Celebrating the Celts

I am stunned to discover that it was a decade ago that I last wrote about the Southern Maryland Celtic Festival. How much has changed since then. Anyways recently (as I’m writing this blog post now posted months into the future) I went to two different Celtic festival-type things, the the aforementioned CSSM and the Fair Hill Scottish Games!

The first of these, the actual Celtic Festival, I wound up going all by my lonesome. My super amazing wife had baby shower that weekend (for someone else’s baby) and could not join the fun. So I drove off the hour to go check out the festival. It was, as far as I could tell, exactly how I had left it. There were a lot of bagpipers, which I am a big fan of. I like that bagpipers will just kinda wander off to tune up, and so scattered approximately equidistant throughout the festival were bagpipers warming up. This included surrounding the porta-potties, which made for a mellifluous bathroom experience.

I had a couple of priorities at the festival. The first primarily was to find some nifty Scottish treats for my super amazing wife. She is of course now an inveterate Caledoniphile and that extends to their baked goods. They actually had a lot of great cookies at the festival and in the end the festival was really a cookie-shopping experience for me. Since at the time Mother’s Day was coming up, I first got my mom the toffee shortbread from the Scottish Shortbread Company (based in New York) which got rave reviews. For my super amazing wife, I opted instead for the Hebridean Baker’s whisky shortbread. The Hebridean Baker is probably my wife’s favorite baker and I tell myself I am not threatened at all by either his or his husband’s masculinity. There were also chocolate-covered ginger snaps she very much enjoys, and perhaps my only regret is not managing to get anything from the InFamous Welsh Cookie Company at either of the two festivals. Though I did manage to also get a tea towel with pictures of cats wearing kilts playing bagpipes.

Besides desserts specifically, food is a major draw of the festival. As you can see above I opted to forego any vegetable except for the mashed potatoes atop a shepherd’s pie. The other two brown meats are haggis (of course) and pulled pork smoked over peat, which I will go ahead and assume is an entirely authentic Scottish dish. This was washed down, as it was ten years ago and many times in between, with IRN-BRU.

The other major draw of the festival after food is the sport. My favorite highland game remains caber tossing because it is so straightforward. And that is the goal of the sport, you want the caber to land straight forward, so it is very understandable. At the CSSM the announcer was quite good and kept the audience closely engaged with the action. While I was watching, simultaneous with the men tossing cabers were the women doing the weight throw, a demonstration of athleticism which I will admit being threatened by, but only because my mind always imagines the weight getting accidentally tossed right at me. They were too good to ever let that happen but still, the mind wanders.

Let’s see, what else at the festival? There was lots going on. Besides the food and sport and bagpiping there was other music going on as well, and dancing! I watched for a while a demonstration of Irish dance put on by a set of very good and very enthusiastic ladies. As good as they were, also a shout-out to the band that was playing unadorned behind them. They were absolutely rocking it. Another fun thing about the CSSM is that it is held on the grounds of the Jefferson Patterson Park, a Maryland State Park. That means there is a museum on-site you can duck into if you need a break from all the Celticness. The museum is primarily about the Maryland tobacco industry, a topic which I remember fondly from elementary school but in retrospect is presented a little uncritcally. Perhaps I am simply too critical, especially when the tobacco industry gave us a museum with a massive steam-powered tractor in it to admire. There is also a blacksmith shop and a tobacco press among some other accoutrements. Also out in the grass field where we were all parking they have this very intriguing display that outlines the shape of a 17th century wooden house, its yard, and a shed. The irregular outlines are of cubby-holes dug out of the ground beneath the house’s floor for storage. Pretty neat, not least because this farm and family would eventually produce one Margaret Taylor.

*Irish dancing and a great backup band.*

That brings us a few weekends later to the Fair Hill Scottish Games. For these, my super amazing wife was able to go and did really want to go to a Celtic Festival (-adjacent event). This one was farther away from us, all the way up in Elkton. That meant a somewhat hot drive in the DeLorean, but we made good time. The weather on the day of the CSSM had been cloudy and the weather cool, but for the Fair Hill Scottish Games there was not a cloud in the sky and it hit about 80 degrees. Pretty ideal weather, really, but we had to make sure to stay hydrated.

I had never been to the Fair Hill event and spent most of the day comparing the two, and they come out pretty equal. They certainly seemed about equal in size and number of vendors, with a large portion of overlap but some unique vendors are at each festival. After having been to both, I think the fundamental difference is that at the CSSM, it is a Celtic Festival with some games tacked on (they were also playing rugby, I forgot to mention), but at the Fair Hill Scottish Games, the real point was the competitions and the Celtic festival portion of it was the bit tacked on. When you watched the piping or dancing competitions or watched the games, they were much less focused on patter and much more focused on judging.

Still, it was very good. Upon arrival our priority was again food, and again there were great vendors. My super amazing wife had to get her own haggis fix in, but I opted this time for a Scotch egg which was very filling. We then poked around the festival but made sure to get a good spot to watch the Tartan Parade of Bands and Clans which involved the various pipe and drum bands in attendance marching by while some clan reps walked behind them. There seemed to have been more clans than bands so some bands went twice to escort the all clans.

After watching the bands go by we poked around the vendors some. Given the rave reviews of the toffee shortbread, we had to get some, and luckily we bought early because here the Scottish Shortbread Company sold out long before the end of the day. My super amazing wife also picked up a card and some Highland Soap Company products, but we managed to avoid buying much else, perhaps because 80 degree weather does not put one in the mood for buying heavy woolen tartan cloaks. But then it was back to watch the games, again of course focusing on the caber tossing. It was exciting on this day because there was also a lady tossing the caber (pictured above), which serves as an inspiration for every young girl anywhere who sees a tree and wants nothing more than to hurl it end-over-end. It is beautiful really.

