Why it's nice to get home from a trip

Reason 1. A good night's sleep, with cool breeze flowing thru the open window and no roar of city buses or warbling beeping car alarms. Sleeping in DC or Brooklyn is hot and airless, you are wet with sweat in the morning. Before air conditioning, Washington DC was considered a hardship post by diplomats. I agree with that.

Reason 2. The grass was on the warpath. I cut it just before I left, but given a week unmowed it was 6 inches tall. Give it another couple of days and it would have been too tall for the mower. May is grass growing month.

Reason 3. Aid and succor to Stupid Beast. I left the cat with a niece to Cat's dismay. Niece had a 2 year old, a newborn, two strange humans and a beagle. Cat was demoted from being The Cat to just another pet. Plus she is a very conservative cat, disliking pick up's, laps, riding in cars, and new people. Faced with a household of picker uppers, petters, and strangers was a trial. She lost weight, going from a tubby 20 pounds down to a shapely 16 pounds.
Cat was overjoyed to get back to the regular house, the familiar rugs and furniture. She started purring immediately and remained grateful for all of two hours after coming home.

The Night of the Living Car Alarms

Spent the night in Brooklyn, on the way home to God's Country. It was warm, (actually it was damn hot) we had the windows open, hoping for a breath of air. All night long it went, beep beep beep, dong, dong, dong, one damn car alarm after another. No sooner than one would shut up, the next would go off. Loud and louder. Pain in the tail.

Mufflers for city buses

Been staying at daughter's place in DC, right off 14th St. It's noisy from the traffic. The cars are quiet, with only a slight hiss from the tires. The city buses are humungously loud, all from engine exhaust noise that a decent muffler would silence. Your car needs a decent muffler to get an inspection sticker. Cities would be pleasanter places if the inspectors got as tough on the buses as they are on private motor vehicles.

Rand Paul Takes 2nd place in NH.

Read the headline here. This is true but somewhat misleading. Mitt Romney was first with 32% and Paul had only 9 percent. A more honest headline might have been "Romney increases lead in GOP primary."
Could it be the writer is pro Rand Paul?

More museum pieces

The Smithsonian has a huge hanger full of airplanes out at Dulles Airport. All the stuff that won't fit in down at the mall is packed in here. They have a space shuttle, an SR 71, the first Boeing 707, a P38 Lightening, a P40 Warhawk, an F105 Thunderchief, a couple of Migs, a SPAD, a super Constellation, a Boeing 307, and some incredible German planes from WWII. There are nearly 200 planes inside the place. If you are a plane buff you have to see this one.
They have a really strange German fighter with two engines, one in the nose and one in the tail. Each engine had 2000 hp, so the plane was pretty hot for a piston engined job. I'd read about that one, but never seen one, apparently the Smithsonian has the only one to survive WWII.
They also had a F35, the brand new joint strike fighter that is so new it isn't even in squadron service yet. Plane becomes a museum piece before it becomes operational.

Museum pieces

We (son and I) did the Smithsonian Museum of American History. The air conditioning is nice. They had a lot of neat old things like antique vacuum cleaners, early electric motors and generators, steam engines, cars. No planes, those are all over at Air and Space. The curators must be on a super greenie tear. No lights in a lot of cases making it impossible to see the stuff in the case and/or read the tags. Surely the US of A can afford the electricity to light museum cases.
The curators also have a bit of trouble writing tags. They have a groovy old telescope hanging from the ceiling. It's all polished hardwood and brass, about 15 feet long. The tag talks about Maria somebody-or-other famous woman astronomer who used this gadget at Vassar and is credited with discovering a comet. Didn't bother to say if the telescope was a reflector or a refractor, how big the mirror or lens was, how it was aimed and tracked, whether it could do photography. We learned a lot about lady astronomer Dr. Maria somebody-or-other of Vasser but little about the telescope hanging from the ceiling. Maybe they should have had her hanging from the ceiling, properly stuffed of course.
Then it can make you feel old. In the electric gadget display they had a pair of electric socks. I can remember when my father gave my mother just such a set of battery powered socks. In the GM sponsored automobile display they had some classics, including our old family car, an '88 Dodge Caravan. 22 year old son commented that it made him feel old to see the family car in a museum.

When he got there the conductor told him

One more nickel. Charlie couldn't get offa that train. Had to use the super modern electronic fare systems on both the New York and the DC subway. What a pain. The machines don't make change, they have a tendency to take your money and not issue a ticket, they break down a lot causing long lines.
And, they keep the change. I had to feed the machine with a $5 each time. The actual fare is supposed to be $4.50, but the system keeps the fifty cent change. I don't get it back. Nice little fare hike.