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"[I]t is unclear whether Parisians work at all. But they sure dress nice while doing nothing."

--Sayers on Paris

Twitter

Breakfasts at home are some of the best things:

Yesterday: Watermelon and red raspberries.
Today: Strawberries and cantaloupe. And I'm shortly heading out to pick blueberries, but I guess that will be lunch.

Here is a super interesting explanation of "all's," as in "all's I know is..." I never realized until I went to college that I said it this way.

Now if someone could just explain why my family says, "I'd vrather..." (instead of "I'd rather..."), I would be grateful.

No one does green dresses like Oscar de la Renta.


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Curriculum Vitae

Hopkins turned me (and many others) onto The Girls of Slender Means. I also heard her talk about Curriculum Vitae, Spark's autobiography, so I picked it up at this past Arlington book sale (one of the great things of the world).

The book was different for an autobiography: it covers only the first 39 years of Sparks life, mostly the part of her life related to her becoming a writer. It vacillates between loads of detail and very little detail--she talks more about her grandmother, for instance, than she does about her husband (whom she shortly divorces--he had some sort of mental disorder). She goes into detail about her memories of her teachers, but not much, for instance, about her son. She also barely touches on her conversion:

"When I am asked about my conversion, why I became a Catholic, I can only say that the answer is both too easy and too difficult. The simple explanation is that I felt the Roman Catholic faith corresponded to what I had always felt and known and believed; there was no blinding revelation in my case. The more difficult explanation would involve the step by step building up of a conviction; as Newman himself pointed out, when asked about his conversion, it was not a thing one could propound 'between the soup and the fish' at a dinner party. 'Let them be to the trouble that I have been to,' said Newman. Indeed, the existential quality of a religious experience cannot be simply summed up in general terms." (How true about the soup and the fish!)

While she doesn't say much about her conversion itself, she does mention occasional experiences of transcendence: "I made one trip with my husband to the Victoria Falls, hoping this would make him feel better. That by itself was wonderful; but I knew my married life was over. Strangely, the experience of the Victoria Falls gave me courage to endure the difficult years to come. The falls become to me a symbol of spiritual strength. I had no settled religion, but I recognized the experience of the falls as spiritual in kind. They are one of those works of nature that cannot be distinguished from a sublime work of art. I think everyone should try once to visit this true wonder of the world; it should become a sort of Mecca and place of pilgrimage for the human race. I don't know why peace conferences are not held in the vicinity of the Victoria Falls. I can think of no other experience that makes for the reasonable contemplation of our humanity, and a sense of the proportions in which we should think."

Honestly, I found the detailed discussion of her childhood to be a bit slow, but it picked up as it went on. I thoroughly enjoyed the references to TSE throughout CV: Describing her grandmother's underwear: "It was called combinations.It was an all-in-one wool suit with knee-length leggings and wrist-length sleeves, and, like the drawers, it had no gusset. These were very 'modern' to my grandmother. They belonged to that generation of young ladies one of whom is described by T.S. Eliot in The Waste Land, as drying her combinations on the window sill."

On a biography of her by an ex-boyfriend that was partially made up: "He says that I was in love with T.S. Eliot. (My comment: I never met Eliot. He was my parents' age. But if Stanford thought I was in love with another man, why was he hanging around? He claims that I went to 'Eliot's church' in Gloucester Road."

Oh, and I can't leave out her references to her time at the Helena Club (after which the May of Teck was modeled): "At the Helena Club my friends there would come to my room after dinner to talk and make coffee. Sometimes we had sherry, a precious present from Colin."

And: "More than anything, according to the hundreds of letters he sent me and which I find among my papers, he disliked what he called my 'liking for male company'. I was unable to take this as seriously as he evidently meant it. I agreed heartily that I liked male company, especially as I lived in a club with at least sixty girls. I told him I also liked the company of women who liked male company." (Also: I want hundreds of letters from someone! Diana and I probably exchanged hundreds, although I guess I stupidly suggested we throw them away!)


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"I used to have one for lunch and one for dinner."

--My grandma on cigarettes (who knew?!)

Coastal North Carolina

I took a day off from the beach in order to run down to New Bern, NC to visit an old friend and her husband and baby. I was super surprised that New Bern is a lovely old town, well-situated on the water. I only got to take one picture, though, since a downpour interfered with our walk around the town:


I was surprised that New Bern was lovely because driving through Coastal Carolina, while fascinating, was not. My mother calls it the Dismal Swamp.


I've never seen so many trailer homes.


