Dulles Airport got 32 inches of snow, a record amount. Reagan-National only got 17 inches. This is the 4th largest amount. But it ain’t over. It is good to have Espen at home for the snow. He is a strong boy and actually shoveled us out w/o us even having to ask.
We didn’t have to go to work today. The government was closed. It will be closed again tomorrow. They already announced it. I am betting that the government will be closed on Wednesday too. We are supposed to get another foot of snow on Tuesday/Wednesday night. That will paralyze our Nation’s capital again. Below you can get an idea of the snowfall with the picture of our cross the street neighbor making a path.
We had around three feet of snow on the back deck. I was a little afraid that another foot of wet snow would cause a collapse, so I pushed most of it off. On the radio, they warned people not to overdo the snow cleanup and specifically not to push the snow off their own roofs. You should get a licensed contractor, they said. They featured some poor old woman who hired a kid to push the snow off her flat roof. She seemed to have good sense and didn’t really take it seriously. I suppose it is possible that somebody will fall off, but I think that risk is well worth it compared with the wimpy idea that you would have to get an officially sanctioned person to do that. Maybe we should bubble wrap ourselves before we go out. I don’t think they were talking about decks, but I felt offended anyway. I didn’t like the earnest way they seemed to care about my welfare.
Espen was stranded at home. They canceled classes at GMU today and tomorrow. We had planned to pick up Alex on Friday, but were snowed out. His classes were also canceled so he is hunkered down in the dorm, but he says he can get to the chow hall, which is open, so all is well.
I don’t recall if they ever shut down University of Wisconsin because of snow, although sometimes nobody was in class. I remember trudging to class through some very high snowdrifts. But the difference was distance. We walked to school and those that drove didn’t have to drive that far. Now they have to worry about a very wide metro area. Like all old guys, I think we were tougher back then. I also remember walking across the Mississippi River in Minneapolis when it was 25 below – real temperature not that wind-chill dodge. It was several minutes before I could get my frozen glasses off my frozen eyebrows.
It is not nearly as cold here as it gets in Minnesota or Wisconsin but the snow piled all around is starting to make me feel at home. And it looks like it’s not going to let up for at least another week or two. We are getting a real winter here. Below is one of our meadows sleeping under the snow last week. It is piled higher now.
On the plus side there should be a lot of good soil moisture for my trees and clover and the cold weather will freeze out most of the southern pine beetles. Of course, none of my trees were infested before anyway. But I will really enjoy looking at the burst of green this spring in the wildlife pastures. The hard winter will produce a vibrant spring.
It has been cold again this year but this year we are also getting more snow. They got a lot of snow in southern Virginia & North Carolina, so I wanted to go down and look at the snow on the farm. Well, it wasn’t a lot of snow by Wisconsin standards and it will melt in a few days, but there was more than usual and it created a different look for the place. You really wouldn’t guess that you were looking at southern Virginia.
I saw a couple cars in the ditch on the way down and I didn’t dare take the back roads, as I usually do. Instead I went down I95 all the way down to Emporia and then went over on 58. I also didn’t dare drive down the dirt roads on the farm. You can see that 623 was good in the spot above, but look near the bottom and you can see why I didn’t want to drive up the farm road. It is harder to walk through the snow but it is nice to feel it underfoot. There were a few animal track, but it was otherwise undisturbed. It is nice to have land.
It was a long trip to see it and it took longer because of the adverse weather conditions. I finished almost the entire audio-book Infotopia, which I found very interesting and useful (I hope) in my job. This was one of the three audio downloads on Audible.com that Mariza gave me for Christmas. It was a good gift. Audio books make long drives bearable and even beneficial. I lose my NPR a few miles outside Washington. I don’t like music radio or those silly talk shows that purport to give advice that will solve problems that I don’t have. Audio books do the job.
Another good audio program is “the Teaching Company”. Alex likes them too because they are around forty-five minutes long, which fits his workout schedule.
