The Saga of D.C. {Part 3}

Well, oh well. How can a week go by without my noticing that there hasn't been a post up here? Do you ever notice how they never seem to write themselves? Irksome nerve...

Tuesday in D.C. finds us at Mount Vernon. I know why George and Martha never wanted to leave. There are tourists milling everywhere, but it's so serene and peaceful and the views are absolutely breathtaking - though I don't envy anyone who had to bring supplies up to the house from the river. 

Everything in D.C. (and the surrounding areas, so it seems) have introduction videos. This is a good one. Pat Sajak (of Wheel of Fortune fame) tromps around Mount Vernon in colonial garb, filling you in on all the tourist experiences you can enjoy while wandering around the grounds and that is followed by a short film of George Washington's life. Real actors. Wow!

   

Then we wander through the paths that don't make sense and end up at the circle drive in front of Mount Vernon. I could die of historical bliss. There it is!

We line up for the tour. Unfortunately pictures aren't allowed in the house, so I make a point to try and memorize as many details as I can. 

The first building we enter is the visiting servant's quarters. Oh well, every tour starts out slow. 

We take the covered walkway to the house and peek in the windows since there's a tour ahead of us and we can't get in yet. I'm so excited I can hardly stand still.

The first room we enter is the formal dining/ball room. It's a lot smaller than I would expect a room  that needs to hold a posse of petticoats and skirts to be. But rumor has it that Washington planned the Battle of Yorktown in that room.

Then we step outside onto the back portico to see the view that greeted George and Martha every morning. 

When the tour in front of us moves on, we go through the double doors in the back (original to the house - now I know why Colonial houses are so drafty! I could stick a finger in the cracks.)

The foyer is rather small, but there are four rooms around it. One holds the harpsichord that their granddaughter Nelly played and one is the dining room painted green. A algae sort of green. I wonder at their taste until the guide explains that green is the most expensive type of pigment and thus a display of wealth. 

I still wonder at the taste.

We go up the curving stairs, aided by the original railing. I'm a history buff, so I get a thrill out of touching it. =D

Upstairs is the room where Lafayette stayed - the bed is quite short - and the room where Nelly Custis had her first babies. We walk through the yellow room to get to George and Martha's. The bed that George died on is there. 

Then down the stairs to George's office and out to the kitchen. Imagine cooking there in the middle of summer! 

There's quite a collection of outbuildings to go through. Stables, blacksmith shops, carriage house, secretary's quarters, barns, gardens, spinning house, laundry house and so on. We get to some of them and then replan and head out to go to Washington's Gristmill and Distillery. It's a few miles away from Mount Vernon.

We feel a bit awkward when we realize that we we're the only ones present for the tour. Not the worst thing that could happen. It'll be up close and personal at any rate! 

Some light summer reading

The mill and distillery are fascinating - as are the period costumes the guides wear. I've always wanted one.
A period costume that is, not a mill and distillery.

Back at Mount Vernon we have lunch and then give ourselves stomach aches by running down to the pier to board the Miss Christin for a tour of the Potomac. 

After we recover our land legs (took about a tenth of a second after disembarking) we visit Washington's tomb where he and Martha are buried side by side. And then a trek through the orchards and seed gardens. 

We go back up to Mount Vernon and take some snaps at the back of the house.








Then we walk to the servants quarters and the greenhouse.
There's a lovely garden out back with very intricately trimmed
boxwood hedges. I've read about that in books.

We've had our fill of gardens after a few minutes and we head on out to the museum. 

The museum is small and full of china (Martha was, so I heard, an avid collector of dinnerware) and then we go to the giftshop. I find the books.

Someday, I'll go back. It's been on of the most 

incredible days of my life.  

Now I feel as if I've accomplished something today. 

Till next time!

Break Out The Spoons!

Seeing as it's been a week since my last post (and that thinking about a post doesn't exactly get it down on paper...Blast!), I guess I should buckle down and type something out. Seems like I've been "just typing something out" for ages... Be ye comforted, though. You're getting more attention than my journal is. And that's for posterity! (Though I cringe at the thought of future generations reading it)

I suppose I can do my usual (these days) posts where I just dump all the information from the week in and give it a good stir or I could try to categorize.

Hmm...

Break out the spoons!

