The weekend began with going to see the Charlize Theron movie "Young Adult" with Jim/Jacqui. Another "eh" movie - great acting, but a story that went nowhere. Plus, any movie that has Charlize Theron acting like a boy is wasting Charlize Theron's many assets. We did learn that Jim has a phobia that causes him to avoid any new restaurants employing searchlights for publicity.
Saturday was for putting up the outdoor Christmas decorations and for doing the final battle with the leaves and banishing as many of them as possible to the woods behind our house. It is amazing that each year when I take the lights down I very systematically wind them in a certain order to make it easier to put up the next year. But the next year it always appears I have done so in the way to make it as hard a possible - basically, the exact opposite of easiest. This year I will pull a Constanza.
The next day Carole was having her annual cookie bake, where our house is invaded by hordes of women bringing bottles of wine and bags of flour, so to avoid the estrogen equivalent of the Exxon Valdez and BP Gulf incidents, Carl and I had planned to drive down to Skyline Drive and activate some Summits on the Air in the Shenandoah National Park. But a call to their road condition hot line revealed that the first 65 miles of Skyline Drive was closed due to snow and ice, and a peek at their webcam verified that. It time for Plan Bravo.
So, we diverted to an oldie but goodie: hiking seven miles from Gathland State Park to Weverton Cliffs on the Appalachian Trail. It was partly cloudy and in the thirties, with traces of snow on the ground when we started. This hike is pretty level until the descent from the cliffs at the end, but there is a bit of an uphill at the start. Climbing that caused me to get a bit toasty, so I took off my hat and gloves, but when we got to the top it became completely overcast and started to snow steadily. There was no wind and it was a very polite and scenic kind of snow, but it was actually accumulating and made us wonder if the roads would be covered when we got back to my car.
However, when we reached the Cliffs, the sky cleared and the snow skedaddled. We had the usual fine views of the Potomac from the cliffs - and the cold weather meant no stinkbugs, which is always a plus. We ran into a few more hikers as we made the switchback descent down to my car, but not a lot of people were out on the AT that day. We mused about the vagaries of dying Korean despots, plans to shut down post office buildings full of rude postal workers, whether Julianne Margulies had ever been on "Mad Men" (nope, it was "The Sopranos") and where Carl had seen Marugulies' boyfriend's wife (in "Young Adult") before (on "The Good Wife) and the vagaries of different types of berries their suitability pie-wise. Hmmm, maybe I did get hit by some random estrogen blasts as the cookie women were approaching my house.
We hiked down to my car, shuttled Carl up to his Jeep and drove home, as usual listening to the radio to hear the Redskins find another way to lose an actual way to beat the evil NY Giants. As I got closer to home I began to hear the high pitched whine of a dozen women fighting over two ovens and began to get whiffs of a mixture of Jessica Mclintock, vanilla, shiraz/syrah blend and cardamom. Now, that might have been pretty exciting if they were having a lingerie show when I got inside, but while a dozen women wielding knives and wooden spoons covered in flour and chopped nuts might be fantasy material for those Iron Chef wannabees, for me it meant grabbing a few handfuls of food and fleeing to the basement...
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