This morning Citrus and I drove to Fort Belvoir, an Army Post in Northern Virginia.  Sesame Street Workshop has been doing a tour of military installations across the country, bringing a live version of their Talk, Listen, Connect series to military kids.  The first DVD was about Elmo’s father being deployed and other videos have address “changes” when a parent is injured.

There were about 300 kids in the audience, nearly all age 2 to 4 years old.  When Elmo made his entrance crowd went wild.  They actually had guys acting as security guards at either end of the stage to make sure no one rushed up the steps.  I suppose if I were a more bold, adventuresome parent not afraid of the military police, I could have encouraged Citrus to throw some panties on the stage.  After all, we carry several pairs with us.

The show was great and the kids loved it.  Citrus was scared at first when the lights went down but was absolutely beaming when they started singing familiar songs that she had heard 1,000 times.  About deployment.  She knows most of the lyrics though she did not sing along.

When Elysia returned from her relatively short deployment, Citrus was two years old.  She did not have a hard time adjusting to Mommy being back home.  A friend of ours, however, had an entirely different experience.  Her son, the same age, was very angry at her and, when kissed, wiped the kisses off and threw them to the ground.  He told her “I love Daddy lots, I love you ONE.”  Heartbreaking!  Thankfully he moved on past that anger.  I imagine that every deployment is different depending on the child and their age.

I have not been posting much this week because my mom was in town.  Most days were centered around Citrus, although we did try to get out and about.

On Thursday we did a Friends and Family tour of the Pentagon. I am not sure exactly how it is different from the public tour, other than you get to see the dungeon.

We also went to Cunningham Falls State Park in Maryland for a short hike to “The Largest Cascading Falls In Maryland!”.  Someone forgot to turn the water on; it was a trickle.  But Citrus had a good time by the lake.  While the other kids were building sand castles, fortresses and mountains, she requested that Mommy build the U.S. Capitol Building, with windows.

Elysia has her PRT on Tuesday, so this weekend we visited the NEX to get her the new, mandatory, uniform.  There have been a lot of complaints about it — everything from the color to the type of fabric.

I guess having grown up around Cal Berkeley, I am used to the bright blue and gold.  But most complaints are that they tried to do a wicking material on the cheap and created a shirt that gets heavy when wet and becomes see-through.  A PT work-out becomes a wet t-shirt contest.  Nice.

The shorts also have a “modesty liner” that apparently serves to give wedgies.  These are the lesser-known sacrifices our troops make.  They are apparently going to correct both problems in the next few months.

Elysia, who often scores Good-Medium or Excellent-Low on the fitness test, laments that there is not simply a category of Good Enough.

With my mom in town, we took a tour of the United States Capitol.  Her representative in Congress is Barbara Lee of California.

The intern giving us the tour is from Berkeley and went to the same junior high and high school as I did, not surprising given that there is only one public high school.  However when I told him when I went there he said “Oh, that is a long time ago!”.  What a whippersnapper.

Citrus made it through the entire tour even though it was way past nap time.  Here is a picture of her standing on the star in the Crypt below the Rotunda.  It marks the spot where Washington DC is divided into quadrants.  Amazingly, she did not pee on it.  She and a few good friends in her class have been having a phase where they wait too long to go to the potty.  Good intentions and then they run out of time.  We hope it ends soon.

I brought along one of my stickers from the Severed Unicorn Head Superstore (“for all of your severed unicorn head needs”).  Did you know that kids love them?  I did not symbolically deface the Congress, despite the will of the people.  Instead, I just took this photo in the Rotunda.

During a lunchtime walk today I noticed the new “evacuation route” on Pennsylvania Avenue.  More than 3,500 street signs will get this new blue attachment but there is no hint as to which way you should go to get out of the city.  In contrast, Constitution Avenue has East Coast Greenway signs that tell you which way to go to find the route from Florida to Maine.

Maybe knowing which way to go does not matter since most of the evacuation routes are at 120 percent of capacity during normal rush hours. Seven years after 9/11, the region does not appear to have made any real progress when it comes to evacuation plans.  The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) recently spent $1.4 million on a guide that was supposed to coordinate DC-Virginia-Maryland evacuation plans but failed because of turf issues. 

I had only been in Washington DC for three months when the Pentagon was hit.  As my colleagues and I evacuated downtown Washington I realized I had no idea which way was home since I rode the Metro every day.  Today I know which way to walk to get home and once I am there I would probably just hunker down:  My county in Maryland has decided not to publish evacuation routes and shelter locations in order to “maintain flexibility.”

Maybe that is what DHS should have done.  Rather than bear the brunt of criticism for not coming up with a good plan, they should have just told everyone that the plan is secret.  We would tell you, but then we would have to kill you.

Today we went apple and raspberry picking with friends at Butler’s Farm in Maryland.  It looked like it was going to rain but we lucked out.  Now I need some recipes to use up four pounds of raspberries. 

[Click on the photo for more pictures]

A few days ago CNN had a story about the last surviving United States veteran of World War I, Frank Buckles.  He is 107 years old.

He lives about an hour away and was recently in Washington DC to advocate for repair of the World War I Memorial.  Honoring 26,000 Washingtonians who served in World War I, it has been neglected for quite some time.  Buckles and others hope to that by getting it changed into a national monument it will not be left to fall apart.

I walked across the National Mall during lunch on Tuesday to see it since I had last stumbled upon it about six years ago.  The Memorial is slightly off the beaten path, a bandshell nestled among the trees to the side of the Lincoln Memorial’s Reflecting Pool.  You could probably sit there for hours unbothered by the tour groups that crowd the other veterans memorials nearby.