School has been going incredibly well. We're whizzing through everything and I feel like I'm in a blender. At least, my brain does... I'm getting to know my teammates really well and we love to joke around and goof off during skills. :) We also have a great time telling each other how nervous we are and how overwhelming everything is. Miss Patty, our instructor, has been incredibly encouraging to me lately and just this morning I opened up my school email to find a note from her that was absolutely unexpected and (forgive me for repeating myself) incredibly encouraging.

I also made the disconcerting discovery that it's not really fear about passing that's plaguing me about this course, but instead my own rampant laziness. What I had been thinking was fear was actually just my brain saying "this takes too much time! How are you ever going to be able to do anything fun with all this studying?" And my fear and uncertainty about actually doing this for a living was also stemming from the same onerous sin.

Yeah...

Not exactly the most inspiring discovery - or the most comfortable either.

I'm not saying that this is what I want to do with my life, but it's starting to look a lot better now that I've actually taken to heart that verse in Colossians: Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for men. 


We'll see what comes of all this now.

Other than that, I'm going on vacation Friday, Saturday and Sunday. It's an annual get-together with a bunch of other families at a state park where we stay in cabins and play frisbee all day and play games all night and have hymn sings and devotions and delicious meals and towel fights in the kitchen. It's awesome. :)

I'm reading Agatha Christie right now (nothing like a good murder mystery to relax you!) and I've just bought a million more books at Goodwill on scratch-off day which I have no room for. Right now they're sitting in bags next to my desk, waiting for...something.

I have been doing a little writing lately, but mostly I'm working on editing (sporadically, of course) my only completed novel: a 94,563 word tome which is in desperate need of polishing. It's so frustrating to go through all the work of writing it and then going back over it and find a million more things that need to be added, changed, rewritten, ect.

*sigh*

And I still haven't decided what my main character's brother is going to look like... I keep telling myself I need to figure that out, but I can't seem to make up my mind about it. Writing can be so scarily permanent at times.

What do you care about that anyway?

Good grief...

As a side note: I can't believe I have twelve followers! Thanks so much to all of you for joining and reading! I always write better when I have an audience. (No wisecracks please)

Well, it's time to sign off and gather more material from life for the next post!

'Till next time!

After 20 days, I attempt to catch up...

Well, now that I have lost all the followers I might have amassed by my unpardonable laxness on the posting end, I will now try to worm my way back into their lives with a post. Haha. In my defense, eight-hour work days Monday through Friday and a weeklong vacation does not a regular posting schedule make.
Anyway, this is what's been happening in my life lately:
- I work at a highschool close to my house doing summer cleaning of the facility. I am an expert at cleaning desks, windows and chalkboards along with the other smorgasbord that somehow collects dust and dirt during the winter months. I am still amazed at some of the things that have to be cleaned. Oh well. It's a job and it pays well enough for me to stay and not go out looking for accommodations more suitable to my tastes. I would love to work in a Christian bookstore or be a professional novelist. Sadly, I am not aware of any openings yet - most likely because I have not been looking for them.
- I went camping with my family, my mom's parents and my mom's sister and her family from June 19 to the 24th. It was cold and rained almost constantly every day but Monday and Wednesday and we, along with our games and paper towels, got rather soggy. To my chagrin, I had expected better weather and packed only one sweatshirt and no socks. Thankfully, I could borrow the latter from my brother and the former (with some careful handling) managed to make its way through the trip without getting majorly wet or dirty. On the upside, I did get better at softball and volleyball, which are sport staples on our trips, I won a mile-long round of Phase-10, I knocked off three or four chapters of Our Mutual Friend, and I learned how to play Big-2 (a Chinese card game).
- My summer reading resolution is tanking. I am stuck on page 161 out of 822 in Our Mutual Friend and progress further than that does not seem to be readily forthcoming. I did recently gulp down a book that is completely unrelated to any book-reading resolution I have made and was read because it happened to catch my interest and be within easy reach on my sister's desk. A Northern Light it was called and I would recommend it with emphatic reservations. Read here as to why.
- I forgot to bring Joyfully At Home with me last week and so my dear friend who lent it to me is going to have to wait a little longer to get it back. Truth be told, I completely forgot I had it until yesterday when I remembered.
- Yesterday, I took four orphaned baby birds to the humane society. If you have ever, ever driven a car with four squeaking baby birds in the passenger seat, you'll know how loud it actually is. Thankfully, they liked the talk radio host I had on or I would have gone stir crazy.
- I'm going strawberry picking in five minutes, which means that I must now end this delightful ramble and let you get back to whatever more constructive thing you were doing before you started reading it.

'Till next time,
Jamie