The Petrini Page

Success, At Last!

2009-11-08T21:27:35Z

Finally, I've had a day in which I surpassed the daily word-count goal for my Stargate SG1 novel. In order to make it to 50,000 words by the end of November, we should be averaging 1,667 words per day. Today is the first day I hit that average. In fact, I was over it, at 2,108 words written today. I think I've also finished Chapter Two.

Of course, I'm still way behind where I should be by now on the total word count. And as for the quality of the writing, well, we're not going there. But progress is progress. So it's all good.

Total word count so far: 5,695.

Just sit at the computer and open a vein...

2009-11-08T02:14:17Z

NaNoWriMo continues. I attended a write-in this morning, which was more productive than I was expecting. The idea of writing my book while sitting in a room with a lot of other people who are writing their own books seemed problematic at first. I tend to think of myself as a no-noise and no-distractions kind of writer. But once we stopped gabbing and got down to work, it was really quite pleasant to write while knowing I wasn't in it alone. I had to leave early for an 11:45 appointment to give blood. (Write a novel, give blood. Same thing.) But I'm looking forward to doing some more of these.

One reason is because I've realized that my house is distracting, even when it's quiet and contains no other people. There are the living room filled with elementary-school arts contest entries I could be matting, the laundry I could be folding, the ringing phone I could be answering, the stacks of junk mail I could be sorting, and the DVDs I could be watching. When the house also contains a husband and small child, well, my chances of finding uninterrupted time plummet even further.

I finished Chapter One this morning.

As the chapter ends, Sam is taking soil samples by the edge of a deep, slow-moving river on a distant planet when a large, powerful water creature lunges out of the purplish water and knocks her over. She screams, Daniel comes running, and Teal'c raises his weapon. But before they can help her, the creature pulls her under the water.

That's my cliff hanger. I'm not entirely sure what's going to happen in Chapter Two, but we can rest assured Sam will survive the attack, since I'm setting this book sometime in Season One or Two, and we all know that the television series continued through Season Ten.

Total word count after today's session: 3,587.

Maybe I'll try to up my wordage tonight, after i finally eat some dinner.

NaNoWriMo Update

2009-11-06T02:38:07Z

National Novel Writing Month total at end of day today: 2,959 words. I was hoping at least to make it to 3,000 today, but I'm so tired I can barely string along any sentence right now, even an incoherent one. Better luck tomorrow. I'm going to bed early.

NaNoWriMo Update

2009-11-04T05:16:05Z

I'm still well behind where I should be by now, but I did make some progress on writing the Stargate novel today, in between driving my mom to the surgical center for her eye surgery, working at the polls, sending the entries for one contest category to the judge, and carrying out general mom-related duties.

Today's word count: 1,374

Total word count so far: 1,691

Election Day Update

2009-11-04T04:32:31Z

It was expected, but it still hurts. The Republicans won the governor's race. My biggest consolation is the good sense exhibited by my own city.

Results for Virginia:
Bob McDonnell (R) 59%
Creigh Deeds (D) 41%

Results for Alexandria:
Bob McDOnnell (R) 37%
Creigh Deeds (D) 63%

My excellent state delegate, Dave Englin (D), also won re-election. As did my neighbor, newly re-elected Alexandria Sheriff Dana Lawhorne, also a Democrat. So there were a few happy returns.

Election Day Exhortation

2009-11-03T19:36:26Z

I just put in an hour at George Washington Middle School precinct, handing out Democratic sample ballots. Soon I'm heading over to Mt. Vernon Rec Center precinct to put in an hour doing the same thing there. In between, I thought I'd take the opportunity to say to you Virginians:

GO VOTE!

If you haven't done it yet, go do it now. And vote for Creigh Deeds for governor. Pretty please.

If It's November, This Must Be NaNoWriMo!

2009-11-02T04:45:01Z

Suddenly, it's November. For some of us, that means it's NaNoWriMo Month (NAtional NOvel-WRIting MOnth). This is the project that encourages participants to write a 50,000 word novel (or 50,000 words of a longer novel) in just 30 days. I participated last year and didn't finish. This year, I'm trying again. My screen name is catpet.