The highway was also loaded with closed businesses and gas stations (the gas stations were confusing, because they sometimes still advertised old prices, so I almost pulled into a couple of them only to realize that they were closed, which was what accounted for the magnificently good advertised price).


What was shocking was that some of the houses that were lived in looked like they were abandoned. The really abandoned ones were absolutely overgrown with trees (sometimes trees even grew inside of those houses). This is really the only part of America that I've ever seen with ruins everywhere. Falling down barns were plentiful.


I'm also way too much of a Pennsylvanian to be okay with how flat Costal North Carolina is (I've never seen the parts with mountains, although I'd love to).

OBX

Home again. After a stop at "The Red Rabbit" of "Make the Red Rabbit a Habit" fame. We will not be making the Red Rabbit a habit, although we enjoyed some pre-Bunny Burger pinball and being scared by the creepy clown game (below).

Quote

"The barracuda came at it like a linebacker..." --one of my uncles

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Talking about toast and cheese (or is it toasted cheese?):

#1tomatolover: "Oh my goodness! Talk dirty to me! (That's an expression from school.) That's my favorite expression. No, it's not my favorite expression: it's my favorite lunch."

Bachelorette

Our Favorite Girl Cousin and Ilana and I watched The Bachelorette the other night. I've seen a couple of episodes of The Bachelor before, but I've never watched this. It was sort of a relief that there was only one girl and lots of boys, because I can't handle the girl bickering of reality television shows (this always happens on Tyra's modeling show). I thought it was clear that, no matter what anyone was saying, the guys who were on that show were there to beat out other men. They were not actually there to fall in love; they were there to win. (This is not a critique of these men: if they were actually on that show to fall in love, I'd think that they were utter fools--if you're interested in falling in love, what are you doing on a game show?)

At one point, the bachelorette referred to "my relationships"--goodness, what a height of silliness! The idea of having lots of relationships with lots of guys at the same time! (I always found this funny in The Bachelor--making out with one guy one day and another guy the next.)

The contrived quality of the show led to the casual, colloquial use of some silly technical language. For instance, "one on ones," which are individual dates, as opposed to the group dates (!).

Then there was the guy with three ivy league degrees who had to go to the (Thai!) hospital in an ambulance after the bachelorette had the guys fight each other. How predictable! (Not gonna lie: I thought he and his slightly droopy eye were cute when he got beat up in his hot pink boxing shorts, but then, maybe I'm just a sucker for nerdy guys.)

Mama Leopard was passing by and sat down for a moment. When the television gave out and one guy's picture got stuck on the screen, she may or may not have said, "I'm falling for that one." She's going to kill me for writing that.


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"It was awkward ... so I just started talking really fast."

--#1tomatolover (I believe in this strategy!)

Muriel Spark and Green Dresses

"My mother was full of superstitions and presentiments. She wouldn't wear green. But I knew this was mad from the evidence of perfectly happy people I saw wearing green."

--Muriel Spark, Curriculum Vitae

"Elegance appealed to [Muriel Spark]. She said she got inspiration from women's magazines, and when a journalist from the Daily Telegraph interviewed her in 1970, she wore "a 'flowing green dress' and insisted they 'drink Creme de Menthe to match it.'"

--From a review of a Spark biography

"She wore a grey-green dress which picked up the colour of the six Somerville eyes; her sleeves were wide, with a mediaeval look."

--From Loitering with Intent

"This enabled me to wash and repair my shabby green dress, and the change of dress in a way contributed to my peace of mind."

--From Robinson

"The salesgirl shouts at the customer, who, up to now, has been delighted with the bright coloured dress. It is patterned with green and purple squares on a white background, with blue spots within the green squares, cyclamen spots within the purple."

--From The Driver's Seat


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What Makes Man Different from Animals.15

"Beautiful shoes, truly, they are what separate us from the beasts of the field!"

-Manolo

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"I am a hoarder of two things: documents and trusted friends. The former outweigh the latter in quantity but the latter outdo the former in quality.

Details fascinate me. I love to pile up details. They create an atmosphere. Names, too, have a magic, be they never so humble. Most of the names in this, the following account of the first thirty-nine years of my life, are unknown to the public. For that very reason they are all the more precious to me."

--Muriel Spark, from the very beginning of Curriculum Vitae


Also, my goal for one year from now: to be at a church that does not sing this hymn. Two years in a row is just too much.