Perhaps the most exciting and unique part of the Fair Hill Scottish Festival is that they perform an “Entrance of the Haggis,” which involved half a dozen guys marching down the little clan area they have. As you can see above, it involved one dude on pipes, one dude with the haggis, another following closely behind dual-wielding large whisky bottles, and then finally a couple of other stragglers. At the end of the clan district they circled up and another man performed a stirring rendition of the Ploughman Poet’s “Address to the Haggis,” which he read off his phone and pausing intermittently to perform the actions described in the poem. It was beautiful.

And so yeah, a great day at the festival. When we weren’t watching bands or bagpipers or haggis, we also listened to music. In the pub tent we caught a couple times “rock piper” Coreyanne Armstrong absolutely belting out piped versions of various pop songs which were phenomenal (I am just now learning she is a Naval Academy grad, stunning. We also spent a few minutes watching a slow-moving mosh pit in front of Albannach, a band which included the again surely very traditional Scottish didgeridoo (or something that looked like one anyway). My super amazing wife also spent a chunk of the day fretting over whether you could count yourself as Scottish if you only married in, but I say it does and so does the nice lady that was trying to recruit is to the Clan Donald Association. Given the different clan backgrounds I-slash-we could reasonably choose from, I was more interested in figuring out which tartan we liked best, though we never settled this question.

And those were the two Celtic Festival-type events I went to this year. They have slighlty different flavors but both are great, and where else are you going to watch people throw logs end-over-end while “Scotland the Brave” plays from several different people from a distance? Perhaps our only regret is never getting those Welsh cookies, and never sticking around long enough to watch the sheaf toss; my super amazing wife would have been eager to compare the athletes’ skills with her own from back in her hay-tossing days. But there’s always next year, and maybe next time we watch some games we’ll just go ahead and watch them in Scotland itself. In the meantime, what this really does is whet the appetite for the Renaissance Festival. Can’t wait!

Charleston III: Fortified

Reading this week:

The French Mind by Peter Watson

If the previous day was all about the agricultural history of Charleston, free or otherwise, this day was going to be all about coastal fortifications. The real big destination of the day was Fort Sumter, but that was only part of the day of course, and so the first thing we did was arrive at Fort Moultrie pretty much the moment it opened. We had wanted to take a bit of a look at Sullivan’s Island, and also of course Fort Moultrie and Fort Sumter represented an interlocking system of coastal defenses, so how can you really understand one without understanding the other?

*Display at the Fort Moultrie Visitor’s Center discussing the ties between Sierra Leone and Sullivan’s Island via the slave trade.*

At Fort Moultrie first we briefly checked out the visitor’s center where I was most interested to find a display on Bunce Island. Then it was across the street to the fort itself. It was a fairly quick wander around, though what I liked best about the fort is that you still got shipping traffic coming in. From the perspective of the fort you can watch as these gigantic container ships slide on by. The shipping back in the day would have been a bit smaller, but it really drives home the strategic location of the fort and how you could use it to fire cannons at ships. One of the most exciting parts of the fort is the World War II command center they still have buried deep in the heart of it. You go down through these blast door sorta things and they have the command center laid out like it would have been, wild-looking coffee machines and all. This is where the duty officers would have plotted out firing cannons at those ships I mentioned.

From there we zoomed off back to downtown Charleston to the Fort Sumter Visitors’ Center, where the ferry departs from. There were a lot of people visiting Fort Sumter that day! Presumably because it was such a nice day and also a holiday. We had a lovely ride over to the fort, with the guide explaining some aspects of the harbor along the way. Once at Fort Sumter we of course once again wandered around, admiring Fort Moultrie now from afar. The wind was pretty blustery which made it chilly, but still right in the middle of the harbor on a sunny day makes for stunning views.

Now, you see, although this was my super amazing wife’s first time at Fort Sumter, I had been before back when I lived in Charleston, so nothing here was too surprising. The first time around I was flabbergasted to find a WWI-era fort right in the middle of the Civil War perimeter, but this time around I was a little more stunned thinking about how the gigantic cannons that had been installed in the post-bellum reconstruction were somehow still muzzle-loaders. It’s like the pinnacle of an outdated technology, like steam-powered cars. What else stunned me then but still now is that Citadel cadets fired the first shots of the Civil War on Fort Sumter, and yet somehow that institution still exists. Here they are talking about it on a page titled, of all things “The War Between the States”! We should have buried the Citadel in the pages of history.

Anyways that’s my anti-bigotry bigotry for the day. You don’t get too terribly long on the fort due to ferry schedules, and eventually we loaded up back on the ferry and head on back to Charleston. At the snack bar on the ferry my super amazing wife got a Charleston Chew, which felt appropriate. Our next goal was to tie up some loose ends before investigating any other tourism we could do before heading to the airport. The first loose end was lunch, and we went to the Charleston Crab House specifically because they had She-crab soup on the menu, a Charlestonian delicacy I had somehow never tried. It was pretty good, I can confirm. This also put us in a good spot to finally pick up a sweetgrass basket for my super amazing wife right there at the market house. She got a shallow, medium-sized example set apart by its gorgeous twisted rim.

Basket in hand, we had to choose what to do with our few remaining hours in Charleston, and we decided to go to the Nathaniel Russel House. The goal here was to go on a house tour, and this fit the bill. It was really nice! You’ll accept my regrets again for not being able to delve too deeply into the history of slavery on the site, though the museum is indeed thinking through this and improving their exhibits. Currently archeology and restoration are going on in the portion of the house where the enslaved persons lived and worked, and it is yielding some interesting results.

*The staircase, from the bottom looking up (clearly).*

The rest of the house was really pretty as well. Its main claim to fame is the three-story floating spiral staircase, which is indeed impressive. The guided tour is also very forward about when discussing the life of the Russels, making sure you are aware that life was made possible via enslaved labor. He bought and sold enslaved people and it was enslaved people that did all the work. Not to be glib, but in addition to his experience in those horrors, Russel also had phenomenal taste in crown molding, chaise lounges, and other accoutrements. Or the curators do, anyway. There was only actually one chair that was original to the house, sitting in the office off the entryway. Outside the house the gardens are done up as well in a traditional style, and walking through them was a pleasant way to wrap up our time in Charleston. From here it was back to the airport and back to DC, but I suspect we’ll make it back again sometime in the next decade or so.

