Like last week, both in blog-time and in real-time, my super amazing girlfriend and I are on our fantastic Florida vacation. We’re down a bit south of Tampa, and there are plenty of things to do in the region. We’re at my grandma’s house, and since she has been my grandma for quite some time and has lived here for quite some time, I have visited many times in the past and I have gone to most of the places that my super amazing girlfriend and I want to visit. This is good! This is good both because these places we are visiting are interesting, and also because it gives me a good chance to blog about them in order to maintain a constant production for the content mines! This blog post is about Ringling Museum.

The Ringling Museum is situated on the grounds of the former home of John and Mable Ringling. John Ringling is of Ringling Bros’ Circus fame, and apparently that old-timey circus money used to be real good money because this dude was rich. He was also the last surviving of the Ringling brothers and lived out his retirement down here in Florida. The museum is really three museums, or maybe three and a half. There is a Circus Museum, all about the circus, an art museum, which John and Mable collected art to be viewed by the public, and then a house tour of their very nice crib. There are also a pretty large and landscaped grounds, which got me my half in three and a half.

The first place we went upon entry was the circus portion of the museum. This in turn is split into two buildings. The second building mostly serves to house a variety of circus wagons and other large artifacts, including John Ringling’s private railroad car which seemed pretty nice. The first building tells the story of circuses and the Ringling circus specifically with a bunch of different displays and old posters and all that. One of their major displays is a gigantic scale model of the whole circus operation, built over 50 years by a very dedicated dude. The above picture is of a bandwagon housed in the main part of the museum. It is a wagon for the band, and it is included because I had never before considered I think that a bandwagon was an actual thing. Learning about the logistics operation of the circus was pretty interesting, and they have a huge section on circus advertising showing the importance of getting your message out. They also had some displays where you could sorta try out being a circus performer yourself, which is why I am expertly riding a horse in the top image.

The thing my super amazing girlfriend was especially interested in seeing, however, was the house, pictured (kinda poorly) right above. They had named their house “Ca’ d’Zan,” which is just Venetian for “House of John,” which makes sense but wow okay I guess we’ll just ignore Mable, huh? Anyways from the fact they named it in Venetian I hope you can guess that they were going for a Venice vibe, and not ever having been there I can’t tell you if they pulled it off but the place is pretty nice! In large parts it was a sorta standard rich person home, and the biggest feature I remember is that they made sure you could move some furniture around and expand the ballroom, because they were into ballroom dancing. They also named this room the “Court:”

They had apparently managed to get rich at just about the right time (or stay rich anyways) and bought a lot of furniture from the homes of formerly rich people who were foolish enough to invest in stocks before the great depression instead of cornering the market on acrobats. Nice! The place is right on the water overlooking the bay between the mainland and Longboat Key and is utterly lovely. The water-side of the Court is all colored glass giving the place a permanent rainbow appearance. Nice lifestyle if you can swing it. Last time I visited they had a full guided house tour, but due to COVID this was self-guided on only the first floor, though they did have an audio tour on your phone if you were patient enough. I’m excited to see what kind of house I build if I become extravagantly rich.

After walking the grounds a bit, the final part of the museum we went to was the art museum. Most of it is the art John and Mable had collected, which was largely Renaissance and pre-Renaissance art from Europe, if I recall correctly (I could look it up but that’s boring and un-exciting). Honestly I don’t really dig all that stuff so much but they did have a very nice collection as far as I could tell. There were some pictures of boats which I always like and also some very very large pictures, the content of which I wasn’t so into but the scale of which I admired. For both me and my super-amazing girlfriend, however, the part we liked the best was a whole section of Asian art, collected more recently than John and Mable’s time. This stuff was more our style anyways, and I think was overall more colorful and interesting.