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Oscar Wilde

This beach I read loads of Oscar Wilde:

The Importance of Being Earnest is just one of my favorite things in the world. It's incomparably funny. It's funny both in its overall themes and in each small sentence in the same way--the character (or play itself, as the case may be) says something that sounds silly and shallow and trite but actually contains truth--they speak truer than they knew, as it were. So Jack actually was Ernest, and Algernon actually was Jack's brother--the silly lies turn out to be the truth. This is far and away my favorite of Oscar Wilde's plays.

Salome couldn't be more different from The Importance of Being Earnest--written in King James-ish English, it is the (somewhat incestuous) tragedy of Herod and his wife's daughter (I'm not gonna lie, though--Wilde's telling of it made more sense to me of that story of John the Baptist's head than just the straight-up telling in the Bible did). Honestly, aside from the fact that Wilde was riffing on a pre-made myth, I would say that that play itself is a pretty great creation of a myth.

Lady Windermere's Fan deals with a weak person who makes a heroic sacrifice. It's certainly less funny than The Importance of Being Earnest and more serious. And it's a little nerve-wracking. Great lines: Lord Darlington: "I can resist everything except temptation."

Cecil Graham: "My dear Arthur, I never talk scandal. I only gossip."
Lord Windermere: "What is the difference between scandal and gossip?"
Cecil Graham: "Oh, gossip is charming! History is merely gossip. But scandal is gossip made tedious by morality. Now I never moralize. A man who moralizes is usually a hypocrite, and a woman who moralizes is invariably plain."

Oh, Oscar Wilde, how right you are.

An Ideal Husband is a nice combination of the trivial charmingness with a meaningful truth--that moralism in a relationship is seriously inferior to love that really accepts the other person. Lord Goring seems to be a shallow fop, but is really the most insightful person in the play. Lord Goring: "It is love, and not German philosophy, that is the true explanation of this world, whatever may be the explanation of the next."

Most interesting and opaque to me may have been A Woman of No Importance. The main thrust of this play is similar to that of An Ideal Husband: moralism in relationships can't work, while accepting love wins the day. An American visitor named Hester (super subtle there!) is rather puritanical--she judges sin harshly, but learns in the progress of the play that this won't work. Hester comes to see that love is more important than judgement. What is complex in this play (and in Wilde's other plays as well) is its take on women's role: Hester argues that men and women treated equally, although for her this means that they ought to be equally judged. Other characters praise men and women being treated unequally, maintaining either that women worship men or that men worship women. I'm still not sure where Wilde himself comes down on women's role--he's always ironically saying that women ought to stay in the private sphere. On the other hand, you don't see women in Wilde's plays doing anything other than accepting or turning down proposals. Either way, in A Woman of No Importance the dandiest dandy in the play is critiqued, which is unusual for Wilde. Wilde does this without making the play into a moralizing tale.


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The Man Who Was Thursday

I remember loving The Man Who Was Thursday, but I didn't exactly remember why (I also can't ever remember if it's The Man Called Thursday or The Man Who Was Thursday).

This little book is subtitled, "A Nightmare," but it's much more of a fantastical comedy, charming and witty at every turn (although, as the subtitle implies, with a distinct dream-like quality). It's a funny mix of profound and trite--the biggest subjects (God and nature and the meaning of the world) are treated lightly.

The story treats the debate between philosophy and poetry (I'd say that poetry wins out, although there's a place for philosophy). In addition, it is a great example of Augustine's conception of evil--it is the absence of good, not something concrete in itself. Nature, according to Chesterton, comprehends good and evil, but with a providential form (which is to say, good wins). Chesterton's thesis regarding anarchy (which the policemen in the novella combat) is that anarchy is not an ill of common people, but rather an intellectual ill. Only super-educated people could be silly enough to support anarchy.


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Quote

"Dashing and courteous, splendidly handsome, he wished often for the strange hats he saw, bowler or thin-brimmed, foot-high or scarlet-plumed, in order to flourish them high to all the people who wished him well."

--From the Economist obituary of Paddy Leigh Fermor, travel writer

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"THIS IS INSTEAD OF TELEPHONING BECAUSE I CANT LOOK YOU IN THE VOICE."

--From a telegram from Dorothy Parker (thank heavens for email for this same reason!)

Via Hopkins and Letters of Note

Weird!

: "T.S. Eliot's 'The Waste Land' is Top Grossing iPad Book App"

HT: Francisco (Do we say "via" now instead of "HT"?)

Kofola!

