It has been a busy few weeks for me. But here is a hodge podge of an update. A couple of weeks ago, I hosted a small “housewarming” party at my new house where the only picture we took was this one:
You can catch a glimpse of my attempt at a Nate-level cheeseboard. It was a nice little soiree and several people brought bottles of rose, which I always appreciate!
I also purchased a two DVD set from the Walmart $5 bin (formerly the $3 bin) which included the Gwyneth Paltrow Emma and the Emma re-telling “Clueless”. I have to say I enjoyed both movies. Rachel Portman did the music in Emma and even though it was basically the Cider House Rules soundtrack, you can’t go wrong. I will never understand how Toni Collette has a career, but despite her presence, I enjoyed the movie. Mr. Knightly should have made more movies.
After our whirlwind trip to upstate New York, which I enjoyed immensely, I was pleased that Mr. Smith could barely contain his excitement to be home again.
He continues to make friends with everyone we meet on our walks–except for a beagle that he cannot tolerate. The poor beagle gets a low growl or full bark whenever he passes the house or they meet on the street. Guess Mr. Smith will not be a Snoopy fan. And because he’s just so cute, here’s a gif of him continuing to channel his inner TR.
My mother tagged me in an instagram post about Skippy, the famous Wire Fox Terrier known for playing Asta in the Thin Man and Mr. Smith in The Awful Truth. Did you know he got paid $200/week to make movies while his trainer only got paid $60?!
100% justified. Just look at that dog studying his pages.
Please note, the algorithm serves my mother tidbits like that. Here’s what I get.
It’s taken me several days to get my house back in order after our little foray into the world last weekend. I did not take my laptop with me, so I was off the internet for about four days except for a few quick Instagram checks on my phone. I have to say it was a nice break. I should take note.
Anyway, I have been catching up on my reading and here are some good links.
I have followed this lady’s blog for several years. She really walks the walk. “Years of higher education cannot compare to the visceral theology of a disability diagnosis. We are forced to tread the Gospel road of humility, where the way is rough, but holy. We learn to guard and guide our child in the beauty of their brokenness, and ours.”
The Desiring God website always provides good daily reading material such as this one and this one. And this video from John Piper’s Instagram is inspiring.
Now don’t be shocked, but I was sorry to hear that Paul Reubens had passed away last week. I know that Carl Trueman says “we live in a childish age, where immaturity is lionized” and I agree with him. But I always thought Pee Wee Herman was amusing–maybe that shows how immature I am–but it’s true. He made me laugh. And I loved all the crazy characters on his kid’s show–Cowboy Curtis (Laurence Fishburne!), Captain Carl (Phil Hartman!) and the rest. The show was like an updated Captain Kangaroo and just as innocent. I also liked Pee Wee’s BigAdventure (1985).
I know that Reubens messed up, but he was resilient. He managed several comebacks–remember Murphy Brown?–and he kept working, mainly because he had a lot of friends.
Mount McGregor is a mountain in Saratoga County, New York. It is one of the principal peaks of the Palmertown Range.
“The Palmertown range is the most easterly of the five great mountain-chains which traverse the great wilderness. The Palmertown range begins on Lake Champlain, near Ticonderoga, and running down on both sides of Lake George, crosses the Hudson above Glen’s Falls, and running through the town of Wilton, ends in the high ground of North Broadway, in Saratoga Springs.”
(History of Saratoga County, New York)
The mountain was renamed after Duncan McGregor purchased it for back taxes and built a hotel called the Mountain House in 1876. In 1881 McGregor sold the mountain to the Saratoga, Mount McGregor and Lake George Railroad, owned by Joseph Drexel who constructed a narrow-guage railroad from Saratoga Springs and built the Hotel Balmoral at the summit with accommodation for 300 guests.
In 1885 Drexel loaned his friend, seriously ill former president Ulysses S. Grant, the use of his personal cottage on the mountain. Here Grant spent the last six weeks of his life struggling valiantly to finish his memoirs before he died. Grant succeeded, put down his pencil and died three days later.
The cottage, preserved exactly as it was at his death, is now the Grant Cottage State Historic Site and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. We toured the house (after waiting for a DAR chapter to go through) and hiked down to the lookout spot where Grant enjoyed the spectacular view.
It was very cool. You can see Mt. Greylock in Massachusetts!
The hour and a half tour was given by a volunteer docent who really knew his stuff and was obviously an aficionado and admirer of Grant. It was really one of the best tours I have ever had–and I do not as a rule like tours, usually given by amateurs who do not know history or understand context and resort to telling “amusing” stories and making cracks about the olden days. This tour was also devoid of politics and or opinions. It was, however, an hour and a half long and as we were standing the whole time, I was about to die at the end of it.
