Above is the U.S. Capitol from the back of the American Indian Museum. Below is the Lincoln Memorial on the other end of the Mall.
The Federal government (although the Senate was at work late into the night) was closed because of the snow, but it really wasn’t hard to get down to Washington. I just caught the Metro. I wanted to see Washington in the snow and quiet. There was a lot of snow, but it wasn’t quiet. Lots of people seemed to have the same idea. I took a long walk from the White House to the Capitol. Some pictures are included.
Above is the Washington Monument. Below is the frozen reflecting pool at the World War II Memorial.
Below is the Smithsonian Mall.
Below is the White House from Pennsylvania Avenue.
This was a record-breaking snow for December. They already announced that the Federal Government will be closed tomorrow. Chrissy and I were able to drive around with the Honda and do some Christmas shopping. The main roads were clear but the side streets were still sometimes bad.
Above is the narrow path of the plow on our street. It is actually better that way because the plows don’t make such an impassible bank across the driveways. Below is the front of our complex.
It is useful to have big boys. Below is Espen clearing the driveway. He also did the same for our neighbor. Good boy.
Below is the back of our house. The red oak trees are getting big.
It has been a cool year so far and it looks like it might be a snowy winter. I don’t know if this will be any kind of record, but it is the earliest big snow I remember.
It is Saturday; otherwise government would be shut down and the whole city thrown into panic. Washington doesn’t handle snow well. These are a few pictures from around the house. The blobs of light in the pictures are snowflakes reflecting the camera flash. I took some w/o the flash, but I kind of liked the effect with it.
Above shows our Honda covering in snow. We don’t plan to drive anywhere. The snow will stop tomorrow and the sun will come out again. Snow doesn’t last long in Virginia. I figure that the Lord put the snow there and he will remove it before I need the car again.
Chrissy got the idea to make a kind of glittering Christmas tree with mirrors and glitter to reflect the light. She made the glittery snowflakes herself.
The tree is a Frasier fir. Alex picked it out at Home Depot. I brought a tree up from the farm when we first got it, but loblolly pines don’t make good Christmas trees. They drop the needles very fast and they are not very bushy. They grow fast, which makes them good timber trees, but that means that they have long growth branches. Christmas trees are usually trimmed to make them fuller. It tried that, but it didn’t work with my trees. It is easier just to go to Home Depot.
Yesterday I did something I have never done before: I left work early because I felt sick. In retrospect and with the benefit of knowing how I feel today, I know it was nothing much. I was just really tired and my body ached all over. I now believe I just didn’t get enough sleep and a pulled muscle in my back was radiating discomfort through the rest of my body. It is better today. I usually would have just ignored it, but I guess I succumbed to all that hysteria about the H1N1 flu, which BTW doesn’t seem as big a deal as we all feared.
Sick of sickness
I felt a little bad about bugging out yesterday and on the way to work this morning, I thought about sick leave. I have a lot of it saved up. In the USG, you earn four hours of sick leave every pay period (two weeks) & can carry your sick leave balance over to the next year. I have saved more than 2300 hours, which comes to about a year and a half of work time when you count in normal holidays. I always thought of it as a kind of disability insurance policy. Who needs AFLAC when you have SL? I am lucky that I just don’t get sick very often, but I also don’t allow little discomforts to keep me home. For example, I would not normally have taken sick leave for something like yesterday. Life is full of little discomforts; most don’t matter.
The whole concept of sick leave is interesting, when you think of it. We get annual leave (vacation) and then we get sick leave. We are not supposed to mix them, but a lot of people do. A significant number of people use every hour of both each year. Sometimes I suppose they really are sick; sometimes not and sometimes I think the definition of “sick” is stretched past normal credulity.
Sick on Mondays and Fridays
As a manager, I noticed that sickness tended to happen more often on Mondays and Fridays and some people were consistently sick whenever some sort of difficult assignment was on the horizon. It is a tough call sometimes. Ostensibly you have to respect that people get sick. But you are very often faced with a simple choice. Either the person is there or not. If they are not there, they cannot work. Whether the reason is good or bad, not showing up takes away a chance to succeed. Since success tends to build on itself, if you don’t show up a lot you will have a lot more trouble succeeding.
All success depends first on just showing up
Is that fair? The chronically absent tend to think not, but what can you do? I did an informal poll at my table during one my senior training last year. It is hard to get into the SFS, so getting there is a measure of success. There were six people at my table and we all had thousands of hours of unused sick leave. It was not a statistically valid sample but I think it makes sense. Of course the causality is unclear. Do successful people get sick less often? Are they sick less often because they are successful? Do they just not abuse sick leave as much? Correlation is not causality, but you can learn lessons from it nevertheless.