Charleston II: The Tea

My super amazing wife first learned about the Charleston Tea Garden when she was in China. China is a great place to learn about tea, but an inconvenient place to learn you hadn’t even needed to change continents to see it farmed. Visiting the Tea Garden was going to be the centerpiece of our whole trip to Charleston, and that being the case, we felt no need to rush into it. She had waited nearly a decade after all, so what was a few more hours? (what was going on here is we had bought tickets for a guided tour early in the afternoon and so had some time to kill)

To get properly fortified for a garden tour and properly in the southern mood, we opened up the day by having true Charlestonian food, namely a flight of fancy grits AND biscuits & gravy AND additional breakfast entrees to boot. We were not skimping on the food. Then, with that (barely) under our belts, we took advantage of the proximity and drove on over to the Charles Pickney Historic Site. The visitor center was closed for the winter, but visiting still justified a national park stamp, even if it had to be collected the next day.

The Charles Pickney site was very nice, as long as I’m dwelling on it. It is a very small site, really now just a large field nestled in between some housing developments built on the former plantation grounds. The house is still there but we only peered in through the windows. Instead we explored the short nature trail off into a little stretch of hammock forest they have on the edge of the site. Also near the house they have some camellias which were very pretty, and as you wandered from forest to flower to fields, all only dimly lit under a cloudy sky, the whole thing was very moody. This box was checked, and so soon we departed, but if we’re ever in Charleston again in the summer I’d like to try to go back. Given the dearth of remaining historical buildings or anything, it seems like from the site’s website that they’ve really tried to make up for that with a lot of deep research into the lives of the inhabitants of the plantation, enslaved and free, which we didn’t get to see.

*View from near the Sweetgrass Pavilion; I always like the cranes off in the distance, like hulking dinosaurs.*

From there, finally, we then proceeded over the peninsula of Charleston (making another attempt at basket shopping by stopping at the unfortunately-closed-at-that-time (though maybe they don’t even sell sweetgrass baskets?) but scenically-located Sweetgrass Pavilion in Mt. Pleasant) and deep into coastal forest all the way down Wadmalaw Island to finally make it to the Charleston Tea Garden. What a place! I mean nothing too crazy it is perhaps about what you would expect, i.e. sizeable fields cleared from forest and now populated with low bushes. But they have a very nice visitor center with an expansive gift shop. There is unlimited tea, both hot and cold and sweet and unsweet you can enjoy during your shopping experience. Through doors in the back you enter the video-guided tour of their processing facility, with the video restarting every 15 minutes or so. The plant was not processing at this moment (it was the tail end of winter, so no harvests had occurred lately), but the plant tracked with what I had seen at the last tea facility I visited.

*It used to be the Charleston Tea* Plantation, but the realized how gauche that was.

Soon the appointed time for our tour of the tea garden itself came around, and we all piled aboard the bus to take a cruise around the fields. The tour was good, and our guide focused on tea puns. The history of tea growing in South Carolina is fitful, with attempts starting as early as 1799. Congress subsidized another run at it in the 1880s, and tea plants were cultivated but eventually left to go feral. Even more decades later in 1963, cuttings from that now native cultivar were used to found the Tea Garden. Although the Garden is owned by Bigelow tea, all the tea grown on site and only the tea grown on site is sold under the Charleston Tea Garden brand.

Also during the tour they showed us the green house where they begin the new plants. My main takeaway is that getting a tea plant to successfully sprout is actually quite involved, so now I feel much better about my couple fitful attempts. Eventually we pulled back around to the star of the show, their custom tea harvester, which cruises down the fields and chops the tops of the bushes off and vacuums them up for later processing at the plant. Apparently they’ve finally bought a fancy new one from overseas as well, but that was locked up in the garage, too precious to stay in the weather. And yeah that was the Tea Garden! My super amazing wife had achieved a dream and was very satisfied. Back at the gift shop we loaded down on tea and accoutrements, and then piled into the car for our final major site of the day.

*The harvester! Really just a sort of lifted lawnmower.*

That site was Magnolia Plantation & Gardens. It was very late in the day by the time we arrived, so we didn’t have a whole lot of time to actually explore. Plus it was now raining fairly steadily. What this meant is for the second time at a plantation in one day I did not really have an opportunity to think too much about what it meant and how that history of slavery was presented and so I’m sorry to not address that. But with the fading afternoon light and rain, what the place was for us is crushingly aesthetic. We had the gardens nearly to ourselves, with their winding paths through cypress swamp dotted with the few sprouting camellias that they are especially known for.

*An alligator in the not-mentioned-in-the-text wildlife rescue area at Magnolia; this was not the suspicious one.*

As we walked around my super amazing wife spotted a wild alligator on the far shore of a little inlet, just chilling. We went up out of sight in an observation tower and came back down to find the alligator gone but then I spotted it in the water, much closer to us. A very suspicious thing for the alligator to do, if you ask me. We took pictures on bridges skirting live oak trees and reflected that the beautiful camellias we were looking at were so closely related to the tea plants we had just seen, and also how the moody Spanish moss dripping everywhere were apparently closely related to pineapples (according to our punny tea tour guide). Eventually though the rain started to really come down, herding us back to our car and then off to a BBQ dinner.

*Vast pools to reflect on your moodiness.*

Charleston I: Nostalgia

To take advantage of a three-day weekend and escape the cold (this was very early this year), my super amazing wife and I went on down to Charleston! Now, I lived in Charleston for two years for Nuclear Power School and Prototype, with a brief interlude up in Connecticut for Submarine Officer Basic Course (the Google AI search results describe SOBC as “intensive” and lemme tell ya intensive it is not). My super amazing wife wanted to go to Charleston to see a bit more of the South, and also to see the city where I had spent those formative years between the Naval Academy and reporting to the ship. I hadn’t been back to Charleston since I had driven out of there heading to Guam so I was excited to see what my old haunts had been up to.

