Wednesday, April 27, 2011

Great leaps forward

We've leapt into summer without stopping for spring here in DC. My personal barometer is the yellow silk twinset which is not warm enough for winter but is too warm for Washington's summer humidity. I managed to wear it only once before the days turned to 80 degrees F, now I will put it away until the fall. The weather's also produced a string of heavy precipitation. My snapdragons on the balcony are bent over from taking the hail. Inevitably they spring back, the potential for destruction mixed with the elements of growth and creation.

Saturday, April 16, 2011

Now on the mall - Coney Island Foot Longs

Just a brief hot dog update. The cherry blossoms have arrived and tourists are now pouring in. The hot dog buffet once at the Natural History museum has disappeared, but several new choices are starring at the snack kiosk near the carousel in front of the Smithsonian Castle. I had the Coney Island Foot Long hot dog, a bargain at $5, which is also the cost of a regular sized hot dog. Never been to Coney Island, but have heard stories from my parents and seen it on TV. Which is sufficient to conjure up images of board walks, salt water taffy, rickety roller coasters and brusque New Yorkers getting you through the food line. All this (for $5!) while sitting next to the Castle rose garden, taking in the twinkly Strauss waltz that makes the merry-go-round go 'round.

Sunday, April 10, 2011

Not Oakey-fenokee

Dumbarton Oaks, just beautiful enough in memory to register every spring, just far enough out of the way that it had been over five years since I last visited. The beginning of warm means tulips, the advent of hot means roses. A friend and I visited last weekend, the yellow budded forsythia are out, the cherry blossoms were bursting forth, there was a romantic field of ground-close violet flowers, and the hope of azaleas to come. An added bonus is the pre-Colombian artifact exhibition in a series of glass cylindrical galleries so positioned that from the air would look like a perfect crystal daisy set in the garden's green hills. From the galleries, one is cleverly seeing the art within, the garden without, and being seen as if through a terrarium glass.

Saturday, April 2, 2011

Model T's still on the road

At the National Archives (where the Declaration of Independence) is kept, I had lunch with a fellow from Social Security. (In Washington, when we say this, we mean he works for Social Security, not that he's drawing social security...) He had colleagues who worked on mainframe computers running on Cobalt and C. He was new to the government and was shocked. Actually, in my office, I discovered a team of engineers working on a system written in Fortran. My mother learned Fortran when she was in graduate school. There is another system, that manages data I rely on, which is written in Pascal. I studied Pascal in high school. The Cobalt system seems stuck in the mud, no movement to change it up. The Pascal system is now in transition, soon to emerge into the 21st century. The Fortran system is now recently listed for updating. Fingers crossed.