It was quite lovely, but I can see why there was so much criticism about the 1996 Altanta Olympics for being so horrifically commercial. Everything in the park — and I mean everything — had a corporate sponsor on it: bricks, plaques, buildings, statues, etc. I can’t imagine what it would have been like when lined with 100s of booths representing a patheon of corporations preying on the American consumer culture.
First thing we learned was to not trust state tourism department’s web sites. It makes sense with hindsight, but both Virginia and Maryland seem to have incentive to be less then honest about the status of the foliage in their respective purviews. In their “foliage reports,” they used words like “spectacular” and “peak” that roughly translated to “intermittent” and “you should have visited two weeks ago.”
The only people who seemed to have a clue about what was going on was The Weather Channel, which has a forecast map showing the state of the foliage on the ground. This turned out to be the most correct, largely because it said that vast majority of the country is, in fact, “past peak”.
In search of what was left, we drove out to Elk Neck State Park in Maryland, which is situated right on the northern tip of the Chesapeake Bay. The drive in had some widespread (but muted) foliage, but there wasn’t anything — and I mean anything — once we go into the park itself. From there, we headed 20 miles west of Baltimore to Morgan Run Natural Environment Area. While the drive in wasn’t as pretty as in the far northeast of the state, the hiking was great.
From all reports, this just isn’t going to be a good year for foliage. I found a great write-up on what makes for good foliage, and we just didn’t have the wet growing season and dry, sunny fall needed for anything other than muted, muddy leaf peeping.
Unbelievable the number of kids out in Mt. Pleasant tonight.
After dropping a friend off in Northeast, I drove through Capitol Hill, Shaw, Petworth and Columbia Heights on the way home … and saw probably 20 kids in 20 minutes (that’s one kid per minute for those playing at home).
As soon as I crossed 16th street, however, I saw packs (PACKS!) of kids toddling from house to house (princesses and angels were big this year, with a strong second for little boys in vampire caps). I would hate pull a National Park Service here, but the count was easily in the hundreds.
I’m guessing not all of them were local, too. I saw every kind of car stuffed with kids heading into the fray — trick or treaters whose parents who had obviously driven across the city. One of the streets west of Mt. Pleasant Ave (not sure which, I drove for a very unusual 30 minutes looking for parking) was closed to handle the throngs.
Anyway, the secret is out: if you are under 5 and in D.C. looking to score some halloween candy then Mt. Pleasant is the place to be.
So, a last week the bathroom vanity collapsed around 1 a.m. in the morning. On Sunday, we made an “emergency” trip to Home Depot, which of course led to an “emergency” bathroom remodel.
The most interesting part of the whole conversation is when we got to Home Depot and saw the exact same medicine cabinet that had collapsed the previous week ($99, fwiw). You would think we wouldn’t have even considered going down that road again, but … fortunately, thoughts of picking glass out of our cat’s hair won out.
We had a couple of halloween parties to go to tonight (even though we only made it to one of them).
After many long evenings frantically digging through our closets, the lady sparkler decided she would go as David Beckham, and I decided I would go as the Pool Boy that my beloved brought back from Belize. You’ll notice the “Why Not Us?” Red Sox t-shirt which was a late addition … because the parties were poorly timed to coincide with Game 3 of the World Series (the nerve, really).
It’s incrediable how much you have to think when you are wearing a sarong. Getting in and out of the cab was almost comical, as was me sitting demurly on the couch (with my legs crossed at the knees) at the party. I don’t know how girls do it … well, except for Britney Spears who doesn’t seem to try very hard.
Now, there are always people who *say* they want to see pictures from the honeymoon, but aren’t prepared for the full 526 photo onslaught. For those, we have prepared something special: the 72 picture abridged Belize.
If you are looking for the full annotated story (the hard core wedding enthusiasts, I presume) check out our more expansive “honeymoon” posts for a walk through our 10 amazing days in Belize.
We woke up this morning at 1 a.m. to the sounds of glass shattering.
Never a fun thing to wake up to, we stumbled out of bed and found that the door to our medicine cabinet had collapsed into the middle of the bathroom floor. The cabinet had glass on both sides of the door, so we got a two-for-one discount on the 7-years of bad luck offer.
About a year ago, in our previous place, we woke up to a horrifically loud crash … I woke up with such a fright that I landed (literally) on top of the lady sparkler. Our bedroom closet shelving had collapsed. To this day, we don’t know if I was trying to protect her or if I was running away and just got stuck on top of her.
Anyway, all the kings horses and all the kings men couldn’t put that vanity back together again, and to make matters worse the collapsing medicine cabinet ruined the sink on its short trip south.
i guess it’s time for a trip to home depot.
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Now that the wedding is over, we have to figure out what to do with tashaandevan.com … do we hold it in perpetuity as a last memento of the glory days of our engagement?
Sitting on the domain just seems unfair to the legions of Evanses and Tashas sure to follow (especially as evanandtasha.com appears to taken as well).
Instead, we have decided to take merge my web site (evancparker.com) with the engagement site, to form a brand-spanking new site called theparkerfamily.org. I had bought that domain for my parents for a Christmas almost five years ago (hi mom!) but sadly, nothing came of it (sorry mom!) and my mom ended up with a computer instead.
Anyway, if you want to keep track of the Sparklers from this point forward, you have come to the right place. You might want to grab our RSS Feed 
(if you are into that sort of thing) or sign-up to be notified by email when we post something new.
p.s. If you are wondering about the picture, for the last decade — dating back to when my vanity web site was unclevanya.com — my site has featured the same picture of my face on Karl Marx’ body that you see here. The new addition is the lady sparkler’s face gracing the body of Catherine the Great, who was arguably the most powerful female ruler of the last half millenium (it seemed fitting).
UPDATE: Karl Marx and Catherine the Great are growing to be a little too obscure, even for us. I just swapped them out for The Great Gonzo (needs no explanation) and Abby Cadabby, the newish girly-girl-fairy-princess Muppet on Sesame Street (which seems to resonate the lady sparkler all over the place). I was also thinking about Shaggy and Velma — which would be funny beyond all possible understanding — so maybe that will come next.
After driving out towards the A.T.M., we parked the van and hiked 45 minutes to the mouth of the caves. Once there, we hopped into the river flowing out of the cave, and swam inside. After about 100 yards, the water was shallow enough to stand up. After hiking through the water for about half a kilometer, we climbed out of the river and spent an hour walking through the formations which 2,000 years earlier were a Mayan burial ground.
The whole day was spectacular, not just the journey, but the formations and especially the Mayan artifacts left untouched for over two millennia.
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