From the category archives:
Here’s the class of six, plus teachers Adele Schmidt on the far left and Sam Hampton on the far right. My co-director, the talented Mario Starks, is second from left. The students are a United Nations of aspiring filmmakers, and a wonderful bunch who produced some great 3-4-minute documentaries over six weeks. It all happened at Docs in Progress in downtown Silver Spring, Maryland.
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Winter's a lot more beautiful with the right architecture and some river birches, don't ya think? Like this view of the Mall side of the Smithsonian's Air and Space Museum. (Still, I believe, our hottest tourist attraction.) I was passing by the other day on my way to the Iranian Film Festival going on at the Sackler Museum. To complete the Southwest Asian experience, I took in the Falmana: Book of Omens tour while I was there. All free, of course – like almost all museums in D.C.
I've posted a different view over on GardenRant.
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To the people who live here, inaugurations are a big annoyance if you don’t like the incoming adminstration or a very cool thing AND a big annoyance if you do. So there you have it – for locals life is all screwed up for a week or so. But waaay more than for the Carter and Clinton inaugurations I’ve seen, nobody I know minds a bit. Euphoria’s breaking out all over the damn place.
For us the conversation starter of choice for the last 10 weeks has been to ask each other whether and HOW we were going downtown on the big day, and local newscasters can’t get enough of it, either. Almost daily we hear alarming new crowd estimates and the prediction that it’ll take us four to five hour to get home via public transportation. The Porta-Potty-to-human ratio is announced and we calculate the outer limits of our bladder control. We hint at invitations to stay with close-in friends, or to use their parade-route office as a home base for the day.
Then this week we learned that all the bridges into D.C. would be closed, leaving Virginians creepily isolated from the North, and we all feel a bit under attack. And the big open question – the weather – is now a known factor and the news is not good. Could be worse, sure, but the expected HIGH on Tuesday is 31, and it’ll be in the low 20s when people gather on the mall and along the parade route…to wait for hours.
So after 9 weeks of scheming and dithering about my own plans for the day, the answer is: I’ll gather in a nice church hall near my house to hang out with like-minded friends and neighbors. We’ll eat, drink, and watch the whole thing on a big screen. PERFECT!
So I say let the out-of-towners take my place downtown that day – God bless ‘em! They go to a lot of trouble and expense to get here, and lucky me gets to see a few of them that I know. In the gardening world that includes one gardenblogger – Mary Ann Newcomer the Idaho Gardener - and my new friend at Gardeners Supply Company in Vermont – Maree Gaetani.
Photo: On Tuesday some lucky people will be standing on the balcony of the Newseum where I was last month when I took this picture, and they’ll have a pretty awesome view of the parade.
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Remember all the cheerful articles I’ve written about becoming a D.C. Master Gardener? I wrote excitedly about the classes, then missing everybody when the classes are over, about starting to create an organization of Master Gardeners, and then changing our name to DC Urban Gardeners, independent of the city’s Cooperative Extension Service at the Univ. of D.C. But finally, we started working on Projects, including the news blog those stories are on, and our website.
Well, the time to be coy about what’s really going on is over. (Only readers of our blog saw the clues.) Several of us, after trying to correct a really awful situation from within, have gone to the top. We’ve written to the City Council, the Deputy Mayor for Education, and the acting president of the university. The encouraging elements here are the new mayor and an evolving City Council who are focusing on the university, holding hearings, asking for input and apparently willing to see heads roll. So at the urging of a staffer at the Council, we’ve submitted testimony for their oversight hearings. I’ve copied my testimony below the "Continue reading" at the end of this article.
I’ve gotta say it’s weird, and not in a good way, for hands-in-dirt volunteer gardeners to find themselves in a role we basically hate – the whistleblower. But because we’re just volunteers we have nothing to lose – at least we don’t THINK they can hurt us for speaking up. Funds for good urban projects are limited, dammit, and we’re just trying to correct this total waste of taxpayer money. Actually, it’s worse than that because in this case city employees are working against the mission they’re tasked to complete.
Now there’s nothing left to be done, except wait to see if anybody gives a damn – anybody who can do something about it.
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There’s nothing like grand architecture as a backdrop for just about any plant. So even after living here 35 years, I have to stop and admire the view. It helps to not think about what’s going on inside.
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No matter that the Kenilworth Aquatic Gardens are w
aaay off the beaten path in an unfamiliar part of D.C. and it’s easy to get lost on the ugly, fast-paced freeway that takes you there. But this little oasis, maintained by the National Park Service, was having their very festive Annual Waterlily Festival and the weather was perfect. For once the day of the festival was not hot and not even humid. That never happens, so I had to go.
Notice in the bottom right the bad boy of wetland
s – purple loosestrife? Shocked to see it, I asked and was told that the biggest part of park clean-up is the removal of trash – lots of it – and these stray invasives get yanked every year during the volunteer event. Well, I’m thinking that the job of removing trash from this large body of water could be a pretty yucky gig. Yucky but rewarding, I’m sure. Seriously.
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