Luckily, I was able to take a seat in exactly the spot where the Great Man himself sat on the front porch. (Not in the same chair, however, which is inside.)
You know how I love U.S. Grant, so this was a special place to be. Here are a few more pictures of the cottage.
By the way, the floral arrangements from his funeral are still intact 137 years later!
I feel that we are on the eve of a new era, when there is to be great harmony between the Federal and Confederate. I cannot stay to be a living witness to the correctness of this prophesy; but I feel it within me that it is so. The universally kind feeling expressed for me at a time when it was supposed that each day would prove my last, seemed to me the beginning of the answer to “let us have peace.” (Personal Memoirs)
Thanks to the boy who drove the rented Expedition like a fighter pilot to our various destinations and to daughter #1 who took all of these pictures!
This was the view out the window of our Uber as we drove home from the STL airport Sunday night–amazing cloud formations which were in fact much cooler and awe-inspiring than could be captured on my iPhone in a speeding car.
Likewise our long weekend in Glens Falls, New York flew by in a blur of socializing–something I, as a deeply introverted person, find exhausting–but I had a super-fun time with my DP’s extended family and it was a wonderful occasion to rally my own small family in a mini-reunion.
Everyone loved getting (for some a first) chance to hold baby Ida…
…and to dance with Katiebelle who partied like it was 1999…
Perhaps the sign of a great weekend/party is that no good pictures are taken–which would be the case this weekend. Suffice it to say, the bride was very beautiful, the groom dashing…
…everyone was dressed up, especially these lucky babes…
(Couture by Aunt Mary)
…and everyone had a great time.
I only cried once and that was during the groom’s dance with his mother when they played “Slave to Love” and I sobbed remembering how my DP used to dance to this song with my own baby Mary back in 1985. The years have flown by.
I love my DP and it was a rare treat to spend time with her and her family.
All too soon we had to pack up and start the arduous trek back to flyover country.
But stay tuned for tomorrow’s post about our one outing to a historic site–the U.S. Grant Cottage National Historic Site in Wilton, New York!
Well, (almost) the whole fam made it to New York for the wedding and back again. Tune in tomorrow for a full recap. In the meantime, be sure to check out DN’s blogpost from Friday in case you missed it!
Ahead of Saturday—the 20th anniversary of the pilot episode of The O.C. airing on Fox—a guest post from DN. Because August 5, 2003 marked a seminal moment in millennial culture.
The O.C. was a teen soap whose first seven hours debuted in August and September—novel timing for a premiere, when no other network was showing new or original episodes. The premise is simple: Ryan, an outsider from the wrong side of town (Chino, CA), is adopted by the wealthy and wise Sandy Cohen (Peter Gallagher) of Newport Beach, CA. Ryan lives in the Cohens’ pool house, attends high school with their nerdy but witty son, Seth (Adam Brody), and queen bee Marissa (Mischa Barton), who lives next door. There is an absurd self-consciousness to the show’s tortured plotlines and heightened emotion.
The first meeting between Ryan and Marissa involves an eyeroll-inducing homage to James Dean. It also includes the show’s only on-screen cigarette—a notable fact, given that part of The O.C.’s appeal was its edgy portrayal of sex and drugs among high schoolers. It felt fun and “adult.” It felt like summer.
In August 2003, I felt like an adult, but not necessarily in a fun way. I was home from college and working full-time for the Army, commuting every morning to the Pentagon. For a summer job, I was making real money—40 hours per week! And for a summer job, I was commuting pretty far, about an hour each way. That’s the time it takes to drive from Chino to Newport Beach.
Reader, they did not.
There’s too much to say about the first season of The O.C., whose 27 episodes (27 episodes!) tore through plot at a ridiculous pace. I haven’t even mentioned the drama between the parents on the show. Suffice it to say, the high schoolers act like adults and the adults act like children. All except the sage Sandy Cohen, who watches the drama from a slight distance and provides the show’s moral core. At one point, Marissa’s father, who has stolen hundreds of thousands of dollars and is under investigation by the SEC, lashes out at Sandy: “Who are you to tell me to get real? You live in a fantasyland! You’re married to the richest girl in the county. You live in a house you’ve never paid for! You have no idea what it’s like to provide for a family!” To which Sandy replies, “There’s more to providing for a family than money.”