And so after landing mid-morning and feeling comfort from the cold back home among the palm trees we went to go haunt said haunts. Although our focus for the weekend was going to be downtown and the coast, first thing we did was head the wrong direction up to North Chuck where we drove around my old neighborhood and then got lunch at the sandwich shop nearest to my heart, East Bay Deli. Back when I lived in Charleston I wouldn’t exactly save up to go to East Bay Deli, but I would only allow myself to eat there once a week, and on test days. I would savor that Rueben and rejoice in sweet tea. Luckily, EBD was exactly as I had left it; I sat in the same seat under the same posters to enjoy the same sandwich. Nostalgia and hunger satisfied, we then drove on downtown and spent the rest of the afternoon walking down and up it.

Charleston really is a charming city. When I was living there post-Annapolis, I thought of it mostly as a much bigger DTA (Downtown Annapolis). During our walk we started at the top end of downtown, and popped into what was then my favorite bookstore, Blue Bicycle Books. That was also as I had left it, unfortunately minus a bookstore cat I fondly remember. We also popped into my aspirational clothing store Ben Silver (mostly aspirational, my favorite pair of dress shoes is from there). I was very pleased when my super amazing wife dubbed it “beautiful.”

We continued to make our way toward the Battery, enjoying the architecture more and more as we went along. I really enjoy the Charleston single houses, with their outdoor door between the street and the porch. It just all seems so charming as you ignore the various historical markers explaining the beginning of the Confederacy. Finally reaching the Battery we admired the water as a small seaplane flew overhead. Absolutely no notes on Charleston’s location with a beautiful and protected harbor.

Having walked down King to get to the Battery, we started back up on East Bay Street, and thus I got to show my super amazing wife Rainbow Row. Back in nuke school I had gotten myself a painting of Rainbow Row from the sadly defunct art gallery in the Pink House, and then spent even more (surprisingly, to me at the time) to frame it. As such I rather like it but upon moving in together my super amazing wife’s aesthetic sense quickly decided the best place for it was prominently on display in the little-used guest bathroom located through a closet. We have not had a chance to redecorate since but my hope is that now that she has such a personal connection that maybe my Rainbow Row can wind up someplace less humid.

Anyways we continued to hit the highlights. We admired the Pineapple Fountain and how much it looked like a pineapple. Then we walked all the way through City Market on the lookout for a suitable sweetgrass basket. I have used one for years as a catchall and my super amazing wife wanted her very own. We weren’t too eager to buy one just then as the plan was to get one at the source on the sweetgrass basket highway, but during the weekend we never actually saw anyone in any of the stands despite driving through several times at different moments. I think it was always either the weather or everyone being at Church but we had to go ahead and get one finally in the Market on our last day.

At this point it wasn’t exactly getting late but it was getting later. The big plan was to go to Hyman’s to really round out my list of nostalgic locales (except for the place that never cut us off from bottomless mimosas one Tuesday morning after getting off the midwatch during Prototype). My fondest memory at Hyman’s is one of the servers getting wide-eyed and excited to explain the different traditional bases for shrimp & grits to my friend’s mom. This time around they only had shrimp & grits as an appetizer (reviewing the menu online maybe I just missed it under the entrees) but the crawfish I had as the main were good, though my super amazing wife stepped that up a notch with the shellfish delight. Plus too I ate soundly knowing I sat in the same spot noted Maggie Rogers fan Pharrell Williams had sat.

After a long day of verifying everything was just as I had remembered it, we drove off into the sunset (actually opposite the sunset) across the Ravenel bridge to check into our Mt. Pleasant hotel. We had to prepare to achieve a nearly decade-long dream of my super amazing wife’s the following day.

Maryland Sheep & Wool Festival III

This was all the way back in May, but I went to the Maryland Sheep & Wool Festival along with my super amazing wife and her super amazing mom! This post is titled “III” because it is now I suppose de rigueur that I write about the festival when I go to it. We went back in 2022 and 2023, but hadn’t been able to go in the intervening years because of course we were in Sierra Leone.

As was totally expected, we had a lot of fun going to the festival this year. The most interesting thing is that this year we frankly felt a bit rushed. The previous years it had felt very easy to see everything at the festival and at some point it just felt natural to head on home. This year however we knew we needed to stay until the very end. My super amazing wife you see had entered a sweater into the knitting competition, and the only way to get your entry back was to pick it up at the very end of the festival, after 4:30pm on Sunday. I was foolishly a bit worried what we would do all afternoon while waiting for knitting entry pickup time to roll around.

*That’s not Ted Cruz announcing, that man has earned the hat.*

What the difference was I don’t know. I don’t think the festival had expanded all that much in the intervening years. Maybe we just had more to do. Upon arrival we head on into the gate and of course the first thing we had to do was to see how my super amazing wife faired in the competition. Alas, she did not get a ribbon. This was due to two factors, one being that there were some absolutely amazing entries in all the knitwear and wool-related competitions (they also had like rug-making and art felting and a whole host of things) so it was always going to be tough. The competition area always has stunningly gorgeous pieces that people have created and even though it is kind squirreled away at the far end of the exhibition areas you should always make sure to check it out. The other factor was strategic – she had entered a sweater she was knitting anyways, one that was mostly a solid color with a small ribbing of colorwork around the collar. This unfortunately meant it had to be entered into the colorwork category, going up against sweaters entirely made of colorwork, and so was probably disfavored among its peers. But none of that really matters, she got a thrill out of participating, and it was fun to see her handiwork up there on display.

Another new thing for us we made sure to see was the parade of sheep breeds. This has been going on for the duration of the festival but we hadn’t stopped by before. That was a lot of fun to watch. It is pretty much what it sounds like. In the central show arena the announcer introduces each breed of sheep before it gets trotted out, more or less willingly, and shown around the arena. There are also some fun facts being centered mostly around the breed’s history and the relative qualities of both its wool and its carcass. You know what sheep look like, fluffy things with four legs, and I have seen plenty of sheep breeds at this point, but it was different to see them all lined up with each other. I knew that Shetland sheep were small but you don’t understand how tiny they are until they are standing next to something like a Lincoln Longwool.