The picture above the previous paragraph is of a goat they had. In museums I’m actually usually most drawn to the oldest stuff, because I like to think about the ancient people that made the art. I think it really connects the past to the present when you can see the brushstrokes laid down by a person that lived in such a dramatically different time and environment. This particular goat is from the Han Dynasty, somewhere within a century of year 0. That’s a two millennia-old goat. That goat and Jesus were contemporaries. It’s a pretty nice goat! I just like thinking about the Chinese person from so many centuries ago who sat down and made a goat, and now it’s sitting in a museum on the gulf coast of Florida. Wild, right?

But with that, having admired all the components of the museum, we head out and went back home. It is a very nice museum, and I am excited to go back when my super amazing girlfriend can get the whole house tour. Hopefully they get some more Asian art too.

Reading this week:

• Child of All Nations by Pramoedya Ananta Toer
• The Old Drift by Namwali Serpell

A lot has happened, faithful reader(s), since last week’s post about New York. Sort of anyways. We’re in blog time now, which has only a tenuous grip on events as they happened. In our blog timeline, only last week my super amazing girlfriend and I were in New York, spending some time before graduation to try to enjoy our New England environs. In between that blog post and this one, we have both graduated from Yale University. We have also packed up our apartments, loaded them onto a U-Haul without any help besides the two of us, driven that U-Haul to her parent’s place, dropped all that stuff off, hung out for a few days, gotten a bus to Boston, and there gotten on a plane to Florida, where we are hanging out at my grandma’s place. We are hanging out at my grandma’s place not only because she is the world’s greatest grandma (I think I gave her a relevant mug one time to prove it), but also because she has a guest room in her house which is in turn located VERY NEAR indeed to the beach. We are on a month-long beach vacation to imagine that like most of my family at this point we, too, are retired, before plunging back into the world of reality and work, luckily for the both of us in government employ.

You are now caught up to speed! One of the first places we went (besides the beach) here in Florida was the Mote Marine Laboratory & Aquarium. Mote Marine is a special place! I have visited somewhere between several and many times before, given that it is fairly close to where my grandma lives and also a pretty neat place to go. This visit, however, is the fist time I visited since learning that it was founded by Eugenie Clark. I learned about Eugenie Clark when I picked up at a used bookstore her book Lady With a Spear. The book is about her early life and career as a trailblazing marine biologist. I enjoyed it very much and then put it on my bookshelf. Some time later, I started dating my super amazing girlfriend. For much of her youth, she too wanted to be a marine biologist. I was therefore excited to give her my copy of Lady With a Spear, hoping very much she would enjoy it. She did! Turns out my super amazing girlfriend had also owned for years Eugenie Clark’s second book, The Lady and the Sharks. My super amazing girlfriend had obtained this book when she had visited Mote Marine some years back. We (she) at some point had put all the pieces together of our connection with Eugenie Clark and Mote Marine, and were excited to go back on this visit.

Mote Marine is a pretty nice place! It is split into two parts in two buildings. The main building is more of a traditional aquarium sorta thing. When we approached on this day we were sternly warned by a very nice employee out front that we might want to start with the other building. The main building, she explained, was currently overrun with a collection of kids from a summer camp, and she suggested avoiding them for the time being. So we went to the second building.

The secondary building at Mote Marine had long been their more animal rescue-focused section. You’ll note from the name Mote Marine Laboratory and Aquarium and it’s founding by a world-renowned shark researcher that the raison d’etre for the place was really animal research and then also marine animal rescue. Since I was at Mote Marine last, the secondary building, as far as I can recollect, as become a lot more “slick.” It used to have I think a much more utilitarian vibe, but now the animals feel more on display rather than just being housed. But you can get rather up close and personal with some rescued sea turtles (see above), and since I was last at Mote they’ve also gained some crocodilians and some aggressively cute otters. The picture at the top is of one of the two manatees they have this side. Given how much they eat maybe it wasn’t so special that we got to see them eat, but I did enjoy watching the manatee shove cabbage into its mouth with its flippers.

