mem day weekend

Greetings to you from Williamsburg!  Philip and I got in the car after I got home from school last night and started driving south.  We had 2 nights booked at Langley AFB with the plan of hitting "Colonial Williamsburg".  It feels sooooooooooooooooooooo  good to be away and alone and just have some space and time (even though I'm sitting here blogging on a study break. . . this is as much "space" as I will be getting for quite awhile).  It's exactly what we both needed.  Time away to relax and just be together.  Just us. 

The trip was about 3 hours (plus the 50 minutes it took us to finally get to Visiting Officer's Quarters when we arrived on base last night. . . the road was closed leading to the lodging building ---- when we finally got there and checked in we were told we had to drive all the way across base [langley is a BIG base] back to VOQ --- um, really? )

We slept in this morning and headed to W-burg this morning.  We opted not to pay $35 each of tickets to go into some of the historical buildings.  It was funny being able to appreciate how "British" some colonial elements looked (fences, signs, names of taverns) - we could see the influence.  But I won't lie, a weekend in Williamsburg is NOTHING like a weekend in London.  "Historic" touristy stuff in the US just doesn't cut it anymore.  But we weren't here to be tourists, we were here to escape the craziness of DC this weekend - so it's been exactly what we were going for.  Right now we are sitting in a Starbucks in the town of Newport News, VA.  We'll go out for dinner, maybe catch a movie tonight and then sleep in/drive back to Alexandria tomorrow.

Two hours into our drive last night I realized that I hadn't packed the camera.  I was pretty bummed.  And then I realized that I wasn't depriving you all of too much earthshattering scenery by not having it this morning, so I'll start to ;post my backlog of pictures from the last couple of months. . .  here are some snapshots of Easter w. the Allen fam and some of my classmates and I having a bit of a end-of-semester gettogether at our social psyc prof's house (very interesting --- she's married to a Harvard mathematician, they met playing bridge, he plays bridge professionally --- they actually play w/ bill & linda gates sometimes. . .)  They live in a pretty swanky area of MD (driving there it was like we were passing houses that could have belonged to the Vanderbilts. . .  there's was not at all pretentious thought but still a very choice piece o real estate for the northeast!)

 SCENES FROM AN AFTERNOON @ DR. K'S (aka "The Life of a Psychoanalyst"  ---- yes, we got a tour of her office and got to see the infamous couch [clarification:  I am not training to be an analyst, but Dr. K does have psychoanalytic training ---- it's several additional years of training after your doctorate.  as I am not totally into classic analytic theory, this is not in my future. . .  I will not be the next Sigumnd or Anna Freud.  Fear not.)

 mazeltov to miss taylor who is actually getting married today :)

Dr. K loves her show dogs.

Check out that huge back yard!  (the cherry blossoms are embarrassing proof of how old this picture actually is!)

ALLEN FAMILY EASTER HUNT!