All in all, everything's gone very well. The airconditioning needed a small repair, a few plumbing things to make things flow better, some improvements on storage space inside and out, all sorts of purchases (gas grill for barbecues in the garden, lots of plants and seeds, garden tools and hoses, some lounger chairs for the garden, bird feeders, trellises for climbing plants, etc.). We felt right at home from day one though, and although I think it was mainly because of the layout of the house, with the right number of rooms for our needs, it was the good condition of the paintwork, all the new windows and double glazing, and all the new plumbing and fixtures in all the bathrooms, as well as the good carpets, that made us feel comfortable and safe from the day we moved in. The wooden floors are also a warm touch.
Our cat made the picture ALMOST complete. I say almost, because we still have to put our pictures up on the walls throughout the house!
As with every year except one since we've been together, we celebrated New Year's Eve. This time we celebrated it with ourfriends Debbie and Bernie from Baltimore. For us it was a fifth New Year's Eve at the Kennedy Center. For our friends, it was their first time.
An early dinner, then a classical concert with a comic twist, then dancing (or watching the dancing) until the countdown to midnight, with party hats, little horns to blow, and lots of champagne to drink. Here are a couple of photos from the dinner, while we were still (relatively) sober.
Still on 'tuxedos'.... here's a study in black and white!
Our (now) three year old cat, Moët, is adjusting nicely to our home. Although I always say she suffers from short-term memory loss: she can be all over you and purring and following you from room to room wanting a belly rub or a stroke, then 15 minutes later if you try and stroke her, she runs the other way, like a bat (cat?) out of hell! She's very predictable in her unpredictability, but we adore her!
For a while, her favourite place was a round cushion chair that I'd bought cheaply from someone in the neighbourhood. This became her throne, and she became the princess:
At other times, she puts on her "beached whale" look:
Meanwhile, outside our little world, there was the presidential Inauguration on January 20 and an extra 2 million in town. Working ten minutes walk from Capitol Hill, I couldn't resist, and walked over to the Hill on the Friday before Tuesday's Inauguration to check on the arrangements and see Congress decked out in all its finery. I never suffer from the cold; on the contrary, I LIKE it cold, but it was so cold that day that my gloveless fingers could not press the camera button after about ten minutes, and I came home with just a couple of photos of myself too cold to care. Tuesday was different though, and Walter and I watched the proceedings with hope and pride in our hearts.
In case you're not too bored with my cat photos, here's another one I took of Moët a few days into Obama's presidency, as she had her mind on a beetle that she'd spied.
One of her favourite pastimes, Walter's too, is to sit next to him on the sofa in the family room. She mostly tries to be in the same room as one or the other of us.
In February, I managed to squeeze in a day of painting. It's not finished, but here's what I managed to do in that day:
Outside in our garden, there was not much happening. Winter still. No leaves, no flowers. Just birds to feed. Question: how does one feed the birds without encouraging the squirrels (who, though they look sweet and adorable, are actually like rats with a cute bushy tail and carry disease)? On the right side of our garden I have a birdfeeder which, if a squirrel manages to climb up the pole and get onto the bar in front of the seed, gets closed by the bar tipping downwards. It's endless fun to watch the birds' surprise, when a fourth bird lands on the bar and closes off the seed!! But a) no squirrel can climb up the pole anyway, and b) the seed is generously laced with hot pepper. Squirrels and other rodents cannot tolerate the pepper, whereas it doesn't affect the birds, so the ground is peppered with peppered seeds and no squirrel comes near.
Wanting to attract the more unusual and larger birds, I bought a wide 'baffle' which literally baffles the squirrels as they can't climb past it and down onto the hanging feeder below it - all hanging from a young crepe myrtle tree on the other side of our garden. A couple of larger birds acquainted themselves with this feeder, but then I saw one morning a squirrel making the feeder its breakfast table. It succeeded in looping itself across from the tree! Naturally, I had to bring in the feeder and think about a better solution.
One weekend during the winter we made it to the house and garden show in Washington's huge convention centre. We had a good look around, but nothing much caught our fancy. Not even this huge jacuzzi for our back yard!
For a week in March, our oldest grandchild, Ben, came over from California to be with us. It's always difficult to know what to visit with our various visitors, as Washington has SO much to see and do. But Ben liked modern art, and so does Walter, so we spent a while at the Hirschorn Museum, and got acquainted with a Louise Bourgeois spider.
Ben arrived at the peak of the cherry blossom. I love this time of year. The three of us went on a DC Ducks tour (in a World War II amphibious vehicle) around the sites of Washington, then took to the water in our 'boat' down past our old place of residence and the National Airport in front of our old building, next to the Potomac River. One of the most beautiful monuments is a little known monument to the Japanese Americans who were interned in the US during World War II (a bit of American history that's not well known outside of the US). The cherry blossoms (which were originally given to DC by Japan by the thousands at the beginning of LAST century and placed around the Tidal Basin closer to the White House) are especially beautiful around this momument.
Another 'monument' we went to while Ben visited with us was the Civil War Battlefield of Antietam, which suffered the most casualties and deaths in one day throughout the whole Civil War, and in fact the most killed on one day in American history. Between the Confederates and the Unionists, over 3,600 dead and over 17,000 wounded or missing. We were led on a guided walk across the cornfields and woods where the battle took place. Such peaceful looking countryside today. Hard to believe such a battle raged that 17th day of September in 1862, and that in all, over 623,000 died in the Civil War, more than all the dead in all the other wars that America's been involved in since the American Revolution.
As soon as spring had finally sprung, I went and bought loads of pansies for the front flowerbed by the pavement (sidewalk!), which had been neglected for a while. The pansies have survived great variances in temperature, pollution and sun/rain, and are now much bigger and bushier than what you see below.