Having given the summer camp ample space to get their fill of fishy sights, we head over to take in the main aquarium. They got all sorts of fish, and for a long time the main draw for me was Molly the Mollusk, an at this point long-dead but well-preserved giant squid. It was pretty amazing to me to think about how much we’ve learned about giant squids between the time I first saw Molly and now. Now they film these guys in the wild pretty regularly, you know? My super amazing girlfriend’s favorites however, much like Eugenie, are the sharks. Mote Marine has a rather large shark tank where you can observe sharks swimming around from both above and below. I guess gifs are just my aquarium thing now, and instead of recording the sharks in the shark tank I recorded the school of fish swimming around in a mesmerizing circle:

I was also excited to watch the octopus they had in its own tank. We must have caught it around feeding time, because this guy was way more active than I usually see them in exhibits:

All in all a lovely day. We saw plenty of fish and other animals, got to hang out at the place Eugenie Clark founded, had a lovely lunch at the aquarium’s café, and avoided being totally mobbed my hordes of summer camp kids. Not a bad time!

Sorry I made you suffer through Sandwiches last week, but this week my super amazing girlfriend and I went to a place! Specifically, we went to the PEZ Factory which is nearby us here in New Haven. We went because a little while ago when pandemic restrictions were slightly more restrictive and we were less able to travel, I had driven by it and thought it might be interesting to go. We just only got around to it, and there will be more adventures in the coming weeks, but still it was a pretty nice little visit.

The PEZ factory, in a way that makes absolute total sense, is very very into PEZ. When you enter you are immediately greeted with a wall of 700 or so PEZ dispensers, and there are so very many more to come. The place is not large and in some sense is more of a gift shop with some overzealous displays than anything else. This is not meant to undermine it! PEZ is a collectible commodity and they embrace this fact!

I think we learned a lot at the PEZ factory. Certainly stuff we never would have looked up on our own. For example, we learned that PEZ is Austrian and “PEZ” is an acronym for “mint candy” or somesuch! We learned the bestselling PEZ dispenser ever is Santa Claus! We also learned that the little things on the bottom of the PEZ dispensers that look like feet and help them stand up (like feet do) are referred to as “feet!”

The vast majority of the displays at the PEZ factory are various PEZ dispensers and other PEZ paraphernalia from throughout the ages (well past century or so, PEZ hasn’t been around all that long). One thing I found curious is that a lot of the displays (such as the one up top) mention how rare and hard to find they are. I don’t think I could ever be a PEZ collector. There is just about no way to even get close to collecting them all. There are limited edition Star Wars sets only given to Lucasfilm executives and PEZ executives! There are umpteen versions of like, Popeye from throughout the decades! Various ones only attainable from exclusive giveaways! There are a lot!

I was delighted to learn, however, that there is a subculture of PEZ lapel pin collectors. I collect lapel pins myself as my preferred souvenir when I go places (picked one up from the PEZ factory, don’t worry). Apparently there are enough PEZ collectors out there from around the world (they had a whole Japan display at the factory) that conventions come hard and fast, and to remember what conventions you’ve gone to as a PEZ collector the thing to do is to get a lapel pin. I want to see how deep we can make this rabbit hole go. Anyone want to have a convention for PEZ collector lapel pin collectors? We’ll issue souvenir spoons to keep the train going.

Inside the visitor’s center area you get a view into the factory floor itself, which is pretty neat. We visited on the weekend, so the factory wasn’t operating, and I can’t say I’m disappointed because that means employees get weekends off which is nice. They had a virtual tour thing you could navigate a la Google Streetview via a touchscreen, and a video showing you the candy production process. Industrial food production is always interesting.

On top of all this, the factory provided ample photo opportunities. On the left is my head on a PEZ dispenser, though now that I look at it, awfully phallic, ain’t it? On the right is a picture of me with the world’s largest PEZ dispenser. I was hoping for equally gigantic PEZ to pop out of it, but alas it appears to have been empty. Is it really a PEZ dispenser if it doesn’t dispense PEZ? Philosophers will have to battle it out for the ages.