The deflation of the Great Depression, as in 1836, did not begin because of any sudden rise or surplus in output. It occurred because there was an enormous contraction of credit (money), bankruptcies creating an environment where cash was in frantic demand, and the Federal Reserve did not adequately accommodate that demand, so banks toppled one-by-one (because they were unable to meet the sudden demand for cash). [T]here was a concomitant drop both in money supply (credit) and the velocity of money which was so profound that price deflation took hold despite the increases in money supply spurred by the Federal Reserve.

I am not a goldbug or a survivalist and for all I know I should be also worried about inflation.  But on the bright side, maybe we can get some large public works going should unemployment kick in.  We have already tried war.

[The excerpt above is brought to you by the truthiness of Wikipedia.]

Aside from being alarming, it has been interesting to see how the Federal Reserve Chairman is trying to use some of the economic tools he described in a speech I attended in November 2002. 

At the time Ben Bernanke was a member of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve and there were some concerns about deflation, or falling prices, as had happened in the United States during the Great Depression and in Japan in the 1990s. 

For consumers, who today are up to their necks in debt, deflation is quite scary:  the money you owe has to be paid back with dollars that are worth more. 

Much of what he talked about sounded dramatic, but not very real at the time since the last deflationary period in the United States was in the 1930s.  It sounded like we did not have much to worry about now.  There were some bubbles in specific markets, but we were assured that

A particularly important protective factor in the current environment is the strength of our financial system: Despite the adverse shocks of the past year, our banking system remains healthy and well-regulated, and firm and household balance sheets are for the most part in good shape.

And so, to be honest, I was focused more on the Chinese food in front of me.

Bernanke was speaking at a Chinese restaurant in Washington DC where a group of economists, and their groupies, meet nearly every week to hear a lecture on the economic issues of the day.  The material is often dry but at least you are assured of eating good food.  If you arrive on time. 

As a member of the National Economists Club, I quickly observed that many of our nation’s top economists think that if a few chairs at their 10-person table are empty at five minutes past the hour it is their duty to hoard as much lo mein as possible before their colleagues arrive.  The laws of supply and demand clearly trump etiquette in this crowd.

But now, rereading his speech, it is a bit more horrifying partly because I still do not really understand monetary policy and partly because I suspect everyone in Washington is totally winging it when it comes to the bail-out legislation.

Back in 2002, Bernanke identified the warning signs of deflation:

[T]he Fed should take most seriously–as of course it does–its responsibility to ensure financial stability in the economy. Irving Fisher (1933) was perhaps the first economist to emphasize the potential connections between violent financial crises, which lead to “fire sales” of assets and falling asset prices, with general declines in aggregate demand and the price level. A healthy, well capitalized banking system and smoothly functioning capital markets are an important line of defense against deflationary shocks.

He also suggested several policy measures that the Federal Reserve could take to head off deflation.  For example, the government could print a lot of money and add it to the economy to increase inflation.  But at the time he cautioned that it would be new territory:

One important concern in practice is that calibrating the economic effects of nonstandard means of injecting money may be difficult, given our relative lack of experience with such policies.

And yet Bernanke and Paulson want the power to address the financial crisis with absolutely no oversight from Congress, the courts, or regulators. 

Fascinating.

Our friend Jeremy recently blogged about his 18 months living in our house while Elysia was stationed in Norfolk.  He remains grateful that he was not kicked out for setting a kitchen towel on fire his first weekend in the house when I returned home to find all of the windows open. 

Little does he know how low my standards were for roommates. 

You can’t do any better than that, Jeremy?  You call that a fire?

New York City has to be the ultimate test of how much you can tolerate in order to live there.  During eleven years I lived in seven different apartments and had fourteen different roommates.  But while I have my share of stories, in New York City you always hear of a greater horror when you compare notes with other people.  

Your problems are trivial when your friend describes the screaming in the hallway and the blood she found smeared on walls going down several flights of stairs.  Or the co-worker who came home to find that his neighbor had been keeping a woman chained in a closet.

And then there was the guy in the East Village who made soup out of his girlfriend and served it to his friends.  Fortunately I had no connection to that one but undoubtedly many New Yorkers took a second look at their roommate that week.  And wondered when the newly vacated unit would be cleaned and available.  Or even just available. 

Compared to that I just knew some eccentrics.  I lived briefly with a British woman who had a nice apartment and was fairly normal until she lost her job.  She then spent every waking moment watching movies in the living room.  I like movies, but she would only watch Westerns.  She would rent six John Wayne movies at a time and the Indians would circle the cowboys from 9am until 3am. 

Woo-woo-woo-woo-woo! 

After many weeks she ultimately moved back to England and sub-leased the apartment to a friend.  I was included with the apartment like furniture and met my new roommate after she moved in.  Awkward.

In Brooklyn I looked for a roommate with a job but asked too few questions.  I found myself sharing my apartment with someone who made a living buying and selling museum-quality chinese snuff bottles.  All kept in a briefcase, about fifteen of them worth tens of thousands of dollars apiece. 

It was a risky venture where he would buy a bottle at a prestigious auction house and then try to quickly sell it on the other side of the world before the invoice was due.  Or at least that was my impression.  Years later I did an online search and found out that he was caught stealing two bottles from a university collection and was convicted.  I am now fairly certain that the first bottle was stolen while he lived with me.

I am not sure why we decided to part ways but I do remember the 11 empty bookcases he left.  A city of skyscrapers in the living room, galley kitchen and bathroom of my 450 square foot fifth-floor walk-up.  Had the FBI contacted me I would not have been able to do much but gripe about carrying the bookcases to the curb.

In contrast, when Elysia moved back and Jeremy moved out, he only left behind some insect repellent.

How mundane.