Category: USA

Happy New Year!

A lot has changed since last year when I wrote from Warsaw. We moved from Poland to New Hampshire via a trip across the U.S. I documented the trip on other parts of this webpage. This is what we are doing now.

We have been living in Londonderry, New Hampshire since September. Londonderry is an exurb, i.e. it has the population density of a rural area, but the demographic characteristics of a suburb. It is a good mix for us. I like the forests and fields, but we are fundamentally a city people. Our house overlooks a pond surrounded by a mixed white pine – maple forest. The water is dark because of geology and soils similar to northern Wisconsin’s. In the middle of the day the sun reflecting off the ripples turns the water into liquid sunshine and near the end of the day it reflects the trees like a mirror. It reflected the green leaves of summer and the crimson fall. Now all except the pine trees are bare and the pond is covered with snow. We got more than two feet of snow on December 7. It melted, but it snowed a couple of feet the next week. Now that has melted. I bought cross-country skis on December 6. I had to break my own trail, but it was good to get into the winter woods between melts.

These are some pictures from our back door showing the pond in some of its aspects.

Family Notes
Mariza is doing well at Mary Washington College. She got all As this year, except for one B. The teacher told her that he does not believe in grade inflation. I thought that was a good principle. I went over to McDonald’s and told them that I did not believe in inflation, but they still would not give me a hamburger for 15 cents. The class she got a B in was sociology, ironically the subject that invented grade inflation. I am proud that she is taking the hard classes. She got 93% in her calculus course. The school is very small and homogeneous. That is what we thought would be the good part, but the college and Fredericksburg are a little too small, so she is now considering moving to a bigger place. UVA is the leading option.

Alex is doing well at his new school in Londonderry. He evidently feels confident enough to argue academically with his history teacher, who seems to be a bit of an uninformed leftist. Alex is less enthusiastic about geometry and Spanish, but he is doing well in chemistry. A couple years back, at the American School in Warsaw, he had a tough science class. A lot of what he learned then is serving him now. He has been lifting weights regularly and is getting very beefy. I want him to start running, to get the other part of conditioning.

Espen is getting As and Bs. He seems to have the easiest time learning Spanish and the saxophone. I think the music and language skills are related and he is doing very well in both. The sweet music of the sax filters up from the basement. Often I can actually identify a melody in the cacophony and he is becoming noticeably better each day. The sax is actually a fairly complicated instrument, with lots of valves and holes. As a completely talent free individual, I am impressed by anyone who can make music in any way beyond whistling.

Chrissy has been working on the house and it is getting much better. She has been patching, fixing, painting and even some plumbing and electrical work. She is getting very good at these things. We still are not sure whether we will sell the house or try to rent it out. Either way, it is better to have a well-maintained house. One of Chrissy’s favorite TV show is “Trading Spaces” where neighbors change houses and renovate each other’s rooms. Professional designers, who generally inflict appalling designs on the unsuspecting homeowners, advise them. I worry sometimes that CJ likes some of them, but she has shown exemplary taste so far in our house. Below are house repairs. We put in a new tile floor. It was a lot of work tearing it up.

My assignment at Fletcher School of Law & Diplomacy at Tufts is great. I often wonder why the USG is paying me to do this. I have access to courses at Tufts, Harvard and MIT but don’t have to take the tests. I am learning a lot, some of which will be useful to the State Department but most of it is just – well – general education. In the last couple of days, for example, I attended a presentation on weapons of mass destruction, more or less related to my job, but I also attended a talk by a psychologist on how machines (and pets) can be programmed to mimic human emotion and spent a couple of hours at one of the Harvard museums learning about Rubens and his contemporaries. I will earn some of my salary spring semester, when I will teach a course on the U.S. image abroad. I have been reading and talking to people about the subject. I am recruiting a mix of students from various places in the world to make the discussion provocative. That picture of me is from the Fletcher webpage. They took a picturesque group, I think.

You can get a good education just living in the Boston area because of the free lectures and historical sites. I have been recruiting for the State Department. It is not too hard. We have many more applicants than places. I was a little surprised at the extent of the interest even at places like Harvard and Yale, where students have excellent job prospects. Students want to serve their country and they seem to like the fact that they have to pass a difficult test to get in the FS. (The only problem for the Department is that not enough “diversity candidates” pass the FS test.) Don’t believe the negative stories about today’s youth. Compared to my generation, they are smarter, harder working, healthier, and more tolerant. The drug and booze culture of my college days is considered old fashioned.