Aaaaaand with that our visit was largely over. The place is not gigantic, but the entry fee is $5 and you get a $2 discount on anything in the place, and since the PEZ dispensers they sell are mostly $1.99, it’s really as though you get a free PEZ dispenser thrown in with the (self-guided) tour. Not a bad bargain! Besides all the dispensers, another remarkable thing is all the old candy they have. They have a whole bunch of decades-old candy just sitting in these display cases (one package from the 1930s, even), and it seems just fine. I guess then the major thing we learned is that when the apocalypse hits, the canned food might expire in a few years, but we’ll always have PEZ.

Reading this week:

• The Splendid and the Vile by Erik Larson

I saw the last launch of the Space Shuttle! Not recently of course. Avid fans of space will know that the last time a Space Shuttle was launched was back in 2011. Astute readers of this blog will also know that I have been in New Haven recently because of grad school, and haven’t gone anywhere at all because we’re not supposed to leave New Haven. That has left me with a dearth of things to write about (my super amazing girlfriend (hi!) suggested I write about cats, a suggestion I callously tossed to the wayside, though maybe I could have combined these topics), so I think I will dig through the unpublished annals of my personal history to come up with some things to write about. Thus, today, I am talking about the last Shuttle launch.

To set the scene, it was way back in the halcyon days of 2011. I had, just that May, graduated from the Naval Academy. Upon graduating the Naval Academy, the Navy guarantees you, after your four years of hard work, 30 days of leave. This is nice! There was some special name for it. Guaranteed leave or comp time or something. The name is bugging me. Some people, like the very eager newly-minted Marine 2nd LTs, decided to forgo this leave and jump right into training. Not I! No siree, I took that leave. Plus Nuke School didn’t start until like September anyways. I spent some of that summer in a stash job (the Navy needs to justify your paycheck or whatever, so they “stash” you in a job somewhere) at an officer recruiting office which was both low-stress and illuminating, but for my big vacation I decided to uh, go big. Specifically, I decided to go to Brazil so I could see the Amazon rainforest before it all disappeared.

I did not watch the last launch of the Space Shuttle from Brazil. I watched it from the Kennedy Space Center, which is where they launched Space Shuttles from, but you see it was all part of the same trip, which is why I bring it up, and also some foreshadowing that the next couple of weeks probably will be about Brazil, or what I can glean from the pictures, at any rate. Anyways! I think this was my grandma’s idea (she lives in Florida), or else my aunt and uncle’s idea, who are the kinds of hip and cool people that would come up with the sort of idea to go see the last launch of the Space Shuttle. I was rather excited at the prospect of seeing a Space Shuttle launch. I, being at times uncreative in my youthful interests, used to be a big fan of space, and had even gone to Space Camp when I was younger. And since this was gonna be the last chance to see one, it seemed like a cool thing to do.

I had nothing to do with the planning of this portion of the trip, and was therefore carried along somewhat bewildered at it all, the same way I imagine the various animals they’ve sent to space must feel. The crowd for the launch included my grandma, my dad (who was coming to Brazil with me), my aunt (the three people just mentioned are pictured above), my uncle, and myself (neither of us pictured above). Apparently, to see a Space Shuttle launch, you show up very early, which is why it is dark in the above picture, which depicts us showing up very early. We set up chairs and a blanket to claim our spot on the lawn of the Kennedy Space Center, and fell asleep again.

By later in the day it had become much more crowded. To justify the ticket price, I suppose, NASA put on a whole morning of events for us to watch. They hauled out some astronauts that weren’t flying that day to talk to us about like, space and stuff, and a jumbotron that displayed interesting facts and stuff. One thing I remember being particularly perplexed about was them droning on and on about how impressive the commander of the Shuttle mission, Christopher Ferguson, was, specifically due to all the time he had spent in space (if I’m doing some math right from his Wikipedia profile, 27 days). Meanwhile, they were like, oh yeah and Sandra Magnus is flying too. This is perplexing because Dr. Magnus there, due to a stint on the International Space Station, had spent (again if I am doing some math right) 143 days in space!!!!! A friend of mine tried to argue that ISS time was less impressive than Space Shuttle time, but I’m Team Magnus all the way.