I wrote about Espen’s birthday last year. He is unenthusiastic about me putting too much about him or recent pictures of him on the blog. He came home for the weekend and we had a cake, but Mariza and Alex were unable to come, so it wasn’t a party. Espen wanted to go over to Fuddruckers for his birthday dinner and we had a good talk, but I don’t want to post all that on the blog. Suffice to say that I miss him, but I am glad he is close and proud of him. Happy birthday, Espen. We love you.
I went to Charlottesville for the meeting of the Virginia Tree Farm Committee. Unfortunately, the meeting was in Richmond. They alternate between those two places, and I just screwed it up. I had actually written the correct place in my calendar, but went to the wrong one. Well, I am not crucial to the meeting and It was not a total loss. I got to visit Alex, since Harrisonburg is not far from Charlottesville. In fact, I think that my desire to see Alex might have figured into my mental slip. Above is the main street in Waynesboro.
Alex had classes until 3:30. This was good when I had planned to attend the meeting, but now I had lots of time on my hands. I thought I might drive up along the Blue Ridge Parkway but it was closed, evidently weather related. So I went through Waynesboro. I was not seeing it on the best day but they did have an A&W. I like the hamburgers and the root beer. A&W fries are not good, however.
Above is the dining room. I had it to myself. Below is the outside.
I followed a little road north. It was a charming rural area. I wanted to stop off at Grand Caverns, but it was closed for the season. Again, not the best time to come around. Since I was still too early, I walked around Harrisonburg. You can see pictures.
Alex likes his classes at JMU. He has a couple of Asian history classes, symbolic logic and an anthropology class on North Americans native people. He found the gyms and good running trails. College life is good. We had supper at “the Blue Nile” and Ethiopian restaurant. Harrisonburg is well endowed with restaurants and services.
Rain mixed with snow scared me a little when I left Harrisonburg at around 6pm. I don’t much like driving up I-81 because of all the trucks even in good weather. The weather cleared up not too far into the trip and there wasn’t too much traffic on 66. I got 42 miles to the gallon on this trip, which is good for going through the mountains. I usually get good mileage on the way to Charlottesville along 29. I think it is because of the slower speeds and the hybrid does particularly well on the rolling hills. I get a significantly better mileage at 50 MPH than I do at 65.
Brian (that is him above) has a plane and knows how to fly, so I got a chance to see the tree farms from the air. This is something I have long wanted to do. I can get the pictures from Google earth, but they are not completely up to date, give only one angle and are just not the same as a live view. I will included some pictures I took in the next post. They are a little hazy because I took them through the glass of the windows.
Above is take off and below is landing.
I have never flown so low over places I knew so well. We left from Leesburg Airport. All the little planes are lined up and it is amazingly informal. Flying out around Washington is highly regulated, but once you get outside the security zones, you can fly were you want. We had GPS, but actually found the farms by looking for landmarks on the ground. It is more fun that way.
You notice a few things from the air that are less clearly evident to the terrestrially tied road denizens. There is a lot more empty space than we think. Most of our structures are near the roads, but roads make up only a small amount of the countryside. On the other hand, lots of very nice houses are hidden down long paths, away from the main roads, obscured by trees or topography. This seemed to be especially true in Loudon County. Of course, my sample was skewed since I took off and landed there, but Loudon County is a classic wealthy exurban area, so I think this kind of settlement is indeed more common there.
Another thing I noticed was the large numbers of ponds and impounded water. Natural lakes and ponds not associated with meandering river are uncommon south of the Mason-Dixon Line because they are largely gouged out by glaciers and the most recent glaciations didn’t get that far south. But people like lakes and they have created lots of them were they didn’t exist before. You can tell the ponds because they tend to have at least one straight side from the dam that holds back the water. Larger impounds have very irregular banks. Water wears away the jagged banks over time, but not enough time has passed for these man-made bodies of water.
