The water's cold

To get started blogging again, I was trying to post a video that I took at a truck stop in Virginia last month. It consisted of two stuffed dinosaurs and a King Kong doll, all battery operated and battling for supremacy of a shelf in the gift shop. It was pretty entertaining at the time, given the fact that the van had broken down and we were killing time waiting for a hose to get replaced, or something. However, I left the silly thing trying to load for an hour, and nothing happened. It was only 20 seconds long. My skills as a web diagnostician are limited at best, so I just left it. Here's a much classier image from that trip.
I like historic sites in general, but Monticello is probably my favorite one to visit. I've been there three times, I think, over the years. One draw is the sheer beauty of the site. A green mountaintop, lush gardens, views over Charlottesville... as a landscape aficionado, it's irresistible. Thomas Jefferson's design for the house is fascinating, as well. I guess that's a large part of what I find so appealing about the whole place... everything there, from the furniture and paintings, to the vineyards, to the shape of the windows, is an expression of one man's mind and personality.

The snarkapoo had a good time, too, being a history nut. (She became obsessed with the Revolutionary War when she was about 6, and things progressed from there. I dunno. She's 9 now.) This was amusing: she became highly upset that the date of birth on Jefferson's tombstone was April 2, 1743. All of her books say that he was born on April 13. HOW to reconcile this? How could all of her books be wrong? It was an intellectual trauma, to be sure, until we asked our guide about it during the house tour. Turns out that the British Empire didn't adopt the Gregorian calendar until 1752, by which time there were 11 days missing. Whew. What a relief. I'd been really worried about the drive home, if we hadn't gotten an explanation for that.

Maybe my next post will be a current ramble, instead of a month-old one.