There was some tension that morning because there was a chance that the Shuttle might not go to space that day, which I suppose is always a chance when it comes to these things. Those coy people at NASA also like to amp up the suspense by pausing the countdown at various intervals. But eventually, the Space Shuttle launched! That was really cool! It looked like this:

Please admire the guy closest to the camera, who is my dad, praising the Space Shuttle as the super cool thing it is (as an aside, during nuke school, they tried to emphasize how smart and stuff we were by saying that nuclear submarines were the most complicated machines on the planet, except, they admit in a touch of modesty, the Space Shuttle). I know that picture isn’t very illuminating, so I prepared a closeup:

So that was super neat! As you have gleaned from the pictures, we weren’t particularly close, so the noise wasn’t particularly Earth-shattering or anything, but it was pretty cool! And now I can say I saw it. Having been at the Kennedy Space Center since the wee hours of the morning, at this point we went and saw the rest of it. I had been before (both during Space Camp and like, other times), but rockets are always cool, and especially cool that day was an exhibit they had on Star Trek (the original/best series), which included several sets you could take pictures with. I am a particular fan of the below picture, because it looks like I am in charge of the Enterprise, but my crew has all been turned into children, a fate I was spared from by being on an opportune vacation:

So that was seeing the last launch of the Space Shuttle! Highly recommend, though that’s not a very useful recommendation. Please come back next week, when I will (probably) write about going to Brazil!

Reading this week:

• The Elusive Quest for Growth by William Easterly

This weekend we went to Sleeping Giant State Park here in Connecticut. The “we” here, as is now typical, is my super amazing girlfriend and I, because it is pandemic times and doing adventurous socialization with anyone but each other is somewhat irresponsible. Because it is vaguely related, I would like to take a pause for a meme I just made:

Anyways, Sleeping Giant is not too terribly far from New Haven, where we live and go to school and stuff, but it is outside of the town and outside of walking distance which makes the whole expedition seem like an adventure. The main source of entertainment in Sleeping Giant is walking around looking at stuff, aka hiking, and we came dressed to hike. My super amazing girlfriend was wearing like a technical sorta jacket, and I was wearing my safari jacket, along with some new pants I have recently bought. After navigating the annoyingly complicated system of paying for parking online, we set off to go hike and stuff!

Here we ran into trouble. All paths in Sleeping Giant more or less lead to this cool castle thing they got at the peak of one of the hills, so we were a bit agnostic about which trail we took. Not that the map clues you into such important information as the fact that some of the trails have really kinda steep rock scrambles which look not amazing on a good day but are even worse when it is somewhat wet out and neither of us were wearing particularly good hiking shoes, despite saying just in the last paragraph that we were dressed to hike. So we decided to turn around and head back to the trailhead to take another stab at it.

From there, we tried to follow a different trail which looked somewhat more promising, based solely on trying to divine the nature of the various trails from the map which provided the nature of the trails and little else. This trail was a bit better, but got progressively steeper and steeper until we were more or less scrambling over rocks again, until we reached the very upper lip of this portion of trail to find ourselves on an unpaved road which was perfectly pleasant to walk along.

And walk we did! We had a great time. The park was relatively crowded, and that was a bit uncomfortable at first (I wonder how long it will be until I face the world, find people in it, and don’t recoil in fear and trepidation), but then again the park has acres and acres and you could probably fit a whole lot of people in it and still stay socially distanced. It was also about this time that I tried to engage in a philosophical conversation about the nature of leaf peeping. The super amazing girlfriend, being super amazing, was pretty game for this conversation, but turns out there’s just not a whole lot of depth there. I briefly tried to wonder if going to aquariums shouldn’t be called “fish peeping,” but that’s about as far as it all got.