Today, after attending a Northern Virginia region NaNoWriMo kick-off party, I started writing the Stargate SG-1 novel I've been contemplating for the last few months. I don't actually have a plot yet, which is a problem. But I had been kicking around a story idea for some time, and was thinking that the difficulties surrounding it were insurmountable. Friday night, after another local NaNoWriMo event, I suddenly figured out a way to get past those problems. And this evening I did a little research and started seeing some glimmers of plot. They're still just glimmers, mind you, but they are more than I had yesterday.

My word count for today is so pitiful that I hesitate to record it. OK, you twisted my arm.

Today's count: 317 words.

Harry Potter Puppet Show

2009-10-30T14:29:28Z

My sister Maria turned me on to this one. Take a look!

Or, if you're reading this on my Facebook page and can't click on that link, try this URL:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tx1XIm6q4r4

Why Didn't I Think of That?

2009-10-22T14:41:48Z

A few days ago, my family was discussing what one thing we'd want to have with us if stranded on the proverbial desert island.

Assuming such basic necessities as food and water were already provided, I said I'd want a well-stocked bookshelf. My husband Bob opted for a sound system loaded with his favorite music. Our seven-year-old, though, is apparently the practical one in the family. He said he'd want ... a boat.

Now, why didn't I think of that?

On This Day in Literary History...

2009-10-15T04:45:02Z

On Oct. 14, 1822, Victor Hugo married Adele Foucher. During the wedding breakfast, his older brother Eugene suddenly went insane.

On Oct. 14, 1888, Katherine Mansfield was born in Wellington, New Zealand. Here's a quote from the always quotable Ms. Mansfield that we NaNoWriMos should post on our walls next month: "I imagine I was always writing. Twaddle it was too. But better far write twaddle or anything, anything, than nothing at all."

On Oct. 14, 1894, E.E. Cummings was born in Cambridge, Mass.

On Oct. 14, 1919, writers Robert Benchley, Robert Sherwood, and Dorothy Parker, forbidden by Vanity Fair to discuss their pay, protested by writing their salaries on signs and wearing them around their necks. But they didn't discuss them.

She Was a Woman With a Mission

2009-10-12T03:48:25Z

This article that ran recently in the Washington Post pays tribute to Dr. Margaret Pfanstiehl, the Emmy-Award-winning founder of the Metropolitan Washington Ear, a radio station that is a reading service for listeners with visual impairments. I co-hosted a live magazine show there for many years (though it's currently on haitus due to budget cuts).

I knew Dr. Pfanstiehl only slightly, but she was a remarkable and tenacious woman whose work enriched the lives of thousands.

***

A Local Life: Margaret Pfanstiehl, 76

For Blind Activist, a Mission to Share Simple Joys

Margaret Pfanstiehl, shown with her Seeing Eye dog, Gracie, founded the Metropolitan Washington Ear reading service for the blind. (1974 Photo By Bob Burchette -- The Washington Post)

By Adam Bernstein

Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, October 4, 2009

After an inherited retinal disorder left her legally blind in her 30s, Margaret Pfanstiehl spent the rest of her life working to help the visually impaired read the newspaper, watch TV and enjoy theater more fully.

Dr. Pfanstiehl, who died Sept. 28 at 76 in a Rockville nursing facility, founded the Metropolitan Washington Ear reading service for the blind in 1974. A few years later, at the request of local theater companies, she helped promote an audio description technology that, through a transmitter, allows blind and visually impaired audience members to hear live descriptions of action, scenery, lights and costumes between the dialogue.

Working with public TV officials, she helped advance a similar technology that created a separate soundtrack for TV viewers that was broadcast on radio reading services nationwide. These efforts, which helped make television accessible to those with vision problems, earned her a national Emmy Award in 1990. Mitch Pomerantz, president of American Council of the Blind, called her "one of the pioneers in audio description arena."

A conservatory-trained singer, Dr. Pfanstiehl (pronounced FAN-steel) said her goal was to enable the sight-deprived to "live a 20/20 existence without 20/20 vision."

She had little tolerance for self-pity, although she recognized life could be hard for the visually impaired. After all, she said, they are more apt to "get stuck listening to a bore at a cocktail party if they are unable to see him or her approaching."

