Spring!  Is there anything more wonderful (as long as you ignore the fact that sweltering humidity is beginning its seasonal slow, menacing weather coup), I ask?  If I were Mr. Rogers I would answer myself by saying, no, indeed there is not, it's a beautiful day in the neighborhood; now would you be my neighbor?  It makes me think of Emerson's essay Nature, "To the attentive eye, each moment of the year has its own beauty, and in the same field, it beholds, every hour, a picture which was never seen before, and which shall never be seen again."  The weather has been particularly beautiful these past couple of days.  "Balmy" is the word that comes to mind, "...Beautiful.  Gorgeous.  Wish you were here."  Which would have been perfect to put on a postcard from Williamsburg, Virginia, from where I just returned.  Every spring (and fall, winter, and ocassionally summer) I come down with a rather severe case of wanderlust.  The siren call of the open road begins to sound as good as Benny Goodman or Louis Armstrong.  Which is why last Wednesday I made the spontaneous (well, spontaneous for me) decision to take a little jaunt up to Virginia for the weekend.  Never having been to Williamsburg and remembering very little from my last Jamestown visit, it seemed the ideal place.  So, 3:30 a.m. Friday morning I packed my travel-size contact solution and camera bag and by the time the sun arose had passed the Virginia state line.  My dad was kind/crazy enough to agree to join me, so we spent a few hours blasting "House of the Rising Sun," some James Taylor, Gordon Lightfoot, and the Boxtops.  The first stop was Williamsburg, which was very charming in its spring pastels.  Next was Jamestown. It was incredibly interesting; we spent quite a bit of time wandering around on the ships in the harbor.  At first I thought maybe I could understand why young boys would run away to sea in the old days.  Ships are extremely beautiful things.  The neatness and compactness has a certain charm.  It made me think of Walt Whitman's poem In Cabin'd Ships at Sea: "Here our thoughts, voyagers' thoughts./Here not the land, firm land, alone appears, may then by them be said,/The sky o'earches here, we feel the undulating deck beneath our feet,/We feel the long pulsation, ebb and flow of endless motion,/ The tones of unseen mystery, the vague and vast suggestions of the briny world, the liquid-flowing syllables,/The perfume, the faint creaking of the cordage, the melancholy rhythm,/The boundleess vista and the horizon far and dim are all here,/And this is ocean's poem."  It was all very intoxicating, I'll admit.  I can see how people were drawn in by the sense of adventure and excitement, the promise of something new and wonderful, barring death at sea, sinking ships, various illnesses, starvation, dehydration and mutiny.  I was converted....and then I went belowdeck.  Being crammed into a four foot square space with nearly fifty other Nike-promoting tourists I went from "Captain Ron" to "Mutiny on the Bounty" in about four seconds flat.  That's got to be some kind of record.  However, ships do seem to be very photogenic little things, so here are a few from Jamestown and Williamsburg. Beautiful. Gorgeous. Wish you were there. 

This is what happens when a) things get slow at the library b) Tim Burton makes a rather different version of "Alice in Wonderland" c) the librarians look for any opportunity to have a party.  Running the risk of looking 'mad as a hatter,' we appropriated the children's story hour room for our own celebratory purposes yesterday.  Our resident artist supplied the magnificent plethora of table decorations. 

(Incidentally, we also did a bit of research and discovered to what the phrase 'mad as a hatter' refers.  Apparently in the early days, the outer pieces of felt on men's hats were treated with mercury, a highly toxic substance which poisons slowly in increasingly mad stages.  Those who wore the hats were generally (comparatively) safe, but those who made the hats, the hatters, handled the treated fabric day in and day out, absorbing the mercury through their skin.  Therefore, most hatters went mad, hence the Mad Hatter.) Anyway, here are a few (or rather many) pictures of the decorations. We never figured out if the fish was 'One Fish' or 'Two Fish,' he's clearly not 'Red Fish' or 'Blue Fish.' The debate is still open.

After visiting the website of the Irish government, I know what I want to do for a living.  I want to be one of the photographers hired to help promote tourism in Ireland.  Everyone talks about their dream job-I think I've finally found mine. 

Ever since I can remember, Ireland has always held some mysterious fascination for me.  I think that is where my obsession with travel started.  Seriously, though, looking at these pictures, can you blame me?  Many places hold quite a bit of history, but for some reason, it seems as if Ireland has held onto its history in a more immediate way.  If fact, I was looking at different colleges in Ireland the other day and nearly all of them included classes, sometimes a major, in the Gaelic language.  This was particularly interesting since I remember seeing when I was a child a re-run of an episode, that looked like it was filmed in the early 80's or so, of National Geographic in which the narrator said that, except for the oldest generation in the most rural parts of Ireland, the Gaelic language was beginning to die out and would soon be lost forever, helped in no part by the fact that during the years prior to the creation of the Republic of Ireland, it was illegal to converse in anything but English. 

In the famous library at Trinity College in Dublin.  Ireland and books.  All anyone could ask of mortal life.

This is actually not in Ireland; it is the house C.S. Lewis bought outside of the town of Oxford, England.  This is my desktop picture to keep me motivated to not give up on my dream of travelling one day.  (I know, I know, the whole 'English/Irish' thing, I probably shouldn't.  But, hey Lewis is one (if not my most) of my favorite authors and he was Irish, so......)
If those haven't convinced you, perhaps this will.