I earn more than two weeks of sick leave a year, which I don’t use, so that means that I work two weeks more than I would if I took off. In the course of my career, I have worked about a year and a half longer than someone who took off all the sick days allowed. It stands to reason that additional time on task will probably yield better results.
I don’t believe that you should come to work when you have some contagious sickness and I don’t. But that just doesn’t account for very much time. My general rule is to assume I am doing something I want to do, a vacation. Would I let whatever I am feeling stop me from doing that? If the answer is no, I should also go to work.
My parents taught me good habits. I don’t remember my father EVER taking a sick day. I suppose he did, but not often enough that you would notice. When I said I was sick he would tell me some stories about the depression or the war. He also told a story about his cousin, Eddy Wysoki, who evidently drank a whole bottle of rubbing alcohol. That made him really sick. I guess ordinary sickness wasn’t invented yet back then. My mother let me stay home from school any time I claimed I was sick. The catch was that I had to stay in my room and rest on the assumption that if I was sick enough to stay home, I was too sick to play. I still recall an instance when I was legitimately sick in the morning, but recovered. Nevertheless, I couldn’t play with my friends outside after school. I thought it was unjust, but it was a lesson I obviously still remember.
How to handle too much sick leave
The problem with accumulating sick leave is that it goes to waste when you leave the government service. That is why I was happy to hear that the Congress has decided to tack ½ of the total sick leave hours onto our time in work for retirement purposes. That means that I will have an extra six months of credible Federal Service when I retire. If you retire after 2014, you will get the whole time credited. It makes sense, since as I wrote above I did indeed work that extra year. The USG was having some trouble with absenteeism.
There is the incentive to just be sick. I mean, who doesn’t feel sleepy in the morning? Could it be sickness? Maybe we better sleep a little more to make sure. Feeling a little winded after climbing some stairs? Maybe better go home and rest. When you have a year’s worth of sick leave that you will just forfeit and you plan to work for less than a year, such things begin to make sense.
I remembered a stanza from the Book of the Tao. It really doesn’t make much sense, but it kind of applies here.
Alex and I went to a lecture at the Smithsonian about the Byzantine Empire by Lars Brownworth. It was a good lecture and the guy had very good humor timing but he also made some excellent points.
One of the key points is how the Byzantines have been disrespected for centuries. Even the name “Byzantine” is pejorative. The Byzantines referred to themselves as Romans, which made sense since they were indeed the heirs to the Roman Empire in an unbroken line of history. Some of it is the responsibly of one man – Edward Gibbon, whose monumental book “the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” has set the concept of Rome for more than 200 years. But in many ways he was merely reflecting a general Western prejudice against the East.
It seems to make sense that we could call the end of the Roman Empire when the city of Rome fell, but this is not the case. By the time the actual city of Rome fell to Barbarians in 476 it had no longer really been the capital of the Empire for some times. The Western Empire was ruled from the more defensible Ravenna. The more important Eastern part of the Empire was ruled from Constantinople. By that time also the Roman Empire had occupied the Mediterranean world for more than 600 years. It had become a single cultural entity a lot like the U.S. in North America. California or Nebraska is not less American than Virginia or Massachusetts because.
Take that back in terms of our own history and we are back to 1409, almost a century before the European discovery of America. Henry V had not yet become king of England and – BTW – the Eastern Roman Empire was still in existence. That was a long time ago, so you can imagine that a citizen of the Roman Empire had no real concept of anything before Rome, or maybe had about the same feeling as we would about Henry IV (for most people i.e. none).
Anyway it was one cultural region and the Mediterranean united the region, not divided it. North Africa was as much part of this Roman world as Italy. We forget about that today because we think in terms of East and West and we think of the Muslims in the Middle East as natural and native. BTW, many mosques are pattered after Byzantine churches (especially Hagia Sophia, that you see in the picture) and the Muslim world owes a lot to the Eastern Roman Empire in general, as we do.
If you read other parts of my blog, you know I am a fan of the great empire of Rome. The Byzantines preserved and transmitted the ancient heritage to us. Byzantine texts and scholars helped spark the renaissance. We should pay more attention to their history.
I think it is great that Smithsonian sponsors these lectures and that hundreds of people come to listen to them.
A significant part of my pay could be “performance pay” now that I am in the Senior Foreign Service (Senior Executive Service) and don’t get automatic increases. I didn’t get to compete for performance pay for 2007/8 because of a technicality – Congress acted too late on my class’ promotion and we were not in grade long enough to qualify according to the State Department’s arcane rules. (Ironically, however, they acted quick enough that I lost my overtime pay in Iraq and ended up taking a pay cut because of my promotion. It won’t be until the middle of next year that I make up the money I lost by being promoted.) This year I just didn’t get performance pay. I am a little surprised.