One of the most interesting things about living in NH is the primary election. All the candidates come up here and I have been going to see them. I am volunteering for the Edward’s campaign. I don’t think he will win the nomination and I intend to vote Republican, but there is no Republican race. Edwards is the best of the Democrats and it is good experience to participate in a campaign. Howard Dean will probably win. I really don’t like Howard Dean. We went to see him in Manchester. He is one of the few people who I like less after I got to see him in person. He is an angry little man. Literally a little man – he is about Espen’s size and build. People sitting next to me gave me dirty looks when I didn’t cheer for some of the stupid platitudes he repeated. When you get beyond his anger against George Bush, there is not much left. I don’t think it will be a good thing if he is nominated. The country needs both parties to be strong. Bush will beat Dean like Nixon beat McGovern. Such lopsided victories lead to arrogance. Edwards could appeal to a wider constituency, but it is not his year.

I got my next job lined up in Washington. I will be “Director for the Office of International Information Programs for Europe and Eurasia (IIP) – Eurasia just means the former Soviet Union. My group does speakers, digital videoconferences and Internet for the region. I also broadly oversee (in State Department jargon, I am the reviewing officer) regional information resource centers in Europe. I am hoping to get to do inspection tours – maybe Norway and Ireland in the summer and Italy, Portugal and Spain in the winter. That would be sweet. I am hoping to use some of what learned at Fletcher to improve the U.S. image.

I will get back to Washington on June 21. I will miss New Hampshire and Boston, but Northern Virginia is more like home. The kids are looking forward to seeing their old friends. Summers in Washington are hot and horrible, but spring and fall are really nice and winter is mild. We will probably move back into the townhouse in Vienna, VA.

Below are mixed photos. Top are Londonderry crossroads. CJ and Alex walking among the stone walls so common around here. Below are the kids at Christmas and Mariza taking her usual naps. Mariza has asked me to clarify. She was not merely taking a nap because she was lazy. She had her wisdom teeth pulled. Even with today’s modern dentistry, that is uncomfortable and tends to make you want to sleep off the pain.

We went to Mount Washington today. It is the highest point in New Hampshire and boasts the most variable weather in the U.S. The highest wind speed ever recorded in the world was recorded on the peak in 1934. For us, however, it was a beautiful day, just a little chilly.

Once again, I was impressed with the beauty of New Hampshire. The northern part of the state is mountainous and almost completely forest covered. What is not covered by trees features neat towns. I could live here for a long time. It is clean and peaceful. Beyond that, there is the intellectual power here of great universities.

This is the Bretton Woods resort at the base of Mount Washington. The allies met here in July 1944 and created the monetary system that helped ensure world growth for a generation after World War II. Most important aspects were exchanged rates fixed to the dollar and the dollar fixed to gold at $35 an ounce. The dollar replaced gold as the world standard. They also created the IMF, GATT (which evolved into the WTO) and the World Bank. It was a momentous meeting. Anti Globalists should hate this place. It was the start of our modern global economy. The dollar remained the “gold standard” until 1973. I don’t remember who caused it to fall. Probably the French or Richard Nixon. The institutions created at Bretton Woods are still with us.

The kids finally got to do something they wanted. Six Flags, New England is not as nice as Busch Gardens or Universal Studios. It has a much more industrial feel to it, more the carnival, less the garden.

Roller coasters

The most interesting aspect was the “Superman” roller coaster. It was the most exciting roller coaster I have ever experienced and the only one that I found a little scary. My previous favorite was Apollo’s Chariot in Busch Gardens. Superman has many of the same good attributes: you feel like you will leave the seat, it is very high and very smooth riding. In addition, it has a 221-foot vertical drop and it shoots down at 77 mph. Mariza and I waited an extra fifteen minutes so that we would get to sit in the front car. It was worth it for the thrill of looking straight down before going into the fall and seeing everything coming at you. The ride lasts more than two minutes, which is an unusually long time for one of these things. We had to wait for about an hour to enjoy these two minutes, but it was worth it.

