Ragged Mountain

Sean and I finally made it to Ragged Mountain to go hiking this morning! We'd planned to go a bunch of times, but something (read: the as-yet-still-incomplete project) kept getting in the way. It was already 87 degrees and humid when we left at ten in the morning, but luckily it was much, much cooler in the woods, and once we got near the lake there was a nice breeze. The trail is 3.5 miles long, and is very steep in places--especially in the beginning, when it rises more than 300 ft in the first half mile. We were both rather out of breath by the time we reached the first crest, so it was good that it was at the beginning!

It took us about an hour and a half to do the full circuit (the website said 2-3 hours, but we were moving at a pretty fast clip), which takes you around the two lakes in the center of the preserve. It was beautifully serene and quiet. Aside from some squirrels, the only other creature we saw was a deer browsing through some foliage. At one point, you cross a land bridge between the upper and lower lakes that gives you an unrivaled view of the splendor of the water, surrounded on all sides by the forest. That was where we saw the curious structure in the photo above: a rickety old cabin built on top of a stone pier rising some some thirty or so feet from the water. The front door was padlocked, which was kind of ridiculous since it's in midair. However, we judged from a lip of stone protruding out from under the door that there must once have been some kind of walkway between the cabin and the land bridge, but what they needed an elevated cabin for, I have no idea.

All in all, it was a tough hike, but totally worth it. I was definitely glad that I hadn't gone on my own, as I had thought of doing a couple of weeks ago. My spirits would have flagged much faster without Sean there to keep them up!

They Like Me, They Really Like Me!

I got great reviews from my students from last semester! Sadly, no one called me a fox this time around, but several kids mentioned my impressive understanding of the subject matter (aw, shucks) and willingness to answer questions as what helped them most during the semester. One (guy, I think) even said that my sense of humor was what helped him most!

To the question "what would you change about the course," most kids didn't respond, while a couple mentioned less homework, and one urged me to be more lenient in my grading (unlikely).
The third and last question is about the instructor's sensitivity to diversity, and while several students pronounced me "very sensitive," one student bluntly assured the reader: "She's not racist or anything like that." Thanks guys!

Blacked Out

We lost power during a terrific thunderstorm yesterday at 5pm, and only got it back (albeit with repeated brownouts) at 11am this morning. Winds were gusting up to 85 mph, the rain was practically moving parallel to the ground, and when I ran out to the car at 5 to pick Sean up from work, getting totally drenched in the process, the wind was actually rocking the car. Sean's car is really low and heavy, so that was a little unnerving. Trees and powerlines were down all over Charlottesville, as we discovered when we tried to go out and find somewhere with power to get dinner and got caught in a huge snarl of traffic and heard on the radio that nearly every major road in the town was blocked by fallen trees. I think we traveled one or two miles, max, and it took us 30 minutes or more to get back to the apartment.

Since Sean doesn't even own a flashlight, and scoffed when I told him that my parents also kept candles and matches around for emergencies (he noted, not without basis, that my dad was totally paranoid), that meant we only had enough light as the sky would give us. Not having air conditioning wasn't pleasant either, but luckily the storm had cooled things down from the 104 degrees it had reached earlier that day. I was able to read on the balcony until 9 o'clock or so, but it was freaky not being able to turn on any lights in the apartment. It was also eerie to look out at the other buildings in the complex without seeing a single light, but at the same time hearing lots of people's voices as they mingled outside in the cooler air.

I ended up going to bed at 10 o'clock and listening to NPR on my earphones until midnight or so. It was so warm that we stripped everything off the bed and just lay there, but neither of us were able to get into anything resembling a deep sleep. I was pretty sure the power would come back on during the night, and I kept repeatedly dreaming that it had, only to crack open an eye at the clock and see nothing but its blank face. At 5am I was restless, and going out on the balcony I saw, to my great joy, that there were lights on in the laundry room of the complex facing ours. Saved! Except our power wouldn't go on, even after I flipped the breakers repeatedly. It turned out that that lucky apartment block was the only one in the whole damned complex (there are a lot of buildings) that had their power; everyone else lost theirs. Still, at the time I was certain that this meant that ours would come back at any moment.

