Fecundity of life and love
It is very spidery out here in the verdant outskirts of Spookytown, and if I had a camera where I could actually control depth of field, you would be able to see a pictorial array of spiders with which I have interacted (long-legged, stripey, jumping, in my sweater at work, etc.). It seems to be spider-breeding season at present, and fertile mother spiders are brooding near their eggs all over the place. One egg sac located just to the left of my front door hatched this morning. You can see the baby spiderlets (so very wee!) to the left of the top sac, on the bricks. (Just fyi, for those of you who don't know, clicking on a photo will give you an enlarged view.) To give a sense of scale, since my archeologist's meter stick hasn't been unpacked yet, here is my right index finger adjacent to another sac, hatched last week.
Just to the right of the door is yet another brooding spider, but this one has arrayed her eggs vertically and atop a bush. None have hatched to date.
As so often happens, the observer turns out to also be the observed -- here, from the livingroom window.
Random impressions
I've been socializing a lot lately, which often means going into Spookytown proper. I do this either by catching a bus to the Metro (but the bus doesn't always appear in the most timely fashion, and also the buck twenty five for the 8-minute ride is in no way transferable to the train, whereas the bus transfer coming from the train allows for just 35-cent rides home, and I find the illogic irritating) or by driving to the Metro (making me feel like a suburban lameass). So the Spookytown Metro system gives me all kinds of deja vu, since it was built by the same Italian company that put together the Bay Area Rapid Transit system, with which I am quite familiar, but what is really impressive is that they managed to make it spookier! One way is by having really deep stations and thus enormously long and steep escalators reaching up up up, which isn't great for those of us with a fear of steep inclines. The other way, not yet pictured here, is by significantly underlighting every station so that it is eerily dark -- to the point where the station signs are sometimes difficult to see. A clever idea for a town with a really high rate of crime and lots of bumbling tourists. But some aspects are still aesthetically pleasing, like some of the ceilings (at least the ones in the better-lit stations, then you can actually see what they look like).
I went to a rather diplomatic part of town the other day to see an exhibit of Central Asian textiles (insert your own snide comment on my nerdiness here), and was continually struck by the oddness of the things printed on building plaques en route to and from the museum. It's like every Spookytown building has a plaque of some kind, and you would never be able to predict what will be written on the plaque based on location or building type.
Many of these diplomatic-type buildings are standard looking Spookytown three-story red-brick buildings, but some have interesting architectural details.
And then, of course, if you are very very lucky you can see garishly painted ceramic pandas, apparently some kind of leftover from an earlier "Panda-monium" (ick) series promoting Spookytown. Like the Chicago (or Prague) cow series. It seems peculiarly apt that it is a caged animal, one imported from a far-away land, and usually dissatisfied to the point where it needs to be tricked into mating and reproducing, which is being presented as a symbolic representation of Spookytown. 
What do we want?
There was an anti-war protest in Spookytown today. You may have seen it on tv. I had been feeling kind of ambivalent about going -- so many slogans and speakers that aren't fully endorsable! Joan Baez. Al Sharpton. The conflation of this war with Israeli-Palestinian issues (and not in a productive way). 
Conspiracy-theory naivete. And so much more. But my friend Hellraiser was coming down from Philly with her friend Warrior, and so we went on down to Constitution Avenue. Many groups of young folk were unabashedly enthusiastic:
Others kept their composure:
"The man" was out in full force, but had nothing much to do.
Same for not-quite-the-man as well:
Some older women who had been helping to carry one protest piece, a long (really, much much too long) piece of rope with the photocopied photograph of every US military casualty to date, in alphabetical order, asked me, Hellraiser, and Warrior to take their places, and so we did.
It was just as moving as you might think, if not more so; some of the plastic sleeves had personal notes from people who either knew or had been in touched in some way by these men and women. We ended up laying the pictures down by the Washington monument, next to a field of 1900 crosses (with some mageyn davids thrown in).
I cried.But there were lighter moments, along with the inexplicable:
Can any of you mid-Atlantic types explain the half smoke pretzel? Because I sure can't.