One particular sheep breed we learned about at the festival was the Hog Island sheep, pictured above (the top of them anyway). That was exciting for being something of a local breed; turns out modern-day Mt. Vernon got themselves a flock for their closeness to what George Washington would have kept. My super amazing wife got herself some Hog Island sheep wool roving to do some spinning later, which brings us the next major thing we needed to accomplish, which was looking at e-spinners. She wants to get an e-spinner as a more portable version of the slightly more traditional wheel she currently uses (an upright model from Ashford), and so wanted to check out some in person. These, turns out, are very expensive but there were some nice more affordable models. She did not walk out of the festival with a new wheel but she got a feel for some of the relevant features.

Then of course there were the other standard things you have to do at the Sheep & Wool Festival. We saw some of the sheep dog demonstrations, amused as always by watching just how excited the sheep dogs are to sheep dog sheep. All they want in the whole world is to round those suckers up. We also had to have some lunch, the only major decision being exactly what kind of lamb we were going to morbidly eat. We’ll eat fish at an aquarium, and we’ll eat lamb at a Sheep & Wool festival, unafraid to look either animal in the eye afterwards. I went with a lamb Milanesa, my super amazing mother-in-law with a lamb pita, and my super amazing wife with lamb mac n’ cheese, if I am remembering correctly. Then we had to check out all the vendors of which there were very very many. Our collective was only in the market for a bit of yarn this year, but was keeping a keen eye out for other accessories. I got some pewter buttons for the sweater my super amazing wife is going to super amazingly knit for me (even though I have been mostly recently bumped farther down the to-do list in favor of a baby blanket for her best friend). We resisted in the end buying some more sheep cheese.

And after having checked out even more sheep it was all-too-soon time to pick up the sweater from the craft competition and go home. I don’t know the next time we’ll be able to visit this particular festival but no matter where we go my super amazing wife will find a way to visit a sheep & wool or a yarn festival so there will be more fiber content on this blog in the future, don’t worry.

Folger Shakespeare Library

One of the places we were excited to visit upon our return to DC was the Folger Shakespeare Library. Both me and my super amazing wife have a deep connection to Shakespeare and the Folger library, despite neither of us having been able to visit before (it was closed for renovations last time we were living in the area). In college she had participated in Shakespeare festivals and played several of the roles and thought deeply about the plays and their meanings. I, on the other hand, have seen the complete works of Shakespeare (abridged) in middle school, and much later I went out on I think two dates once with a woman I dimly remember working at the Library. We also of course have both been to the Globe.

The Folger Shakespeare Library is really quite an institution to have in DC. If it’s not the top place for scholarly Shakespeare research in all the world it certainly has to be the most substantial. Listing off the superlatives from the Wikipedia page, it has the world’s largest collection of the printed works of Shakespeare including 82 copies of the First Folio (really more than anyone could reasonably need), the world’s third largest collection of English books printed before 1641 (now that I copy that over I wonder who is tracking that), and, among many, many other things, Henry VIII’s childhood copy of Cicero’s De officiis. All somehow nestled behind the Supreme Court instead of you know England or something. And for all that if I wasn’t such a Shakespeare scholar myself I’m not sure I would have known about it.

*A First Folio with writing in it by a girl named Margaret c. 17th century.*

Now that we were back in DC, on a cold December day we went up to Capital Hill to check out this magnificent Library. The public area of the museum is not too terribly large. On the bottom floor there is a museum that talks of course about Shakespeare. They have a big display with a number of their collection of First Folios, and that is neat to see. I mean they got a whole bunch of the things. Around the first folios is a smattering of other artifacts. One thing I hadn’t realized about the library is how they use the First Folios to do a bunch of scholarship on what should be something like a definitive version of each of the plays. The plays have each undergone edits and had transcription errors or changes from edition to edition, but with so many early copies the Library can synthesize these. They have then published really nice editions of each of the plays, and what else is that they are available online. Here’s Macbeth, for example.

*On the left are Ira Aldridge’s lines from* Othello which he hand-wrote and autographed to Dr. Edmund Schebek, c. 1853. On the right is an etching of Aldridge dressed as Othello c. 1854. This display was significant to me mostly because we had previously gone out to see Red Velvet *at the Shakespeare Theater Company.*

We had two actual things bringing us to the Library that day. The first and more minor one was a printing press demonstration, done like they would have done to print up the First Folios (they really like the First Folios at the museum). The most significant thing that my super amazing wife and I learned is that the paper had to be wet. An interesting and important detail, that. Then the big thing we were there for was a talk all about old writing utensils and calligraphy, which was pretty neat. After a talk on various stuff they had pulled out (as expected) old fashioned writing utensils, like fountain pens and silver tips or something along with calligraphy manuals and we all got a close-up look. The biggest thing I was thinking about is how hard it must be to curate the Shakespeare Library, like where do you draw the line at what counts as Shakespeare-related? But that is why the curators are professionals.

A booke containing dieurs sortes of hands : as well the English as French secretarie with the Italian, Roman, chancelry & court hands by John de Beauchesne, 1602. It contains examples of different handwritings (“hands”) of different scales of fanciness for every occasion.

Other draws of the Folger include the café (called the Quill & Crumb, a great name) and the Library itself. Both are done up like grand Elizabethan halls. Initially I wondered if Folger hadn’t bought up some hall in England and shipped it over, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. Both are beautiful. Having gone to Yale, which itself is all Oxford cosplay, I am always a bit thrown off by 20th century folks pretending like its the 16th but I suppose it keeps the craftspeople employed and that is a good enough reason.