At the top we got to the castle thing, which was pretty cool. It’s an historic structure, in that it was built some time ago, but it has always just been a cool kinda thing you can climb up to the top of. It’s not like, a defensive fortification or a former home or anything. But the views get progressively nicer as you go up and we spent some time admiring all the leaves, like you do. Earlier on in the hike, I had struck a pose for a picture, which the super amazing girlfriend commented on as being my go-to pose, which is fair because it is, but for my picture at the top I made sure to exaggerate it as much as possible:

After poking around at the top, there was nowhere to go but down, so down we went. It was much like the hike to the top, except no rock scrambles, which was an improvement. There also appeared to be even more dogs on the way down than on the way up, and we got to admire all of them. There was a particular French bulldog that we followed behind for quite some time, and he was very popular with everyone and that was cute to see. At one point he came across an even smaller French bulldog and this was borderline too much. Eventually we got back to the car and drove off into the sunset, or whatever. It was a fantastic day out and it was nice to see the world before it got too bitterly cold for such things.

Reading this week:

• Shaping the Future of Power: Knowledge Production and Network-Building in China-Africa Relations by Lina Benabdallah
• Against Elections: The Case for Democracy by David Van Reybrouck

We set out today to steal a penguin. The semester here at Yale as been dragging on a bit (they eliminated all the breaks, for reasons which made perfect sense, but man we don’t get a break), and we needed to switch things up and add some excitement to our life. So we went to Mystic Aquarium with the intent to steal a penguin.

The “we” in this scenario was me and my super amazing girlfriend. She will tell you that we did not in fact set out to steal a penguin, but instead went to Mystic Aquarium because it is a nice place to go and also that she has fond childhood memories of visiting every summer, but she is just trying to cover her tracks. We visited exactly a week ago from when this should be posted, so it was a slightly cool October day up in Mystic, and I was a bit surprised at how many people were there. They had timed tickets, so I had imagined relatively controlled crowds, but there were about as twice as many people as I would have really been comfortable with. And not to complain too heavily about children, but they’re excited to see beluga whales and less excited to stay six feet away from people. I can hardly blame ’em.

My super amazing girlfriend’s loyalties when it comes to favorite animals at the Mystic Aquarium is split between sharks and beluga whales. Luckily the whales are up first and we got to see them get fed and interact with people through the tank. They seemed to be having an alright time, so were a delight to watch, and by hanging out a bit we established ourselves as normal tourists instead of daring penguin thieves. You gotta establish your bonafides, you understand.

The biggest takeaway from the day was actually that the Mystic Aquarium is super into Halloween. There were Halloween decorations everywhere. The polar bear at the front had a giant spider in its mouth. The majority of the fish had to contend with new neighbors in the form of skulls and skeletons. There was an entire skeleton island in the marsh, and the rain forest exhibit featured incongruous pumpkins and unfortunately congruous black cats. Do they buy new stuff every year, or does the Mystic Aquarium have a gigantic warehouse of Halloween decorations stuffed to the gills 11 out of 12 months in the year?

Anyways, back to the heist. After passing by the seal and sea lion exhibits, where we admired their grace, beauty, and the fact that it kinda sounded like they were sneezing whenever they came up for air, we head up the marsh walkway. At Mystic, you split off the marsh walkway to get to the penguin exhibit. We spent a chunk of time here, to scope out the scene, and also (on our second go-around) to call my girlfriend’s sister, who loves penguins. Here I learned all the penguins have names consisting of two colors (“blue grey,” “yellow red,” etc), and are identified by beads on their armbands. We also learned that in captivity they lived for 30+ years and had regular appointments with an eye specialist. Most importantly, we learned that two penguins sitting in a little rock hut and looking out are very cute!

Unfortunately, there were just too many people, so we called off the heist for right then and decided to see the rest of the aquarium. After the penguins and the marsh, the rest of the exhibits were indoors, which we braved out of a love of sharks. I think I failed to take any good quality pictures of sharks, but I did take this photo of a blue lobster which, I am told, is very rare, and must also be a criminal, relegated as he was to an individualized jail. Poor thing.

