…in a galaxy far, far away…

So I have finally been motivated to leave my island paradise for a brief time. I grew up back East in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. – the very belly of the beast, so to speak – in fact I even went to Georgetown University, back in the ’80s. After college I caught the westerning bug and spent the next decade in Los Angeles where I met my husband; soon after we married, we realized the westerning bug had hit again so off to Hawaii we went. This was in August of 2001 – when 9/11 hit, our friends in LA said we were like rats leaving a sinking ship…

Six years later, my niece and nephew have grown into little people who can have conversations with you and everything (weird how that happens) and of course my parents are still living here too so I figured, it was time to go (thankfully my parents are retired and love to travel, so they have been out to visit us several times over the years – I mean, c’mon, it is a long trip but Hawaii isn’t such a bad place to go!!)

So from my metaphorical hilltop monastery I set out last weekend to weather the big, bad world. Frankly I must admit it’s gorgeous here; lush and verdant, not to mention the spectacular lightning bugs which delight us in the evenings. Yesterday we spent the afternoon at the National Gallery looking at art; aside from that, and catching up with a dear friend from grade school, and of course my family, there are no other big plans. One request both my brother and I made (he and his family now live in North Carolina) was a crab feast. If you didn’t grow up with Maryland Chesapeake Bay crabs you don’t know what you’re missing. Yummo!

I did manage to set up a wireless router but my laptop has been a bit lonely since I got here. I will try to blog a few times but probably nothing too big until I get back home in August. I did snap a few shots of the wonderfully symbolic architecture here in DC as well as the obligatory chemtrails, which surprisingly haven’t been as bad as I thought they would until today (my eyes are burning right now). We’re spared that insidious poison in Hawaii because of our fierce trade winds – they can’t make them stick, though they still occasionally try. I included several photos here; one of my parent’s backyard which they work very hard to keep beautiful; also a sculpture from John Aaron’s Pantheon of Scoundrels in Arlington, and of course, Dali’s “The Sacrament of the Last Supper” at the National Gallery, about which Dali himself was quoted as saying, an “arithmetic and philosophical cosmogony based on the paranoic sublimity of the number twelve…the pentagon contains microcosmic man: Christ.”

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