Below is Vulcan Quarry near Freeman. That is where my rip-rap comes from. The material is porphyritic granite. I am not sure exactly the significance of that, but the rock is kind of grayish with crystals and twenty tons of rip-rap cost around $500, delivered. It is good to have land near the source. In time, I suppose that quarry could become a fairly deep lake. Since it in not far from the Freeman forest tract, we may eventually have lakefront property.
Neither man-made nor natural lakes last very long in the great scheme of geological time, since they silt up. Man-made lakes tend to silt up faster because they are often or river fed and they impound muddy floodwaters.
Alex is off. I drove him up yesterday and left him at James Madison University today. I am proud that he is becoming more independent but sad that he is pulling away. Above is Alex at the quad. Below is Alex next to James Madison. It is life sized statue. He was a little guy.
I used to talk to the kids at bedtimes. Sometimes I know that they allowed me to ramble on just to prolong the time before bed, but I enjoyed it and I know they learned some things because I hear them saying them. I miss that.
Above and below are buildings on campus.
James Madison is a good university and looks like a nice place. It reminds me a little more of a Midwestern university than it does of Virginia. Maybe the stone buildings on the hills remind me of some of the building at UW along the lake. Maybe it is the spruce trees. Spruce trees can and do grow in Tidewater and Piedmont Virginia, but they don’t thrive. They do better in the cooler, more continental climate of Western Virginia.
Above is Alex’s dorm room. Below is the TV lounge.
We spent Saturday night at the Marriott Courtyard in Harrisonburg. Alex wanted to get there first thing in the morning when the university opened. We didn’t need to do that. Alex was the first customer when the dorm opened. The hall lights didn’t work, so we had to find his room by sense of touch. Empty dorm rooms are vaguely depressing, but it literally brightened up when we opened the roll-up shades. His room has a nice southern exposure. Alex appreciates the sun too and since he was first in, he could claim the bed near the window.
Above is a view from the quad. Below are Norfolk and Southern RR tracks that run right through the center of campus.
Alex hadn’t been able to make the orientation, so the second thing on our list was to get his ID. The place didn’t open until 1 pm. We were second in line. It went very efficiently once we got in. The ID is the key to success. Alex can now use the libraries, get into building and – perhaps most importantly – eat at the chow hall. Below is the lake at JMU.
I didn’t want to leave Alex but the time came and I went. Alex will be fine. He won’t be as close as Espen. It is an exciting their lives, full of potential and contradictory emotions.
I drove home through the mountains of Shenandoah National Park and along Highway 211. It is still rural much of the way with beautiful woods and fields. There was not much traffic and it was a relaxing drive. Back home, a little more lonely than before but hopeful, grateful and optimistic. Above is Sperryville, VA.
My big boss Jeremy is retiring. I will miss him. The generation of great officers who were running the show when I came into the FS is passing. Now I am among the old guys.
We went out for the last breakfast at a downtown hotel and I walked back to work after. Although I walked through an area near the State Department, I don’t usually go this way and I found some interesting things for pictures.
Above is the statue of Jose de San Martin the liberator of Argentina. Below is John Rawlins, a Civil War general and friend of US Grant.
Below is the Octagon, the headquarters of the American Architectural Society.
Espen went off to school this year. It is sad for Chrissy and me not to have him around all the time, although we are happy that he is not far away at George Mason University. He comes home a lot, but we sometimes don’t see much of him anyway, since we are generally awake during the day while he is sort of nocturnal.
Experiments in sleeping
He is trying a sleep experiment over the Christmas break. His idea is to go to bed a couple hours later and sleep later every day until he moved completely around the clock and can wake up fully rested early in the morning in time to go back to school. It should work. It is much easier to go to bed later than to wake up earlier and I read that this moving around the clock is one way they use to cure insomnia. He has fallen off the discipline recently, however, since he has been going out with his friends.
Studying computers & interning at Lockheed
Espen is studying computer engineering. He has to take a lot of hard classes, but there is strong job growth for those who make it through. He had a paid internship at Lockheed-Martin working on their computer systems last summer and will probably get the job back next year. That will probably be as important to his future prospects as what he learns in school. They also got him a security clearance, which is very valuable for jobs around here with government and government contractors.
