so they dug down. Also underground are the highways. So while you walk in the gardens or on the grass, the cars are driving below and people like me are laboring, Morlock-like, below ground.

Maybe the word labor is not appropriate. I still cannot believe my good fortune in getting the job. My biggest challenge will be too many great opportunities. I have been there only two days and I am already filling my notebooks with ideas for connections and partnerships.

In my business, we sometime use the unfortunate phrase “hit the ground running.” It is supposed to be a compliment, implying getting right to work, taking charge & moving quickly. I don’t believe in hitting the ground running. When you hit the ground running, you often fall down later. Beyond that, you might be moving fast, but maybe in the wrong direction. I think it is better to land firm, take a look around and decide based on what you see, even when you have a long way to go and a short time to get there. A year is a short time when there are so many possibilities. In this case more than most, it will be a great delight to do the looking around.

My picture up top is outside my office area, a long way underground but well done.  Next is the garden.  I think that my office is more of less under the place I took the picture. After that is the Mall with the Capitol and last is the Ripley Center.  That is how you get to my office, you go down steps and then take the escalator to the bottom.

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Walking in Northern Virginia suburbs

Went for a two-hour walk to listen to my audio book and take advantage of the hot & humid day. I have learned to like humidity.  You sweat, but if you don’t have to wear a suit or sit still it doesn’t matter after a while. And it was a beautiful day, as you can see from the pictures.  Besides, it only got up to about 90, despite weather reports of higher temperatures. Even so, this is one of the hotter days in what has been a cool summer.

I have been walking around this neighborhood since we bought the house in 1997 (and I sure am tired after walking those 17 years :)) There are lots of changes near our house. The whole area has been transformed for the better. We now have a town center with restaurants and a movie theater. I like to be able to walk to these attractions. Near the metro, they are building another complex that will include a Harris Teeter grocery store. I won’t need a car very much anymore.

But most of the place where I was walking are changed less, although there has been a steady knocking down of little houses and replacement with more elaborate ones. It remains mostly a typical Northern Virginia suburb of the 1960s-70s varieties. I cannot tell the age of the houses, although you can guess by the styles. But you can get a reasonable estimate by the size of the trees and the sorts.

Silver maples were very popular during the 1960s and you see lots of mature silver maples in the area. I have come full circle on silver maples. When I was a kid, I liked them a lot. My uncle Ray planted one for me on our hill. It is still there. Then I “learned” that silver maples were not good trees. They were weak-wooded and short-lived. But I have been observing them now for forty-five years. They get big and stay reasonably healthy for at least that period of time. Nice trees but maybe not a great idea to plant them near sidewalks or sewers. The roots seek water enthusiastically enough to break up concrete.

We chose the neighborhood because it was near the Metro and the W&OD bike and walking trail.  These are my roads to work – bike in summer, Metro in Winter. There are other things. Navy Federal CU has its headquarters and a big park-like campus that includes a walkway with boardwalks over the wet places. Above shows the variety of trees popular in the 1960s and 1970s.  From the left, we have the silver maple; in the middle are some Norway maples crimson variety. On the end are some new ginkgoes.  You really cannot see the row of loblolly in this picture, but I have included another at the bottom, with a white pine in the foreground.

I was thinking about what makes a neighborhood nice. Space and parks are nice, but security is most important. There are nice places in DC that have lots of parks, but I would not feel as free to wander lonely. Around here, there is no significant vandalism, no spray paint, and as I walk through the woods I pass lots of other people just walking. People feel safe and that opens all this place to be used.

My picture up top is the new construction around the Dunn-Loring/Merrifield metro.  When we moved to the area, there were some fast food places, a lot of parking lots and a mulch yard.  Supposedly, the town center etc were going to be build in a few years. That was 1997.  Finally, it is happening.   The next picture is W&OD trail, then some new construction replacing the little houses (notice solar panels). Below that are some of those big silver maples I mentioned.  Next is the area around Navy Federal and finally a weeping willow on one of the quiet suburban streets.

My audio book, BTW, was “The Half Life of Facts.”  It is very interesting so far and maybe I will write a note re.

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Background on my new job at Smithsonian


The Smithsonian Institution, established in 1846 with the mandate for “the increase and diffusion of knowledge”, today comprises 19 museums, numerous research facilities, and the National Zoo. The Smithsonian’s collections include over 137 million artifacts, works of art and scientific specimens that attract more than 30 million visitors every year.
The State Department signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Smithsonian Institution in 2012 to enhance and broaden joint collaboration in a wide range of areas. The Office of International Relations (OIR) in the S. Dillon Ripley Center is the Smithsonian office responsible for managing that collaboration. The State Department provides a Senior Adviser to the OIR.  That person is the principal point of contact and starting point for all interaction with the Smithsonian. The current adviser is John A. Matel – please feel free to contact him at: MatelJ@si.edu or MatelJA@state.gov.

