Walters Art Museum, IKEA, King’s Gap, Pakha’s Thai House (posted from home)
(this post covers 9-11 December)

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Monday, 11 December -

Today the weather was fantastic. Here it is mid-December and it’s almost 60 this afternoon. We spent the day on little chores. I did the daylight testing and setup on the third of our new motion-detectors, this one a solar-powered one. Then I spent four hours on a one-hour project. I built a table which both encloses the pressure-tank for our well and serves as a stand for our dehumidifier. This opens up space around Labashi’s new workshop sink. It should have taken about an hour but for one little thing—the copper water lines and power cable around the expansion tank meant I couldn’t just build the table and set it over the tank. I had to fit it and there wasn’t enough room to get the screwdriver on the screws. And just as I thought I had it whipped I bumped the drain valve on the expansion tank and spewed about a pint of water into the area. Fun, fun, fun. Actually, the table looks good and is very stable so I’m happy.
That afternoon we had a brief visit from work buddy Rabbit who stopped in on his motorcycle on the way home from work. I enjoyed hearing stories from his recent rider-safety course.
Afterwards I zoomed over to the video store and picked up the ‘Desperate Housewives, Season Two’ disk set so we can watch a few more episodes tonight.


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Sunday, 10 December -

Today we took advantage of the nice weather to take the Miata to its winter storage garage at my brother’s house. We had thought we might be able to meet up with some friends in the area. Labashi’s high-school buddy who lives in Maine in the summer had recently come home and we were hoping to meet up with her but we only saw her very briefly—she had to work. My brother had something going on and my high-school buddy and his wife weren’t home so we struck out all around with that idea. On the way home we decided we’d take a walk at King’s Gap State Park. As we drove in we saw there was a Christmas celebration going on at the mansion. We’ve been to the park several times but the mansion had always been closed. This gave us a chance to check out the mansion and still have time for a walk in the last part of the day. The mansion now serves as a retreat facility for state government environmental agencies. It was re-habbed in 2000 as part of a $1.6M project to establish an environmental-education facility and it’s very new and very nice. We enjoyed a walk around through the demonstration garden and spent a few minutes with the live great-horned owl and it’s keeper in the training center. In the gift store I bought an excellent orienteering map of the park and took copies of the three orienteering courses. I’m a sucker for orienteering maps and can spend hours looking at them. Later this winter I’ll go over there for some compass work on the orienteering courses and do some bushwhacking to interesting features I see on the map (like ‘passable cliff” and ‘impassable cliff’). Then we went for a walk out the scenic-view trail, returning just before dark.
On the way home we had a little gustatory adventure. We wanted to try someplace new and couldn’t think of anything along our route when I remembered there’s a Thai restaurant in Dillsburg. We found ‘Pakha’s Thai House’ along US15. That turned out to be a GREAT choice. Labashi tried the sweet apple-yum salad and I had satay for an appetizer. Then I had a kang-kai curry and Labashi had pineapple fried rice, all excellent and very fresh-tasting choices. This is great; we often come home this way after visiting my brother or friends in the western Cumberland Valley and now we have a whole new menu to work our way through.
That evening we watched a little TV and I was very happy to see footage of Alaskan bush pilot Don Sheldon. My other-brother, Orat, is an amateur pilot and gave me three books about bush pilots on my last visit. All three of them speak of bush-pilot-legend Don Sheldon and there he was setting a landing-altitude record by landing on Mt Denali to rescue a sick climber from near-certain death.

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Saturday, 9 December –

Today we needed a break from the home-improvement work and decided to spend a day in Baltimore. We did a fairly-early start (for us) and were parked outside the Walters Art Museum by 1000, only to learn that the museum doesn’t open until 1100. I noticed a young lady walking by carrying a coffee and asked if there was a shop nearby. That led us to Donna’s, a nice (and very busy) little neighborhood café and coffee bar a block north of the Washington Monument, at Charles and Madison. They had a superb coffee mocha and their ‘everything’ bagel was fantastic.
Though we had found a traditional curbside metered parking spot, we noticed something new about parking in this area. The city has removed all the parking meters from many of the blocks and in their place has installed a ticket machine. Instead of feeding an individual parking meter next to your car, you walk to the nearby ticket machine and buy a ticket to place on your car’s dashboard. The cost of parking is still a dollar an hour but the ticket machine takes both quarters and credit cards. Tickets do not have a specific parking spot or block identified so I assume they are good for anywhere this style of parking is permitted. The removal of the parking meters is very striking visually. The sidewalks look extra-wide and the streetscapes are less cluttered. Great idea! Hopefully we start to see this type of parking in our local towns.
At the Walters, we had another pleasant surprise. Both the Walters and the Baltimore Museum of Art now have free admission and free use of the audio players. We learned from the audio-players lady that the museums had been given additional money by the city and had started the free admission policy on 1 October.
We first visited the headliner exhibit about the mid-19th Century landscape paintings of Gustav Courbet, a French painter. Courbet was known for being a coarse and controversial person and developed a mastery of painting with a palette-knife. The multiple layers of paint give his paintings a unique sense of depth. This traveling exhibit had been developed by the J. Paul Getty Museum and was intended to be accompanied by nature sounds and by lights simulating the passing of day and night. The idea was to make the experience of viewing the Courbet paintings an ‘immersive’ one. The Walters chose not to add the nature sounds or day/night lighting but did use theatrical-style spotlights for the ‘Winter’ rooms of the exhibit. The scrims on the lights allowed bright light to fall only on the paintings in these darkened rooms, giving us viewers the effect that we were looking out windows at the surrounding landscape. As we exited the exhibit we were accosted by an artsy young guy who surveyed us about the exhibit. We were a bit surprised to see how closely our opinions matched on this one. The survey had us rating various questions (like “Was the music a more-immersive or less-immersive experience for you?”) on a numerical scale and we were always within one digit of each other’s opinion.
After Courbet we spent another hour on the 4th floor looking at the French 18th century paintings. I particularly liked the styles of Gerome and Bonnat. It had been hilarious to learn that Courbet so disdained th highly-detailed and polished realism of Jean-Leon Gerome that he (Courbet) called the donkey he used to carry his easel and supplies ‘Gerome’. Life is tough all over!
We then walked through to the Asian exhibit since Labashi wanted to see some Japanese screen paintings. I loitered in the samurai exhibit and loved seeing how a samurai sword is forged, polished, and assembled.
By mid-afternoon we were ready to move on and drove back out of the city and around the beltway to the IKEA store in Whitemarsh. We like going to IKEA for ideas. It’s amazing to me that we buy so little there but we spend hours looking at the Swedish design ideas. It’s like going to a different type of museum. This time we were looking for ideas to modify or replace our entertainment center setup. We didn’t find anything suitable for a direct replacement but did come up with some ideas to modify what we have. These ideas will have to ‘cook’ a little more; they’re not quite fully-formed yet.
On the way back up I-83 we stopped at Timonium and I introduced Labashi to fish tacos at Baja Fresh. I had first tried them while on a business trip to San Diego (the self-proclaimed ‘fish-taco capital of the world’).
That evening we watched ‘Patriot Act’, a movie by stand-up comedian Jeff Ross. Jeff took along his home video camera on a stand-up tour he did with Drew Carey in the early days of the war in Iraq. Good movie.