She dedicated herself to making the lives of those with bad or failed eyesight a little more joyful.

The blind were often at a disadvantage by not being able to read the newspaper and know what's behind the headlines, Dr. Pfanstiehl said, and so she started Metropolitan Washington Ear.

The Silver Spring-based agency is a volunteer organization that reads newspaper and magazine articles over a closed-circuit radio. Several thousand blind and physically disabled people use the service, which expanded to include a dial-in service that allows listeners to scan major publications through pre-recorded readings.

A lover of the fine arts, Mrs. Pfanstiehl said the blind missed a lot of important descriptive action when watching a play or TV show. "I always wanted a little voice to tell me whether it was a gunshot or a slamming door onstage, if the villain was walking across the stage with a dagger, and whether or not the lovers were facing each other," she said.

She trained readers how to record for the audio description service without seeming condescending to visually impaired audience members.

"I remember once going with a novice describer to a performance of 'The Caine Mutiny,' " she told Reuters. As she recalled, a describer spoke into the earphone, "He's leading the witness on."

Dr. Pfanstiehl was annoyed. "I said, 'You don't do that. Blind people can hear, the problem is that they can't see.' Most blind people that come to the theater are fairly sophisticated. If you can come to the conclusion that he's leading the witness on, so can a blind person. You're there to be the eyes, the color camera lens -- what comes in the eye goes out the mouth."

Margaret Gillian was born Oct. 10, 1932, near Norfolk to a naval architect who moved the family to New York and then Maryland. She graduated from the old Academy of the Holy Names in Silver Spring. As a young woman, she showed a talent for operatic singing and received a music degree from Baltimore's Peabody conservatory in 1960.

Her early marriage, to Justin Rockwell, ended in divorce. In 1983, she married Cody Pfanstiehl, a longtime spokesman for Metro who liked to joke that Washington's mouth married Washington's ear.

Survivors include a son from her first marriage, Justin Rockwell Jr. of Silver Spring; three stepchildren, Carla Knepper of Glen Burnie, Julie Hamre of Bethesda and Eliot Pfanstiehl of Silver Spring; nine grandchildren; and two great-grandsons.

Dr. Pfanstiehl entered graduate school at the University of Maryland in the mid-1960s, just as her vision began to fail. She had suffered since birth from retinitis pigmentosa, which gradually destroys the nerve fibers in the retina, and her condition allowed her only to distinguish shapes and dark and light areas.

Not long after she received a doctorate in education in 1971, she heard about a closed-circuit radio reading service for the blind in Minnesota. She spent a year lobbying local governments and foundations for the money to start Metropolitan Washington Ear as well as lining up volunteers and getting the technical equipment for her nonprofit business. Its first program was broadcast on a subchannel of WETA in November 1974, with an audience of 63.

In 1981, she was approached by an Arena Stage official to make its performances accessible to the visually impaired. She was one of the earliest people to create and refine a system of audio description, which she called "verbal descriptions of essential visual elements." Working with her husband, Cody, and other volunteers, they helped train describers for theaters in many states and as far away as Australia. They developed audio descriptions for museums and national parks and developed an expertise in opera description.

Bill Patterson, a retired theater professor who volunteered for Metropolitan Washington Ear before starting his own audio description business, said audio description for opera can be difficult.

"It's a delicate balance," he said, "between providing the visual information of the action, scenery and costumes and so forth as well as the translation provided by the surtitles, and then knowing when to shut up so people can hear the most important thing, the singing."

The sweeping Americans With Disabilities Act of 1990, which broadened civil rights protected in earlier legislation, did not include a provision for descriptive services, and Dr. Pfanstiehl became part of an effort to lobby the Federal Communications Commission to require broadcasters to provide video description via a secondary audio channel.

Although the FCC agreed to the mandate in 2000 in some TV programming, the victory was short-lived. In 2002, the FCC decision was overturned by a federal appeals court in Washington, finding that Congress had given the commission authority to investigate the need for video description but had not specifically authorized the body to mandate it.