This was the last performance report that included Iraq. Next year my Iraq experience will be buried under the relative obscurity of this Washington assignment. If I didn’t deserve performance pay for Iraq, I certainly should not get it for Washington, so my prospects don’t look good. Iraq was about the best I can do. I am beginning to feel unpopular.
In fairness, my colleagues are doing lots of important things in Embassies overseas and in Washington. I don’t doubt the merit of those on the list.
But being a PRT leader in Iraq seemed a bigger deal to the Department when they asked me to take the assignment. They dragged me out of the job I had and made me feel that delay of even a couple of days was disastrous. It sure seemed important. Of course, the perceived value of a service declines rapidly after that service has been performed and there has, anyway, been a shift in priorities. You get little advantage being tied to yesterday’s urgency, no matter how important they told you it was at the time.
I said when I signed on for Iraq that I did NOT do it for career advancement and I was telling the truth. I remain glad that I volunteered. I derived immense satisfaction from doing the job there. I worked with great colleagues and I am convinced that there are people alive in Iraq today who would not be had we not done the work we did. I would not change my decision.
Nevertheless, it bothers me a little to conclude that I would likely have been in a better career position, at least in terms of contacts & assignment prospects, had I not volunteered, had I kept and built on the good job I had in September 2007. Things moved along w/o me while I was literally wandering in the desert. It is my own fault too. I did a poor job of reconnecting. I thought I could just pick up where I left off; I was mistaken.
Chrissy says that I don’t get mad enough about these sorts of things and that I need to develop a stronger sense of entitlement. Sometimes the people who make the most noise get the most recognition. I tend to downplay hardships and achievements and I am not prone to anger. I am mad about not being recognized for my Iraq service, but this is about the extent of my rage.
“Do it because it is the right thing to do, but remember that the State Department talks a lot about the importance of the mission and the people who do it, but the bureaucracy has no memory.” That is what I will tell the people who ask my advice on taking on hard assignments.
It is a dreary, depressing day, both in terms of the weather (as you can see from the picture above) and my outlook, but the sky will brighten up and so will my situation. I plan to wallow in self-pity for a little longer; then I will stop and try to do something useful again.
We got to Appomattox too late yesterday, so we had to go this morning. It is not the big tourist season, so we had the place largely to ourselves.
I like these kinds of communities, with the old fashioned houses and the open spaces. Alex thought the houses were “lame.” But it is interesting to stand at the cross roads of history. They have done a good job of preserving and restoring the historical area, but I think they should get some animals. The community of the time would have featured horses, pigs, cows and chickens. Well … probably not exactly in April 1865, when the starving soldiers of the Army of Northern Virginia would have made short work of such rations on the hoof, but in normal times a community like this w/o animals would not be normal. I bet the Park Service could get some farm hobbyists to do it for nothing.
I thought back to April 1865 and the starving ragged Confederates up against Union forces that were better off but still not properly rationed. Both armies were exhausted. Robert E. Lee made the horrendous decision to surrender and the enlightened decision not to keep the fighting going on by guerilla tactics, as President Jefferson Davis wanted. The South was finished. No reason for more men to die and the country to be torn up even more for a lost cause. Grant and the Union made it as easy as it could be in such circumstances.
There was generosity, nobility and honor on both sides. April 9, 1865 was truly a day when humanity showed its better side amidst terrible suffering and hatred. As I wrote before, this is a even unique in human history. Grant later wrote, “I felt… sad and depressed at the downfall of a foe who had fought so long and valiantly, and had suffered so much for a cause though that cause was, I believe, one of the worst for which a people had ever fought.”
There is no such thing as destiny. People make history. If Grant, Lee or Lincoln had been lesser men – ordinary men – blood would have continued to flow and our great nation may have never recovered. But it could have been different.
Lincoln was there in spirit and he was a motivating force behind the generosity that Grant was able to give, but within a few days Lincoln would be dead, shot by that cowardly actor John Wilkes Booth. Had Booth struck a week earlier it is not likely that Grant could have offered such terms to Lee. The conflict might have continued as a desperate war of extermination.
Grant’s close friend William T Sherman would soon be similarly generous with General Joe Johnston, who would also prove as honorable as Robert E. Lee.
We all remember Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, but the Second Inaugural is my favorite. It is not very long, so I copied it entire. I especially like the last paragraph.