Alex starts at JMU via NOVA
Alex will be going to James Madison University in January and starting as a junior. His is a real turn-around story. He was an unenthusiastic student and wasn’t ready for college when he graduated HS. It was hard for Chrissy and me not to push him in, but I remembered my own early college experience. I wasn’t emotionally ready to go and I didn’t study and managed to achieve a 1.67 GPA in my freshman year. Alex found a decent job at Home Depot, which both helped him with his basic discipline and made him see the value of formal education. He started to go to Northern Virginia Community College and eased into higher education part time, soon studying hard and getting good grades.
Valuable experience at Home Depot
It might have been better for him to wait until fall semester to start at JMU. He has been doing very well at Home Depot, working hard and getting some of the respect and opportunity that comes from doing a good job. I think it would be good for learn some more useful skills. He has been scheduling contractors and working with appliances and fixtures. This experience is worth a lot in the real world, but I understand that he is impatient to get on with the next steps in his life. I will miss him. We have been attending Smithsonian lectures together. Unfortunately, I think that has made him even more eager to get to JMU. He is usually by far the youngest person in the audience and he feels life is passing too fast.
Following in my historical footsteps
Alex likes history and that is what he probably will study at JMU. Studying history is not directly applicable to any particular career but it is a great general background for life. My history MA has been as useful as my MBA, although it doesn’t tend to impress hiring managers as much. I think there is a big difference between rigorously studying history and just coasting along. Alex really tries to understand.
Mariza working at Travelers’
Mariza is still working at Travelers’ Insurance in Baltimore. She is an insurance adjuster for environmental claim, which means asbestos, mold, oil spills & sewage – all the fun stuff. Most the clients are firms and it is usually third party liability. A lot of these things are subject to interpretation. Of course most of the claims are legitimate, but she also has to deal with hypochondriacs who probably really believe that they were made sick by various things and predatory lawyers who prey on insurance companies, firms and putative victims alike.
New apartment not far away
She moved to a new apartment last summer, not far from her old one. It is a cheaper and she doesn’t have to share with roommates. Mariza was the de-facto property manager in his former apartment. It was hard for her to get her sometimes lackadaisical and deadbeat roommates to cough up the cash for rent. The landlord did the old “joint and several” lease, whereby every individual was responsible for the whole rent every month. Mariza’s roommates had a higher tolerance for risking eviction and/or bad credit and that is how she got stuck trying to herd the cats and get them to pay up.
Baltimore has some nice neighborhoods
Baltimore is a very nice city, if a bit uneven in its attractiveness. There are some very distinctive sections that are almost like towns within the city. Mariza used to live on Bolton Hill, which was an area of nice old building, some being renovated. She lives in Mount Vernon now, dominated by an interesting monument to George Washington. It also has some of the spillover of students from Johns Hopkins University. Nearby, however, are some very gritty and dangerous looking places. Espen and I drove through one area after dropping Mariza off. We noticed some really little kids just hanging around and it reminded Espen of a Dave Chappelle skit you can watch it at this link if you are not offended by colorful language.
Chrissy doing HR at Department of Labor
Chrissy is doing well at the Department of Labor. She got an award this year and will probably get her promotion next year. The Civil Service is not like the Foreign Service. Our ranks follow us personally not matter what job we do. The FS system has its disadvantages, but the rank-in-person allows us to take a wide variety of jobs. The all important arbiter in the GS system is the position description. Chrissy spends a lot of her time analyzing and assessing job descriptions. It is, unfortunately, almost impossible to reward well-performing individuals. Managers have to rewrite their job descriptions or move them to new positions. They are not supposed to do that just to reward employees and that is the problem Chrissy often faces. She has to keep them to the rules.
