Wednesday, January 31, 2024: Welcome to our January cocktail hour! I’ve decided to try a revival of my monthly cocktail hour since it is too time consuming for most people to read my year-end recap. I’ll still be doing a shortened version of the year-end recap, with fewer details and photos.
Please come inside where it’s dry and warm. I can offer you a a special cocktail concocted by Mike using Darina’s gift to us of Tatratea, a Slovakian liqueur with 52% alcohol content! (Mike’s cocktail includes coconut water, seltzer, lime juice and mint leaves). We have vowed to have a “damp January,” reducing our drinking nights to Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays, although we haven’t been very successful at keeping to that schedule. I can also offer sodas or seltzer water of various flavors.
Winter is here, solidly entrenched, with a few abnormal spring-like days thrown in. We had snow and sub-freezing temperatures the third week in January, which accumulated, stuck around for 4 days, and then vanished with the arrival of oddly spring-like days; this week we’re under drizzle and clouds.
I hope 2024 has started out well for you so far. Have you read any good books, seen any good movies, binge-watched any television series? Have you learned anything new, taken any classes or just kept up with the news? Have you marched or otherwise participated in political protests? Have you been planning your adventures for the year? Have you had any winter getaways? Have you sung along with any new songs? Have you dreamed any dreams? Gone to any exotic restaurants, cooked any new dishes? Have you undertaken any new exercise routines?
I have continued doing yoga once a week, rowing at The RowHouse once a week, and walking the rest of the time (weather permitting). I’m trying my best to stay fit as I get older and approach the big 7-0 in 2025!
I was a bit unsettled as I began the year by reading the book 1968: The Year that Rocked the World. In the first chapter it was mentioned that in 1968, New Year’s Day was a Monday and the year was to be a Leap Year, both of which are true also for 2024. I read about the 7.5-magnitude earthquake on New Year’s Day that rattled Ishikawa prefecture on the main island of Honshu in Japan and killed at least 64 people. On Tuesday, January 2, I read about the Japan Airlines flight in Tokyo that caught fire on the runway after colliding with a Japanese Coast Guard plane; miraculously all 367 passengers and 12 crew were safely evacuated, although 5 in the Coast Guard plane were killed. I was struck and a somewhat shaken by all of these incidents in the similarity between 1968, a year of upheaval, and in the two incidents in Japan, our hoped-for travel destination in October of this year.
Mike and I went to the National Gallery of Art to see “Dorothea Lange: Seeing People,” mostly black & white photos of people barely surviving the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl years. This was fascinating to me as I’d just finished reading The Four Winds by Kristin Hannah at the end of November. Looking into the faces of people who struggled to survive so long ago, during those awful times, I imagined the characters in the book as those people whose faces were captured in these photos. The exhibit begged for reflection and for gratitude that so far we have been lucky in life.
The other exhibit we saw there was “The Land Carries Our Ancestors,” which compiled works by a group of nearly 50 living Native artists practicing across the United States. Their powerful expressions reflect the diversity of Native American cultural identities and show a deep reverence for the land.
We also went to the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM) to see “Many Wests: Artists Shape an American Idea.” All of this was a throwback to our October trip to Texas and New Mexico, bringing back happy memories of all we experienced out west.
By the way, did you know that almost all the museums in Washington are free? All of the Smithsonian museums and the National Art Gallery are included. Sometimes they will charge for a special exhibit, most mostly they are free. You don’t find that in many cities.
After our museum day, we had dinner at one of Chef José Andrés’ restaurants, Oyamel Cocina Mexicana. The food is always delicious (but pricey), and the atmosphere is fabulous. I have no problem spending money in these restaurants due to Chef Andrés’ involvment with World Central Kitchen, an organization that helps bring food to disaster areas and war zones.
We got good news that Alex got a permanent job in Atlanta; he had been working at the company as a temp and his contract ended in January. He begins the new job in on February 5. Alex and Jandira are also moving to an apartment in April that is closer to where they both work in Atlanta. Little Allie is doing great, growing like crazy and wanting badly to sit up and even stand. She will be 4 months old on February 5.