Return of the forest

We drove down along the Massachusetts turnpike and then I –91. Once again I was amazed how much forest there is in this crowded area. According to what I have read, forest covers more of New England today than almost any time in the last millennium. 100 years ago, more than 2/3 of the land was pasture for horses and cows. Before that, Indians regularly set fire to the woods to encourage game species, such as white tailed deer, and to make it easier to move around in the woods. The forests were the heaviest when the Pilgrims landed in 1620. Smallpox and other European diseases had reached the Indian tribes before the Europeans themselves did. Indian populations along the East Coast had declined precipitously a generation before, and with fewer people to burn the forests, the trees had returned. The Pilgrims did not find a virgin land, as they thought, but they did find a land that had been widowed. Their accounts of the thick forests reflect this anomaly. You can tell what had happened by the types of trees they found. Northern hardwoods and hemlock would have replaced the pines, so famously a part of the landscape, if left undisturbed. The white pine forest peaks about a century after the forest regenerates. That is what the Pilgrims found, and that is what they thought was the natural landscape. The settlers set to chopping the trees for their own purposes and did a pretty effective job of destroying them. The forests reached their lowest point about 1920. Since then, the regeneration has been nothing short of remarkable, although the phenomenon is rarely remarked upon. It happens too slowly to be noticed and seems counter intuitive. As suburbs replace farms, it seems like there would be fewer trees, but think about what a farm looks like – not many trees are allowed to grown on a cornfield. A walk in the woods reveals the situation. You come across stone walls that used to divide farm fields and foundations that used to support houses. Now it looks like virgin forest. Once again nature returns.

It is taller than it looks in the picture. Notice the cars on the top about to go down.

We are looking for houses in New Hampshire and may have found one in a condo community called Century Village. It has most of the things we need and we think it would be easy to rent out, which is a big consideration since we plan to leave in a year. Pictures are below. Tennis and basketball courts are easy walks for the boys. There is a nice pool, but I don’t think we will get much use out of it in the winter months we will be here. The place we hope to buy overlooks a large pond and the roads nearby will probably make good running trails.

Londonderry is a very nice place. It is full of apple orchards and maple trees. Robert Frost’s house is nearby and you can see the birches, pines and stonewalls mentioned in his poems. The town has a Civil War monument that makes me think of Virginia. It looks like the same guys designed it. Of course these boys fought on the other side. The schools, both high school for Alex and middle school for Espen, are good, and New Hampshire schools are good in general. People take pride in their lack of sales and personal income tax. When I asked how the state can get by without the usual taxes, a couple people told me that they do without the socialistic policies of Massachusetts (their words, not mine). The live free or die state does not encourage welfare dependency. There seems to be some rivalry between the states. When we talked to a guy in Massachusetts about New Hampshire, he said, “sure you can live cheaper there, but you will be in New Hampshire.” He obviously did not feel further explanation was necessary. Unemployment is less than 3% in southern NH, but wages are low by regional standards. Londonderry is run by town meeting, in the old New England style. Ordinary citizens are involved in the government. I read the town meeting minutes on the Internet. People bring up whatever they want and evidently feel passionately about some pretty arcane things. The meetings must be more entertaining than television and I look forward to attending the September meeting.

I will also be very happy to be here in the run up to the New Hampshire primary. My guy will run without significant competition, but I will take pleasure in watching the dozens of Democratic dwarfs duke it out in the snow. Maybe I will get to meet them in town meetings. Among these guys, my favorite is Joe Liberman. National newspapers say that John Kerry and Howard Dean will have a leg up since they come from nearby states, but my initial impression is that coming from those states confers no particular advantage beyond a short drive. Unlike its neighbors, New Hampshire went for Bush in the last election, but is considered a swing state by strategists, so it might get some attention from the RNC.

The only downsides of living here are that I have to commute a fairly long way to Tufts (which means buying a second car) and we have to come up with a down payment to buy the house. It takes only about 35 minutes to drive from Londonderry to Tufts on Interstate 93 when there is no traffic (we tested it ourselves), but I can’t count on happy state of affairs every time I drive. I also understand that it snows around here. I noticed people have the habit of talking about snow in terms of feet and yards, not inches. This is probably not a good sign. Still, all things considered, life is good. I keep on looking for something bad about this assignment at Tufts, but I still can’t find anything serious. After a life spent honing the fine art of complaining, I am at a loss. Given time, however, I will come up with some appropriate sarcasm and figure out the nefarious plan State Department manifestly devised to mistreated me by making me come to a place I think is great and paying me to go to a school that – given my grades, SAT & attitude – would never let me in if I applied as a student.

Below is the pond near our house. Alex wants a little canoe so that he can paddle to a small island in the middle. I suppose he will only use it once or twice, but I think it might be a good idea to indulge him – with an old canoe of course. Mariza is doing the model pose in the picture. The woman in purple is the real estate agent Alina Tobin. She moved from Poland in the 1980s. We didn’t know that about her before we called the office. It is a small world. She was so happy to talk to someone who had been to her home country; I think we saved a couple of percentage points on the commission. She was a very nice woman, very helpful and, as an American by choice, very proud of her new home in New Hampshire.