Dr. Pfanstiehl, a Silver Spring resident, died at the Hebrew Home of Greater Washington of lung disease. She was the recipient of many community honors and in August received a Leadership Exchange in Arts and Disability award for lifetime contributions to the visually impaired.

"It's no great honor to be blind," she once told The Washington Post, "but it's more than a nuisance and less than a disaster. Either you're going to fight like hell when your sight fails or you're going to stand on the sidelines for the rest of your life."

How Cool Is This?

2009-10-08T20:28:10Z

An old friend of my family just won the Nobel Prize for Physics. He worked with my father at ITT, back in Roanoke, and his daughter Amanda was one of my closest friends in high school. Our families actually owned a business together. I remember dinners at their house. They'd be discussing mathematics, and suddenly everyone would pick up the paper napkins and start scribbling equations on them. A very brainy family.

When I knew Charles Kao, his wife and my mom were not only co-business owners; they were also co-leaders of our Girl Scout Troop. Both families would come along on camping trips. So I guess I can say I knew a Nobel Laureate back when he was a Girl Scout! We understood at the time that he was a major figure in the world of applied physics. He was already known as the Father of Fiber Optic Communications. Now I guess he's known as a Nobel Laureate, as well.

Way, to go, Mr. Kao!

The following press release is from the Nobel Prize website at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences:

The
Nobel Prize
in Physics
2009

Press Release

6 October 2009

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Physics for 2009 with one half to

Charles K. Kao
Standard Telecommunication Laboratories, Harlow, UK, and Chinese University of Hong Kong"for groundbreaking achievements concerning the transmission of light in fibers for optical communication"

and the other half jointly to

Willard S. Boyle and George E. Smith
Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, NJ, USA

"for the invention of an imaging semiconductor circuit – the CCD sensor"

The masters of light

This year's Nobel Prize in Physics is awarded for two scientific achievements that have helped to shape the foundations of today’s networked societies. They have created many practical innovations for everyday life and provided new tools for scientific exploration. In 1966, Charles K. Kao made a discovery that led to a breakthrough in fiber optics. He carefully calculated how to transmit light over long distances via optical glass fibers. With a fiber of purest glass it would be possible to transmit light signals over 100 kilometers, compared to only 20 meters for the fibers available in the 1960s. Kao's enthusiasm inspired other researchers to share his vision of the future potential of fiber optics. The first ultrapure fiber was successfully fabricated just four years later, in 1970.

Today optical fibers make up the circulatory system that nourishes our communication society. These low-loss glass fibers facilitate global broadband communication such as the Internet. Light flows in thin threads of glass, and it carries almost all of the telephony and data traffic in each and every direction. Text, music, images and video can be transferred around the globe in a split second.

If we were to unravel all of the glass fibers that wind around the globe, we would get a single thread over one billion kilometers long – which is enough to encircle the globe more than 25 000 times – and is increasing by thousands of kilometers every hour.

A large share of the traffic is made up of digital images, which constitute the second part of the award. In 1969 Willard S. Boyle and George E. Smith invented the first successful imaging technology using a digital sensor, a CCD (Charge-Coupled Device). The CCD technology makes use of the photoelectric effect, as theorized by Albert Einstein and for which he was awarded the 1921 year's Nobel Prize. By this effect, light is transformed into electric signals. The challenge when designing an image sensor was to gather and read out the signals in a large number of image points, pixels, in a short time.

The CCD is the digital camera's electronic eye. It revolutionized photography, as light could now be captured electronically instead of on film. The digital form facilitates the processing and distribution of these images. CCD technology is also used in many medical applications, e.g. imaging the inside of the human body, both for diagnostics and for microsurgery.

Digital photography has become an irreplaceable tool in many fields of research. The CCD has provided new possibilities to visualize the previously unseen. It has given us crystal clear images of distant places in our universe as well as the depths of the oceans.

Charles Kuen Kao, British and US citizen. Born 1933 in Shanghai, China. Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering 1965 from Imperial College London, UK. Director of Engineering at Standard Telecommunication Laboratories, Harlow, UK. Vice-chancellor, Chinese University of Hong Kong. Retired 1996.
www.ieeeghn.org/wiki/index.php/Oral-History:Charles_Kao

Prize amount: SEK 10 million. Kao is awarded one half, Boyle and Smith share the other half.