There were also jellyfish, which I don’t normally really like because I have been stung by them before, but I figured they would make a cool gif. I also briefly was in awe of a living creature of such a different sort than the vertebrates I normally interact with, but that passed as I moved onto thinking about blog content:

After seeing all the indoor exhibits, we went outside and took another lap around the outdoor exhibits, but alas the potential for penguin thievery hadn’t improved any. So we went to go say goodbye to the belugas who, I am sure, were as sad to see us go as we were to leave them, and then exited via the gift shop. I managed to buy a lapel pin, despite them hiding them in the absolute least visible spot. We then set off to eat some seafood, which now that I think about it was probably in bad taste? Tasted good though. I also took this very nice picture (I think) of a pigeon:

Reading this week:

• Development Aid Confronts Politics: The Almost Revolution by Thomas Carothers and Diane de Gramont

It is fall in New England so we went apple picking. Couple of points here. First, as you can tell from the title of this post including the word “Redux,” this was an event we also did last year, when it was also fall in New England (being a year ago, you understand). Despite the similarities in the season, and despite the fact that I again busted out my super sweet safari jacket (modelled above), there were a number of differences. I have not recently read any Steinbeck, so I didn’t ponder as closely how our adventure related to the plight of the American worker. I also haven’t talked about Marx nearly as much in the past few months as I did in the fall of last year. I feel very overworked this year; maybe the decline of Marx in my life and the increase in work is related.

The most significant difference between last year and this year, however, is the huge difference in the use of “we” in the sentence “we went apple picking.” Last year we got official funding from Yale to go on a group-bonding expedition, and so the we was a whole host of people. This year, “we” includes only myself and my super amazing awesome girlfriend, who is awesome, and who totally exists, despite the fact I felt weird about posting pictures of her here because I haven’t asked her about it. Unlike me, who is from the Southern land of Maryland, she is from New England, up in Massachusetts, and she goes apple picking every year. It is a pandemic and all, which is why we couldn’t go with all of our closest friends like we did last year, but going apple picking was a nice respite from the looming threat of death and a lifetime of heart damage.

We were not the only ones who felt this way! As you can’t see from the picture above (I really promise I was not the only person in the apple orchard that day), a number of people were there that day picking apples. But that’s not all! The orchard also had pears (I am fairly surprised by the wide range of fruit that grows up here in the frigid reaches of Connecticut), and people (including us) were picking those too. They had a corn maze that didn’t strike us as worth $7, but others disagreed. So it was a grand ole day staying warily apart from other people in a field as we picked various fruits off of trees. We filled up a whole bag, and took various photos so we can someday admire how young and sprightly we once were. Here, the super amazing girlfriend I have mentioned so often took an action shot of me picking an apple:

This was all very fun! We had a great time. I wish I had written this blog post closer to the actual event so I could relay to you more intimate details, instead of what I currently have, which is a hazy memory of having a really nice day outside among some trees.

This apple picking is a healthy activity, involving healthy fruit and walking outside in the fresh air, so we had to rectify that with a trip to the farm store on the way out. This particular farm store was much more of a supermarket, but it had cider donuts and cider and that is what we were there for so we were quite successful in that. I took two pictures of things that were funny:

The image on the left I enjoy because it makes me feel bad for the plantains, whom I am sure would like to be defined as something other than what they are not. And as a fan of plantains, I want to defend them here by saying if they’re not as sweet, they’re just as nice. The image on the right is an AMERICAN chicken pie, which is not the funny part. The funny part is right under that label, which I hope you can see, which says NO VEGETABLES, which I think is just a standard food label but I like to think it speaks to the AMERICANness of the pie.

After all this we went home. Please stick with me, I will write better blog posts in the future. I am quite swamped with work!!!

Two weekends ago, as you’re reading this, my super amazing girlfriend and I went to the Susan B. Anthony Birthplace Museum. I have a pretty strong affinity with Susan B., because when I was really young my mom had saved for me a Susan B. Anthony dollar, which I could look at if I asked really nice, with mom retrieving it from a box she kept in her room. I had three teddy bears, and they cycled through several sets of names because I kept forgetting them, until I named them “Susan,” “B,” and “Anthony” (Susan looked kinda like a “girl” bear I guess, and then B was dressed in a small t-shirt that had a picture of a pig on it diving into a pool, so B was “cool,” and got the “cool” name of “B,” and Anthony wore a little sweater so he was a nerd and Anthony was a nerd name).