A little later in the morning, with still no power, I went in search of the maintenance people to ask if they knew anything about when it would come back. We had a lot of perishables in the fridge, including some catfish fillets, that I was worried about. They told me to call the power company, so I called Sean's mom from the laundry room, where I was charging my phone, and she gave me the number as well as the news from their website that 48,000 people were without power in our area. The power company then told me the power was expected to return by 10 o'clock tonight. Unbelievable, especially with the temperature predicted to hit 93 today!

I ended up going to Walmart around 9am to get a cooler so we could pack the perishables with ice. Most of the street lights were out, and cops had to direct traffic at the intersections along Route 29, which is the single main artery leading out of Charlottesville. By the time I stopped back at the gas station near the apartment, they were down to their last couple of bags of ice, which I snagged. Luckily I had a few dollars in my wallet, because despite being open, their power was still down too: cash only. It's times like that that you realize how dangerous it can be to rely on plastic. Anyway, I got back to the apartment, stuffed as much as I could into the cooler, and began making plans with Sean to spend the day at the library, then find an unaffected restaurant and movie theater so we could stay away from the apartment. Just about 11, though, the wonderful sound of the air conditioner kicking in alerted us that the power was restored. The people rejoiced! Literally! There was some booing, later, when the power kept flicking off and on, but mostly it was rejoicing. Sadly, the catfish could not be saved; it had begun to smell fishy. We consulted the FDA's website and learned that technically, I shouldn't have eaten that soy milk with my breakfast either (but that was like 8am and I haven't died yet). We're keeping the other two cartons, which were unopened anyway. The jury is still out on everything else, like Sean's yogurt )which he tends to stockpile as if it were the yogurt-alypse), the mayo, etc.

Anyway, we survived the great blackout of 2010! What have we learned from this? Well, for one thing, we now know that JTD was not wrong to have plenty of flashlights, candles, and even a very old, black-and-white, battery operated TV on hand. It is really, really boring not to have electricity once it's dark. Also: air conditioning is AWESOME.

Night on the Town

Yesterday evening Sean and I drove to Staunton, a small city about 45 minutes away from Charlottesville, to see a production of Beaumont's "The Knight of the Burning Pestle" at the American Shakespeare Center. We had dinner beforehand at a cute little place called The Pampered Palate. We both had Greek salads with the tastiest feta imaginable on top, and Sean also bought a bottle of blueberry wine, which we have not yet tried. I vetoed his attempted purchase of peach-flavored port, however.

The theatre at the ASC is a re-creation of the Blackfriars Theatre in London, which after 1609 was taken over by a group of actors from the King's Men, including William Shakespeare. It became their winter playhouse, while the more famous Globe continued to be their summer venue. Blackfriars was one of the earliest indoor theaters, and (according to Wikipedia, as ever) was the first to use artificial lighting and to play music between the acts. The ASC won't let you take photos inside, but here's one from Google:

We had seats in the fourth row from the stage, which cost a pretty penny today but, as Sean pointed out wryly, would have been the cheap seats back in the day. The ASC tries to present its plays in as close to the original format as possible: that means the lights stay on, audience members are up on stage (and, in last night's show, occasionally pulled into the action), and the actors double or triple up on roles with minimal costume changes. I've seen Shakespeare done that way before, most notably the Macbeth we saw in high school (three orgasmically-writhing witches, anyone?), but not any of the comedies.

The play is an exercise in meta-theatre; it starts out with a company of actors doing a comedy about a couple of lovers, when a guy gets up out of the crowd (the row behind us, actually) and starts heckling. He and his wife (both dressed not in Jacobean, but contemporary middle-class attire, with her looking particularly Jersey-ish) start demanding changes to the play, and the rest of the show revolves around the players' increasingly farcical attempts to both satisfy their demands and keep their own play going at the same time. Beaumont's original play apparently included a lot of contemporary music, and the program noted that they substituted modern music instead so that it would more relatable for the audience. Translation: when we went in to sit down before the show, the actors were in the balcony, in full costume, singing "Eye of the Tiger," and at another point a harried husband fends off his wife by singing a version of Lenny Kravitz: "Jacobean woman, stay away from meeeee...." All in all, I thought it was pretty hysterical. It was a powerful reminder about how hard it is to do justice to a play, especially a comedy that calls for lots of physicality and bawdy gestures, just by reading it; a couple of times as I was laughing particularly hard, I found myself thinking that I probably wouldn't have found the lines funny at all by themselves, but acted out they were awesome.