A Little Less Safe

2009-10-07T22:05:03Z

A horrible event took place this week in the little town in New Hampshire where my sister lives. Mont Vernon is an idyllic village west of Manchester, a town where a lot of residents leave their houses unlocked. It's filled with woods, twisty roads, home lots of several acres, and quaint old buildings. There is no Wal-Mart, no Starbucks, and no McDonald's. In fact, there are no stores at all except for an old-fashioned general store. It's the kind of town where if you need a building permit, the town clerk will direct you to the barn where the guy in charge of permits can always be found milking his cows at 5 p.m.

Until this week, there had not been a murder in Mont Vernon in something like 50 years. Unfortunately, that's no longer true. Late Saturday night, four teenage boys decided it would be interesting to murder someone. They chose a house at random, simply because it was isolated. And they agreed they would go inside and kill everyone there. They broke into the house, found a woman asleep in her bed, and hacked her to death with a knife and a machete. They attacked her 11-year-old daughter as well, but the daughter -- who takes karate lessons with my nephew -- is a black belt. She managed to fight them off and to run for help, despite the fact that she had broken a leg and sustained other serious injuries in the struggle. Her dad was in London on business at the time.

So a 42-year-old mom -- a nurse and a runner who was well-liked in the neighborhood, is dead. An 11-year-old girl is lying in a Boston hospital, where she is expected to survive but will have to face the rest of her life without her mother and with traumatic memories of the worst night of her life. A whole town is shell-shocked. And it's all because four twisted boys thought murder might be fun. The only bright spot (besides the heroism of a young victim) is that the murderers were quickly arrested. One of them had even posted on his Facebook page about how much he loves blades. Two of them go to high school with my niece.

It's so easy to be lulled into thinking that things like this don't happen in places like Mont Vernon, New Hampshire. The story reminds me a little of the horrific shooting of Amish schoolgirls a few years ago in Pennsylvania -- not in the particulars of the crime but in the incongruity of the setting. If it can happen there, it can happen anywhere.

And we're all left feeling a little less safe.

Let's be careful out there.

Happy Birthday, FSF!

2009-09-24T05:26:10Z

Let's sing a big round of "Happy Birthday" for F. Scott Fitzgerald! He was born on September 24, 1896, and would therefore be turning 113 today, if he were still around to raise a bottle or two (or three, or four) with us. And yes, I am one of those English-majory types who actually likes The Great Gatsby.

Worst Poetry on a Bumper Sticker

2009-09-23T01:29:52Z

My nominee for the worst poem spotted today on a bumper sticker has to be this one, on the bumper of a huge, honkin', beat-up old pickup. The bumper sticker is for Crow's Creations, which I assume is a tattoo parlor. Here is the poem:

Tattoos are colorful,
Piercings are neat.
Get one now
Before you're across the street.

Ahh. Just rolls off the tongue, doesn't it?

The driver wasn't sporting any apparent body art. At least, not where I could see it.

Happy Birthday to an SF Icon

2009-09-21T23:36:57Z

Happy Birthday, H.G. Wells! The "Father of Science Fiction" and author of such classics as The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds was born 143 years ago today, on September 21, 1866.

Ahoy, Mateys!

2009-09-20T01:36:14Z

This is not a pirate-related video, but I couldn't let "Talk Like a Pirate Day" go by without alluding to it at least a little bit. Hence, the heading.

Instead, this is a tortoise-related video. There was supposedly a large Tortoise In Residence at the hotel where I stayed in San Antonio last week. I saw its friends and atrium-mates, the Toucans In Residence. And the Parrots Down the Hall. Witnesses claim there really was a tortoise in that atrium, but it was always in its little Tortoise House when I came by to visit.

So there I was, feeling all tortoise-deprived, when my friend Lee posted this video about his daughter's pet tortoise, Linda. (I'm guessing it was the seven-year-old who named it.) I am posting this with permission from Lee, who composed and performed the song.

