Andrew is....
Jul. 1st, 2009 10:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rhu... too paranoid to post anything on Facebook about being hundreds of miles away from home. So here are my status updates.
Sunday we drove to my parents' house. We got there in time for the kids to spend a couple of hours playing with their cousins, who had been staying at my folks' while my sister and b-i-l attended her 20th HS reunion.
Monday I worked from my parents' home while H and my mom took the kids to the NY Hall of Science. Monday night the six of us went to Chattanooga. Mmmmmm.
Tuesday I worked again, and then Tuesday night I took H out for her birthday. Le Marais followed by Blithe Spirit. I miss NYC. I love what they've done with B'way in Times Square. Dinner was good; they haven't recaptured the quality that they had in the '90s but the food was quite enjoyable and our waitress was very good at managing the time. (We told her when we sat down at 5pm that we had to make a 7pm curtain, and we were out at 6:40.) The show was very enjoyable; Angela Lansbury was quite good even if she missed a few lines; Rupert Everett was right on; Michael Blakemore's direction made great use of the difficult sight lines in the Schubert Theatre. I miss going to see several shows a year, and hope that we can get back into that habit.
Today we drove to Philly and spent the afternoon at the Franklin Institute. The highlight for me was getting to look at and through Galileo's actual telescope. It was almost a religious experience. The exhibit of the Medicis' artifacts was quite thorough and interesting, but you really need to know the science going in. As a FI employee said when I was discussing it with her afterwards, they're presenting it as an art exhibit --- which it certainly could be, but that's disappointing from the FI. The last room of the exhibit has some great stuff about the physics of optics, but that should have come first to provide context, and it's a pity that all the explanation of how astrolabes (for example) work was in the form of 17th-century Italian folios. Which was great for the Medicis, but not so much for 21st-century Americans who aren't coming to the exhibit with a thorough grounding in physics.
After the FI we drove past Independence Hall to show the kids, and then we met George and Julie and their daughter Gillian for dinner at a kosher pizza place on the Main Line. It was delightful. After that, we drove to Baltimore, where we're spending the night before proceeding on to DC in the morning.
The GPS has been a great asset. It's great being able to be a little spontaneous --- "Hey, I need coffee. I wonder if there's a Starbucks not too far out of our way. There is? I'll add it as a waypoint!" It's great not having to track a map in the dark during a ferocious downpour. It's great that it told us about a significant delay on the Van Wyck this morning that wasn't on the radio traffic reports, and routed us up onto the service road, saving us 10-15 minutes.
However, I do miss having the bigger picture at times.
While our cheap Ramada motel has free wifi, our more expensive hotel in DC doesn't. If the Starbucks down the block has free wifi for people with a Starbucks card, I may yet be online for the next week, but otherwise this is probably the last you'll hear from me until we return to Baltimore next week for the NPL convention. And don't expect the level of detail you got when we were in Israel, regardless.
Sunday we drove to my parents' house. We got there in time for the kids to spend a couple of hours playing with their cousins, who had been staying at my folks' while my sister and b-i-l attended her 20th HS reunion.
Monday I worked from my parents' home while H and my mom took the kids to the NY Hall of Science. Monday night the six of us went to Chattanooga. Mmmmmm.
Tuesday I worked again, and then Tuesday night I took H out for her birthday. Le Marais followed by Blithe Spirit. I miss NYC. I love what they've done with B'way in Times Square. Dinner was good; they haven't recaptured the quality that they had in the '90s but the food was quite enjoyable and our waitress was very good at managing the time. (We told her when we sat down at 5pm that we had to make a 7pm curtain, and we were out at 6:40.) The show was very enjoyable; Angela Lansbury was quite good even if she missed a few lines; Rupert Everett was right on; Michael Blakemore's direction made great use of the difficult sight lines in the Schubert Theatre. I miss going to see several shows a year, and hope that we can get back into that habit.
Today we drove to Philly and spent the afternoon at the Franklin Institute. The highlight for me was getting to look at and through Galileo's actual telescope. It was almost a religious experience. The exhibit of the Medicis' artifacts was quite thorough and interesting, but you really need to know the science going in. As a FI employee said when I was discussing it with her afterwards, they're presenting it as an art exhibit --- which it certainly could be, but that's disappointing from the FI. The last room of the exhibit has some great stuff about the physics of optics, but that should have come first to provide context, and it's a pity that all the explanation of how astrolabes (for example) work was in the form of 17th-century Italian folios. Which was great for the Medicis, but not so much for 21st-century Americans who aren't coming to the exhibit with a thorough grounding in physics.
After the FI we drove past Independence Hall to show the kids, and then we met George and Julie and their daughter Gillian for dinner at a kosher pizza place on the Main Line. It was delightful. After that, we drove to Baltimore, where we're spending the night before proceeding on to DC in the morning.
The GPS has been a great asset. It's great being able to be a little spontaneous --- "Hey, I need coffee. I wonder if there's a Starbucks not too far out of our way. There is? I'll add it as a waypoint!" It's great not having to track a map in the dark during a ferocious downpour. It's great that it told us about a significant delay on the Van Wyck this morning that wasn't on the radio traffic reports, and routed us up onto the service road, saving us 10-15 minutes.
However, I do miss having the bigger picture at times.
While our cheap Ramada motel has free wifi, our more expensive hotel in DC doesn't. If the Starbucks down the block has free wifi for people with a Starbucks card, I may yet be online for the next week, but otherwise this is probably the last you'll hear from me until we return to Baltimore next week for the NPL convention. And don't expect the level of detail you got when we were in Israel, regardless.
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Date: 2009-07-02 03:56 am (UTC)