O4-JUL-A-3

FURTHER FLURRIES OF WORK ON THE DR/HAITI TRIP,

WITH ALL THE STUDENTS GATHERING AT DERWOOD

FOR PACKING PARTY OF MEDS AND EQUIPMENT,

LAST MINUTE SHUFFLES IN PERSONNEL AND TICKETS,

AND A START ON THESES DUE IN MY ABSENCE

JULY 6-11, 2004

It has been a steady week of email and telephone calls with a party in the middle. All of this revolved around the supplies and ticketing for the DR/Haiti trip with more than the usual waffling on the part of students who could choose to accompany us, since I was already on the hook for the discounted tickets, and several have been off and on and off again, each of those flips is a one hundred dollar change fee, but for them it is all less than the original air fare. I had a house fool of fellow travelers on Wednesday night. Lee Dutton had come down right after the Monday Holiday to stay to work on some details of his seeking a GW appointment as he is applying as a senior investigator on a grant. We were also supposed to be going over a chapter in the “Surgery and Healing in the Developing World” book, which is now five years past writing and according to the publishers would have come out at the first of the year.

It has rained a lot. During that rain I have been standing in the Breakfast Room—an almost ideal “treestand” watching a set of “Five Bucks.” They live close to the house and like to come out and browse during the rain. They have been cropping the abundant green vegetation under the canopy along the walkways, and I have made an excessive number of pictures of them, since it is hard to believe that these five big bucks are preening and displaying themselves to me so regularly in their full glorious velvet covered racks. The smallest one of these is a wall hanger—at six symmetric points, but he lags behind the eight pointer, two ten pointers and—would you believe?—the fourteen pointer is back on site after hiding for much of the later construction period at Derwood. They are gloriously mature bucks with full headdresses, but also very well fed. I am sitting in side the Game Room where the more recent bucks of my deer hunting experience are displayed, while an equal number are distributed outside for the photo safari types. Many of my visitors have come to appreciate the both sets of antlered trophies.

I did some work around Derwood, cleaning up the basement at the storage room and also the garage, each stuffed with excess building supplies and pare doors, screens and dozens of cans of paint, each labeled with the room name for later touch up. To accommodate the paint cans, I emptied the front of the spacious garage and emptied the steel rack I had placed at the subbasement step storage doors, and after cleaning everything up, I have racked the paints and items such as my tools and other pieces for later use. Included in the later plan is the pressure treated two-by-fours which will be put down on the storage room floor on which the file cases now all stacked up in the basement will be put. I have made a little interior progress, the most notable of which had been the retrieval of the three new framed pieces at the Great Indoors—one of them the enormous Egyptian papyrus, now in a gilt frame worth more than all the other paintings together, and under its own spot light from the recessed lighting. There is one more buck to hang (the “Shot in the Dark” from Somerset County) and the big buck centerpiece “The Phantom o f the Derwood Deer Woods” will have its homecoming if Charly Culbertson can be coerced to appear in Court on a date appointed upon my return from Haiti. There is another date set for the Rubins, and a resolution of how they figured it was appropriate for me to pay entirely for a tree that fell that was theirs—entirely.

I have not prepped much for the visit that is forthcoming tonight and tomorrow by Michael and Judy and the twins, who will arrive after dark. I had promised that I would go to the Audubon Center where Joe and I have frequently run (“by ear”) and make phone calls for the Sierra Club and others to help defeat the ICC proposal that would cut through the woods. I will be returning, then, at about the same time the kids will for their first view and tour of the new Derwood and all its splendors which they have only seen in photographic foretaste. So, I am looking forward to the unambiguous hugs that can be shared with these little guys, since it has been a big disappointment to me that there seems to be no convenient time for me to see my new grandson in Gainesville, as, indeed, there seemed to be none during the past year despite three trips patterned in advance to see the two grandkids and Donald, each ignored. So, I had made a very labor intensive and expensive extension of my trip back from Haiti and rented a car and a place to stay so as to simply stop by and see Matthew David Geelhoed two months after he was born, but that was determined to be much to inconvenient, and my flights were canceled. There seems to be no future trip that can possibly be planned that would find a convenient time, so there is the passive aggressive view that this is just not going to be happening at all. This is too bad, since I am sure there would be a delightful visit for Andrew William particularly, in the place where the twins will be playing later tonight, but Donald will not make any effort to see that this happens, and other efforts will be put in place to see that it does not. So, I will have to rearrange my life in this respect, as I may have to in others, and wait for them to come to me on their own time, if they can still remember that they have another grandfather, despite seeing the other as regularly as living with them.

But here come the twins—and their new twin stroller is all gussied up to receive them!

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