*The Folger Shakespeare Library reading room.*

And that was the Folger Shakespeare Library, or that visit anyway. They have a nice little gift shop and if you are in the area looking for a place for a coffee, it is worth going to the Quill & Crumb. The other thing about the Library is that they have a whole theater. Some months later we went to go see As You Like It and that was fun. The theater itself is a really nice space. It is small and designed to look a bit Elizabethan, maybe something like the Blackfriars Theater would have looked like. We were in probably the worst seats but they were not bad, and the physical chairs themselves felt pretty luxurious after some of the other theater seats we have been in. We also wound up in the action during the play as some of the actors came up right next to us for a part of it. The production itself was good as well, set sorta kinda in DC as opposed to a kingdom and a forest. There was a running gag where the actors would notice the unicorn painted on fabric draped across the ceiling. It is a really great theater for a play and I would look forward to seeing another one there.

The Stars We Do Not See

I am a bit late in the game to be talking about this, but all the way back in December my super amazing wife and I went to go see a travelling exhibit at the National Gallery of Art titled “The Stars We Do Not See.” It comprised of works by indigenous Australians and it was phenomenal.

The style of the works were all so new to me, comprised of motifs we hadn’t seen before coming from a tradition we were unfamiliar with. I think the closest thing they looked like was all the tingatinga art we saw in Tanzania, with repeating designs based in nature. All the dots made for an entrancing way to create the image. It’s not exactly pointillism, and for some of the works each dot (in some cases painted with a brush made of human hair) represented not a portion of an image but a star, all connected throughout the universe.

Wawurritjpal II (the fish) by Wukun Wanambi, 2005.

Really the cultural context probably rendered the art impenetrable, but it was still transfixing. A sign in the exhibition was careful to explain that the works derived from twin concepts of Country and Dreaming. Country is “more than just landscape” it is “the nexus of land, skies, waters, knowledge, bodies, and Law,” and “understood to be closely tied to personal identity.” Dreaming meanwhile is the era before Country, “when Ancestral beings shaped the world, created life, and established the Laws…” More importantly, since the knowledge of Country and Dreaming is sacred and is often secret to outsiders, shared only with community members, the exhibit had to make sure to specify that everything on display was “suitable for public viewing and none of the information described in the labels is culturally restricted.”

The first sets of works were these eucalyptus tree trunks covered in designs. That was such an interesting canvas to use. With the trunks being so tall and thin the motifs stretched up and down and to get a sense of it all you of course had to walk all the way around. Displayed together they created a forest of meaning.

Ngalyod, the Rainbow Serpent *by Jimmy Njiminjuma, 1993*

The different types of art used a range of different materials. Some focused on all natural materials, with earth pigments painted onto the tree trunks or pieces of eucalyptus bark. The advent of eucalyptus bark as a canvas is a fairly modern invention to allow the pieces to be mobile. Normally the designs would have been painted on rock walls or the like, and so immoveable. It’s in the piece above, Garak, that each dot is a star and each line the connection between the stars and everything else. Other works embraced other available materials, including stretched canvas and artificial pigments.

Spirit Dreaming through Napperby Country by Tim Leura Tjapaltjarri and Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri, 1980

The star of the show was probably the above work. The photo doesn’t capture it but it is monumental, stretching across a whole wall. In this one, Spirit Dreaming through Napperby Country, the label tells me the “collaborative painting chronicles the artists’ deep connection to the Country while also referencing the dispossession of the Anmatyerre people, whose land was overtaken by the Napperby cattle station in the early 20th century.” What I like about it is although you can’t tell exactly what the whole narrative is, from the line down the middle and the different sections it is clear there is a narrative. Some of the designs have to do with foodways, and some clearly with even more grim topics. It is awe-inspiring in-person.

Women’s Dreaming at Marrapinti by Doreen Reid Nakamarra, 2006

Another favorite piece from the exhibit was the above one, Women’s Dreaming at Marrapinti. It was displayed horizontally, reflecting, the label says, how the artist Nakamarra painted it on the ground; it has no horizon or top or bottom. It was mesmerizing. Being displayed on the floor meant you could walk around it, and it seemed to change as you did. The rippling peaks on the painting makes it feel like you are flying over the landscape it depicts. It was stunned at how such a simple pattern of peaks could create a whole terrain.

Erub Has a Bitumen Road Now *by Clinton Naina, 2004*

And then finally for this blog post we have Erub Has a Bitumen Road Now, the name referencing the artist discovering that his home town on Erub Island had gotten a tarmac road. The piece does not have the same sort of aesthetic as all the other ones I’ve been going gaga over, but what it does have is a white cross in the lower right corner. According to the label, this symbolizes the event known on Erub as the “Coming of the Light,” which was the arrival of the London Missionary Society on July 1, 1871. I think so much about the LMS and its impact on modern Zambia. In these places, the Christianity espoused by the Society has become the deep-seated and meaningful beliefs of the communities, replacing and displacing, as the label notes, “traditional culture, language, and rituals.” For Naina the linkage he finds most significant is the line between the arrival of the LMS and the environmental and spiritual degradation symbolized by a road designed for cars. And yet that event is still referred to as the “Coming of the Light.” I suppose for all I know the name has become a consciously dark irony, but that juxtaposition is some insight to the Torres Islander version of a question I’ve wondered about in Zambia.

In the end, “The Stars We Do Not See” is a very powerful exhibition with gorgeous art and which leaves one with many things to think about. It has bumped Australia much further up the places I want to visit (though technically I’ve been before) so I can explore more the world of indigenous art there.

Manatee Parks

We are wrapping up our current little sunshine state series with everyone’s favorite Florida fauna, the manatee. In the midst of writing that sentence and trying to remember that “the sunshine state” was Florida’s nickname, I have found out that the legislature has gone to great lengths to gerrymander the state symbols and delineate as many animal constituencies as possible. So although manatees are Florida’s state marine mammal, on that same page you’ll note the dolphin still makes the list as the state saltwater mammal (which in my opinion does not address manatee migration habits), the alligator is titled the state reptile, leaving therefore room in turn for the panther to represent the entire Linnean kingdom as state animal and thus rounding out every animal that anyone is aware lives in Florida. I will note for the sake of my dairy cow-raising father-in-law that we get down to meat of things with the Cracker Cattle being the Florida state cattle, rounded up presumably by cowboys on the state horse, the Florida Cracker horse. Every state is stupid and ridiculous.

But back to why we’re here, manatees. The state is dotted with manatee viewing areas and over the course of our travels we visited two of them on different days. I am not educating any readers here but manatees, like any reasonable living creature, prefer warm water and will therefore concentrate on cold days where the water is warm, specifically the cooling outlets of power plants. The first of these we visited was Tampa Electric’s Manatee Viewing Center next to their Big Bend Power Station.

*Look at all those manatee backs at the Tampa Electric Manatee Viewing Center.*

I had first learned of this viewing area via Atlas Obscura, and I thought it would be kinda hokey. Like not really a destination, but some picnic tables where the locals were aware you could see manatees. We were very surprised therefore when we arrived and turned into the large parking lot dotted with solar panels leading the way to a massive visitor’s center. It is a whole destination. You could spend the afternoon. We only really touched on a part of it because it was so late in the day when we arrived, that we couldn’t possibly have gotten down to the big viewing tower or anything before the trails closed.

But we arrived and proceeded directly to the manatees. And there were tons! It will be an unfair comparison to our next manatee park, because on the day we visited the TECO MVC it had been cold (for Florida) for the few days prior in addition to being a bit nippy right then. So the manatees were huddled for our viewing pleasure right in the little discharge canal. They mostly floated there. It was a lot like watching hippos, in that most of what you see is small patches of the backs of manatees, though every once in a while you see a snort or them swimming around. Manatees fight less than hippos do though. Still, magical to see the majestic manatee in its natural(ish) habitat.

And the visitor center is very nice too. We didn’t poke around the exhibits much, but they had a café and a gift shop. The whole place is set up by the power company to make people feel better about living next to a coal-fired power plant (when I bought a lapel pin in the gift shop the credit card charge was to Tampa Electric), but it’s pretty effective. It seems a great place to take kids, and also very significantly they had an unbranded Mold-a-Rama, which I went gaga for. I love a Mold-a-Rama, and I am now the proud owner of a plastic manatee.

*I love plastic injection molding so much.*

Our next manatee viewing experience some time later was down at the Fort Myers Manatee Park! This again was a nice little way to spend some time in an afternoon. This park is downstream (as seems obvious in hindsight now that I’ve looked it up) of the Fort Myers Power Plant. This one, from my quick Googling, is natural gas- and fuel oil-fired. The biggest thing about this park for us is that it had been warmer when we visited, so there were not so many manatees. They were taking advantage of the nicer weather to go forage in less crowded pastures. But there were a few, and also some big fish and then also some kayakers, one of whom we got to watch capsize. I can’t tell if that was due to the fish, the manatees, or a personalized imbalance.

*Some shadows of Fort Myers manatees, if you can spot ’em.*

The rest of the park here too is a nature park with some short nature trails, and we got to check those out more thoroughly in this location because we had more time. It is always beautiful to be in nature. This location too had a gift shop (though without lapel pins that said something akin to “Fort Myers Manatee Park”) but which supported the local government instead of the local power company. There was no visitor center per se except a few signs about manatees. All in all a nice little local park, with the added bonus of seeing some manatees, and pondering the modern power infrastructure that makes the world work.

*I think the first two signs are redundant.*

Tampa Museum of Art

This post continues of course my current little disjointed Florida series, but it also continues a survey of Tampa-adjacent art museums – I have previously covered on this blog visiting both the Dalí Museum and the Imagine Museum. Both those museums are actually in St. Petersburg, but we won’t split hairs. On this day we were in fact in Tampa visiting the Tampa Museum of Art to give us something intellectual to do on a sunny Florida day in late November.

The most significant part of the experience of going to the Tampa Museum of Art was the fact that we (my super amazing wife and I) went with my mom. As a youth, I do not recall my family going to art museums a whole bunch. This is not my mom’s fault, it is the fault of kids having such a heavy choice in the selection of museums, by which I mean my brother always wanted to go to the Natural History Museum but if I had a say in the matter we would be going over to the Air & Space Museum. I think if dad got to pick we went over to the American History Museum, and mom’s influence was generally being in favor of any museum that would keep either the kids or dad from getting too rowdy. All of which to say that although it’s not like we haven’t taken mom to art museums before (see my first two links), it is always fun!

And the Tampa Museum of Art has quite an eclectic collection. Thinking back, the eclecticness is probably my major recollection. The museum’s website has that habit of particular museums that I am disappointed by, i.e. they have only a tiny portion of their collection viewable online, so it will be hard to show you some of this, as a heads up. The bulk of the museum is up on the second floor, and exiting the elevator we were deposited in a small section of I think recently acquired contemporary works. The first ones I took photos of were by Ya La’Ford and Paul Devoti. The piece my mom particularly liked, which I cannot find online because I did not take the right photos, was a large photographic artwork titled I think “Tod’s Liquors.” This was a I think you would call it a surrealist piece, a photo of the eponymous store but with out front a whole bunch of people designed to exude character. It would be seedy if it weren’t so sunny and my mom liked it a bunch. Maybe that says something about her psyche. This is a swerve for her because while that was up there in her favorites list, her actual favorite was a much less surprising pick by Emile Gruppe titled “Winter Stream.”

Winter Stream by Emile Gruppe, c. 1935-1945

I mean look at that thing, that is much more a mom piece of art. This piece was in the second part of the museum we wandered through in our rectangular journey (the museum is mostly on the one floor, and you go around the perimeter), a long gallery of various impressionists and closely related artists. I feel like I am about to say I didn’t know the earth went around the sun here, but I’m not sure I was aware there were particularly any American impressionists. But there were and they were pretty good. As you walked down the gallery the impressionism came into focus with a number of artworks more in the Hudson School vein. The bits I liked the most though were the most Florida bits, which were paintings of the swamp. There were some really great ones! I feel like capturing say a sunset over a river valley nestled amongst mountains is a difficult skill but a widespread one as you got all these American artists roving the West learning from each other on how to paint that, but how many artists were honing the ability to evoke the particular choking depth of a cypress grove? It seems to me it takes a real light brush for that stuff but some of the artists on display had mastered it.

