DC

In the movie "Ground Hog Day" the same event was repeated over and over until the main character got it right. For him it was a question of showing that he had learned to be a moral person. For us it was showing that our identity was what we claimed it to be. Not our moral identity, but our actual identity.

We meant to leave DC on February 1 but that didn't happen. As our two months in DC neared its end we sought out a used car. We had waited until the end of our stay to minimize problems with parking the car. Anyway, we found one to our liking and had no problem finding a parking space for the last few days of the month but then we had a two-week delay in registering it, which meant we no longer had any place to live. Luckily we found another apartment in the same complex (River Place) where we had been staying.

The extra time has given us a chance to do more of the same and some new stuff. "More of the same" means going to Cato,Heritage, and other public policy forums. They are really interesting to us. We got into two Congressional hearings, including one where Colin Powell testified.

We got very familiar with the Library of Congress,making five or six visits. The first was to tour the restored 1890 building. Beautiful is too limited a word. The second was to the LOC Cleveland Auditorium where we heard Valéry Giscard d'Estaing give a speech; he talked about the future European Union constitution that he and a congress have been working on. Too bad it wasn't in French. This past week we've been there for "work". Jan is using their Ukranian dictionaries to translate an article about Narodichi, the birth place of Gerry's mother. Gerry has been researching the usage of "Palestine" in maps through the ages. It's great the facilities we taxpayers pay for. When we have more time we'll write extensively about both.

We've also managed to double our (or Gerry's) family time, as we have seen each of his cousins and nephew several times.

As intimated, we're out of here on March 1. At least, if today's snow doesn't close down the whole world, or if it does, if the world (DC branch) opens again by Saturday morning, we'll be off. We're heading south, via the north. First we're going to New Jersey to see friends and to see the storage locker where our things have been for at least four years. We've talked to managers and all seems well but it seems like a good idea to check it out in person. After that we'll spend a few days in New York city with friends and get in another visit to the Metropolitan Opera, this time for La Bohème.

Then it's really "The South". That being more than a week away we don't know our schedule yet. But we should get to Atlanta, Charleston, and multiple stops in Florida. Look out for us.

February 26, 2003

The biggest new thing — but it doesn't show up instantlly in our web site — is that we have our own domain, www.ChandlerBates.com. We are hosted by Barron Hosting. We have their cheapest plan, $34 to get started. For that piddling amount we get 100MB of diskspace, email, and a few other things. Because of that enlarged space (about 2.5 times what we had on AOL)  the other new thing is that we restored some of the photos that we could not display before. These are of Paris, Vietnam, and China.