Saturday we went down to Boston to see our friends Tucker, Liz, Dan and Whitney. Dan and Whit had flown in from Charlottesville for the 3 day Martin Luther King weekend and my friend Matt, Heidi, Amelia and I drove down.
We had a great time with everyone until the 4 am wake up of Amelia.
None of these guys have kids so we were pretty sure we provided some good deterrence on them having any soon. Especially Matt who had to endure about 1 hour of wailing on the ride home.
Making a big weekend even bigger we got to see Heidi's sister Becky too. Becky and Grammie came over for dinner on Sunday night and we ate lunch together today.
Part II
On a different note...while I was shoveling snow today I had the radio on and they replayed Martin Luther King's speech from the steps of the Washington Monument (I have a dream). At points it made me stop and listen because of how enduring many of the things he said were. While we still have many, many problems it is heartening that the conditions he spoke of in terms of the treatment of black citizens are now universally deplored. I do worry that somewhat irrational fear of people that are different does still percolate through our country. As a religious non-church goer, I worry about taking away the rights of any person even people that we might disagree with. In all of my readings about King (and Ghandi, etc.) I have always been struck by their ability to treat their enemies much, much better than their enemies would treat them.
People much smarter than me have drawn the obvious parallel to Obama and King. But in listening to King's speech I was awed by the way he spoke with such optimism about the future and with such a lack of hatred in his voice. At a time when atrocious violence and mistreatment was being perpetrated upon Southern blacks, King spoke of not falling prey to the easy urge to fight violence with more violence. During this tough time in our history I hope that Obama's rhetoric will be turned into action and ALL people in this country and the world will benefit from his optimism. Beginning tomorrow we will see what happens--but I hope for the best.
Part III
We were greeted Sunday morning with a huge snow storm that I had no idea was coming. You know you live in a snowy place when you miss a 12 inch snow storm. I think it is actually sort of fun. Anywho, I am currently in a battle with the plow truck drivers over how much they like to plow in our mailbox. I know they are just doing their job but they really did plow the box totally shut. Stage 1 of the battle began when I extended our mailbox out a bit (you can see it in the picture) so the mail lady could get to it. (A corollary to this is that if you don't plow out your mailbox you have to pay $500 dollars to the post office to get your winter mail. I wonder if Bernard Madoff is involved in that scheme?) Stage 2 involved the plowers plowing right up to the box and pushing a huge pile of snow right up to it. Stage 3 today, while I was listening to MLK and had just shovelled out the mailbox occurred when the plow once again came by and pushed all of the snow back in front of the mailbox. It was so obvious that 2 cars that saw it happen stopped and commiserated with me. It is good to know that boxes are being plowed in all the way up the street.
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