Untitled (Marshland with Palm) *by Alfred Hair, c. 1958*

Like all conscientious American art museums are doing these days, the museum was also taking a focus on art by Black artists. “Untitled (Marshland with Palm)” above is by Highwayman Alfred Hair, but also they had a small if stunning display of Vodou flags by Haitian artist Myrlande Constant. These were really remarkable. We have a Haitian friend whose house is filled with beautiful art, but these flags were an artform we were entirely unfamiliar with. They are so intricate, using beadwork to form scenes inspired by religious stories.

Ogou Ferrialle by Myrlande Constant, 2004

But I mentioned eclecticness. After all that Very American stuff, then the museum has the real pride of its collection, a whole bunch of mostly Etruscan artifacts. You really gotta change up your perspective as you go from one gallery to the next. Mom wasn’t too interested. The focus on the antiquities comes from an early donor, one Joseph Veach Noble. There is apparently exactly one photo of this guy, and it is fierce. But what to say about these artifacts? They were neat. The Etruscans are mysterious enough that every little glimpse into their lives is a portal into a strange and unknown world. Like a little model of a liver used for divination, that is something I would never do, use a liver to divine the future. And then of course there is also the mundane but beautiful, like a 2300-year-old fish plate with bright colors and fetching wave pattern on the side and a very useful built-in central indentation probably used for holding fish sauce. I would use that today and as always it is so amazing to see the same brushwork that they would have seen as they sat down to an evening meal.

*Liver Model for Divination, ca. 150-50 BCE*

And so yeah that was the museum. A nice place with a lot of cool art and changing exhibitions. It is strongest when focusing on art centered on Florida itself, reaching into the swampy mists to discover a side of the United States not typically part of the American canon. But artifacts are cool too!

Mote SEA

Fresh from our Danube adventure, the next few of posts will comprise something of a Florida series, amalgamating a couple different trips. During one summer when I stayed with my grandparents down in Florida, I read off of their shelf A Land Remembered by Patrick D. Smith. It remains the source of most of my impressions of the origins of Florida, and to this day I expect there to be a lot more cattle around then I typically wind up seeing when I’m down there. All of which is to say don’t worry, these posts won’t be nearly so long and will also involve a lot more marine life.

On one of our trips on down to Florida we were especially excited to visit Mote SEA. Longtime readers of the blog will recall that my super amazing wife and I (only my super amazing girlfriend at the time of writing the post I’m about to link, oh how times change) are big fans of Mote. I have many fond memories of going as a Youth, and my super amazing wife loves both sharks and Eugenie Clark.

Mote SEA is their new aquarium as of October 2025. We had initially tried to go in November 2025 only to find out all the tickets had sold out well in advance. It is very popular! We finally did manage to go on a subsequent trip a couple months later, but only because this time we had bought our tickets well in advance; it had again sold out the day we visited.

Whereas the previous aquarium, Mote Marine, had been jutting out into Sarasota Bay, perched on one end of Lido Key, the new Mote SEA is well inland (if you don’t count the retention ponds) and behind a mall. Frankly I’m about to come down a bit harshly on the aquarium. And for that I’m sorry. I understand entirely the purpose of the new location. Mote SEA stands for Science Education Aquarium, and the place I think is designed around school field trips to get kids interested in science and marine life and conservation. Which is a very, very noble goal that I support wholeheartedly, but having visited Mote Marine so many times, it just lacks the same charm. At Mote Marine you felt more like you were visiting what it was, which was a marine animal rescue center with an aquarium tacked on. At Mote SEA it seems so much more like just an aquarium. And they didn’t even bring over Molly the Mollusk, though again apparently for good reason, that being she is just too fragile to move. I read online that they are going to re-open Mote Marine to the public in some capacity, but maybe that is just an optimistic rumor.

But enough of that, let’s talk about the good bits. The place is very nicely done! You enter and, if you were hungry like we were, you can duck directly into the café they have on-site. My super amazing wife had a fish sandwich, which I will never tire of pointing out is a bit morbid in an aquarium. Then you take a three-story escalator right to the tippy-top to start looking around. The aquarium of course retains its focus on the sealife of Florida and the Gulf of Mexico. Up on the top floor in an outside area they have both manatees and the ever-cute otters, so they were both as always entertaining to watch.

As you wander down you get to more fishy-fish, with many tanks of fish. And also penguins! Penguins don’t feature much in Florida generally, but here we happened across a feeding so we got to watch them slurp up some fish. I also liked to watch roundabout here the jellyfish setup they had, which seemed to me to be basically a fish washing machine. I liked to think they had gotten a little bit dirty and needed a freshening up.

*You have to make sure to regularly wash your jellyfish.*

And then of course there was the absolute best bit of the aquarium, which was the shark tank. It is a big tank and if you are descending from the top of the aquarium you first encounter it from above, looking down through the surface at all of the sharks. This is cool and they have going along with it an exhibit on Eugenie Clark, which is great. But then eventually all the way down you get to the tunnel underneath the shark tank, and if the shark tank is the best part of the aquarium, the tunnel is the best part of the shark tank and worth the visit. You get to see the sharks gliding around above and beside you and that alone is worth the visit to the aquarium. Just hang out there for a while watching all the sharks and rays glide past, it is great.

Having gone through the whole aquarium, we realized it hadn’t actually taken that much time, so we went on through again, this time appreciating the tops of the sharks even more now that we had seen the bottom, and getting to see the manatees in a different spot of their tank and munching on different pieces of cabbage. Eventually we exited through the gift shop where we both had been tempted by many things but ultimately resisted. All in all if you’re around you should check out Mote SEA. Now that Mote Marine is closed it has the advantage of being no longer knowable and therefore perfect in my memory, but Mote SEA is very good at what it is trying to do, which is show you that Eugenie Clark was cool because she liked sharks.

Pat in the World

Paperwork enthusiast seeking new frontiers of paperwork. Former submariner, former Peace Corps Volunteer. Opinions, thoughts, and comments reflect no actual persons, living or in the Navy.