Happy Birthday to Us!

These cool cats celebrated their birthdays this past weekend!

DH reached a milestone birthday this year, and I originally wanted to have an open house/birthday party, but...pandemic. And he didn't want a Zoom party. So we just dragged out the celebration(s).

Friday night after dinner, we opened the cards and gifts that had already arrived while enjoying the Dairy Queen ice cream cake I had gone 20 minutes out of my way to pick up on my way home from work (Dear Husband's request). Thank you to family and friends near and far for thinking of us!

This was the white cake from DH's work colleagues. I think he was equal parts thrilled and chagrined that the cake was "on fire"--and that was with only nine candles! Some were accidentally the relighting kind, so it took a couple tries to blow them out for good. Normally the staff would help him eat it, but because of ongoing restrictions at church, it is up to just the two of us.

Saturday was his actual birthday. That evening I had arranged seats in the upper deck of PNC Park to watch the Mets play the Pirates. It was an unseasonably cool and wet night for FOUR HOURS of baseball, the first three of which were excruciating to watch in a stadium whose outfield bleachers were wall-to-wall New Yorkers, not to mention the Mets fans scattered throughout the other sections. The Pirates kept trying to rally with two outs. Finally, in the 8th inning they got on the board with 5 runs, and although the Mets earned an insurance run in the top of the 9th to go up 7-5, and in the bottom of the 9th the home team's star batter struck out looking on a full count with the bases loaded and one man out, the catcher came up to bat...and hit a walk-off grand slam! There was pandemonium! Fireworks! A long spontaneous ovation! Do I know how to pick 'em, or what? Sometime after 11pm the official fireworks began, and we discovered that I had chosen exactly the wrong seats for a good view of them. Ah well. It's still a night we will remember.

Sunday after church we went out to lunch with a friend at a place where the street had been blocked off to provide outdoor seating. Monday was my birthday and a partial work day for me, on either side of an hour-long massage. In the evening we went out for our first fancy, indoor dinner since the pandemic began. We were hoping to be seated in the gorgeous main dining room of The Grand Concourse, but given the small volume early on a weeknight were put in the side room overlooking the Allegheny Trail, the Monongahela River, and the Smithfield Bridge. It was just okay, given the price.

Afterwards we rode the Monongahela Incline up to Mt. Washington, since we'd only ever ridden the other incline (Duquesne). We walked along Grandview Drive and sat for a while looking at the city, but due to the wildfire smoke from Canada, everything was hazy and orange. Finally, on Tuesday we had an after-work pool party at some friends' house, just the four of us (and some cake). For our second pandemic birthdays, they were pretty good. Thank you for thinking of us!

TSPGH: In miniature

Dear Husband and I recently took an evening walk after dinner. The night was surprisingly mild for July. Because the sun had not set yet, we decided to walk through the grounds of the Frick House. Henry Clay Frick (1849-1919) and his wife, Adelaide Howard Childs Frick (1859-1931), lived at "Clayton" from 1883 until 1905, when for business reasons they mostly relocated to New York City. (Frick had fallen out with Andrew Carnegie over labor relations at the steelworks.) Today the mansion is open for tours (currently under renovations), the garage holds old cars, and there is a small separate art museum; the "big Frick" is in the Big Apple.

The greenhouse--which looks like a smaller version of the Phipps Botanical Garden--was open the evening we were there. It holds a variety of common and exotic plants. Next door is the red-brick "Playhouse." Now the site of staff offices, it was a small house with child-sized furniture where the Frick children could practice their future social roles: Helen (1884-1984) invited other girls to tea, and Childs (1883-1965) drilled the neighborhood boys in military-style exercises. (It was the Gilded Age/Age of Empires; he went on to become a naturalist.)

I just hope that when it is safe again, we can attend Summer Fridays at the Frick--free, live lawn concerts to which you could bring a picnic or buy from food trucks. We never went as often as we wanted to or should have, and with the end of residency in June 2020, I had been looking forward to many evenings in a lawn chair, watching other people's kids while listening to good music. One more thing that COVID stole, and something we will miss about living in this neighborhood if we successfully purchase a house next spring.