No account of The O.C. is complete without mentioning some of the show’s legacies. First, and most important to me, is the show’s relationship to music. The O.C. had its finger on the pulse of “indie” music in the early/mid aughts, and it wore this cultural cred on its sleeve in the form of Seth Cohen, who basically shepherded the popularization of nerd culture. In a pre-MCU pre-streaming world, the fact that Seth’s taste in comics and music could even conceivably be coded as “cool” felt extraordinary.
But throughout The O.C.’s run, no song has had more lasting influence than Imogen Heap’s “Hide and Seek,” which is deployed at the end of the show’s second season, when Marissa impulsively shoots a man who is attacking Ryan.
The scene and its generic beats led to an iconic SNL sketch.
You can find the trope remixed across the internet, but my favorite is when mmm whatcha say came for Gandalf.
So Sandy was right: there really is more to providing for a family than money—you must also provide the memes. But it will be awhile yet until my sweet children are old enough to understand them.
On August 2nd, 1923–100 years ago–Vice President Calvin Coolidge and his wife Grace were on vacation at Coolidge’s family farm near Plymouth Notch, Vermont in the Green Mountains.
The farm house had no electricity and a phone that only occasionally worked. The couple went to bed early, but a little before midnight, they were awakened by a loud knock at the front door. A moment later, Coolidge’s father called up to Calvin to come down. President Warren Harding was dead.
Coolidge got dressed. He prayed with his wife. And in the early morning hours of August 3rd, he was sworn into office by his father John Calvin Coolidge Sr. who was a Vermont notary public and justice of the peace. By the light of a kerosene lamp, Calvin Coolidge became the 30th President of the United States. Since it was 2:47 in the morning, President Coolidge went back to bed.
With the 1924 election just around the corner, many expected Coolidge to be a lame duck President, but on his train ride back to Washington he began immediately to plan how to build upon Harding’s most important policies. His first order of business…limiting the government itself.
We could use old Silent Cal these days, don’t you think?
Well, it is August now and we are well into the Dog Days of Summer. We are finally getting out of town tomorrow–heading to Saratoga, NY to attend the wedding of my nephew Tim and Abbie.
We are very much looking forward to the festivities and to seeing our DP and her family, but the air travel will no doubt be arduous. Please pray for travel mercies for the OM and me, the boy, daughter #1, and daughter #2 and her petite famille.
In the meantime, here are some good links to worthwhile things:
August on TCM is Summer Under the Stars month with a different star celebrated every day. At first glance it’s not a great selection, but there are some good days in there!
This is the Introduction to the graphic novel, The Grand Inquisitor, but it serves as an excellent overview of Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. This novel is very relevant today in view of our culture’s desire to find technological/scientific solutions to the problem of Evil. “This way of thinking appalled Dostoyevsky. With his profound grasp of psychology, he regarded the materialists’ view of human nature as hopelessly simplistic. Deeply suspicious of what intellectuals would do if they ever gained the power they sought, he described in greater detail than any other nineteenth-century thinker what we have come to call totalitarianism. Even in its less terrifying forms, rule by supposedly benevolent experts was, he thought, more dangerous than people understood.”
Also, I read recently that the New York Times is disbanding its sports department. Oh really? If our local paper got rid of its sports department, there would be (literally) nothing left to read. Another nail in the coffin of print journalism I guess.
We are looking forward to a guest post from DN on Friday, so stay tuned!
The painting is “The Swearing In of Calvin Coolidge by His Father” by Arthur I. Keller, 1923.
Today we celebrate the day in 1876 when U.S. President Ulysses S. Grant signed a proclamation admitting Colorado to the Union as the 38th state. Because the country had just celebrated its centennial a few weeks earlier, Colorado became known as the “Centennial State”.
Several months prior, in December 1875, leading Colorado citizens gathered to draft a state constitution, among them our great-great grandfather John Simpson Hough, who represented Bent County.
He received 240 votes in the sparsely populated county.
Delegates to the convention came from every district in the soon-to-be state. They met at the Odd Fellows Hall, upstairs from the First National Bank, on Blake Street in Denver. Modeled after the United States Constitution, Colorado’s Constitution set the terms and duties of state government officials, and outlined the manner by which a law could be introduced and passed. It established the State Supreme Court, as well as district and county courts. A program for the supervision and maintenance of a public school system was created. A state tax system was developed, rules that regulate railroads and other corporations were adopted, and provisions created to amend that State’s constitution.
So join me tonight in a toast to the state of Colorado and to John S. Hough.
In science news, please note that the first of two full moons in August will reach its peak today, August 1, so be sure to check it out. And as an added bonus, both of the full moons this month are also supermoons!