The spookiness continues
Today I went to a workshop at the new building I'll be working in once I get my clearance. It is a secure site. I went by bus (well, bus and then bus) and many of my bus-mates were clearly lefty university professors being all public transportationy, so it was quite the shock to the system to arrive at my destination and walk around the high-security fence (a "Hercules" fence, made, perhaps, after the stable shovelling?), past the guard gatehouse (only after showing my badge), and past the in-building security desk, where I was forced to surrender my (possible security hazard) cell phone. I'll stop here -- if I write any more about this, I will probably have to find you and kill you.*
How did I get here?
*And obviously, no photo essay supplementing this entry.
Questionable marketing
Spotted in strip malls en route home from Trader Joe's. If you're ambivalent about cleaning clothes, why open a laundromat? Also, I really don't think that this is the best way to sell mattresses, given intertextuality...
"Let's Talk Hair"
That SS (whoops!) recruitment poster is from the metro station here in Hippy Dippyville (our lefty enclave of the Spookytown metro region is known for its tie-dye-wearing, organic-vegetable-loving, Birkenstock-clad, protest-music-producing populace). Other signage around town is a bit more laid-back.
A body in motion
Years in the midwest apparently dulled my awareness of the relationship among among gravity, potential energy, and kinetic energy, but this morning I was reminded once more that running down a slope is significantly easier than running up it.
Move faciliation
People love me!* At least my family does, and also my friend J-ka - Mom and Dad drove down the 
day before my stuff arrived in order to help with the unpacking, and J-ka and Stovie took a Greyhound bus from NYC the next evening. Quite the whirlwind of activity, and after they left about 75% of the unpacking and organization was done. The heat made us all a bit punchy. Berets were donned, for example, perhaps not wisely. 
J-ka's organic beet and heirloom tomato salad, made with CSA veggies lugged down from the city (on the bus, no less) had a calming effect. The carrot (as shown in Carrot Frenzy), however, had a stimulating effect: a song was composed in its honor, and it posed for several poignant photographs, like this one here.
My brother apparently thinks it is funny to take bad photos on purpose, but it is not. 
But we got a lot done
which explains the anti-paparazzi stance
and also the fatigued faces.
*That was a statement rather than a command.
The Move 2005
Even though my camera was at the ready for the whole journey, I found the Illinois-Indiana-Ohio-Pennsylvania-Maryland route to be, well, not particularly photogenic. So we begin our photographic odyssey just after arrival. Here we see Wethead, whose love of boxes is so overwhelming that he must jump into one of the newly purchased Ikea underbed boxes before it is even assembled.
Not long after, Wethead and the Sveltie met one of the cats next door. A dramatic moment.
Now we apparently have a new morning routine. I open the kitchen door, within half an hour Mr. Aggressive Gray Cat From Next Door comes by, yowling ensues, I close the kitchen door. So much for cross-ventilation.
Meanwhile, the Giklet didn't really emerge until after Dad's departure, but then was jolly as can be.
Labor Day weekend was boring, but the weather was good, so I went hiking in an eh park near Gaithersburg: park website claims of 16 miles of creekside hikes were greatly exaggerated. I did, however, see this tree, apparently felled by gnawing beavers. No other signs of beaver habitation, though, sad to say. The only other invasive animal behavior of the weekend was this, Wethead's attempt to keep me from putting together my Andersonville photo-essay album. Jerk.
It is very spidery out here in the verdant outskirts of Spookytown, and if I had a camera where I could actually control depth of field, you would be able to see a pictorial array of spiders with which I have interacted (long-legged, stripey, jumping, in my sweater at work, etc.). It seems to be spider-breeding season at present, and fertile mother spiders are brooding near their eggs all over the place. One egg sac located just to the left of my front door hatched this morning. You can see the baby spiderlets (so very wee!) to the left of the top sac, on the bricks. (Just fyi, for those of you who don't know, clicking on a photo will give you an enlarged view.) To give a sense of scale, since my archeologist's meter stick hasn't been unpacked yet, here is my right index finger adjacent to another sac, hatched last week.