Kofola's liquorice flavor is an acquired taste, but it's one that's worth acquiring. It actually goes in the very small category of sodas I will drink (along with diet coke and sprite when I'm sick). I once ordered 10 decibels of Kofola (instead of deciliters) to my great embarrassment and the Slovaks' great amusement ("Would you like some loud Kofola, Emily?"). This economist article on nostalgia in the former Czechoslovakia is quite good and reminds me of the communist era candies we ate in Romania, while complaining about everything else about communism.


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"They don't know how to twist their toes."

-My grandmother, while dancing to some old music with the grandkids (after she said that, she hiked up her house dress and started "twisting her toes" in the way they used to do in the 40s and 50s)

(Diana: What was that dance your grandmother taught us to do up at the cabin one year? We also tried that one, but it mostly turned into a Conga line.)

Green Dresses.13 Victoria Beckham Edition

I'm not gonna lie: Victoria Beckham is not my favorite celebrity in the world. I think it's the haircuts (and colors) and the sunglasses and the scowls and the poses. But the woman can wear a green dress! (Extra points for a green dress with long-ish sleeves!)






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Williamsport at Night

And a bicycle built for two just sitting there inside a storefront! I've always wanted to try one of those, although I have a feeling that I'd hate it, especially if someone else were in front.

So Far:

Family. A baby. Wild horses (and dolphins and sting rays). Hot tub. Volleyball. Walks to Virginia. A shaving cream fight. A nasty computer virus (Macs, I think, are in my personal future). Beef stroganoff. Tootsie pops. Pringles and licorice on the beach.

Strawberries!

(Ilana just taught me how to use supermacro on my camera--can you tell?)

Strawberry picking this year was not as good as I remember: It rained a lot this spring, and I guess that's the cause of the strawberries being both not as sweet and pretty rotten. In addition, there were more bugs than I ever remember before, hopping on me at every turn. Plus, my back ain't what it used to be (how are those old people so good at strawberry picking?). Ilana lapped me--we were 5 to 3 on boxes of strawberries picked. But the strawberries were pretty, so I figured it was best to just take pictures of them.

Also, there was an old random man who, out of the blue, told us a story of when he was being paid to pick strawberries as a small child and his brother put a toad in one of the boxes!

Baby!

Gypsy's baby, who lives in the fairy tale house, is hard to photograph: since I've seen her last, she has gained lots of mobility--she rolls over like she's never gonna stop, and she crawls as if she's trying to breaststroke across the carpet in a modified military crawl (her mother takes her to swimming lessons, which may have something to do with it). When you try to take a picture, she either spins out of the frame or starts crawling toward the camera so that she can put it in her mouth.

Speaking of Gypsy's mother, that woman makes some amazing strawberry shortcake. It's my first strawberry shortcake of the season. And strawberry shortcake may be my favorite dessert (it's certainly right up there with tiramisu and strawberry punchbowl dessert).

But back to the baby--not only can she move, but now she can also giggle, too! And she can clap, and she's super proud of it. A multi-talented baby, for sure.

Quote

"She said Mr Weiner wanted the leave of absence so he can be evaluated and work out a course of treatment. The statement doesn't say what he would be treated for."

--From a BBC article

This is excellent--I kept wondering from the headlines, what sort of treatment is he seeking? Treatment for vice?? Not all vices can just be turned into medical emergencies!

Coffee and Puns

Greenberry's, a coffee shop in between Courthouse and Rosslyn, is becoming independent and changing its name to "Bean Good: The Coffee Pub." Besides being a silly name and reminding me how much I don't like that coffee shop (it is in no way comfortable), this reminds me of how much coffee shops love names with puns! Why is this? I know of no other type of business that loves puns this much.

For instance, at Buzz (that name is more or less a pun, right?), the Georgetown-esque coffee shop in Ballston, a shot of espresso added to a coffee makes it a "Shot in the Dark." The coffee shop in Waco was called "Common Grounds" (I think there was a related coffee shop called "Uncommon Grounds." In New Jersey there's "It's a Grind." Actually, this is yet another point in favor of NSS, my favorite coffee shop ever: there are no puns associated with the place that I can think of.

This also reminds me, as Percy aptly wrote the other day, "I've measured out my life in coffee shops."


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OBX

I think that the colors of these crab claws are lovely. I'm definitely going to use them for fashion inspiration later. It's just a shame that the crab itself was detached...

