On our recent trip to DC, the wife and I listened to the novel, Water for Elephants. Even though much of the book is set in the early Depression Era, the colorful storytelling and the dynamics of a traveling carnival made us want to visit the circus. The Ringling Bros and Barnum & Bailey Circus just came through Greenville and we went to see yesterday’s show. I took these pictures with my phone:
I recently wrote another guest editorial for The Greenville News. This time, instead of printing it just as I wrote it, they butchered it down and ran it as a letter to to the editor. As is all too common, their selective editing removed the larger context of the piece.
Here’s their version: Letter: Downtown wants you for 120 minutes
The full piece is here:
This weekend, the wife and I decided to take a day trip to Walhalla and nearby Stumphouse Mountain Park, which includes Stumphouse Tunnel and Issaqueena Falls. Walhalla is a small town about 20 minutes south of Clemson on Highway 11, and the park is on the other side of the highway from Sumter National Forest.
We had an ice storm this past weekend. It was very mild and by Sunday morning the streets were navigable enough to do some sightseeing. Here’s the Reedy River from the South Main Street bridge:
I lived on Capitol Hill for five years, splitting my time between the Lincoln Park area of SE and the Union Station area of NE. I only moved away a few years ago, but the change in the local culture has been extraordinary. Maybe I just didn’t notice it before, but there’s an off-putting aura of pretense and pomposity that permeates the air, especially around Eastern Market. It’s like all the fashion-chasing trendsters who were too poor to buy a place in Dupont or Adams Morgan suddenly decided to migrate their herd to the Hill. I asked my friends who still live in the region if they noticed a change and they all agreed that the community was becoming a monochromatic melange of like-mindedness.
The wife and I drove up to DC recently to explore our old haunts and visit some friends. Some things looked different and some things looked the same, but the biggest change was in the Navy Yard area where the new Washington Nationals stadium was built:
We moved away from DC just before the stadium was built and were amazed by the development in the surrounding area. Although still in the early stages of gentrification, the neighborhood is much nicer and more developed than it was when I lived there.
Last week, the wife and I decided to leave the house get some vitamin D. The foothills of North and South Carolina have many waterfalls, so we decided to visit one of the prettier falls about a half-hour away. Jones Gap Falls is in the Mountain Bridge Wilderness Area in northern Greenville County. It’s easy to access, fun to hike, and soft on the eyes.
In a suburb of Greenville, there’s a family that gets decked out in light suits and waves to passers by. We’ve heard about this bizarre spectacle for a few years and decided to drive by last night:
I guess Louie the Lightning Bug didn’t visit the schools in Pelzer?
The wife and I have been using a fake, four-foot Christmas tree since our days in Washington, DC. We’ve never had a grown-up tree, so we decided to finally get that stamp in the passport of life. It’ll go right next to the “endure three hours with a door-to-door vacuum salesman” stamp that we earned in October.
On a whim, the wife decided we needed a real tree this year. Like always, that impulse cost us a small fortune. Not only did we have to pay for an eight foot Frazier fir, but we also had to buy a tree stand, skirt, lights, topper, and some grown-up ornaments. We own several ornaments, but most of them are those little Hallmark collections that celebrate cartoon characters. You know, tiny Peter Pans and Tiggers and R2D2s and all the other symbols of the dreaded Consumer/Entertainment Complex. They’re just too small for a big tree. So after burning a few hundred bucks, we opened our arms and hearts to this slowly dying plant that will leak sap and shed needles all over my hardwood floors for the next five weeks.
UPDATE: The topper didn’t seem to fit with our other decorations, so I made a retro-looking star out of some wood scraps in my workshop.
Now that it’s practically winter, our tomatillos suddenly ripened. We decided to use them and some peppers from the garden to make some salsa verde. Last time we made roasted tomatillo salsa, we kept it sweet as a sauce for some pork. This time, I wanted it to be more like a hot sauce or spicy salsa. We used about a pound of ripe tomatillos, a few pablanos, a couple of chopped onions, a handful of chopped garlic, and assorted peppers and chilis:
