austin_dern

It wasn't until my father talked about sights in Savannah that he never got to, because my mother doesn't feel like seeing the railroad museum or such, that I understood he might have wanted to make that trip anyway. He did, though, suggest we might go to the H L Hunley museum, again something right nearby. I was interested, naturally. bunny_hugger mentioned it to her mother, who basically leapt down to Charleston to demand that we go. Well, that convinced me.

So our Sunday plans would be an expedition to this museum, another one that's maybe 285 feet away from my parents' apartment as the crow flies, and 185 miles by the highways. Also again, my mother didn't want to go along. bunny_hugger remembered watching the made-for-tv movie about the Hunley, which she was sure she'd seen on the urging of her starter husband, the Navy fan. I remembered the existence of the movie, but not watching it, and with some investigative work figured out why. When it aired I was in Maryland, attending a three-week teaching session NASA/Greenbelt ran about parallel processing. By the time I got back the movie was somehow not in the endless repeat cycles anymore.

The Hunley museum is a small museum, and is clear about its academic work: it only takes tours on the weekends. Clemson researchers work on it the rest of the time. Right out front is a replica of the Pioneer, Hunley's first attempt at building a submarine and scuttled when the United States recaptured New Orleans. The small museum also has one of the props from the tv movie, set out where you can climb in and get a photograph of yourself bent way over to fit your hands or feet on the propeller crank. The prop is about ten percent larger than the real thing, which I learned later and made my back retroactively hurt more.

We got there in time for the guided tour, which took us right to the conservation tank where the iron submarine is still being stabilized, cleaned out, and investigated. It'll likely never be brought out of fluid. Right now, we can just look down into the pool, shrinking the apparent size of the thing. The docent said he hoped someday it'd be displayed in a tank transparent all around.

The docent talked some about the building and mission and sinking of the Hunley, as well as its recovery. And then went and confused me, at least, with just how it did sink the USS Housatonic. The submarine used a spar torpedo, basically a mine held on a long rod out in front, and the docent got us confused about what precisely was known about the way this worked. My dad revealed that he had been on the tour before and had heard different things every other time about how the submarine and its spark worked. Not particularly confusing us is that there is mystery about what exactly sank the Hunley. The obvious thought is that the blast which sank the Housatonic also damaged the submarine, but apparently the artifact doesn't show signs of that, and they had a poster showing numerical simulations suggesting it shouldn't have been that hard on the submarine at least. Being sunk by Union forces deliberately seems ruled out by the lack of damage; possibly it was sunk by the wake of a Union ship. (This is where I would put my money, although in point of fact, everyone on the tour was given a little plastic coin and encouraged to drop it into one of four buckets for the leading theories. I kept mine as souvenir, as the signs said we could do, too.) The submarine was also way out of the path to safety, which is another mystery.

Anyway we explored the museum a while, particularly paying attention to descriptions about the challenge of how to recover artifacts from it, which filled with silt over the course of 140 years and that needed, like, years of work to think about whether and how to set it upright again. Or how the human remains were identified. (One of the crew is known only by a single name, a reminder of what record-keeping was just like back then.)

While we looked around the gift shop bunny_hugger and I got very anxious, as there was a guy who'd cornered the cashier and was explaining the museum to her, at length. I reached a point I was looking desperately for something I could buy so as to just break up that scene, but I wasn't sure I wanted one of the books --- or the DVD of the movie --- enough for this. bunny_hugger did get some souvenirs, although not before the guy had finally used up all the words and left.

Meanwhile my father got a little bit anxious as he'd hoped to bring us to Magnolia Cemetery, nearby. The Hunley sank three times, killing some or all of its crew each time. Those killed in the machine have been buried together there, and this was particularly interesting as family lore at least has it that one of those dead (on the first sinking) was part of my family. This is of course interesting and we couldn't help thinking: there has got to be a letterbox here. Probably several, as quite a slice of South Carolina wealth is buried in the cemetery. We only had a short while, though; the cemetery closed at 5 pm and my father was not willing to see just how much of a grace period they gave people lingering. There were people still driving in ten minutes before the place closed, though.

This was another day of doing small things, low-key things. We came back to the apartment and had dinner, salad with basked squashes. It's another meal that's really good and really easy to make, considering; we should try it sometime ourselves.

After that and more minced meat pie desserts we finally exchanged Christmas presents. I gave books, since that's the sort of thing I think of first and besides they're very good things to bring in carry-on luggage. (That said, airpot security theater did insist on swabbing the wrapped packages when I flew out, part of their deep suspicion of people flying with books.) I also gave my mother a couple of Michigan-themed coasters, heavy marble things, again, nice flat things. I had liked them when I picked them out, and liked them more as we hung out at their apartment since they seemed to need a couple more coasters. So that went well. bunny_hugger gave my father a set of tools he'd put on his wish list, easy enough. And she got a neat little portable jewelry case, neatly filling a gap we hadn't thought about her having.

And then, already, my mother was ready to get to bed. bunny_hugger and my father and I watched a Columbo episode Murder By The Book, where I think the episode missed the actual clue, phone records, that should have undone the killer's plans. Also, once again, the criminal would have been so much better off if he didn't try to force Columbo down the wrong path. It also has a bit where Columbo goes home with the murder victim's wife to make her an omelette, which is just weird. bunny_hugger briefly confused this episode with Publish Or Perish, a completely different episode with the same guy playing the murderer. And then MeTV had this show where a couple of Wizard of Oz fans showed off their collections, revealing that allegedly in the 30s there was a thing where you'd get an elephant figurine and have your friends sign it? ... One collector had such an elephant signed by The Movie's cast, which is ... all right, certainly a thing, since we can see it and all that.

This is around when my father went to bed, and we got to preparing for bed and going to sleep early, for us. We had a flight to catch.

Trivia: The earliest known recipe for chocolate ice cream was published by La Chapelle in 1735. Source: The Essence of Style: How the French Invented High Fashion, Fine Food, Chic Cafés, Style, Sophistication, and Glamour, Joan DeJean.

Currently Reading: The Broken Dice: And Other Mathematical Games Tales of Chance, Ivar Ekeland.

PS: I have more stuff to show you from Lakeside Amusement Park.

Look up! A train goes along Cyclone.

A train on Cyclone making its turnaround, on the hill, behind the Tilt-A-Whirl.

And oh, a look from a different angle at that clearly defunct ride. ... Now, what is your story, there?

After the boat tour, through the deep dark water --- tannins from the cypress needles that fall in winter --- we thanked the guide and walked around some. There's a bunch of other exhibits. A couple of parrot-class birds in a large cage. There's also a butterfly house, with many flowers and several bunches of birds inside. We ventured in and almost right away saw the plants of, and sign for, ``Mexican Heather'', which we hadn't heard of before. The sign warns, it's ``in now way related to heathers'', so there we go. It was a lovely peaceful spot, and as we went out we saw a bright yellow butterfly going past. I'm confident that it was not one from the enclosure; there just weren't any bright yellow butterflies inside. Still, weird coincidence.

There's also a small building with local animals, some of them fish, some snakes and reptiles and all that. Outside it there's a captive alligator, alleged to be the largest in captivity in the state. It was just hanging out at the side of the water, getting photographed by people who were fenced off from being all that nearby.

Then we went along one of the hiking trails. bunny_hugger had noticed on the map that there was a graveyard deep within the forests and we hadn't passed it on the boat tour. So we walked there and found, yes, a small graveyard marked off by a two-foot-high stone enclosure, with a free-standing cross maybe fifteen feet tall. There were three main gravestones, with dates reaching after the gardens were donated to Charleston, so there must have been some arrangement. Also there was a small gravestone, ``My Happy'', for something sixteen years old at the time of its 1957 death. My supposition is dog, possibly cat. And we walked back, pausing to photograph the small fake stone bridge made for filming The Patriot and kept around since, hey, free fake stone bridge.

And that was our big outing for the day. We went back to my parents' home; my mother had made macaroni and cheese and we had dinner. At home bunny_hugger and I always eat at the dinner table, an innovation I introduced because we did it that way when I was visiting her, before we married. My parents? ... Well, as is the custom in my family, the dining table was so covered in clutter that there was no eating off of it. I wouldn't fault bunny_hugger if she didn't know there was one. We just took plates to hang around the living room area.

A bit after dinner, while waiting for Jeopardy, one of my parents' friends visited. He's an author and his wife had a surplus minced meat pie and they just live in circumstances where people bring over surplus minced meat pies like that. Also like 75% of everybody they've met since moving to South Carolina, he's from New Jersey. He shared a couple quick stories about the Freehold Raceway, which I never went to because I couldn't be less interested in such, but also talked a bit about the fixing of harness races there. Which does interest me, peculiarly enough.

After all this, I go fishing around the TV channels and find they're playing a series of Planet of the Apes films on Turner Classic Movies. So we settle on that, the first time I've seen the movie in a long while. Longer, for bunny_hugger. We're both impressed by just how talky and low-action the movie is. You forget the screenplay was co-written by Rod Serling and when you learn that, you understand why so much of it is people declaiming angrily at each other. Then on to Beneath the Planet of the Apes, which bunny_hugger doesn't remember seeing at all. So when the movie gets back from being kind of boring by introducing telepathic mutants with a doomsday bomb in Saint Patrick's Cathedral? That's a surprise to her. She also was impressed by how the movie was just killing off everybody right before its end, just in time for the abrupt end of the picture.

She wanted to know how there were like eighteen sequels to the movie given how the second one ended, but it was also getting past midnight and she was far too exhausted for all this. So she just looked it up online and went to bed. I would make it through the movie, although losing focus, before I fell asleep.

Trivia: The enzyme which binds carbon dioxide into carbohydrates, as part of photosynthesis, is named Rubisco. Source: Oxygen: The Molecule that Made the World, Nick Lane.

Currently Reading: The End of Physics: The Myth of a Unified Theory, David Lindley.

PS: More things to look at in Lakeside Park.

I would legitimately try pushing a cocktail book that's just pictures of the ticket booths for Lakeside Amusement Park. Notice the Tower of Jewels in the background.

Satellite --- be a pilot!. It's one of the rides that's across the railroad tracks and near the edge of the water; you have to get to it by going over that silly little steps. Notice the column supporting nothing on the right there.

Even in the full light of day, without the neon being on, the Spider's ticket booth looks fantastic.

What we had to sleep early for was my parents. We didn't want to go another Christmas season without visiting them, and found that a flight right after New Year's could be affordable and fit bunny_hugger's work schedule. This forced us to a short flight, since the first day of classes would be the 7th. And she'd have to do class prep while visiting. But we aim for low-key, low-event visits to my parents and we could deal with that. Also, after we'd got our plane tickets, it turned out bunny_hugger had mis-read the schedule. Classes don't start until the 14th. We could have gone a week later (and not missed the first pinball tournament of the year) or gone for a longer time. We won't make this mistake again: it turns out the cheapest time to fly out is mid-December, and we're thinking seriously about whether we can do that instead next Christmastime.

The real drawback was that we'd have morning flights both times. The flight out required us to get to the airport by 6:30, which implied leaving the house by 5 am, which implied our being up before 4 am, which is about when we normally get to sleep. So we had to pack and ready the house and ready the car and ready for bed by an hour when we usually sit down to dinner.

But we got out, safe and sound, and comfortably enough, and we left the dining room lights on. Well, it wouldn't stand out for us to have the dining room light on till all hours of the morning anyway.

Our flight went through Charlotte, North Carolina, with several hours of just hanging around waiting for nothing particular. We used this chance to get lunch, to use the time efficiently and to keep my parents from waiting for us to have their own lunch. We got in to Charleston in the early afternoon, and got a nice curbside pickup and returned to my parents' apartment home, somewhere on Daniel Island. They're still decorated for Christmas, naturally; it's only the 2nd of January. They have a wreath hanging on the apartment door and everything. Their cat --- just the one now, twelve years old --- prowls around under their artificial tree and glares at us until bunny_hugger takes her Zyrtec.

We napped. My parents expected us to do that. It's not quite two hours but it makes all the difference. We're still groggy but now we're functional. We go out to dinner, to a Chinese place that's nearby. My parents are well-known to the staff there, in a way I'm too shy to ever be with a place. Its name is something like Lucky Dragon, and while the place can't be that old, it has that old-fashioned American Chinese Restaurant look to it, dark wood and red walls and under-lit. bunny_hugger confirms my hypothesis that it looks like Lansing's lost House of Ing restaurant, the one that used to have columns out front climbed by Chinese dragons. They have an eggplant dish that I knew right away bunny_hugger would want; I have a tofu one myself. We all have enough for leftovers the next day. And, my mother notes, we all mark our take-out boxes differently. My father scratches an X in the case with his fingernail. My mother writes her initial. bunny_hugger writes all four of her initials. I write my name in tiny block letters; the styrofoam box soaks up ink from my pen perfectly. And we get dessert; bunny_hugger and I split a fried banana with ice-cream thing that the waiter tells us tastes a bit like cheesecake. It doesn't, but it has got a nice cheesecake texture.

Back home we have a question: exchange Christmas presents now or later? We decide to do it later, maybe some day when we haven't done anything all day. Before we visited my mother had suggested we go to Savanna, Georgia, one day to take in the historical sights. This implies getting up around 7 or 8 am, so that we can make the two-hour drive at a reasonable hour. Now, though, she isn't so keen on the idea. She suggests we might go to the cypress gardens nearby; it's a county park, showing off a cypress swamp, that's only recently reopened. She had gone on a boat tour a few months ago and liked it, although she got seasick and didn't want to go back. The plan sounds good to me, though.

We look for the Christmas music channel. There'd been one last time we visited, that played music through Epiphany. Not so this time. There's a channel claiming to play Christmas music, and that has Christmas imagery for its background pictures. But it's a slightly baffling mix of contemporary music that's playing. There's some nice absurdity to pictures of Santa Claus dolls while Notorious B.I.G. plays, but we only take so much of that. We end up going to bed early, certainly by our standards. Only a little late by my father's. My mother goes to bed her usual hour around 9:30 or so.

Trivia: Spain demanded a promise of help recovering Gibraltar and Minorca before joining the American and French war with the United Kingdom in 1779. Source: The First Salute: A View of the American Revolution, Barbara W Tuchman.

Currently Reading: Flywheel, Shyster, and Flywheel: The Marx Brothers' Lost Radio Show, Editor Michael Barson. Scripts from the one-season radio show, for which strangely Harpo Marx didn't get a part. It's kind of weird, like reading Condensed Marx Brothers Movies. Also Groucho's character started out named Waldorf T Beagle, which sounds like thomaskdye's Marx Brothers Fanfic character. Chico's character was Emmanual Ravelli, like in Animal Crackers.

PS: Hanging around Lakeside Amusement Park's carousel some more.

A closer view of the green-painted rabbit, with the paint worn off to show a more realistic brown underneath. Or possibly a faded red.

And here's a donkey. There's a little metal handle on the side and I'm not sure if that's where stirrups for the saddle once went.

The dragon chariot for the ride, beaten down by age but still well worth attention. There's a lot of dragon chariots out there and I wonder what set that as a standard.

In a tense series of last-minute discussions my father decided to take us to the airport himself, while my mother stayed to do something or other whose details I didn't follow and which I didn't quite understand. But on his own, and with some pressing by bunny_hugger, my father admitted that he'd found South Carolina rather nicer to live than he expected, particularly given the climate. He still felt lost for not having his tools and workbench and all that, much less the circle of people whose houses he could go around fixing eventually, and he admitted that he was disturbed by the racism folks occasionally expressed.

I don't know what to make of my parents' move. My mother seems content; my father says he is and I guess in many ways he is, but he also tends to sigh and claim he's fine and sulk afterwards. They're doing a lot of the stuff they like, although they were doing that before too. My parents say the cost of living is so much less in Charleston that even stuff like travelling back to the northeast to see their friends and grandchildren makes sense, and my father's enjoying the relief from responsibility of homeownership that comes from renting an apartment after decades of having a place of his own. Boy do I hope they know what they're doing.

The flights back weren't nearly as chaotic or difficult as the flights out, although since we were rebooked on a flight that went through Charlotte that did mean that we managed to have not a single one of the flight segments we had actually originally purchased. (We were supposed to fly back through National Airport). On the Charleston-to-Charlotte segment we were able to swap seats with the other person in the row. But the connection between flights at Charlotte gave us about four minutes to get to the extreme far end of the airport, so we weren't able to talk with the people in the two rows we were assigned to in order to work out a swap, and the overhead bins were full, so we had to check some of our carry-ons. Those would be restored to us, we were told, at baggage claim in Detroit, if all went well. Admittedly, it did. We wouldn't have fresh problems until after we got our bags.

Trivia: The second month of the Babylonian calendar, Gusisa, was dubbed Ayaru in the Semitic calendar and Daisios in the Seleucid calendar. Source: Mapping Time: The Calendar and its History, EG Richards.

Currently Reading: The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA, Diane Vaughan.

After the ride we still wanted to wander around town a little despite the cold and we aimed for the mystery shop bunny_hugger had seen. It was chill and windy enough that we ducked into another shop, one we thought was a cafe, to warm up. It was actually a shop for selling spices and cocoa and chocolate and and such, so it didn't sell cups of coffee, but it was giving away samples of spiced hot chocolate as well as various dips we could put on crackers. We didn't actually buy anything, but it was a pretty close call.

The mystery shop meanwhile was a disappointment: though it had a modest selection of board games (like a commemorative anniversary edition of Clue) and mystery novels (and books whose inclusion was itself a mystery, eg, Tom Clancy and Co-Author's Tom Clancy-Branded Political Technothriller For Paranoid Conservative Males), it was mostly a dinner theater and we were nowhere near dinner. The lone staffer we could see working there explained the overall concept and explained how far we were from the show and we wandered off without finding, like, junior fingerprinting kits or other fun stuff.

My parents wouldn't let us get through another day without letterboxing, though: there was one near an intersection referred to as the Four Corners of Law, a name given by Robert Ripley to the intersection of Meeting and Broad streets, where a church, city hall, a county courthouse, and a federal courthouse --- thus representing ecclesiastic, local, state, and federal law --- can be found. Again, though, cold and windy, so we ducked into a historical society museum-and-gift-shop along the way, letting us warm up and use the bathrooms as well as admire books and antique furniture and sacks of souvenir grains and the like. They also had an actual centuries-old well discovered when the building, formerly a gas station, was renovated into the historical society structure.

The letterbox clues for the Four Points of Law location were not the usual ``follow the path until you come to the fallen tree'' sort of thing; instead they were a set of photographs of things you would see if you were going in the right direction, which would be really charming if it were about fifteen degrees warmer and it felt like time to just wander aimlessly around looking at things. As it was we found the park where the letterbox was, we thought, likely to be and found the second or third photographic clue first, letting us skip to the prize which it turns out was right about where we expected. And this surprised me since it was in a reasonably well-maintained and not neglected yard. This was another pretty well-used letterbox, not as ancient as the one we found in Isle of Palms (which had stamps going back to 2009, an eternity as letterbox logs go), but still, a great find.

As we were getting near the end of the afternoon we went to one of the hotels downtown, an upscale place with the sort of restaurant that's too nice for people like us to actually eat in. They serve a coconut-frosted cake there that my mother had wanted us to experience --- she'd suggested we get it to go the night before, but my father thought eating at the restaurant was part of the experience --- and we went to the restaurant's small bar to get a drink and two slices of cake, shared between the four of us. The slices, I should point out, are huge, roughly as tall as a standing badger, but my mother was right that they're delicious. While there my mother explained some of how she'd gotten to have a social circle in a state where she knew, as far as I can determine, not a single soul; it was all church groups, she said. I'm still left wondering how my father hasn't got more of a social circle, then.

While my father and I finished our slice of cake, my mother only had one or two bits of the one she and bunny_hugger shared, and we would take the remains of that home. My mother walked back to the car through the hotel's lobby; she pointed, a bit snippily, to the gardens outside, which my father had described the night before as part of the restaurant's ambiance and which we hadn't seen on the way in. This felt like part of a broader little squabble that, on reflection, I didn't want to get into. We did walk through the garden, though; it was small but quite attractive.

And after all that we went back to my parents' apartment and got a fresh new bit of unwanted hassle from US Airways.

Trivia: Cluedo was invented during the Second World War by former Britigh government actuary Anthony Pratt, with help from his wife. Material shortages delayed its introduction until 1948. Source: The Game Makers: The Story Of Parker Brothers From Tiddledy Winks To Trivial Pursuit, Philip E Orbanes.

Currently Reading: The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA, Diane Vaughan.

PS: A Hundred, And Other Things, about how wondrously many different things can be meant by a ``hundred''. Sixth of these since the last roundup, if you haven't been following the Livejournal Syndicate feed, or the raw RSS feed it started from.

Wednesday would be our last full day in Charleston and we figured to take a horse-drawn carriage ride around the downtown area. I don't think this was my first horse-drawn carriage ride ever, but it would certainly be my first in years, anyway. My father talked a bit about the complicated politics of building stuff in Charleston as there's a strong architectural-history and historical-preservation movement and so things have to fit the style. I'm of divided feelings about that. On the one hand, I'm inclined to generally let people be to build stuff the way that suits their tastes, and to allow that architectural styles have lifespans, and accept their passing with grace. On the other hand, it keeps the place from looking like every other place, featuring endless storefronts in that dark beige wall with triangular roof fronts to give the implication of architectural ornamentation. My parents, though not living in Charleston proper, are in a town that is roiled right now with the debate about whether a drive-through Starbucks would fit its architectural character, a debate elevated by the town being in some areas nearly as much as fifteen weeks old. And this may be a petty quarrel, but it also touches on some important stuff of defining public space.

On smaller issues we had to eat, and went to a Greek restaurant adjacent to a former movie palace, the kind with your grand overhanging balcony. It's apparently still a theater but now dedicated to live events and rentable for special occasions. Nothing was happening when we were there, which is to be expected for early afternoon on a Wednesday, I suppose. It also turned out we were there at the start of Restaurant Week, devoted to finding something to bring tourists in during a two-week dull stretch for the tourist trade. Yes, they had sandwich wraps, because we live in an era when pretty much everything can be eaten in wrap form.

We got a reservation for a carriage tour --- it hadn't occurred to me they wouldn't just set off as soon as they had enough people --- and since there was time to pass before that we wandered around the City Market which does go back to the 19th century but was not, our tour guide would point out, where Americans held as slaves were bought and sold. It's occupied now by cute decorative and tourist-y stands, including a number of Christmas ornaments that we looked at fairly seriously, and jewelry counters, and even a spot selling (among other things) Cheerwine. My father was surprised we knew what that was, but we'd tasted the soda back at the Midwest Pop Festival, when we went to that pinball arcade outside Kalamazoo with the distant sodas, Moxie included. (We also saw racks of the Avanti greeting cards, made in Detroit, down there.) There's also an outdoor part of the market, which had relatively few sellers there, since it was in the low 40s and windy, and was looking only to get colder and windier.

Trivia: The Greenwich Observatory's original construction costs of £500 were raised by selling off 690 barrels of surplus gunpowder which had been provisioned for Prince Rupert of the Rhine during the Third Anglo-Dutch War. Source: Ingenious Pursuits: Building the Scientific Revolution, Lisa Jardine.

Currently Reading: A Brief Guide To Oz: 75 Years Going Over The Rainbow, Paul Simpson. OK, so there's a link between Ghostbusters, the guy who made Santa Claus versus the Ice Cream Bunny, and 1960s efforts to make new Wizard of Oz movies. Didn't see that coming.

On the way back we spent more time inside, belowdecks, and while we didn't see a porpoise we did see some remarkable bird. It looked like a pelican, but it hopped up into the air, glided a bit, and then just ... cut its engines and dove, smashing hard into the water and vanishing underneath it before emerging a couple seconds later. My mother said she remembered reading about that bird in the local newspaper's report of what was migrating through the area, and that it was a relative newcomer to the Charleston area, although she didn't remember what kind of bird it was. She promised to look it up and either she forgot or we forgot to ask.

Also while sailing back we saw an oddly-shaped boat, with a huge, pretty squat profile to it, and wondered what it could be. My father remembered seeing it in the harbor in past times. We couldn't make out the ship's name, but bunny_hugger used her big, quality camera to take a zoomed-in picture of it and she was able to make out its name in the photograph, later on. It turned to be a boat designed for sailing cars, which apparently are made more in Charleston than I would have guessed before this.

My parents weren't sure we had gotten enough letterboxing in, and when they learned there was a letterbox reported planted not a mile from their apartment they were enthusiastic that we should go looking for it. We were skeptical that the box was there --- it had never been reported found, and the letterboxing web site said the person who planted it hadn't logged in in over a year, suggesting the box was defunct and the person had left the hobby --- but we drove past the spot where the box likely was and confirmed that it looked like the sort of place that would get a letterbox. So we returned to their home, got our gear, and bunny_hugger and I set off on foot.

We did find a spot, woods past a little park that's got a small pond and warning signs about alligators, and we feel very sure that we were in the right location. It just had all the right feel for a letterbox location. There just wasn't any actual box there. The last couple clues referred to items like twin pairs of tree stumps, and we could find only a single tree stump; and the references to fallen trees just didn't help matters since we could find spots where there were too many fallen trees for any to stand out, and none of them seemed to be the described ones. We had to conclude the letterbox had gone missing and the planter disappeared.

But it did give us the chance to walk around a bit near sunset and see some lovely marshland, as well as to see a good number of dogs and to get a feel for the squirrels of Charleston. They appeared to be mostly Eastern Greys, but they were smaller and scragglier than those we've got back home. Particularly, they haven't fattened up for winter, which is defensible when the winter is something that lasts for literally hours, but still looked funny. Also the squirrels were very aggressive; they spent a lot of time glaring at us and making threatening noises before running off. I feel like there's a history we don't know at work here.

We went out to a Thai restaurant for dinner. I forget where bunny_hugger had heard about it, but my mother identified its existence as something my father surely proposed. He likes the place, apparently, and I guess they don't get to it as often as he might like. Again I feel like there's a history we don't quite know at work here.

Back home we finally --- finally! --- got to giving my parents their Christmas presents, which were mostly books because those are easy to pick out and wrap and send in luggage, even if the wrapping on bunny_hugger's gifts were inexplicably chewed up while in flight. Also we got to give them a box of Fabiano's chocolates, which brought a gasp of delight from my mother, so that was a good bit of gift-giving.

My mother went to bed relatively early, but my father stayed up with us, talking a lot and listening to the Christmas music channel on their cable box. Their music stations included, besides songs, some pictures and various bits of trivia. Some were sound, like mentioning the big Christmas-industrial complex at Frankenmuth, Michigan. Some were dubious, including multiple and not-quite-compatible origin stories for ... oh, I forget which, now, but some Christmastime snack. There were some ads for their music service too, including one that offered the suggestion you should pick a music channel when you want to select your mood, which seems to come pretty close to the homunculus problem to me since surely wanting to have a particular mood is itself a mood, isn't it?

To our surprise --- we missed the exact moment --- the Christmas music station switched off just at midnight, at what anyone would have to admit was the end of the (non-Orthodox) Christmas season, the end the Feast of the Epiphany. We were delighted the music station respected the season so, and wondered about the Christmas music stations back home. When we got back, the main ones we'd been listening to had reverted to normal programming, although there were two Muzak channels still on Christmas songs. We missed the exact time when those channels went off the air.

It was getting pretty chilly at night, and when I closed up the window before bed I was sorry I hadn't closed it up earlier. We were dodging the second real cold snap of the winter back in Michigan, but that didn't mean South Carolina was going to stay warm.

Trivia: The secession convention which met in Charleston in December 1860 passed an ordinance reverting all state powers ceded to the United States back to the state legislature, with the exception of the power to impose duties and customs, manage the Post Office, and declare war, which it kept to itself. Source: Look Away! A History of the Confederate States of America, William C Davis.

Currently Reading: Washington Burning: How a Frenchman's Vision for Our Nation's Capital Survived Congress, the Founding Fathers, and the Invading British Army, Les Standiford.

PS: A Venn Diagram of the Real Number System, which isn't really a Venn Diagram, but it's just me reblogging a nice little (if flawed) picture. But you already knew about it if you're following its Livejournal Syndicate feed, or the raw RSS feed it started from.

We got up about the same time Tuesday, and ate at home while waiting for word my father's next checkup was done. My mother drove us out to pick him up at one of many, many building complexes named MUSC, which turns out to stand for Medical University of South Carolina, which is an admirably straightforward name for a thing. Apparently Charleston has been developing a big health-industry complex. Also one of the doctors my father saw actually knew him already, thanks to having worked at the hospital where my mother used to work, which is the sort of long-shot coincidence that makes you go ``huh'' and then move on.

We were going, again in deference to my history interests and perhaps because it's the obvious thing to bring tourists in Charleston to, to Fort Sumter. There's a ferry running to it from Patriots Point, where among other things we discovered the USS Yorktown. I didn't know the ship was there or, really, anywhere, and I caught enough of a documentary video playing with the sound off to know that among other things it was the recovery ship for Apollo 8's Command Module, so I was ready with that in case anybody asked, which nobody did. But I was ready for my bluff and trying hard to remember if it was the recovery ship for any other Space Race missions. (No, although I can't say whether it was a backup ship.)

We had some confusion actually buying the ticket, because we got confused about which booth to use, and then which lane for the boats to take, and they kept directing us around to other places. We did all pose for a group photo, which they offered us to buy on the ferry. I did buy it, even though neither my mother nor bunny_hugger thought it was a good picture of them, though I can't give a rational explanation why I felt like getting it.

On the ferry ride we started belowdecks, in the enclosed area, although after a couple minutes bunny_hugger and I went out to the front, listening to the ferry's narration of the harbor and the city's history and all that. My father joined us, while my mother sat inside by herself. I'm not positive she wasn't a bit seasick. My father mentioned that on this ride often on the left side you could see porpoises, and sure enough, we saw a couple of them off on the right side. Briefly; it wasn't a porpoise-heavy ride.

And, finally, we pulled up to the dock and actually got onto Fort Sumter.

Trivia: On the 15th of April, 1861, the United States federal government spent about $172,000 per day, in all its departments. Three months later the War Department alone would spend a million dollars per day. Source: An Empire of Wealth: The Epic History of American Economic Power, John Steele Gordon.

Currently Reading: Washington Burning: How a Frenchman's Vision for Our Nation's Capital Survived Congress, the Founding Fathers, and the Invading British Army, Les Standiford.

Monday morning, we knew, my father had a doctor's appointment. Just a routine checkup, but, they had to be sometime and he wanted to do them early in the quarter. We figured we'd sleep in until we heard him getting back, since if we knew anything from the old place, my parents are fairly noisy as they get up. We didn't hear anything until pretty close to noon when my mother finally knocked on the door. My father'd gotten back long ago and apparently the soundproofing in their new place is just that good. We went to lunch at a nearby sports bar and my father wanted to make sure I saw they had a sign saying, no concealable weapons please. My father's very amused by the gun-pusher culture in his new home.

I'd wanted to see just, you know, what's normal stuff for them and they wanted to show off tourist attractions and the natural thing to bring me to would be, well, Fort Sumter but we were too late starting to really get there. Near to it, though, was Fort Moultrie and we had plenty of time for that. Fort Moultrie served well to keep the British from capturing Charleston in 1776, and then not at all to keep them from capturing it in 1780. (That was all right, as it fit well with George Washington's so-called ``Fabian strategy'', of losing so many battles and so much territory that the British would be driven to finally give up and go home.) In 1860 the federal government's extremely light garrison held Fort Moultrie until South Carolina formally started the Slavers' Treason, and at Major Robert Anderson's direction the garrison moved into the harbor and Fort Sumter.

My father by the way had some kind of super-powered admission card to National Park Service installations that let him get all four of us into Fort Moultrie for free, parking included. He bought this card several years back, before apparently anyone realized what a steal it was, and the cashier tried to offer him the new card in which he would get less stuff for free. My father declined the offer to replace his worn-out old card with a new.

The centerpiece of the visitors center, besides the piles of artifacts from the fort's service --- it was hastily built in 1776, and rebuilt after the War of 1812, became reasonably noteworthy in the Civil War, was renovated around the time of the Spanish War, and used as a garrison and training spot in the Second World War --- is a movie theater explaining all this history. I'm not positive when it's from; from the typeface on the movie's titles I wouldn't be surprised if it dated to the bicentennial, though the film stock looked awfully clean and non-faded for that. It was a little tour of the various major eras of the fort as explained by one guy per era, reenacting what a typical soldier of the time might see and might say to an unknown party poking around while the fort was under fire, if he had no sense of discretion or secrecy or suspicion whatsoever. The framing device was a guy in late-40s garb driving a jeep up to unlock and lock up the fort who certainly didn't remind me every single second he was on frame of John Cleese doing his British Army Guy in the slightest.

We prowled around the fort --- well, my father, bunny_hugger, and I prowled around; my mother raced through as if she had another appointment --- and particularly were delighted by some of the powder rooms and such. My father noticed how deeply the rooms echoed, better than the shower for singing, and before we knew it we heard him singing out, ``Way Down Upon The Swanee River'', which he recorded on his iPhone and sent to his Facebook. ``Crazy Old Man Singing At Fort Moultrie'' could be the hot new YouTube channel, so, you heard about it here first, before it even quite exists.

Histories of the Civil War, doing their best to get to the exciting part where shooting happens, tend to mention Major Anderson's withdrawal from Fort Moultrie to Fort Sumter vaguely if it at all. Actually being on sight made obvious why Anderson had to withdraw, though: besides Fort Moultrie having walls in spots as much as twenty inches above the surrounding ground, it's terrifically easy to walk up to from the mainland. The informational movie mentioned the threat of how a mob from Charleston could move out and overwhelm them. So I understand this action rather more immediately now.

Trivia: After driving the organized American forces out of South Carolina, British forces captured Charlotte, North Carolina, on the 26th of September, 1780. Source: America's Wars, Alan Axelrod.

Currently Reading: Powering Apollo: James E Webb of NASA, W Henry Lambright.

PS: Reading the Comics, January 17, 2015: Finding Your Place Edition, a bunch of mathematics comics from a fairly busy week. Second of these since the last roundup, in case you're not following these on either the RSS feed or the Livejournal Syndication version.

So, our 11:19 flight got cancelled, somewhere around 3 am as we were notified by text message; thus, we knew before we showered that there wasn't any particular flight to get to. We went to the airport anyway since the hotel check-out time was 11:00 and there wasn't anything useful to be done at a budget hotel and without a car in an unfamiliar city. We called up the US Airways rebooking service and learned they had rebooked us for the 7:30 pm flight, the one that was cancelled at the last moment the night before. Happily, they agreed that was a bit of a wait and looked for seats on an earlier plane.

They had one leaving about 4:15, at least, and I phoned my parents to say that was the worst we'd be on. They also could put us on standby for a 2:45 flight and who knew what might happen there? That sounded worth the shot even though we didn't expect much. We nested down by the gate where our standby flight was and waited, and figured at least we could eat once the plane left without us. And then after everybody had boarded and we were figuring whether to go to Burger King or to some other restaurant there, they called bunny_hugger, and then me. We gathered everything we could, quick as we could, and I phoned my parents to let them know of our new arrival time.

We were tucked in the back, just ahead of the bathrooms, again, with no promotion to the exit row. After the storms the previous day --- apparently including a row of tornadoes across Georgia and Alabama --- there weren't any empty seats, far as I could tell, and probably wouldn't be for days. But we got into the air, for the very short flight, too short for drinks to be served. (My mother had suggested she could just drive to Charlotte and pick us up, but that seemed too far and too likely to result in our luggage being detonated by TSA agents.) And we arrived on the ground almost exactly on time, then waited as the airplane puttered around the tarmac waiting for a better airport to turn up or something, I don't know.

Charleston's airport is being renovated, alas, but it also unironically delighted me because it just looks like a municipal complex building circa 1982, with dark-brown square brick floors and walls. It's not attractive, exactly, but it is of its time and I respect something that's so distinctive, especially in the modern era of aluminum sheets and tinted glass. We puttered around and around trying to find first baggage claim --- where, against expectations, they had our suitcase --- and then my father, who insisted by text message he was sitting in baggage claim waiting for us. And he was, although he was looking along an entry path that we didn't take, and that I'm not sure you could take. But we did find him, and I saw him in person since that time last year when I last saw their old house, with him sitting in its lone remaining chair --- the longest, I'm pretty sure, that I'd ever gone without seeing him --- and we got out to the car as my mother drove it in from the cell phone parking lot, just ahead of some rain.

Originally we had planned to fly back home on Wednesday, leaving us with a short trip but one enough to see my parents' new home, and some margin before the start of bunny_hugger's new semester. When I called the airline to find what happened to our flight they suggested rebooking the return leg to Thursday, and although I wasn't sure whether fiddling with anything about this was wise (nb), I agreed. We would go back on Thursday, so as not to lose any net time with my parents, and just at the cost of some class prep time.

And what of our original flight, the one that went to Philadelphia Horrible, and its connecting flight to Charleston? I'd like to report whether it arrived or whether we had traded a night at a Philadelphia Horrible airport hotel for a Charlotte airport hotel, but, we failed to check what did happen to it. It would be interesting to know what might have happened. The storms apparently hitting the southeast suggest we probably couldn't have got to Charleston either way, though.

Trivia: Chicago's municipal airport handled 1.3 million passengers in 1946, about twenty times what it had in 1941. Source: Naked Airport: A Cultural History of the World's Most Revolutionary Structure, Alastair Gordon.

Currently Reading: On The Map: A Mind-Expanding Exploration of the Way The World Looks, Simon Garfield.