VIP Visitors

2009-09-17T21:58:35Z

My son's elementary school hosted some high-powered visitors a few weeks ago. Due to a communications snafu, parents were not informed of this until weeks later! My son had come home that day with a free book that he said he received at school, but all he remembered was that some grownups he didn't know were there to read to the kids. Here's the after-the-fact announcement about it from an Alexandria City Public Schools e-mail:

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, U.S. Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis, and Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson participated in a special bilingual reading event at Mount Vernon on Aug. 28. Marking the culmination of “Read to the Top!!,” the Department of Education’s summer literacy initiative, the government officials read three stories to assembled students and staff:

My Very Own Room – Mi Propio Cuartito, by Amada Irma Perez
Growing Vegetable Soup, by Lois Ehlert
Listen to the Wind: The Story of Dr. Greg and Three Cups of Tea, by Greg Mortenson and Susan L. Roth

Kids Speaking Up

2009-09-12T20:00:22Z

Some smart, committed high school students spoke today at the NFPW conference's student journalism awards luncheon. One boy, now a college freshman, wrote an award-winning column about a classmate, a student athlete with testicular cancer who refused to give up -- and agreed to go public in order to help others. A girl who is now a junior wrote an international piece about people who are willing to sacrifice everything for the cause of free speech.

The featured speaker, though, was the most amazing. Sophie D'Arcy is a 15-year-old Californian who at the age of 10 founded, with her 12-year-old sister, an organization they called Kids Speaking Up. The student group is dedicated to fighting ignorance and apathy among kids, helping them to understand the issues that affect their world and to find their voices so they can work to solve the problems they care about. They have chapters at elementary, junior high, and high schools, and they publish their own magazine.

Portrayals of teenagers in the media so often portray them as self-absorbed, hormone-crazed, and shallow. It's nice to see another side of the story.

The Power of the Goddesses

2009-09-11T20:26:59Z

The Goddesses have done it again. Allison and I are here in San Antonio, but Goddess Paula couldn't make it. When all three Goddesses are present, our powers combine to bring lovely, perfect weather wherever we may be. When only two Goddesses are present, the power of the Three is unbalanced. Planets misalign, glaciers melt, and strange winds blow. The tornado in Nashville? That was our doing. A St. Louis snowstorm in June? We did that too. Here in San Antonio, it has rained every day, despite the fact that San Antonio is in the middle of a drought. And who knows what tomorrow may bring? Paula, we miss you.

Book Club To Discuss Obama Memoir Tonight

2009-09-08T17:20:20Z

My book club is meeting at 8 p.m this evening in Alexandria, Virginia. We'll be discussing Barack Obama's memoir, Dreams From My Father. If you live nearby, feel free to join us. Contact me for information on our meeting place.

BC In DC In 2011!

2009-09-08T00:38:26Z

Plans are underway for the Bookcrossers 2011 Convention that we're hosting here in the Washington, D.C., area. Festivities take place April 15-17, 2011. Preliminary information is now up on the convention website. Here's a link:

Attend BC in DC 2011!

Up and Running Again

2009-09-04T11:54:55Z

The Comcast technician came out last week to get our wireless cable Internet hookup working again. When he finished, he tried it out on my laptop. He was able to get online, so he said the problem was solved and left. Unfortunately, he never bothered checking on the other three computers in the house, and they still couldn't get online. So I've been relegated either to using the laptop -- which is brand new and doesn't have a lot of stuff loaded onto it yet, and which for which there is no desk space in my office -- or to going online on my desktop system via a maddeningly slow dial-up connection.

We (meaning mostly my computer genius husband, Bob) had been trying since then to diagnose and fix the problem. Finally, Bob gave up in disgust and began hardwiring all three of the desktop computers, a process involving cables strung around the basement and holes drilled in the floors, because the computers are scattered throughout the house.

It worked! I'm now sitting at my desktop computer in my office, and I am on the internet but not tying up a phone line. He still has our little boy's computer to tie in this weekend, but two out of the three are set. One advantage we're noticing: I have a ton more memory free than I used to. Apparently the poor computer was straining itself, trying to talk to a wireless router that was too far away and too obstructed for it to connect to easily.