Mine safety is serious business
Her section deals with mines and mine safety and Chrissy gets to travel around to do job fairs and recruitment. Given the nature of mining, these fairs tend not to be in the large and sophisticated metro areas. They have a lot to do in West Virginia and rural Pennsylvania, for example. The mine inspector program has a diversity problem that upsets some of the leadership. Given the location of most mines and nature of the industry, people with significant mining experience tend to be white and male. Also given the life-and-death nature of mine safety, you cannot fake or fudge this experience as you can in many other jobs.
On top of all that, inspecting mines is a physically difficult and demanding task. All this means that “achieving diversity” is a daunting task, which is why they do job fairs in places like El Paso and Puerto Rico.
Federal hiring process is confusing
It is hard to get jobs in the Federal government, hard because of the arcane and Byzantine system they use for most recruitment. They system is designed to be perfectly fair and perfectly transparent, but because it tries to do these thing perfectly in theory it usually means that it is unfair and opaque in practice. It is a frustrating challenge for Chrissy a lot of the time. But that is a story that she can tell, not me.
Public diplomacy moves to social media
My job had its ups and downs this year, but nothing spectacular. I wrote about some of the public diplomacy we helped do for President Obama’s appearances in Cairo and Ghana. IIP has really become a new media center and my colleagues are developing programs very nicely. I am getting a little concerned, in fact, that the new media is getting a little ahead of our capacity to use it effectively in public diplomacy. In the last couple of weeks, I have had the chance to work with FSI to develop training in social media for decision-makers. We are hoping to make this a policy level course, not just a how-to but a why-do. It is too easy to get beguiled by what we think we can do w/o asking what we are trying to accomplish and what tools are most appropriate. I have appropriated the poetic phrase that we must not let our new media reach exceed our public diplomacy grasp.
Our reach exceeds our grasp
I worry that the ubiquity and easiness of new media will convince us Washington that we can reach overseas and influence far-away audiences with a one-size-fits-all strategy. We really need the on-the-ground presence and expertise. There is no such thing as a world brand or a strategy that works all over the place. The strength of our FS is that we can be decentralized and near the “customers,” responding to local cultures and nuances. But this kind of work looks plodding compared to the excitement of the new media. It is tempting to go direct. We tried to bypass our posts in the 1990s. In many ways, the dot.com debacle was like the new media craze. We unilaterally dismantled a lot of our networks in the late 1990s and paid the price later. I hope we don’t do that again and I will do my best to prevent it.
Back overseas for me … in 2011
I suppose I do have a dog in that fight. I agreed to go back overseas, back to Brazil. I will be public affairs officer there with lots of up-close, hands-on opportunities. I won’t be going until summer of 2011, so there is a lot of time to prepare. I haven’t keep up much with Brazil, so I have some catching up to do but I am looking forward to it. My favorite issues relate to economics, environment & Energy and those are the crucial ones in Brazil. I will also be glad to have some line duties again. The Wall Street Journal has a Portuguese version. I have been reading it for the past couple days and can still do it reasonably well. I don’t think it will be too hard to take it up again.
All things considered, not bad
It has been a good year for us, all things considered. Both boys took the next big steps in their lives, but I didn’t see any major turning points and we end this year as we might have expected at the start. Of course, you often don’t see the big changes as they happen. They are clearly evident only later and when you look back you cannot believe you didn’t know at the time. Maybe there is something like that. We go into the new year grateful for the blessing of the present and optimistic about the future.
I don’t think that life runs in circles, but we kind of follow trials, maybe more like a bloodhound following scents. The scents can be stronger or weaker. Sometimes they are washed away completely, but more often it only seems that way. Naturally the course of your career is often determined by your core competencies and talents. You tend to circle around the places where you have expertise. That is why it is so important to start along a path with lots of options, since you may be travelling that way a long time.
The natural circle
Forestry was probably my biggest circle. I have always loved nature and studied forestry in college, but abandoned it as impractical. I believed that was the end of it, but I didn’t know myself as well as I thought. While my conscious mind was not paying attention, under the surface I was always paying attention to the opportunities and – in the Chicago term – when I saw my chances, I took them. I became a forest owner. People wondered not only why I wanted to do that, but also how I knew what to do. I just did. I had learned to identify forest types and assess forest land, not in the professional sense but enough to know what I was buying because that program had been running in background for thirty years.