Potential running trails steps outside the door. The scar on the road, I am told, is where they recently laid cable for high-speed Internet connections. This is good, since I hope to telecommute some days.

This is the view from outside the back door. The grass is not on our property, but we can use it. The best of all conditions – use without mowing responsibilities. You can’t see the pond on this picture. It is just on the other side of the first group of trees.

Inside. The place is not that big, but should be enough for us. It was built in the 1980s and still has that “look”, which I do not like too much. I actually like the pond and the trees. That is what draws me to this place. Most of New Hampshire is covered with trees, so I figure it can’t be too hard to get wood for the fireplace. I do enjoy making fires and I will enjoy making the boys spit wood. I really like to chop wood myself. It was always the service I provided to anyone I visited who had a wood stove. Anyway, it builds character. Chop your own wood and it will warm you twice, said Ben Franklin. CJ can fix house problems, such as the sliding doors. We will have to paint. This is the front room. Below are the potential boys’ bedroom (with loft) and the basement that CJ may make into another bedroom.

Reports have it that the boys don’t look happy in the pictures, so I asked them to smile. Espen complied with a fake smile. Alex made a special effort to look unhappy. But I caught them a couple second later looking sincerely happier. I think they will like this place.

Looking for houses.

We have been looking around in Winchester, MA. It is a very nice place, but house are expensive and a little old. It reminds me of my college days – the dumps I lived in then. One time part of the walls of our basement just fell in. I had to put up plastic sheets with duct tape to keep out the cold air. The landlord never bothered to fix the damage. By the time he got around to thinking about it, the winter of our discontent had been replaced by glorious summer and there was no immediate threat of cold air. I moved out before the next onset of cold weather. I think the word to describe most of the apartments we have visited is “funky”. I don’t like funky. Actually I like neighborhoods were everyone else lives in such houses but I no longer enjoy funky houses with “character”. I prefer sunlight and air, and the lack of musty smell.

I love the area, however. In Winchester, you can walk to all the stores. There are several lakes in town. Parks and running trails abound. There seems to be little crime, no litter and no graffiti. If I could find a non-funky house with enough room for the family – one that I could afford – I could be very happy here.

We are thinking of New Hampshire. It is a long commute, but housing is supposed to be much cheaper there and the towns are just a quaint. We are looking in Londonderry, NH. New Hampshire’s most famous natural monument was a rock formation called the old man of the mountain. I say, “was” because it collapsed. It hung from the same ancient mountainside since the last ice age and then a couple of month ago it just fell off. Nothing lasts forever. Elvis has left the building. I guess that is something I will never see, not that I planned to anyway, but there are lots of lakes and mountains I will get to enjoy. Another good thing about New Hampshire is that it has no income or sales tax. Government is small and close to the people. I also like the state slogan “live free or die”. It is on the license plates. Convicts make license plates. Imagine the cognitive dissonance when you spend your time behind bars stamping plates with the slogan “live free or die” – “live free or die” – “live free or die” – hundreds of times each day. I suppose that adds to the punishment. I don’t expect to become a convict and I would consider living in the Granite State just so I could have drive around with such a cool slogan on my plate.

Speaking of driving around, we have been noticing the strange driving habits around here. People drive slowly, but poorly. They are always cutting each other off, sometimes in spectacular fashion. It seems socially acceptable to make a left turn from the right lane or to pull out in front of oncoming traffic. Massachusetts has stronger gun control than Virginia. Do some of these things in the Old Dominion and you may get a quick and painful introduction to Smith & Wesson. You have to drive slowly around here because they mark the roads so poorly. You don’t see many signs in general and they don’t bother to mark major roads, except on major intersections. How stupid is that? If you are lost you stay lost. On the plus side, people here are tolerant of each other’s bad habits. I have not heard drivers beeping their horns as a form of protest. Of course, I have only been in the Boston suburbs so far. I have heard nothing good about traffic in Boston. Maybe conditions are different in the heart of darkness.