Destination: Leesburg, Virginia

2009-08-27T04:32:26Z

Last weekend my seven-year-old asked if he could go to Leesburg. He had no particular destination within Leesburg and no particular reason for wanting to go there except that it is a nearby town he'd never visited. He loves exploring new places — and studying which routes lead there. I reminded him that he had a school holiday this week for a teachers' workday, and I said we could go then.

Today was that teachers' workday, so we drove out to Leesburg late this morning, with a lot of input from the backseat as to which roads I should take. Leesburg is in Loudon County, about an hour west of here. I used to go there quite often for browsing antique stores, taking walking tours of the historic downtown area, and eating at quaint cafes. Those activities didn't sound second-grader-friendly, so I did a little research this week to ferret out activities that would be more to his liking. I learned about a Civil War battlefield that sounded interesting. (Except this is Virginia, so I could justifiably call it by its southern name, The War of Northern Aggression.) Being a seven-year-old boy, my son is frequently fixated on violence, and I hoped this would provide a more educational outlet for that preoccupation than building Lego structures that include weaponry for fighting off bad guys, even when those structures happen to be airports, hospitals, and restaurants.

The Battle of Ball's Bluff was a small but dramatic Civil War engagement in which Confederate forces thoroughly trounced Union troops who made the mistake of relying on intelligence from an officer who couldn't tell a Confederate encampment from a grove of trees. The only sitting U.S. Senator ever to die in battle was killed at Ball's Bluff. This battlefield park is not a highly developed tourist attraction. Woods have taken over much of the site, there is no visitors center or gift shop, and the tour is self-guided (though occasional guided tours are available, if you get there at the right time). First we sat on a bench near the parking area and ate our picnic lunch. Then we picked up a brochure with a map that showed various trails through the woods, and we set out walking through the woods, following the white blazes on the trees. Along the trail were plenty of historic markers (yes, Markeroons, I snarfed 'em all) describing the events of 1861. I'm not sure how much history my little guy retained, but he seemed to enjoy the stroll.

After Ball's Bluff, we headed into town (and back another hundred years) to tour the Loudoun Museum. Actually, our tour consisted mostly of my following as he made a beeline for the Children's Discovery Room and sat down at a crayon-laden table to draw maps and complete colonial-themed word-search puzzles. I was able to convince him to dress up in the 18th-century-style children's clothing there, so I could take some pictures of him looking Colonial.

Then we walked back to the car and drove home in time to eat pizza with two visitors from Tajikistan. But that's a different story.

The Truth About Exercise

2009-08-26T03:16:33Z

Researchers have finally admitted it. After nagging us for years about exercising in order to lose weight, they've admitted what I had figured out long ago: it doesn't work. They've kept this fact to themselves because they don't want us to stop exercising -- because, of course, exercise is crucial and imparts all sorts of important health benefits. It's just that for most people, losing weight is not one of those benefits. For that, you need to change the way you eat. Here's a link to the story in Time magazine.

Why Exercise Won't Make You Thin - TIME

Or use this URL:

http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1914857,00.html

The Petrini Page

Success, At Last!

Just sit at the computer and open a vein...

NaNoWriMo Update

NaNoWriMo Update

Election Day Update

Election Day Exhortation

If It's November, This Must Be NaNoWriMo!

Harry Potter Puppet Show

Why Didn't I Think of That?

On This Day in Literary History...

She Was a Woman With a Mission

For Blind Activist, a Mission to Share Simple Joys

Margaret Pfanstiehl, shown with her Seeing Eye dog, Gracie, founded the Metropolitan Washington Ear reading service for the blind. (1974 Photo By Bob Burchette -- The Washington Post)

How Cool Is This?

TheNobel Prizein Physics2009

Press Release

The masters of light

A Little Less Safe

Happy Birthday, FSF!

Worst Poetry on a Bumper Sticker

Happy Birthday to an SF Icon

Ahoy, Mateys!

VIP Visitors

Kids Speaking Up

The Power of the Goddesses

Book Club To Discuss Obama Memoir Tonight

BC In DC In 2011!

Up and Running Again

Destination: Leesburg, Virginia

The Truth About Exercise

The
Nobel Prize
in Physics
2009