And here’s a poem about the moon by Robert Louis Stevenson:
Have a good day! Read some history. Look up at the night sky.
The painting is “Moonlight Study” by Christian Friedrich Gille, 1831 .
*The motto of the state of Colorado: “Nothing without the Deity”
How was your weekend? Hope you managed to keep cool. We had more storms and this time the electricity at our house went out for an hour and a half! I was just packing a bag to go to daughter #1’s house, when it came back on. Such drama–these days we are lost without our precious electricity.
Poor daughter #2 and famille had their air conditioning go out on Saturday and had to wait all day to get it fixed. I am sympathetic, but back in my day, we didn’t have central air conditioning at all and we had to wait all summer for relief. We are very spoiled now, that’s for sure. We would go to the movies to sit for a few hours in the AC. Grocery shopping was also a diversion!
Anyway, c’est la vie. Saturday morning I went to a flower arranging workshop at church led by the floral director at Schnucks Markets. I learned a lot!
I like the fact that the flowers at our church are always done by volunteers. There is no “the flowers are given (i.e. paid for) to the glory of God and in thanksgiving for/in memory of by so-and-so” announcement in the bulletin. It is just an anonymous gift. But we in the flower guild do our best (for the glory of God) and every week the arrangements are very different.
After church on Sunday there was a reception for a lady who is retiring after working there for 24 years–one of those unsung women who make everything run smoothly in the office and, if they are lucky, are appreciated for being “hard-working” and “organized”. Lois was also lauded for her sincere faith. Well, “Whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men” (Colossians 3:23).
I watched a really good movie–Intruder in the Dust (1949) based on William Faulkner’s novel, which is basically a mystery story set in the deep South. It is the story of Lucas Beauchamp, an independent, land-owning black man, who is unjustly accused of the murder of a white man, Vinson Gowrie. Through the help of two teenage boys, the town lawyer and an elderly white lady, who figure out who the real murderer is, he is able to prove his innocence.
I had not seen this movie in many years. It held up. Shot entirely on location in Oxford, Mississippi, it has an air of authenticity that the backlot never would have achieved. The actors are all solid. The screenplay by Ben Maddow sticks to Faulkner’s book. The Director Clarence Brown, who grew up in Knoxville, Tennessee and apparently knew something about the South, was not even nominated for an Oscar for this movie, but he won the British Academy Film Award for it. (Brown holds the record for the most Academy Award for direction nominations–6–without a win.)
Not surprisingly, the film failed at the box office, not even earning back its negative costs according to studio records. There is, after all, no romance in this movie; there are no pretty girls. There is no real action to speak of–only the threat of action (a lynching). There are tense moments, to be sure, for our heroes as they ride around at night and dig up a dead body and, when they get the sheriff on board with their plan, dig the body up again. But American audiences were not interested.
It is said, however, that William Faulkner himself was pleased with the film and Ralph Ellison wrote that of the whole cycle of race-based movies released in 1949, Intruder in the Dust was “the only film that could be shown in Harlem without arousing unintended laughter, for it is the only one of the four in which Negroes can make complete identification with their screen image.”
Check it out. It’s worth a viewing. Then read the book!
“Some things you must always be unable to bear. Some things you must never stop refusing to bear. Injustice and outrage and dishonor and shame. No matter how young you are or how old you have got. Not for kudos and not for cash: your picture in the paper nor money in the bank either. Just refuse to bear them.”
Well, the first sleepover at Mamu and Pappy’s house is in the books.
Since the wee twins are not quite old enough to be introduced to our classic film favorites in their entirety, daughter #1 and I had the genius idea that we would introduce them to some favorite movie dance/song sequences from movie musicals. Their favorite was “Make ‘Em Laugh” from Singin’ in the Rain (1952):
Who can blame them?
We also watched the square dance/barn-raising scene from Seven Brides For Seven Brothers (1954), “Everything’s Up-to-Date in Kansas City” from Oklahoma! (1955), “Getting to Know You” from The King and I (1956), and the rehearsal scene from Viva Las Vegas (1964). When we watched “Do Re Mi” from The Sound of Music (1965) Lottie said, “They keep saying my name!”–Do re mi fa so la ti do! She was not wrong.
We also showed them the Moses parting the Red Sea sequence from The Ten Commandments (1956) because they love The Prince of Egypt (1998). They thought it was pretty cool, but were non-plussed to see the Pharaoh was also the King of Siam. Somehow this does not compute.
Anyway, all parties lived through the night.
*”Make ‘Em Laugh” by Arthur Freed and Nacio Herb Brown
dual personalities 