August 12, 2003

Salem, MA

In 1692 twenty people were executed for witchcraft in the famous trials. Most were hanged; one man was crushed by stones. Nobody was burned. By European standards of the time, this was not a big deal, but it was the most famous persecution in America. It all started when a group of girls were playing silly games and listening to scary stories. Soon they started to accuse their neighbors of making deals with the devil. In the climate of the times, they were believed. It was a horrible example of mass hysteria. Most of the people really believed in witches. We went to the witch museum, where the whole thing was portrayed as intolerance, and gives examples of anti Commie campaigns, AIDS crisis and racism. I don’t agree with the characterization. The witch-hunts were an example of superstition, lack of due process and maybe mass hysteria. The victims were not members of minority groups and the accusers were not people in authority. Nobody could say the obvious: that there is no such thing as witchcraft. One man who tried – a William Proctor – was himself accused of witchcraft and hanged. The closest modern parallel are trials having to do with accusations of sexual abuse. Today, licensed therapists replace the 1690s witch hunters. You have those famous trials of the 1990s, where children accused various adults without physical evidence. There were some guilty individuals, but it turns out that most of the abuse was created in the minds of the poor kids by therapists with agendas. It was very similar to the witch-hunts in methods. A couple years later, we all see how society was caught up in the hysteria and many of us feel ashamed. We forget that in both these cases the people who perpetrated these terrible injustices thought they were doing good in an evil world, and they did their nefarious deed in full view of the public with the willing support of “the people”. It was democratic. The jury at the first witch-trial found the defendant NOT guilty, but changed its verdict after the little girl “victims” wailed and cried and the public demanded the self-evident finding of guilt. It is easy to point the finger of blame at these benighted people of the past and let our tolerant selves off the hook. We can feel virtuous, but that would mean we learn nothing from the past. The real lesson is that we must rely on strong institutions and rule of law, not strong personalities and rule of the politically correct majority.

Modern Salem is a very cute town. We drove on to Marblehead on the coast and Marblehead Neck. That is even nicer. It is a lot like Disneyland. Everything is nice, and perfect and newly painted. I don’t think any poor people are living there, at least not after the police have swept through. The kids at the local tennis club all had nice white uniforms. There was an order on the headland. I tried to explain to Alex the difference between old and new money. A century ago, people whose ancestors made their money through war, slavery and piracy (otherwise known as the nobility) looked down on those who made it through commerce and industry (capitalists). I am not sure how it is now. The Kennedys are a big deal around here. Their money comes from smuggling booze and manipulating the political system. I am not sure if that represents commerce or piracy, but no living Kennedy has even actually earned an honest dollar. (You know that more people have died in Ted Kennedy’s car than in all the nuclear accidents in the U.S. ) I would be a lot prouder to earn my own money than get it from my father or grandfather. My father, in his wisdom, spared me the former embarrassment, and I have not yet achieved the latter. The old money is mostly gone, or shadowed into insignificance by much larger new fortunes. College dropout Bill Gates would probably not be invited to the ever shrinking circle of old rich, but he probably wouldn’t notice the shunning, or care if he did. I suppose going to the right school still makes a difference. You can always tell a Harvard man, you just can’t tell him too much at one time. The problem with being of the elite these days is that nobody knows about it anymore except you. In America you can’t lord it over others. What a shame.

Chris and John in Salem. CJ is scared of the witches of Salem. I am on the mobile phone trying to get pre-approved for a mortgage from USAA in case we buy something in New Hampshire, which is more frightening in many ways. Notice my new white beard. Last time I checked, it was reddish brown – the old keep getting older and the young must do the same. Now people mistake me for Sean Connery all the time. Notice the close resemblance. Imagine him without the toupee and me much better looking and there is no significant difference between us. Anyway, we both have white beards and that’s enough. Mine will be nicer in a month when it either grows in or I shave it off. I am growing a beard to compensate for my general lack of hair, at least that is what Mariza tells me. I just figured I should look more professorial for my new job at Tufts. By the way, I successfully resisted the urge to give myself more hair electronically with “Paint Shop Pro” or just substitute a picture of Sean. Of course I do plan to take a picture of the nicest house in Boston and claim that’s where we live – shit I should not have revealed my audacious plan.

An old Salem house. They look nice on the outside, but you know they are funky and smell funny on the inside. Also notice how narrow the place is and you can bet the bathrooms are foul. I like other people to live in such places because they are quaint. I prefer houses that look old on the outside, but have the latest of modern improvements on the inside. A good rule is to never sit on a toilet older than you are or step into a shower that remembers Ronald Reagan. Progress has been made. People who lived in these old houses would not have done so if they had a choice. Old fixtures are the true horrors of a haunted house.