Fellow-Countrymen:
AT this second appearing to take the oath of the Presidential office there is less occasion for an extended address than there was at the first. Then a statement somewhat in detail of a course to be pursued seemed fitting and proper. Now, at the expiration of four years, during which public declarations have been constantly called forth on every point and phase of the great contest which still absorbs the attention and engrosses the energies of the nation, little that is new could be presented. The progress of our arms, upon which all else chiefly depends, is as well known to the public as to myself, and it is, I trust, reasonably satisfactory and encouraging to all. With high hope for the future, no prediction in regard to it is ventured.
1
On the occasion corresponding to this four years ago all thoughts were anxiously directed to an impending civil war. All dreaded it, all sought to avert it. While the inaugural address was being delivered from this place, devoted altogether to saving the Union without war, urgent agents were in the city seeking to destroy it without war—seeking to dissolve the Union and divide effects by negotiation. Both parties deprecated war, but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it perish, and the war came.
2
One-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union even by war, while the Government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it. Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with or even before the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. “Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.” If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”
3
With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.
Alex and I visited the battlefields associated with the Petersburg Campaign and Robert E. Lee’s final retreat. Petersburg gave the world a taste of what trench warfare would be like. You go from Federal earthworks to Confederate earthworks. As in the World War I, the armies were racing around the flanks. It soon became a grim slog, a war of attrition. The South could not win this kind of war. They just didn’t have enough men or materiel.
Above is Alex in front of some of the earthworks. Below is a reconstruction.
Lee was trying to escape to the west, where he could hook up with General Joe Johnston, while Union forces tried to bottle them up. Lincoln’s fear was that the war would go on and maybe turn into a guerrilla war. The Petersburg campaign has that endless war feeling anyway. They were regularly taking thousands of casualties each DAY. The soldiers were becoming more accustomed to war and much more cynical. They came to understand that the war in Virginia was ending and nobody wanted to be the last man killed. There is a good novel about this period called “Last Full Measure” that captures some of the feeling.
Above is a soldiers’ house. It looks like a playhouse, but it held four men. Below is what is left of the crater. Union miners from Pennsylvania made a tunnel under the Rebel positions and blew up Confederate fortifications. Unfortunately, the attack didn’t go well. Union troops poured into the crater and many were trapped there. It looks bigger in real life. You also need to remember that there has been almost 150 years of erosion and filling in.
America’s Civil War was remarkable in its ending. In France, terror followed revolution. The Russians and Chinese murdered millions of people in similar situations. In fact, protracted Civil Wars almost NEVER end without significant retribution and bloodletting. I think that I can safely say that the ending of the American Civil War was unique in human history. The victors were generous and the vanquished honorable. Because it happened as it did, we think of it as inevitable, but the decisions made in April 1865 were not foreordained.
Grant allowed Lee’s soldiers to keep their side arms and their horses. Robert E. Lee instructed his men to go home and become good citizens. Most did.
I know that some scholars talk about the “myth” of reconciliation and point to the problems that persisted. Some people still hold a grudge for Sherman’s march through Georgia and the Carolinas. You have to ask the “compared to what?” question. In most countries, more people die violently AFTER the wars. Not in America. Rebel leaders are usually executed. The lucky ones are only imprisoned or exiled. Not here. Can you imagine Cuba exiled welcomes back by the regime? Russian exiles lured back were usually murdered.
The Civil War was the worst war in American history. The destruction was horrendous. Yet after it ended … it ended. April 1865 was probably the most remarkable month in world history. This just doesn’t happen very often – or at all. I think we should take time to think about this. If others had learned from the Federal-Confederate example, we might have avoided most of the carnage of the 20th Century.
Above is a battlefield at Five Forks. When the fight turned into a battle of attrition, most of the engagements were small, but this was a key turning point. Phil Sheridan defeated troops under the unlucky George Pickett, who was off having a fish dinner and didn’t return until it was too late. The collapse of the Confederate position at Five Forks led directly to Lee’s decision to abandon Richmond & Petersburg. It was the beginning of the end for the Army of Northern Virginia and for the Southern Confederacy, and so Five Forks is sometimes called the Confederate Waterloo. There is nothing much to see here today. The trees and fields have grown back. It is hard to believe that war was ever close to this peaceful, bucolic place.
My mother was born on this day in 1923. I never got to know my mother after I was an adult. She died when I was seventeen. So my memories are seen through the eyes of a child or at best a teenager. The one thing that I remember very clearly was that I was always sure that she loved me. Everything else is less important after that and I know that she shaped a lot of my character.
