September 2009 Archives

We were in western Maryland to track down a building owned by a relative in the late 19th century, which took us through downtown Cumberland in between late-summer rainshowers:

Cumberland’s earlier economic importance was based in large part on its relationship to the C&O Canal:

Parts of the canal area have been nicely landscaped and turned into a pleasant biking/walking path:

Continuing September’s festival of travel, on to the capital for some Sir Norman Foster inside the old Portrait Gallery:

Can’t forget the Organization of American States!

Plus a tour of museums and monuments that weren’t here when I lived in the area in the late 90s:

Some things haven’t changed, though, like the Air and Space reliably delivering freeze-dried ice cream in their gift store.

The highlight of the trip for me was a visit to the otherwise unremarkable Madison Building at the Library of Congress. I spent a long time here as an eight-year-old, while my dad was doing research in the archives. (Other highlights from that trip: Montecello, Colonial Williamsburg.) I had high hopes of re-visiting the blue-tiled interior fountain court, where I was left to amuse myself in what a more innocent era regarded as not really such a big invitation to kidnapping, I hope. The only person who knew what I was talking about was the septuagenarian gentleman behind the Lost and Found desk, who was shocked that anybody else remembered that there had once, indeed, been a blue-tiled interior fountain courtyard, right over there where cubicles and partition walls now stood. I’m hoping some otherwise-forgotten article in Government Architectural Review happened to publish a picture of the interior courtyard sometime in the 1970s, before it was lost to the demands for more space. Where do kids hang out nowadays while their parents work?

Driving north from Mt. Lassen, in northern California, back towards Seattle, we stopped by the new visitors’ center:

The site chosen for this building was where the old chalet used to be, in the part of the park where I learned to ski in the 1980s. In 1992 the federal government decided they didn’t want to be in the business of running a downhill ski area (understandable), and took out both the lift system and, about ten years later, the old chalet itself. Everyone who didn’t grow up wearing a “Go Ski a Volcano” t-shirt can only try to imagine what once was here.

As befits an active geothermal zone, the Sulpher Works were busy as ever:

North of the park, we stopped by Middle McCloud Falls:

and interacted with the wildlife nearby:

When I was a kid, I had a remote-controlled car called the “Frog,” made by a Japanese company called Tamiya. The company had their origins in scale modeling, and the Frog was actually a high-precision kit that you assembled out of dozens and dozens of small plastic and metal parts. Painting and decaling the model was just as important, and took just as much time, as putting the gears in the differential together, or assembling the oil-dampened shock absorbers.

That Frog is long gone now, but Tamiya has been re-releasing some of their classic R/C kits from the 1980s. Pictured above is the Grasshopper, which was a more basic buggy than the Frog I had as a kid. Still, it was a fun kit to build this month, partly because it provided some context to the design decisions in the more-sophisticated successor model, the Frog I used to own.

One thing that’s changed in 23 years: I now enough patience (if far less free time) to attempt to paint the optional driver figure. My guess is that most kids left these out in the 1980s, as they required extremely careful masking and painting. If you look carefully you’ll see that the figure’s eyes and pupils have to be painted in. As of yet, he doesn’t have any eyebrows — but a can of dark brown acrylic paint just arrived in the mail.