Friday on the move again

Monday we traveled to the Pocono Mountains. Tuesday we rafted the Lehigh River. Wednesday we explored Scranton's rail history (part 2). Thursday we ventured out cautiously in the rain.

Friday morning, fed and packed, we hit the road south to Harrisburg. Destination: the National Civil War Museum. A private museum that opened on the top of a reservoir hill overlooking the state capital in 2001, it claims to be the only one in the country to present an unbiased view of the conflict, its causes, and its human tolls. You can see it was cloudy when we arrived, and it tried to rain on us while we ate a picnic lunch under a tree toward the end of our visit.

This is "Moment of Mercy," depicting a Southern soldier giving water to a fallen Union foe.

Looking north/northeast from the observation deck,

under a large American flag that really needed to be retired due to its frayed edge.

Walk of valor with bricks donated by descendants of combatants; there are not one but two for Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, the Maine professor who while Colonel held Little Round Top at the Battle of Gettysburg and later became Brigadier General, Governor of Maine, and President of Bowdoin College.

This was a very well done museum, well worth the 2-3 hours TripAdvisor recommends scheduling. In my opinion they tell a pretty conventional narrative, enlivened by a variety of artefacts, dioramas, and especially the personal vignettes from different vantage points (enslaved mother, escaped slave, poor Southern farmer, soldiers and women on both sides) carried through the course of the conflict.

This diorama depicts part of the battle of Antietam/Sharpsburg (September 17, 1862). They also had video of a retired professor from Virginia Tech discussing some of the military history. 

Here are the obligatory food and medicine photos. There was also a thread of placards on African-American experiences you could follow throughout the museum. Most of the interactive exhibits had been removed due to COVID, but I hope those are coming back, not least because many people are vaccinated, and we now know that this virus is rarely transmitted on surfaces. (Which isn't to say that other pathogens aren't, but maybe keep the hand sanitizer dispensers and bring back the flip books and other movable parts.) As it was, I think I was the only person in the museum wearing a mask, as I was not interested in bringing the Delta variant back to the clinic with me.

After all of us had seen everything we wanted to, and checked out the gift shop, we hopped in the car for a short leg to the Amtrak station. The train was late leaving Harrisburg, but we managed to make up most of that time before we reached Pittsburgh. We spent this ride losing the fight with the WiFi and listening to the 20-somethings behind us giggling and discussing their jobs, family secrets, and genealogies. Two more buses and we were home again, home again, jiggety jog, where Rosamunde wondered where we had been all week. It was a really wonderful trip, despite the weather and travel challenges.

Thursday in the rain

Overnight I woke up briefly to the sound of rain on the roof. Thursday morning dawned cloudy, and a light steady rain set in after breakfast. We spent the morning amusing ourselves on our computers, sewing, reading, and completing a 500-piece puzzle of—what else?—a cabin in the woods. We also got to watch a delicate doe and her speckled fawn grazing on the lawn right outside the living room window.

Suffering from cabin fever by lunchtime, we scouted out a local restaurant near a state park, so we could hike during a break in the showers. Although the internet promised us the joint was open, all in-person evidence was to the contrary, so we found a different café one little town over. Unfortunately, they took so long to serve us that it was raining again by the time we had eaten. The afternoon was spent much like the morning, but with Wimbledon tennis in the background. When the precipitation let up again after dinner, we hopped in the car and headed to the nearest trail. Bad Google directions aside, we took a short walk to a beautiful vista overlooking the misty Lehigh River Gorge.

Of course it resumed drizzling while we were on our way back to the car. Below is a "fairy glen" of ferns. Ferns really owned the place. From the hiking map we learned that that Hickory Run State Park had once been half-covered by a glacier, which left a boulder field, and its melt had carved a deep river canyon. The rocky path was made of crumbling red sandstone, and above us many different birds chattered and chirped (reportedly 6 kinds of warbler!). Next time we want to explore the “Shades of Death” trail, which is supposed to have beautiful rhododendron bushes and nothing at all to do with dying (anymore--maybe the earliest settlers had it rough). Back at the cabin, it was too wet to make a fire for s’mores, so we popped some microwave popcorn and introduced Dear Husband to the original [sic--only] Charlie and the Chocolate Factory movie with Gene Wilder as Willy Wonka.

Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday Part 1 and Part 2