Well, I’m sitting here in our house in Woods Hole, sipping a beer, reading an interesting physics paper about the holographic principle, and I thought that it might be good to take a few moments to update you all on the past few days.
Having left Matt’s place in Atlanta on Friday morning, I journeyed up through the Carolinas, Virginia, Maryland, New Jersey, New York and into Connecticut on Friday. Baldr and I slept at a rest area in the back of my car in Connecticut and then went on to my parents’ place in Concord, MA on Saturday. Saturday evening, after dinner, I finished the journey down to Woods Hole, MA so as to avoid any morning traffic on Sunday (the 4th).
In the process, I managed to finish Cloud Atlas and I am pleased to report that it was, in fact, quite good.
Anyway, leaving Atlanta, and driving through Georgia for a while, I ended up in South Carolina. Driving through South Carolina on an interstate, one sees quite a few signs advertising the sale of fireworks. Initially, my reaction was mostly a ho-hum, fireworks are kind of fun but do I really care enough to stop and buy some. Thankfully, after passing a dozen or so advertisements on the road, I came to my senses and realized that, of course, I want fireworks, big awesome fireworks. Coming to my senses, and stopping at the next place I could find, I proceeded to buy a bit over a hundred dollars worth of fireworks – primarily mortars and bottle rockets as those are my preference. We went through about half of the fireworks yesterday while we watched the Falmouth fireworks from Fay Beach. A number of youths (youngsters, teenagers, hooligans, whatever you want to call them) clustered around us and we were nice enough to share my fireworks with them. It was rather pleasant to share fireworks with a younger generation and I certainly know that I would have appreciated it had someone done so with my when I was that age; I couldn’t help but also feel good about possibly instilling some tiny amount of respect for the proper operation of things that have labels like, “Warning: Shoots Flaming Balls”. Subsequently, Dave, Paul, and I played a rousing game of Power Grid, which is an excellent board game.
That’s most of what I have to report of the past few days; it’s nice to be here after so long away. I should be here for about the next three weeks so it’ll be interesting to see how things play out.