Bookending Brazil
Now I may well be bookending my career with Brazil. Brazil was my first post and Portuguese was the first language the FS taught me. That was a long time ago, a quarter century ago. Besides my sojourn in Iraq, I spent the rest of my career in Europe. But I wasn’t so completely out of it. In 2000, I went to the EU Summit in Lisbon. Their Portuguese is very different from the Brazilian variety and for a couple days I couldn’t say anything. But then it came back, mostly. A couple years ago, FSI offered an online Portuguese reading course. I had no reason to take it, but I did.
I went down to Sao Paulo and the State of Parana in May of this year. Brazil surprised me. I guess I should have known that it would change in twenty-five years, but it had changed a lot. The country of the future was finally catching up with its vast potential. So when they advertised for the PAO in Brazil, I applied for the job. Yesterday I got it.
Foreign language is hard and you tend to think you sound better than you do
It is well in the future. The job doesn’t start until summer of 2011. I will finish the job here in IIP next summer, so I will have to find something for a couple months before I start the area training and language again. I want to get my Portuguese as nearly perfect as I can and that takes effort and training. I was easily fluent in the language when I lived in Porto Alegre, but I know that at my best I sounded like the equivalent of Sergeant Schultz from Hogan’s Heroes. I want to move up to the Louis Jordan or Ricardo Montalban level.
FSI has language proficiency levels. IMO – the 1 level is like those Japanese fighter pilots on old movies, You can say just enough to make a few exclamations. When you approach the 2 level, you can ask where directions to the bathroom or the train station, but you might not understand the answer well enough to find it. The 3 is Sargeant Shultz. People understand you, but it is often comical. You have to get at least 4 to approach Louis Jordan or Ricardo Montalban, but they are probably closer to 5.
Once more around the track
So it looks like I will be doing another lap around another circle. Brazil is a very good post. The PAO seemed like a real big deal when I was looking at it from the junior officer perspective. Now, maybe not so much, but it will be a good and rewarding work. It has a big budget and a lot to do. This time I will be able to see the country and appreciate it more. Last time we were so poor that we couldn’t afford to go anywhere unless the government sent us. We were paying off student loans, car loans and then the expenses of the kid. Mariza was born in Brazil. We should be on easy street this time. The verse from TS Eliot seems appropriate.
We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.
Pedestrians are like Rodney Dangerfield. We get no respect. They did a good job plowing the streets for the cars, which means they piled the snow up on the corners, where anybody on foot has to climb a small mountain to get to the road. The problem is often not climbing the snowy mountain, but sliding down the other side and controlling your descent w/o falling on your rear or sliding into traffic.
I have written before about the obvious way the authorities prioritize auto traffic while ostentatiously praising pedestrians. Below – if you look carefully, you see that there is a car in there. Good luck on driving out of that.
This is even the case near the Metro. Presumably some people might be on foot on the roads leading to Metro entrances.
But I have to admit that Washington DC does a relatively better job than Virginia. As you can see from the picture below, they have made a path. Here we have a different problem. Pedestrians tend to walk in front of cars even when the cars have a green light.
I think we have a general disrespect for the law because the law has a general disspect for us. Many drivers in the Washington region don’t seem to understand crosswalks. It is not just because we have a car culture. California is more a car culture than we are but you have to credit drivers in California. They pay attention to cross walks. Many places the “walk/don’t walk” signals require you to push a button and wait a long time. In other places the transitions are too fast. I know of one place where the green turn signal stays on all the time, confusing both drivers and pedestrians.
Above – I just had to include this. It was actually fairly warm in the sun and the guy was snoring loudly. If you look nearby at the bottles, you notice that this guy probably has plenty of antifreeze in his bloodstream anyway. Below is the three-way snowball fight standoff. Something went wrong with my camera settings, which is why we have such “artistry.”