The Smithsonian has a vast and growing array of resources publicly available online. Whether you want to plan an official program or just enjoy the Smithsonian’s unparalleled offerings, the following resources will be of interest:
Smithsonian Web Site – A wealth of information on all that’s happening right now at the Smithsonian.
Smithsonian Education – Collection of lesson plans, online interactive, videos, exhibitions and more for educators, families, and students.
Smithsonian Mobile – A listing of Smithsonian created mobile apps, games, and websites that can be downloaded and used anywhere in the world.
Smithsonian Collections – A searchable database of over 8 million objects around the Smithsonian.
Smithsonian Blogs –  A listing of Smithsonian blogs that showcase activities behind the scenes and complement current exhibitions.
Smithsonian Events – A sortable calendar of all events at the Smithsonian by day; can be sorted by live webcasts.
Smithsonian Virtual Exhibitions – A searchable listing of virtual exhibitions hosted by various Smithsonian museums.
Smithsonian YouTube – Smithsonian channel on YouTube; includes listing of individual museums’ YouTube channels
Smithsonian Folkways Music – Extensive collection of rare recordings of classic traditional and folk music from around the world, including such American artists as Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger and Leadbelly
Smithsonian Libraries – Gateway to the collection.
The Smithsonian Channel – Overview of the Smithsonian Channel’s most recent programming, including content that you can download and use.
The Smithsonian in 3D!
The American Spaces Project – The Smithsonian is also currently developing an extensive catalog of unique content that will be made available to all U.S. diplomatic missions abroad for their use in American Corners, American Shelves, or in other venues.
Research Opportunities – The Smithsonian welcomes students and post-doctoral fellows from around the world. The publication Smithsonian Opportunities for Research and Study includes all the key information.
This is a PowerPoint prepared by my predecessor.  I will use it until I get familiar with the place.

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Good bye to Brasilia & all that

I have less than a week left here, so almost everything I do is “for the last time.”  I sold my old car, pictured above.  It had only 7,000 miles, most of those put on during a few long trips.  But it is better to sell it here in Brazil than to take it home.

I went to the dentist for the last time.  Dentists are a good deal in Brazil.  They charge less, work faster and don’t give you a lot of trouble. I found that I could walk to the dentist office in reasonable safety.  It takes only around 35 minutes.  I don’t have a car anymore anyway, but even if I did, I prefer to walk whenever practical. You don’t always have a sidewalk and there are sometimes some steep walks, as you see above.

Brasilia is also changing quickly.   The old planned city is still around, but it is being replaced by newer and usually better features.  They are building lots of bike trails and pedestrian crossings.  If the original planners didn’t dislike pedestrians, they sure didn’t do anything to make their lives safer or more pleasant.  Brasilia’s current leaders are making up for some of this.
 

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Alex turning blue

We went down to Ft Benning, Georgia to see Alex graduate from boot camp and infantry school.   He graduates tomorrow. Today he had his “turning blue” ceremony.  We got to give him his blue braid. 

He lost some weight but mostly developed a stern look.  I think he looks good.

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I got the old per diem paunch blues

Traveling broadens the mind … and the belly, especially if you travel for business as I do and your business is like mine.  It goes beyond the obvious temptations to eat the nice big breakfasts or munch on chips at night.  One of the most important job for a diplomat is to eat and drink for his country.  This is harder than it seems.

Anybody can eat when he is hungry, but it takes a real man to eat when he is not. At official receptions or dinners, I have to eat things I might not like in quantities I would not usually want.  I was a picky eater when I was a kid and still have somewhat pedestrian tastes, but now I eat everything.  I will not share here the things I really don’t like because tomorrow I might be served a heaping helping of it and will have to eat it with eager abandon.

Well, let me share one thing at the “risk” of not getting it again.  I really don’t like açaí.  It tastes like dirt unless you put loads of sugar into it and then it tastes like sugary dirt.  But it is supposed to be good for you and so you often get it around here.  I drink it, but I have learned to “savor” it, lest I get a refill too fast.

I was not – am not – much of a coffee drinker, but I have come to enjoy the little coffees, cafezinho,  that you always get when visiting offices in Brazil.  If I have a busy day of meetings, I get a little shaky from the caffeine, but it is worth it for the social aspect.

When I leave Brazil, I will probably drink coffee no more than once a week and then mostly I like the cream.  I get French vanilla.  When I was in Poland in the early 1990s, they would sometimes break out the vodka for office calls.  That was a bit of a problem.  A busy day of meetings could give you a headache for more reasons than one. The practice died out as the free market took hold.  Under communism, it helped to stay a little drunk at work, not so when you have free choices.  My worst incident was up in the Polish mountains in Zakopane with some local mountaineers, guys that take pride in their capacity to consume hard liquor.  They would drink the vodka and then hold the empty cup over their heads to show it was really empty.  I am not sure how much I drank, but I held up my end.  