Gender and Sex Scandals

Two recent articles on sex scandals and gender:

This NYT article maintains that women get caught in sex scandals much less frequently than men do. The author wonders whether this points to a deeper difference between men and women:

"'The shorthand of it is that women run for office to do something, and men run for office to be somebody,' said Debbie Walsh, director of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University. 'Women run because there is some public issue that they care about, some change they want to make, some issue that is a priority for them, and men tend to run for office because they see this as a career path.'" This is interesting, especially if you consider it in light of Jane Addams's arguments for why women participate in politics--because it isn't possible for women to be good mothers without a larger concern for their community as a whole.

Harvey Mansfield's article, "Manliness and Morality" considers the behavior of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Dominique Strauss-Kahn. He maintains that these spectacles point us to some old-fashioned truths: One is that "Men are more adventurous and aggressive than women"--"It certainly seems strange that being capable of rape can make a person better qualified for greatness, but it’s probably true." Another is that "Women are more vulnerable than men"--"The enforcement of law and morality is done mainly by men or by women with the strength of men. ... Women need men to save them from men." I'm slightly uncomfortable with his gender stereotyping here, but not too, too uncomfortable (he really does qualify everything he says--honestly, I have a feeling it's because he doesn't believe in nature, so the essentialism game is a little harder for him to play). What I have more serious qualms about is his last point. Before that last point, he writes super interestingly about morality:

"Morality has a hold on all human beings, and it does not easily accept excuses. It is more powerful than the cynics believe. It can be very democratic in raising the low and abasing the high. Morality and democracy are both levelers; they encourage each other and they take satisfaction in each other. Democracy on its own doesn’t care for moral relativism; only democratic intellectuals want that."

However, his last point is a caution about morality:

"Morality wants to be sovereign over all other considerations, but it doesn’t deserve to be. Morality when sovereign makes moralism, an ugly posture that breeds fanaticism. So, whether it’s because I have studied Machiavelli or am now a grand--father wise in the world I couldn’t say, but I can think of scenarios in which Dominique Strauss-Kahn might be excused (still assuming he is guilty). Many French now think that he has been the victim of a plot, which seems far-fetched and against the evidence. But suppose he were; could that plot not be justified if it removed a very bad man from a situation in which he could do much harm? And, on the contrary, supposing he were a very good man essential to the good of his country, could not another plot have been mounted to cover up his unfortunate moral failing? Working out these possibilities will keep you from feeling too much moral indignation. Not too much of it, but not too little, either."

My point is not that political leaders must have zero moral failings. I don't think, though, that I'd be willing to excuse attempted rape. Plus, if you do buy Mansfield's earlier points, laws to enforce morality become even more important given women's weakness.

Traveling

First, way up north where you need four wheel drive; then, Corolla.

May We Borrow Your Husband?

This collection of short stories was lent to me under false pretenses: I'd been told that it was a volume of Graham Greene's erotic short stories. It's much more tame than that. May We Borrow Your Husband: And Other Comedies of the Sexual Life is just that--comedies of the sexual life, which is to say, not especially comedies about love, but about romantic relationships in which there isn't love. On second thought, I'd like to qualify that--the comedy is a very dark, sad humor. It is very funny, but the sort that you feel a little bad laughing at. It is probably at the shockingness level of Travels with My Aunt (although I read that a long time ago, so I can't say for sure).

The narrator is often an older man who is a writer and who observes the goings on of the short story and sometimes plays a small role in the story itself. One narrator writes (explaining the slightly creepy impression you often have of the narrator, even though he's pretty passive): "I watched her as covertly as I could--like most writers I have the spirit of a voyeur..."

Greene is endlessly funny: One short story deals with the son of a man who dies when a pig falls on him from an apartment building (and the son's attempt to be able to tell this story in a non-funny way). Another is about a fancy dog named Beauty, whose owner is a turban-ed woman past her prime. The narrator writes of his identification with the dog, who runs away (no obvious tale about beauty leaving there!): "I must admit I was wholly on his side. Surely anything was better than the embrace of a flat breast." So you can see--it's a little risque, very funny, and not that bad (the story is about a dog, for crying out loud!). Ah Graham Greene, let's be friends! (Unless you're as creepy as the narrators in these stories, in which case I'm alright with the fact that we never met.)

Quotes:

"Interrogation had always seemed to her a principal part of American social life--an inheritance perhaps from the Indian smoke-fires. 'Where are you from?' 'Do you know the So-and-so's? Have you been to the botanic gardens?' It came over her that Mr. Hickslaughter, if that were really his name, was perhaps an American reject--not necessarily more flawed than the pottery reject of famous firms you find in bargain-basements."