Soon after Ben left us, Karina and her family came to visit, staying a block away, at the Embassy Suites.
Walter and I returned to Antietam so that Karina, Steve, Jennifer and Daniel could all experience the same guided tour. We also spent time at the National Zoo...
and a wonderful concert by the Tokyo String Quartet, as well as good restaurants...
Our cat continues to regale us with her antics, and her acrobatic poses... she'll lift her hind leg up in order to clean somewhere important, then forget what she was about to do and get started on some other part of herself, and forgets that her hind leg is still up in the air!
As spring moves on, so does the planting. I tried my hand at sowing seeds in the house, then transplanting them into single pots once they were strong enough. Various herbs, and a few flowers. For all the hard work, it wasn't worth the trouble. I did not manage to get much past the seedling stage, and ended up buying little plants of basil, rosemary, dill and other herbs, that would grow and be harvested on the steps outside our sunroom. Only a few sweet peas made it through the first stage and are now growing in the flower bed.
But however the garden looks, we just love being out in our own backyard... especially when we can sit at our table under the sunshade and eat our lox and bagel and creamcheese on a Sunday morning!
Another couple like our backyard very much. A pair of American robins (American as in LARGER!) set up house over the two movement sensitive night lights under the eaves of our garage. For a few evenings I kept imagining we had intruders as the lights kept going on and off without us being in the garden. It must have been the parents once their eggs had hatched, as parents go on 30-40 food missions every 24 hours for their progeny.
Once the garden was all cleared up and tidy, Walter made us hamburgers on the grill outside in the evening, and we enjoyed our first evening out in the garden.
The garden is still very much a work in progress. The magnolia that we had planted in September died - probably from too much cold and not enough moisture at its early stage of life. Our tree people gave us a new one for free, and although quite a few leaves have turned brown and fallen off, Maggie II seems to be holding her own, producing quite a lot of new leaves now, so we keep our fingers crossed that she'll survive and give us joy.
A couple of months back, I bought over 90 plants, some annuals, some perennials, to brighten up one side of our garden. Blues, pinks and mauves. We paid someone to help improve the soil and dig in some nutrients as the earth is full of clay and stones. He and I were on our knees planting these small plants that I'd bought online. Lobelias and pansies are starting to bloom finally, as are the young delphinium, and beautiful deep purple flowered Morning Glory plants that have woven themselves around three trellises. I hope the lupins and foxgloves grow and eventually flower too.
But many of the plants still aren't big enough to flower, so I got impatient and drove out to my favourite gardening centre to buy some more plants that are already established in size and are flowering beautifully. The garden's finally starting to look better.
Even just the view from washing up at the kitchen sink is tranquil!
Somewhere in the middle of my gardening attempts, my work had its annual policy conference. 6,500 people came, listened, debated, trained, lobbied, networked, ate and drank. Lots of good stories, though it's sad that there's even a need for our policy conference. I wish I were out of a job, that there was no need for me. But alas, that's far from true. On the last day of our policy conference (PC), two Germans and two Austrians came over and I ordered some delicious Thai delivery. We were happy to host our four friends who are trying to warn opinion leaders in their countries about the dangers of a nuclear Iran.
Once I could relax after PC, I organized a small group of ex-Brits for tea at home. In our neighbourhood, we have a "listserv" that is accessed by almost 3,000 households in the local area. Recommendations for and against service providers of all sorts, home security issues, DC and Maryland laws and regulations, objections, notifications of meetings, block parties, yard sales, house rentals and sales, or people seeking to buy or rent, vacation properties, etc. (Everything we've done in the house has been from a recommendation on the listserv: plumber, electrician, handyman, gardener, tree specialists; we even got our cat from someone on the listserv AND a groomer for her!) When I saw on the listserv that someone mentioned that she was from the UK and was looking for a bookclub to join in the area, I sent out a message on the listserv to ask if there were many ex-Brits, who might be interested in meeting up and doing 'British' things. Eight answered from our area, and four were due to come round for tea, but at the last minute only two came round, but it was very nice, and I hope that a friendship will develop between the three of us. One of the two women who turned up, lives just fifteen or so houses down the road.
Walter too has made new friends but in amazing ways. One day he got talking to the person in charge of the social activities at the synagogue we joined in 2008 just before the High Holidays, and it turned out that this family had lived in Argentina before coming to the US, and Walter's step father in Buenos Aires had performed the wife's bat mitzvah! There were other connections too, and when we were invited for a dinner at their home, and then for Passover, there was always one or two more people who'd known Walter's step father and the congregation he led back in Buenos Aires in the 50's and early 60's. Then another time Walter was playing racquetball against someone whose aunt was close friends with Walter's aunt and uncle back in Bolivia. And again there were more connections between the various families. We had an enjoyable Sunday afternoon with this aunt and her sister-in-law, the mother of Walter's racquetball partner Andrew, and Andrew himself. What a small world!
And in between work, family visits, obligations around the house, we continued to go to the theatre, opera, films, baroque concerts in the Smithsonian, dinners at great restaurants (our favourite is an Indian place just five minutes walk away), and now we're planning for another family visit to us in August, then in September we leave for California and our youngest grandson's bar mitzvah. We'll then drive up to Yosemite and stay there a few days, then up to Oregon for several days of river gorges, orchard country, a volcanic crater lake, the wild Pacific coastline, and the city of Portland.
And while all these things were happening, our robins flew the coop! One day there were four large babies in the tiny nest under the eaves of our garage, then the next day there were none.
Stay tuned for the next episode!
Meantime, I'm signing off with this picture which I call "cat nirvana"!
