Mal and Lauren

November 7, 2023

In September of 1967, Mal and his family took The Queen Mary across the Atlantic from New York City to Southampton, England, on one of the iconic ship’s final voyages. Soon after, it was retired from service and entered into its new life as a hotel in Long Beach, California. Fifty six years after he last stepped on board, Mal went for a visit, along with our daughter-in-law, Kylie. This is Mal on board back then (in bow tie).

And this is Mal on board now.

At an overall length of 310.7 meters and a weight of 81,237 tons, The Queen Mary held 2,140 passengers and 1,100 crew. That might seem big but it doesn’t compare to today’s largest cruise ships. The Wonder of the Seas, for example, is 362 meters long, weighs 236,857 tons and holds up to 6,988 passengers. Here is the actual Queen Mary.

And here is the lego version, which just happens to be the world’s longest lego model of a ship. At 25’11” long, it is made of approximately 250,000 bricks.

We walked the decks

And the beautiful wood paneled halls.

We visited the Bridge

And the Captain’s cabin which was tucked in behind the Bridge. Not his main cabin, which we expect would be much fancier. This is the one he used in potentially dangerous seas where his leadership might be urgently needed.

We played a little shuffleboard

Spoke on the phone.

Checked out the bar

And, finally, the engine room.

Special thanks to Kylie for indulging Mal on his trip down memory lane.

November 6, 2023

About an hour’s drive down the coast from LA is scenic Laguna Beach. We made the drive down to meet Lauren’s old school friend Lisa and her husband Dave. After a beautiful lunch at Las Brisas restaurant, sitting high on a point overlooking the beach, we went for a stroll along the coastline and into town. Here are some of the sights.

October 28, 2023

Named after Griffith J. Griffith (cool name), who donated the over three thousand acres on which it sits, the Griffith Observatory is the place to go for extensive views of Los Angeles and the nearby Hollywood hills. Opened in 1935, it is a beautiful deco style building that has featured in numerous movies, perhaps most famously in Rebel Without a Cause and more recently in La La Land.

Griffith’s legacy was marred by his notorious shooting of his wife in 1903. The shot did not kill her but left her disfigured and she lost her right eye. He was charged with assault with a deadly weapon with intent to commit murder. However, under cross-examination, his wife testified that Griffith was subject to paranoid delusions. Consequently, he was convicted of the lesser charge of assault with a deadly weapon and sentenced to two years in San Quentin State Prison.

We parked down the hill In the surrounding parklands and along with our son, Jake, started the long winding walk up to the observatory.

Along with the amazing views, the Observatory also offers informative space and science related exhibits, that include a Tesla coil

And a piece of moon rock

The observatory is surrounded by beautiful decks from which to enjoy the views.

October 27, 2023

Silver Lake is a hip suburb in Los Angeles. It is east of Hollywood and straddles across Sunset Boulevard. Our son, Ben, recently purchased a property there. On yet another sunny LA day, we headed out to explore the neighborhood. It was quite a strenuous walk as it is very hilly in this part of LA. With its staircases cutting down to the main streets, narrow windy streets and many Spanish style homes, we were often reminded of Europe.

The neighborhood gets its name from the reservoir that sits at its center. Built in 1907, the reservoir is named for Herman Silver, a LA Water Commissioner

Sitting among the houses lining the reservoir is the Neutra VDL Studio and Residences. An original building, designed and built in 1932 by the famous Austrian-American architect, Richard Neutra, as his home and studio, was destroyed by a fire in 1963. It was rebuilt by the architect’s son, Dion, with his father’s oversight. The original footprint of the house was preserved, although a number of changes were made in the design. It is now listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Finally, here is the classic car of the day.

October 25, 2023

Our son, Jake, and daughter-in-law, Kylie, recently purchased their first home. It is a beautiful Spanish Colonial Revival house in the California Heights historic district that was developed in the late 1920s. Jake and Kylie took us for a tour through the neighborhood. Here are some of the houses we passed, starting with Jake and Kylie’s home.

Apart from the coyote threat and the constant drone of the small planes flying overhead, it truly is an idyllic neighborhood.