Our house was the center of family activity while my mother was there. She had three sisters (Mabel, Florence & Lorraine) and two brothers (Harold & Hermann) and we had much of the extended family, minus Harold, who I don’t remember ever meeting. The family didn’t get along with his wife, Sophie. I don’t know why. All the other aunts and cousins would come over to play cards. Usually the cousin would come too, so while I had only one sister, I feel like I had lots of siblings. I really don’t know what card games they played. I just recall the constant chatter of a kind of mixed German-English. “What’s spielt is spielt” and “now who’s the high hund?”
As I wrote above, I didn’t get to know my mother as much as I would have liked to and I am astonished at how much I don’t remember or maybe never knew. Kids are rarely interested in their parents’ life stories until they get older, maybe because they just cannot believe their parents were ever young enough to have anything to say. Besides, kids in my generation spent most of their time outside and away from the house. Parents and children have much more intense relationships these days, if for no other reason than that they are together when parents drive the kids everywhere and arrange various teams, trainings and activities. We didn’t have a car and we didn’t belong to any organized activities. I spent most of my days hanging around outside with my friends who lived nearby and I didn’t ask much. I know she was born Virginia Johanna Haase (Mariza has her middle name). Her father was Emil and her mother was Anna (Grosskreutz). She grew up on the South Side of Milwaukee and married my father after the war. Of her childhood, I know little. Her father was an engineer who remained employed throughout the Great Depression, which was evidently a rare achievement. She was an unenthusiastic student in HS and dropped out in the tenth grade, but she always encouraged education for my sister and me. She worked at Allen Bradley during WWII but not long enough to get Social Security benefits. After she married my father, she no longer did any paying work, besides occasionally free-lance catering with her sisters. My mother made really good German potato salad, which was always in demand at family gatherings.
Ma
Ma was phenomenally good natured and I remember her always being cheerful. My father told me that he was lucky to get my mother to marry him, since she was extremely popular because of her open personality. She later became a woman of substance, as you can see in the bottom picture. My father was fond of big women, so I guess they had a good thing going.
My father enjoyed beer, but Ma drank only a little. She had one bottle of Gordon’s Gin in the downstairs refrigerator. She had a drink at Christmas and that bottle was down there as long as I remember, only gradually emptying. It was still half full when she died.
Sad to say that my most vivid memories are from the end of my mother’s life. I was riding my bike up to the Kettle Moraine State forest when my mother went into the hospital for the last time. It was a big trip that I had planned for some time. My parents kept my mother’s urgent condition from me so as not to ruin it. When I called from the pay phone at the lake, my father told me that ma was sleeping. I thought that was odd, but didn’t think that much about it. When I got home she had gone to the hospital. I never saw her again.
We talked on the phone, but my mother didn’t want us to visit her in the hospital during the last days. I feel a little guilty about that, but it was a good decision. She wanted us to remember her from better times and I do indeed remember her healthy and happy instead of what I imagine it must have been after the chemotherapy and ravages of cancer.
My father got a call from the hospital about dawn on the day before she died. I heard him talking on the phone and inferred what was happening, but didn’t come out of my room when he went to the hospital. We didn’t handle the whole thing very well, but in retrospect I am not sure how it would have worked out any better if we did things differently. I lived in dread the whole day, but she didn’t die that day. I know it is illogical but I convinced myself that she would be out of the woods if she only survived the day.
But miracle recoveries happen only on television & in the movies.
They cut down the last of the big elm trees soon after Ma died. I thought it was symbolic and I paid special attention. She loved those trees and felt bad as they succumbed, one-by-one, to the Dutch elm disease. The tree by the alley was the last survivor near the house, and Ma was happy to have at least one left. It was in its yellow fall colors as I watched it fall to the ground. It was a pleasant fall day with wispy clouds.
I don’t want to end on this sorrowful note because that is not the end of the story. Among many other things, my mother left me a special legacy. Ma followed my various interests and encouraged them. All I needed to do was mention an interest in something, and soon a book appeared about it.
I have to thank my mother for all the books on dinosaurs, ecology and history. Even more important, she gave me the gift of reading itself. A well organized or impressive child I was not, but my mother had confidence in me anyway in a way that only a loving mother can. My first grade teacher put me into the slow reading group and I lived up to the low expectations. My mother complained to the school, essentially arguing that I was not as dumb as I seemed and my problem was not that the reading challenge was too great, but that it was not great enough to hold my interest. She convinced my teacher to put me into a higher reading group. Although I couldn’t meet the lower standards, I could exceed the higher ones with Ma’s help. This kind of paradox is not uncommon. I wonder how many kids w/o mothers as good as mine were/are trapped by the gentle cruelty of low expectations. Ma saved me from all that. She just expected me to succeed. I did, by my standards at least.
Thanks Ma. I wish you could have met the grandchildren. They would have loved you.