Fortunately, it was the last appointment of the day and my driver, Bogdan, made sure I got safely home.  I remember they tried to teach me a song called “Gorale.”   It was a sad song about a poor guy who had to leave his native mountains to seek a better life.  Dla chleba – after bread. They told me in America, but that might have just been for me to hear.  It was similar in sentiment to sad old America country songs, like that old Bobby Bare hit, “Last night I went to sleep in Detroit city.”

As a diplomat, I never turn down anything I am offered to eat or drink.  This sort of gastronomic diplomacy is very important.  And it is true that I sometimes get to like things just from exposure.  There was a kind of sour soup in Poland called żurek,   or white barszcz. I hated it, but after a while I got to tolerate it, then like it and now I really miss it.  I got to like the goat in Iraq too.  Maybe that is how it will be someday with açaí.

Returning to the problem originally stated, I just eat too much when I travel and I don’t get enough exercise.  It is hard to maintain routines.   One thing that I have learned is not be proactive about getting food.  I used to buy food when I had the chance, “just in case.”  This is rarely necessary and usually results in eating even more than I need.   The chances of going hungry are very small and it doesn’t hurt to miss a meal if you do.  One thing I try to do is make sure I have Coke Zero, but that is the only thing that I provision specially.

Don’t get me wrong.  I like to eat and I like discussion at dinners.  Dinner parties are great, if sometimes a little draining. What I don’t like are cocktail parties and receptions.   I would rather write a long report than attend a cocktail party.  But that is another story.

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New place for the old blog

I have been having trouble with my old blog page interface and it is no longer supported by the Yahoo host.  So I am moving here.  It is a little different format, but I will write the same simple stuff.  The old blog will continue to exist (I hope) but new I will make new entries here.

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Mariza’s new place

The boys and I helped Mariza move into her new place.  It is a very nice place, completely renovated, and they did a really good job. I like the neighborhood.  It is “recovering” but already pretty nice. Within easy walking distance are restaurants, take out places and a Giant.

I know that my impressions are not statistically valid, but I think you can get a feel for a neighborhood by walking around.   It seemed peaceful. One of Mariza’s neighbors, a guy called Greg, introduced himself as we were bringing in stuff. He said that he had lived in the neighborhood for thirty years. It had gone through good and bad times, but things were getting better.  It is the kind of neighborhood where I would be happy to live so I am glad Mariza is there.

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Happy days are here again

2013 was not a good career year for me, as I have written elsewhere. I tried not to let it bother me. I was content that I was doing the best I could and was producing great results. I understand that randomness plays a much bigger role in career success than most of us like to admit. Throwing snake eyes is against the odds but it happens. Of course, the mind can understand things that the heart cannot feel. Today my good luck came back big time.  

Today I was offered the senior international adviser job at Smithsonian. This is great. I have been interested in this job since I found out about it. State Department seconds a senior FSO to Smithsonian. The job is a kind of State liaison and involves helping Smithsonian make international connections. I will be able to do a good job, make a contribution and it will really be fun.

I have always been fond of museums and of the kinds of outreach they do in terms of culture and education. Science, history, innovation, arts, I will be doing the kinds of things I love. And it gets even better. My office will be in the Smithsonian Castle on the National Mall. In all the world, there probably is no better location. 

So this is pretty sweet. I have been very lucky with my assignments. I “settled” only once for an assignment that I didn’t want when I did my time in the Ops Center, but I was only there for nine months punctuated by three months temporary assignment in my beloved Poland. My assignment at IIP/P went south. I just couldn’t make that one work, but I really cannot complain about how they treated me. Besides those two, it was a string of great jobs: Porto Alegre, Oslo, Krakow, Warsaw and Brasília. I even found Iraq fulfilling, if not physically pleasant. State Department gave me a great gift when they assigned me to Fletcher School of Law & Diplomacy ten years ago. I think Smithsonian is even a bigger deal. Excuse my exuberance. I am very happy just now.  

I took the picture yesterday. It is the view I will have just a few steps from my office next year. 

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Another tequila sunrise

The last time I drank tequila was on January 4, 1974. I worked at Medusa Cement Company over Christmas break that year.  It was tough work.  I did the night shift, midnight to noon, unloading hopper cars full of cement.  It was cold.  I remember being out there looking at the Allen-Bradley clock and temperature.  I can still picture it today, the clock at one in the morning and the temperature -5 or less.  We would run out to the hopper cars and set up the shakers and then run back in to our shacks with heaters. The heaters ran on propane and were shaped like torpedoes.  They produced lots of heat along with of noxious fumes and the occasional belch of flame.  My partner LC Duckworth (he evidently had no first name, just initials) actually set his pants on fire when he fell asleep in front of the heater.  No real harm was done.  It was only on the bottom and the coveralls were fire resistant. He woke up a little startled.  I ran in and I helped put him out.  