Since we’ve had a lot of miserable weather, we’ve been to several movies this month: The Boys in the Boat, Maestro, Driving Madeleine, and The Holdovers. We enjoyed them all, especially The Boys in the Boat since I’ve been rowing (in a studio on an erg). Also, we enjoyed the limited T.V. series, Lessons in Chemistry, in which the main character Elizabeth Zott also rows, especially to take out her anger over being excluded from the male-dominated scientific community during the 1950s.
We ate out at Artie’s, one of our favorite restaurants, where we like to sit at the bar and chat with Remy, the long-time bartender there. I enjoyed Bibimbap at Maru with Mike, and we had steaming bowls of Ramen with our friends Karen and Michael at Jinya Ramen Bar. The soup hit the spot as the temperature outdoors was about 19°F. Brrr. We also discovered Mazadar Restaurant, about 10 minutes from our house. It features food from seven countries, including Turkey, Greece, Afghanistan, Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan. I can’t believe we have never encountered this delicious restaurant in all the years we’ve lived here.
We took several hikes in the snow, in below-freezing weather, mainly just to get out of the house. We never had any snow to speak of last year, so it was our one opportunity to get out in it since we have no idea if we’ll get any more this year.
We’ve booked our flights to visit El Salvador, Nicaragua and Colombia in March. I look forward to visiting my friend Mario in El Salvador, Adam and his new family in Nicaragua, and doing the tourist thing in Colombia.
Other than that, I’ve been super busy trying to scan all of our family photos and share them in Google Photo albums with my adult children. I’m then dividing the photos between the three of them and getting them out of our house. It’s time to start decluttering so when Mike finally retires, we will be able to move somewhere smaller in short order.
I read 4 books this month, out of my goal of 52 books this year, my favorites being At the End of the Matinee by Keiichiro Hirano and My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante.
I hope you’ll share how you’ve launched your new year, and what plans you have for 2024. 🙂
~ wander.essence ~ 
The first picture in your Dorothea Lange gallery is so familiar, yet I hadn’t known the name of the photographer before. It was interesting to see the same woman again feeding her baby, and the other pictures. Those expressions! I can’t even begin to imagine how hard their lives were. I liked the picture of you where your outfit matches the flowers behind you! A full month. We still have another Celtic Connections concert to go to, then next week should be quieter.
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That Dorothea Lange photo that is so famous actually has some controversy to it, apparently. It is a very famous one, for sure, and really depicts the hard times of the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression. Thanks, yes, it was fun to find those flowers that went so well with my sweater!
Sounds like you have been very busy. Our February so far has been a bit slow, but it will pick up soon with Valentine’s Day and Mike’s 70th birthday coming up at the end. Then we leave for El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Colombia in March. 🙂
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The first Lange picture is one of her most famous photos, “Human Erosion in California”. She was hired by one of Roosevelt’s New Deal Agencies to document the difficulties of the time to help promote the New Deal policies. We are keeping our eyes out for an exhibit by another famous photojournalist from the same time frame, Margaret Bourke- White.
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It was a very moving exhibit and especially went well to illustrate the book I’d read, The Four Winds.
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I love your cocktail hour posts, so I’m glad to see you’re bringing them back! I’m reading the book Lessons in Chemistry at the moment. It’s very good and my daughter says the TV series is very close to the book so I’m looking forward to seeing that too. After a busy 2023, January was a quiet month at home for us. We enjoyed just being home and pottering around. Happy 2024 to you.
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Thank you, Carol. I have debated about the cocktail hour posts as I’ve tried to keep the focus of this blog on travel, but then I always have that huge write-up at the end of the year to tell about all the other stuff in our lives that happened during the year. I guess I’ll keep doing it, just because that end-of-year post becomes too overwhelming (although I’ll still keep doing that for my own recollections).
I have the book Lessons in Chemistry, but I haven’t read it yet. We did enjoy the series very much. Once we’ve seen a TV series, it’s hard to go back and read the book, but I found with My Brilliant Friend that after seeing the series, I still enjoyed the first of the 4 books very much and now plan to read the other 3.
You did have a very busy 2023. What are your travel plans for 2024? I’m sure you’ll be going somewhere… Oh, I think I’ve seen posts about a cruise you are now doing? I need to pop over, for sure.
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