We're going to go back on Sunday night for a free preview of Othello. It'll be interesting to see the range these actors can play in just the space of a couple of nights!

Mmmm

That's two pounds of fresh-picked sweet cherries, courtesy of yours truly! Yesterday we went to a potluck dinner held by one of the faculty in Sean's department, and one of his professors told us that she had just been cherry picking with her kids the day before, and said that although it's the very end of the season, I might be able to get some if I went today. Sean didn't come, as he was supposed to be working on his project (due to the same professor), but as I type this he's continuing what must be a near-record streak of procrastination.

On the map, the orchard was pretty close, only 15 miles away, but getting there reminded me how very rural Virginia can be, and how much of a surburbanite I really am. After heading down Route 29, a major thoroughfare, I turned off onto county road 633 (everything hereabouts is a county road), which is a pleasant, if narrow, little road that runs by some farms. Then it got really narrow, with no shoulder, leaving me uneasy how this would work if another car came around one of the turns. Then this skinny little strip of blacktop stopped being paved at all, and became a very bumpy gravel lane that started to rise steeply, winding through the mountains. Every fifty feet there was a completely blind curve, so I was driving about 20 miles an hour and hoping that no local was about to come speeding through. The road was so rough that I thought the car might shiver to pieces right underneath me, it was shaking so badly, and the road behind the car was completely obscured by the dust and dirt it kicked up. This was terrain suited to a pickup truck, not a 1994 Buick LeSabre!

By now I was in a densely wooded area, with the trees occasionally breaking to reveal beautifully lush valleys below. At one point I glanced out the window at a particularly nice view, only to look back and see a deer running across the road in front of me. I'm used to deer, but not in broad daylight. As the car shuddered further up the road, there were a few houses dotted here and there. Their sheer isolation caused my inner suburbanite to wonder, How the hell do they deliver mail up here? Jesus, what do they do when it snows? I mean, Sean was trapped in his apartment complex for four days this past winter, because no one in Charlottesville owns a shovel and there are so few plows. What did this people do, ski down the mountain?

Going seven miles on this road took about twenty minutes, but eventually I reached the orchard. It was indeed the very end of the cherry season, so the trees had been almost completely picked over, but I was able to come up with my two pounds of cherries after about an hour of squinting under the tree branches, looking for that elusive bit of dark red. It's more fun to pick cherries than it is blueberries (though we plan to do that too, in August), but it's not cheap: my two pounds cost $9, more than they would in the supermarket. But the taste. They're fucking delicious! Granted, I'm not a connoisseur, having only begun to eat fresh cherries last year in Spain, when our grocery-store breakfasts consisted of them together with bread and jam. Still, Sean was in agreement that these were the best damned cherries he'd ever tasted.

Next year I'll have to come down earlier so that we can hit the orchard when the trees are still loaded with fruit. Honestly, I'm not sure what I'd do with more than a couple pounds of cherries (blueberries freeze really well, so they're easy), but hey, a surfeit of delectable fruit is never a bad thing. Next time, too, Sean can drive!

A Change of Scenery

Last weekend was a long one! I traveled from Philadelphia to NJ to NY for a wedding, a bridal shower, and a bachelorette party, then back to Philadelphia and on to Virginia. Quite the whirlwind tour, but it was fun! Now Sean and I will be in Virginia until the beginning of July, when we head north again for Anna and TJ's wedding.

Virginia really is lovely, there's no denying that. Since Charlottesville is only 20 miles away from the Blue Ridge Mountains, you can see them towering in the distance whenever you're on a slight hill. I've been to a couple of the parks in the past week, both of which were serene and beautiful, if not particularly challenging in terms of their trails. When Sean has a day off (he's working Tues-Sat) and the weather is nice, we're going to go to Ragged Mountain, where the trail climbs 300 ft in the first half-mile!

We also have tickets to see a play called "The Knight of the Burning Pestle" at the American Shakespeare Center in a couple of weeks. This is the description: "Imagine Homer and Marge Simpson buying tickets to a Chekhov play and then climbing on stage to redirect the show with Bart as the star, and you have some idea of the fun Beaumont unleashes in The Knight of the Burning Pestle. Loaded with laughter and song, this play is a celebration of the way Elizabethan audiences expected to be a part of the action." I'm excited!