"'Original sin gave man a tilt towards secrecy,' he would say. 'An open sin is only half a sin, and a secret innocence is only half innocent. When you have secrets, there, sooner or later, you'll have sin. I wouldn't let a Freemason cross my threshold." (This is my motto in life!)


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Don Pasquale

The last time I went to the opera, it was Madame Butterfly. Don Pasquale was quite the opposite (in the sense that it's a comedy and not a tragedy)--it was delightful and hilarious and silly. Like a chick flick of an opera. It struck me as both the opposite of Romeo and Juliet--in the sense that there are lots of coincidences, but the coincidences always work out for good--and of The Taming of the Shrew: Norina tames the difficult uncle, Don Pasquale, into not disinheriting his nephew for falling in love with and wanting to marry her. The moral of the story is that old men shouldn't marry (and should, rather, will their money upon their death to their handsome nephews).

Norina (an actress, at least in this version) explicitly mocks male chivalry, sarcastically reading some romantic poetry. Her take is that romance does not result from men's valor, but rather from girls being clever and manipulative and getting what they want from men (although in this case, her manipulation is in the service of true love, however deceitful it is). And women do come out looking pretty powerful in Don Pasquale--both Ernesto (the nephew) and Don Pasquale (the uncle) are fools in their own way.

Don Pasquale plays with plays--Norina is an actress; some of the scenes are set in her theater; her scheming with the doctor to fool Don Pasquale forms a play within a play. In addition, the servants themselves, at one point, put on masks and perform another play within a play. At the end, Norina declares in her speech that it is the epilogue and precisely what lessons the viewer should take from the play.


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I'm obsessed with this song (two days on repeat--most songs only last one day). Please tell me that it is loaded with artistic merit. Or at least that it's super charming (even the video is adorable!).

Home

Dear readers, meet Pearl, Mama Leopards' response to her empty nest (we didn't get around to chipping in on a name in time, so Pearl it is). Pearl is nesting at the moment, which is sort of sad, since there isn't a Mr. Pearl, and the eggs are all empty.

Home is wonderful--I had forgotten both about all of the things about it that I love (the sound of the creek/crick outside the window at night, seeing the stars, my delightful family), as well as all of the things about it that sometimes drive me slightly crazy (my delightful family). But I hadn't forgotten about my mother's cooking, which is as delicious as ever.

On my first night home, we were all watching an unidentified flying object in the sky at night. My mother was insistent that it was disappearing from view; my father, on the other hand, was sure that it was maintaining a consistent level of brightness:

Mama Leopard: "Look, it's disappearing! I can barely see it now!"
Papa Leopard: "I can still see it perfectly." (I think that he was slightly unhappy about a previous insinuation that his vision is deteriorating.)

30 seconds later: Mama Leopard: "Look, I can't see it anymore!"
Papa Leopard: "I can still see it fine."

This went on a couple more times. How wonderful that, nearly 30 years into their marriage, they are down to disagreeing on very minor points!

Twitter

When I was done being pulled over today (on a one-way road) for going the wrong way on a different, littler one-way road (I couldn't tell! I was lost! There was construction! Boy, I haven't lived in Williamsport in too long.), a woman in a mini-van tried to turn down our enormous one-way road directly into the two cops who had just finished pulling me over! (Really, did they need two police officers to pull me over? I don't look harmful! Also, thankfully, my police officer was both nice to me and let me off. Also, there are way too many one-way streets in Williamsport. Who knew you could spend half an hour being lost in such a little town?)

Ilana: Don't tell this story to mom and dad before I get home!

Lancaster.2 (Central Market)

This man told us all about his goat cheese. Stearns disagrees with me, but the impression that I had was that he did not look exactly dissimilar to a goat, what with his curly white hair and long, narrow face and two fake teeth in the front. Our Favorite Girl Cousin did not disagree.

The man had us taste several of his cheeses, the strangest of which was made into a pyramid and covered with ash to make the mold take over faster!


On this trip to the market, I was quite taken with the windows and doorways.






I am always taken with the Whoopie Pies. Our Favorite Girl Cousin said that she heard a story about Amish women licking their fingers and running them along the edge to make the cream have a perfect edge. This dissuaded her from eating Whoopie Pies. It did not dissuade me.




I'm sorry about the blurriness (or, Hopkins, are pictures like food in that we aren't supposed to apologize about them?), but I couldn't leave this one out because the guy's such a character. The quintessential gentleman farmer.


Here are some hand-decorated coffee cups. Third from the right is a drawing of Central Market herself.



The best chocolate milk in the world. It's like melted ice cream. The strawberry milk isn't half bad, either.