I made the big bucks that year; at least it was big bucks to me at that time.  The twelve hour shifts meant four hours a day of time and a half overtime, but it interfered with my social life, which consisted mostly of boozing with my friends.  My nights were always cut short, as I had to be to work at midnight.  In that time and place, they didn’t really mind if showed up a little tipsy.   In the land of soaks, the semi-sober man is king.  I have a theory about how this affected all of U.S. society, which I include below. But I still felt oppressed and longed for the end of my working term so that I could go back to my dissolute ways.  

I finished my working week and my working term on Friday and set up a party at my house, in the basement.  With some of the big bucks I made, I bought all sorts of booze. I used to walk back from work and buy a couple of bottles at Bay View Liquor on my way home, so I had the feeling that I was building up to this for a long time.  I invited all my friends and acquaintances. My plan was to give away free booze.  I would stay perfectly sober and talk to my old HS friends. That was the plan. The flaw in my bold plan was that everybody else was drinking.   It is not much fun to talk to drunks when you are not among them. So I set about to catch up. 

I had a long way to go and wanted to get there quick as I could. There was a bottle of tequila that had remained untouched.  I started to drink that, one shot at a time, but persistently and with vigor. I am not really sure if I finished the bottle, but I knocked down a lot of it. The last thing I recall from that night was noticing that it seemed like I was looking through a broken mirror and the world was spinning. The last person I remember seeing was a girl I knew from HS called Janie Peterson.  There was a two or three of these Peterson sisters.  They all looked alike and they all were blond and pretty. I didn’t impress her. Actually, I am not entirely sure she was there. Lots of things I remember from that time may not have happened and many things that happened I forgot.

The next morning I woke up with no way to hold my head that didn’t hurt. As an experienced boozer, I thought that I would take care of it in the usual way. My method was to run. It moved the blood around and provoked a horrendous headache. After about a mile you would usually throw up, but then you felt okay. I still recall with some fondness walking back in the sublimely icy air (it was winter a lot in Wisconsin) feeling restored. Not this time. 

This time I could not even get out of bed.  When I stood up, the world would spin and I fell back.  I was really thirsty, but just about as fast as I could drink water, I would throw it back up.  I spent the whole day trying to get up, drinking some water, throwing it up, sleeping a little and then starting it all over. Sometime around evening, I could move again. I was extraordinarily hungry.  There was not much around the house and in those days we didn’t have that many restaurant choices.  I walked down Kinnickinnic Av and ended up in “the Ritz.”  It was not a great place, but it was open. Hunger is the best cook and I recall with joy the greasy hamburger and fries.

This experience did not entice me to swear off booze or even swear off tequila, but I found that the smell of tequila and even the thought of tequila brought back vivid and unpleasant memories.  I didn’t drink a drop of tequila for the next nearly forty years, no Margaritas, no tequila sunrises, no tequila with salt or lemon, nothing.

I told this story to Espen, who told me that I should give tequila another chance on the fortieth anniversary of the great unpleasantness. I didn’t quite wait for forty years, jumping the gun by a couple weeks.  I tried tequila again.  It was surprisingly hard to drink a shot. It was like jumping into a pool of cold water, ready – go…go.  Are you going or not?  But I did it. It didn’t taste that bad, but neither was it good. It was a long run for a short slide, something maybe worth doing but not worth thinking about doing for four decades.  I will never become a fan of tequila, but I suppose I should be grateful to the cactus whiskey for crystallizing a memory. 

Re my theory of boozing and work.  I was a member of the Longshoremen’s Union Local 815 back in the early 1970s.  We were in that union because we were near the river and some of our cement came in boats.  Most of my brothers worked on the Milwaukee docks and most were hard workers. Many were also boozers, but it didn’t matter.  You could come to work a little tipsy and some of the jobs didn’t require that you work every day.  You could show up and work hard for a few days and then take off. The hard manual work could be done by people recovering from a bender.  I observed that guys sweating out a drunk are often very hard workers.   Besides,  there were “opportunities” to find things that “fell off the back” of trucks.  This world was destroyed in the 1970s when containerized cargo came in.  They needed fewer men to work on the docks and those men could no longer be boozers.  They had to run big machines and come in every day. IMO, some of the homeless problem can be blamed on these developments. There was a general disappearance of short-term, itinerant jobs.   Some guys can work hard, they just cannot work consistently. They had a place before; they do no longer.  I am not saying this was a great world.  It was not.  But it did have an easier time for some marginal people.