We wandered over to nearby Los Cerritos. Established in 1906, the Los Cerritos neighborhood consists of larger homes, some of which you may recognize from the movies, including this home from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.

And this home from Donnie Darko

Here are some other homes from the neighborhood. With Halloween just a few days away, some had gone all in with their decorations.

October 23, 2022

In the center of Los Angeles, next to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) are the La Brea Tar Pits, an active paleontological research site. Over many centuries, animals ventured into the pits and became stuck and their bones have been preserved. There is now a museum on the site displaying a sample of the over 750,000 specimens that have been discovered there. Among the prehistoric species found at the Pits are mammoths, dire wolves, giant sloths and saber-toothed cats.

The scientists are still uncovering, preserving and studying bones.

Here is the skeleton of a Harlan’s ground sloth.

And here is what it would look like if it was still roaming about today.

September 5, 2023

Outside Charlottesville, high up on a hill, is Thomas Jefferson’s home, Monticello. The name derives from Italian, meaning “little mountain”. Originally, the property consisted of a 5,000 acre plantation growing tobacco and labored on by slaves. Jefferson designed the home at the age of 26 and the similarities with the University of Virginia (UVA) campus buildings which he also designed is easy to see. Today, the home, along with the UVA campus have been designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Jefferson was very much a renaissance man and you get an idea of his various interests as you walk through the home. There is everything from a mastodon jaw

To Oliver Cromwell’s death mask.

To Elk horns brought back from the Lewis and Clark expedition.

Jefferson even designed a clock hanging in the entrance hall that tells, not only the time of the day, but also the day of the week. If you look at the following photo you can see weights hanging down the side of the wall that worked the clock by gravity. Jefferson realized that the slow falling of the weights as the week progressed could also be used to tell the day. It’s not visible in the photo, but the black stripes on the wall actually have the days of the week, starting from Sunday. Looking at the top weight you can see that we were there on Tuesday morning.

Jefferson loved a gadget. He wrote the Declaration of Independence on a swivel chair of his own design and he used a polygraph which enabled him to make exact copies of everything that he wrote. His use of the machine has been a boon to historians as he kept copies of many letters that he wrote. You can see both the swivel chair and the polygraph in his office in the following photo.

Here is a portrait of the great man. The likeness in this painting was used for his portrait on the United States two dollar bill.

Here are his actual boots. They have aged remarkably well and look rather comfortable.

And here is a map of the United States showing the country when he became President in 1801. Jefferson also had a good nose for a bargain. During his presidency, the size of the country would double with the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, under which the United States acquired 828,000 square miles in the middle of the continent from the French for a mere fifteen million dollars.

After his wife Martha died, Jefferson spent a number of years in France. While there, he noticed that the French would sometimes locate beds in alcoves in the walls of homes to save space. On returning to Monticello he adopted the practice.

The outside of the house is reminiscent of The Rotunda at the University of Virginia, which Jefferson also designed. It is also depicted on the tails side of the United States five cent coin (nickel). Jefferson, himself, is on the heads side.

By the standards of the time, Jefferson lived a long life, dying aptly enough on July 4, 1826 at the age of 83. Coincidentally, his friend and rival, John Adams, the second President of the United States, died later the same day. Jefferson is buried on the grounds under an epitaph that he wrote, “Here was buried Thomas Jefferson, Author of the Declaration of American Independence, of the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom, and Father of the University of Virginia.”

September 4, 2023

On a scorching hot Labor Day, we found ourselves In Charlottesville, Virginia, home of the University of Virginia, commonly known as UVA. We headed down to the pedestrian mall, in the historic part of town.

But with most places closed due to the holiday and temperatures soaring into the high nineties there weren’t too many people about (apart from the occasional homeless person trying to keep out of the sun).

With nothing much going on downtown, we headed over to the UVA campus, which was much more lively with students heading between classes, carrying their mandatory backpacks. We tried, unsuccessfully, to remember if backpacks were a thing during our college years. UVA was founded in 1819 by Thomas Jefferson and most of the architecture is unsurprisingly, Jeffersonian, the mix of neo-classicism and neo-palladianism that America’s third president favored. It is a massive campus, taking up 1,135 acres and catering to over 25,000 students.