So of all the places in the Berkshires, my aforementioned super amazing girlfriend had never been here because it was only opened about 10 years ago and she had never gotten around to it. That made it a convenient place for the two of us to go to, together. And plus, the centennial of women’s suffrage is coming up on August 26th, so that’s neat. Anyways, what with the pandemic and all, the place had timed tickets, and we arrived at 11:28 am, with the website having sternly warned us to wait in our car until the previous tour group had cleared out and there was sufficient social distance between us and them to be able to enter, at which point staff would come retrieve us. Except when we arrived, we were the only car in the four-car parking lot, and the place looked deserted, so we wandered up. We had the place to ourselves the whole time, which was nice, because it is not a large museum.

The whole place is about four rooms. It’s pretty well done for what it is, and with the pandemic they (well, the one nice woman working there) handed us a tablet for a self-guided audio tour. You enter in the kitchen, divert into a pantry that holds the history of the house’s restoration and journey towards museum-dom, and then enter into the intensely named “birthing room,” where Susan B. herself and three of her siblings were born. In the kitchen and birthing room, they have some information on her early life and Quaker upbringing, and some excellent examples of needlework, so that is cool. The next room has a store display, and the story about how her dad was selling alcohol for a while, but then after a man died of exposure due to being drunk (someone else sold it to him, not Susan B.’s dad), he forswore it. There is also a cutout of Susan B. Anthony, with which you can take a selfie.

It is in the fourth and actually final room that you get to the jam-packed story of Susan B. Anthony’s journey in advocacy and the suffrage movement. I had not realized that she was active in both the temperance and anti-slavery movements, and a friend of Frederick Douglass. Good thing I went to the museum!

Besides the displays, this is the room that really assembled a small but significant number of artifacts from the suffrage movement. I was drawn to some of the obvious, hit-you-over-the-head parallels to the current Black Lives Matter movement. Race and racism played a part even in the suffragette movement, as the figurine (on the left in the below, hastily assembled collage) clearly demonstrates. They seem to have had a hand-held laminated sheet to give some insight into the statue, but that was missing due to COVID, so I don’t know exactly what the statue means but I can make some guesses. And when it comes to Black Lives Matter, people are aghast that protests can turn violent, and property damage can ensue. I don’t want to delve into whether it is BLM protesters or right-wing agitators actually breaking windows, but the museum told us that the suffragettes would carry around toffee hammers like the ones below specifically to break windows as a form of protest. The toffee hammers were convenient, because the suffragettes could hide them in their purses, and breaking windows was convenient, because how else do the powerless assert power? For all the vapors people get over broken windows, I gotta say, it worked at least once, you know? The pin is only included because I found it witty.

One thing I had to keep reminding myself of was that there were actually huge swaths of people out there that were very much against women’s suffrage. That was tough to remember because so many of the anti-suffrage pamphlets focused on the terrible world that awaited if women were given the vote. From the perspective of 2020, I think they read as awesome and amazing. Women hanging out on street corners chatting! Women wearing pants! Women achieving financial independence and having interests outside the home! And below is a terrible vision of a “future inauguration,” with a badass looking woman laying down, I assume, some truths, while other women listen and a sad-looking man in the corner carries around a ribbon on a pillow. I thought to myself “heck yeah” before I realized this was supposed to be bad:

And with that the Susan B. Anthony birthplace museum was done. I actually managed to buy some lapel pins here, so that was cool. They also had a lovely garden full of Black-Eyes Susans outside, which I always like because heck yeah, Maryland, though it wasn’t until I wrote this blog post that I realized why they wanted Black Eyed Susans, and it wasn’t until I googled it and scrolled way down on this webpage that I figured out it wasn’t a pun on her name and the flowers were from the Anthony family homestead on West Road, apparently. Anyways. A lovely little museum, and remember, wear a mask: