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The Big Trip, part 6: Chapel Hill, NC/Washington, DC

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Now I understand why my folks had an ironclad rule of no more than 6 hours a day in the car when we were little. We only had to do about 5 hours each day, and Owen was almost unbelievably good about the whole thing, but it was still a long two days. Chapel Hill: Barbecue, swimming in the hotel pool, and a Whole Foods for snack refills and breakfast the next morning. A quiet sort of win. We arrived in DC too late yesterday to do anything but eat dinner and relax, but we had big plans for the 4th of July. Plans involving dinosaurs. You have to understand that for the last two days we had been hearing a near-constant refrain of "Dinosaur bones! Dinosaur bones!" Owen even made up his first joke yesterday in the car: "Knock, knock." "Who's there?" "Dinosaur." "Dinosaur who?" "ROAAAARRRR!!!" (This is even funnier when repeated twenty times by someone who can't actually pronounce "dinosaur" properly.) I was frankl...
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Working on the inside

The piece below is something I wrote a little over a year ago. At the time I felt like it represented a real ‘happy ending’ point in my life, a reckoning with the issues I had while we were living in the UK that I had long kept fairly quiet about because of the shame I felt around them. Watching a friend endure something similar last fall somehow unlocked the words for me -- even though, until now, I haven’t shown them to anyone but that one person.   Here it goes: ———— January 2018 People ask me a lot about what it was like living abroad. For a long time -- the whole time we were there -- I couldn’t answer that question honestly. I’ve had three major depressive periods in my life, each lasting about two years. The most recent one started when we moved to Scotland. That’s the one I’m going to talk about. I didn’t really want to go there in the first place. When Eric decided to include the UK in his academic job search, as his postdoc appointment was coming to...
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Outings

Owen and I have gradually been exploring the museums around Dundee. Today we went on our second visit to the McManus Galleries . The McManus is an incredible mishmash of a museum - some old art, some contemporary art, some natural history, some cultural history, and some fairly random collections of stuff that various colonizers brought back from across the globe during the Age of Empire (shrunken heads! seriously!). One of the "stars" of the collection is the complete skeleton of a humpback whale that swam up the River Tay in 1883. "The Famous Tay Whale," it is called. Or would you rather look at artifacts from the Roman period? Maybe an authentic Dundee Football Club uniform from the 1950s, or is Victorian portraiture more to your taste? (Dante Rossetti was the biggest name I noticed among the permanent collection, although I'll admit to being less than expert on Scottish painters.) The big draw right now is Titian's "Diana and Actaeon," which t...
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