At the center of the University is its most iconic building, The Rotunda. It was designed by Jefferson, modeled after the Pantheon in Rome and accommodated the University’s library. The campus was unique at the time, as other universities in the English-speaking world surrounded a Church. Thus, to many, The Rotunda, symbolizes Jefferson’s belief in the separation of church and education.

The Rotunda looks over a large lawn that is framed on two sides by The Range, which includes rooms for a select group of 54 fourth-year undergraduate students. Each room includes its own rocking chairs. The rooms were included in Jefferson’s original design and have housed many famous Americans, including President Woodrow Wilson and writer Edgar Allan Poe. In fact, Poe’s room has been preserved. Fittingly, for a writer who specialized in horror, it is number 13.

Here are a couple of other Jeffersonian buildings that we passed on campus.

There is a memorial to the over 4,000 enslaved laborers who built and maintained the University. Completed in 2020, its beautiful simplicity reminded us of the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington DC.

August 9, 2023

We visited the Brandywine Museum of Art with our good friends, Dale and Joe. It is a beautiful museum in a bucolic location, housed in a converted nineteenth-century mill on the banks of the Brandywine Creek.

There was an exhibit of works by the Italian-American artist, Joseph Stella (1877-1945). Stella is best known for his futurist works, especially his paintings of the Brooklyn Bridge. However, this exhibit contained works which were decidedly more whimsical and included many floral and religious paintings.

The main reason that people come to the museum is to see the works of N.C. Wyeth (1882-1945) and his talented offspring. N.C. had moved to the Brandywine Valley to study with the illustrator, Howard Pyle, and eventually settled in Chadds Ford in a home near to the museum. He went on to become one of America’s best known illustrators and the museum has a number of his most famous illustrations, as well as some of his beautiful paintings. The illustrations, in particular, looked decidedly modern and would have fit nicely into a contemporary comic or graphic novel.

Particularly poignant was this painting of a local farmer and his daughter. The daughter is looking back to the solitary lit window of the farmhouse where her mother lies on her deathbed.

N.C . and his wife Carolyn had a number of talented children and grandchildren whose works are also exhibited in the museum. We liked this self portrait by their daughter, Henriette.

And this portrait by their grandson, Jamie.

But the main attraction is Andrew, N.C. and Carolyn’s youngest child, who grew up to become one of America’s best-known twentieth-century artists.

Near to the museum is an old school house that N.C. had purchased to use as a studio. In 1940, Andrew and his wife Betsy moved into the house where they lived until the 1960s. After they moved out, Andrew continued to use it as a studio up until just before his death in 2009. It has been lovingly preserved by the Brandywine Museum of Art to resemble how it looked when the family lived there. It still houses the furnishings, library and collections acquired by the artist, as well as examples of the art materials he used throughout his career.

There was just enough time to fortify ourselves at the nearby Centreville Cafe and enjoy the view of the massive Stars and Stripes hanging on the house across the road before heading back to DC.

July 27, 2023

With temperatures hovering around 100 degrees farenheit (38 degree celsius), we decided to head out of the city and find a quiet spot to go for a swim. So along with our good friend, Kelly, we drove out along River Road to Poolesville. Along the way we passed by Bretton Woods Country Club, where Mal had spent many happy childhood days swimming in the club pool while his dad played golf. But we were heading for a more natural spot to have a dip, Seneca Creek.

We parked next to The Seneca Store which first opened its doors in 1901. It has been run by the Poole family since the 1960s and now sells, farm, equestrian and hunting goods.

Sitting next to the store is The Upton Darby House that was constructed in 1855 by John Darby who operated nearby mills and is named for his son.

Just a short walk through the woods from the store and you come to Seneca Creek, and an idyllic spot to go swimming. On a scorching hot day, it was very pleasant sitting in the shade of the trees and the creek was cool enough to be refreshing but not too cold. It is a perfect place to take children as the creek is fairly shallow with a gentle current. We were practically alone with only a handful of other people enjoying a swim, although we expect it would be more crowded during the weekend.