(Travel) Agent Ali

If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a million times: Ali’s missed her calling.  She is, without a doubt, the best vacation planner I’ve ever known.  We had planned a quick daytrip to Napa to pick up the wine from this month’s wine club.  To my surprise, she handed me a sort of two-day Napa scavenger hunt.  There were nearly a dozen items and about 36 hours to get ‘er done but that’s not all!  The theme was, “A Weekend of Firsts.”

 We started with a California staple, In-N-Out Burger (Double Double and a Milk Shake).  Excellent burger, terrible fries, good milkshake.  We will go again. 

 Shortly thereafter we proceeded to a new Napa dog park (even the dog park has vines), checked-in at the new temporary domicile (Beazley House), visited three new tasting rooms (Grgich, Girard, and Corley Farms), and then had dinner at a new restaurant in downtown Napa.

 The “Weekend of Firsts” continued on Sunday with a trip to the Old Faithful Geyser of California, Buster’s BBQ, and reached a glorious crescendo with an afternoon viewing of Top Gun in 3D at the SF Imax Theatre (!!).  I didn’t get a picture of us in our 3D glasses but I did get this!

The Impenetrable Mist

One of the complexities of a family genealogy project is the reality that information sought is often difficult or impossible to obtain. Since leaving Sharpsburg, I stumbled on a might-be-relative (Dr. Lemuel Line) who similarly documented his ancestry...except he did it during the 1893. At the beginning of the document, he writes better of the difficulties which I find.

"It is difficult to write a history of ones ancestry when every thing that he has to rely upon is so enveloped in a mist that is impenetrable and no matter how one may yearn, to look into that realm of the unwritten past his effort will almost prove useless, as the record is only written upon the minds of those who slumber in the grave. What an age has passed we of this latter day can fully appreciate, and yet our lives are like dying embers at first a flicker, then another and with a mighty effort to survive, it flashes up only to go out as those who have gone before- we sit and muse and wish that the ashes of the past, might once again, assume their ruddy glow, and tell the tales that oft they had heard - yet we in our progression can not give the inanimate speech nor portray with an adequate justice, the many scenes in wood and field-Their deeds and actions can only cast their reflection through the generation of the present, and as we labor on in our daily avocation our lives displaying many of the traits of the forgotten dead-The restless spirit of man although limited by the laws of the body is yet as boundless as the universe-In his curiosity he is adventuresome and fears no restraints that may seemingly be in the way-The heat of a tropic zone or the rigors of an arctic winter did not quench the desire for adventure among those sturdy yeomanry of a century ago, and although many heroes have their names enrolled in the archives of history, yet many, who have performed heroic deeds have moldered in the dust and are forgotten these many years ago."

I wish I wrote like this!

Thirty Six Thousand Feet

What would you guess is the the air temperature at 36,000' above Earth's surface at mid-day on February 24th?

Well! I feel a little bit smarter today and I'd like to bestow this knowledge upon you. For the record, the temperature at 36,006' above Nebraska registered a bone chilling -73 degrees fahrenheit! Whaaaa!?

On our way East, we saw temps drop below -90 degrees in the middle of the night.

Snowy Sweet Tooth

A kid in a candy store was I this Monday past. Or, as it may be, a former Bostonian and current San Francisco dweller in a snowstorm. I've been glued to the New England weather of late. Reports of blizzard conditions and near zero temperatures conjure nostalgia in me. My California friends and colleagues think I'm crazy but I always enjoyed the sense of bravado and perseverance that came from being able to enjoy and thrive in a New England winter.

You can imagine my excitement when I woke to falling snowflakes on Tuesday morning in the Pennsylvania mountains. The snow started to accumulate in the morning and finished in the afternoon. All told, we got a respectable 8" of snow. Watching a snow storm come and go is one of my great pleasures. Before long I was shoveling the walkway and shuttling firewood from the woodbox back to the house.

The only thing that was missing was Jake the Wunderdog, my partner in crime. I don't feel too bad for him though. He's been living it up for the past week with his new buddy Mr. Carlton in Santa Cruz!

Visiting The Poffenberger Farm

My Ancestry.com (and related) antics take me in lots of unpredictable directions. We were in Boonsboro this week visiting the cemetery and ended up with some extra time on our hands. Ali suggested we visit the Antietam Battlefield and off we went!

I've been to Antietam before but it's been quite some time. I recall the lookout tower and one specific conversation with Dad. At the time, I was particularly intrigued by civil war era bullets. Go figure... Anyhow, Dad was explaining that, if we looked very closely, we just might be able to find one on the grounds.

Wifey and I opted for the convenience of the driving tour that passes through a dozen (or so) historic locations around the battlefield. I'm vaguely aware of our family roots in Washington County. For example, Dad's mom and dad grew up in Boonsboro and Hagerstown respectively.

I was pleasantly surprised to see that one of the tour stops was the Joseph Poffenberger Farm (and house) because my Great Great Grandmother is Fannie Mae Poffinberger (1868-1934). My imagination runs wild thinking about the likelihood of connection between Fannie Mae, her line, and Joseph Poffenberger.

While the J Poffemberger farm is in the best condition and boasts the most information available, there are two other might-be-family-member farms on and around the battlefield. The H Poffenberger farm is located just west of the battlefield and the Line Farm is located just to the southeast.

Anyone Can be Cool, But Awesome Takes Practice

Happy Birthday David!  Thank you for being awesome, and not just cool.

Love, Wifey and Puppy

This Can't Be Winter?

Across the northern hemisphere, ski boots, parkas, hats and gloves are coming out of closets and storage bags.  Having experienced a variety of winters and noticing that December is half way behind us, I'm taking a more critical look into the San Francisco winter.

I used one of my under graduate elective courses to study weather.  Yep...weather. Go Jackets!  Based on that experience, I do confidently declare the correlation and causation between latitude and seasonal
temperatures.  Money well spent, indeed!

Having spent no less than four seasons in various regions of the eastern seaboard, my interrogation of winter will begin using the popular financial forecasting method of...guessing (otherwise known as observing comparables).

San Francisco’s latitude places it somewhere north of the Richmond and south of the DC domiciles.

• Washington, DC 38°53′42.4″N
• San Francisco, CA 37°47′N
• Richmond, VA 37°32′27.5″N

For those playing along at home, San Francisco is roughly 400 miles further south than Bostonia.  As luck may have it, San Francisco experiences both warmer temperatures and smaller temperature variations.

Winter in DC is an interesting beast.  The daily highs are above freezing and the nightly lows below.  Throw some moisture in the mix and it all makes for an wintery icy mess.

It was the winter at RMC that taught me the true meaning of 100 miles.  In Ashland (10 miles north of
Richmond), snow is rare.  I recall one of the annual snowstorms…er, dustings.  I barely knew how to react when one of our friends confessed that it was their first experience of snow!  Of course,
classes were cancelled the following day.  It was then that I learned that the county didn’t own a single snow plow.  Huh?!

And then there’s San Francisco.  No snow, no ice, no sub-zero temps.  Not too bad, eh?  This is the first January since Jake joined us that I don’t need to put on snowboard pants to go on the night walk.  What a relief!

Conclusion: grab your clubs and catch me if you can.