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The Spirit of '43 -- 04/16/10 |
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I'd like to be out working in the garden. It is cloudy now but rain is supposed to be on its way (and it certainly looks like that) and I am sure that the instant I step outside, it would begin to rain. So I'll type a journal entry instead. We are planning on going into New York City tomorrow to visit Adam & Leah and the boys. It is supposed to rain tomorrow. Periods of heavy rainfall are expected. No, no dangers of flooding from this one -- they are predicting about three quarters of an inch of rain, not the multiple inches (seven to ten inches, depending on where exactly you lived) that we got a couple of weeks ago that flooded so much of the state. Nancy didn't feel well this morning. She went to work this morning and sent me an e-mail saying that she was going to try to stick it out at work but that she thought maybe she would have to stay home tomorrow. I was about to type "I was at a meeting yesterday" -- but, in the modern way, it was a virtual meeting, a telephone conference call. Except for two meetings in our Providence office (one of which was a lunch meeting to mark a successful conclusion to a corporate fund-raising for charity campaign and the other was optional but since I had found out where the office was, I figured I would attend in person rather than by telephone), I have not been involved in a physical meeting for work purposes since attending a technical conference in Las Vegas at the beginning of May in 2008. Our meetings are all by phone (or by phone plus Internet). Anyway, I was at a meeting yesterday of my employer's state leadership council (yeah, I'm on the council but that sounds more impressive than it is, I'm not really anybody very important) and having disposed of our substantive business, we were discussing how the recent flooding had affected us. (I had been looking for interesting stories for possible use in an employee e-mail magazine I'm also involved with.) One of the guys told how he had been on the Amtrak Acella (Amtrak's high speed train) going to New York City on that Tuesday morning when the flooding had begun. He said it took about 45 minutes to go from Kingston to Westerly, a distance that the Acella usually covers in about five minutes. He looked out the windows and all he could see was water on both sides of the train... with the train leaving a wake in the water, indicating that the tracks were actually underwater. After his meetings with clients in New York, he took the Acella back to Providence -- except when the train stopped at New Haven they were told that was the last stop, that flooding in Rhode Island had blocked the tracks. A couple of days later they began rerouting New York to Boston trains up through Hartford and Springfield and then across Massachusetts to Boston, adding hours to the trip, but on that rainy Tuesday, New Haven was the last stop. So he took a taxi. Yeah, a very, very long cab ride, made more difficult by Interstate 95 being closed shortly after entering Rhode Island, and then route 138 being blocked at West Kingston, which required lots of roundabout travel. Ah, but what about the title of today's entry, The Spirit of '43? I am vintage 1943... and here is a 1943 vintage Donald Duck cartoon: The Spirit of '43. It is quite a bit different from contemporary cartoons. Just imagine going to a movie theatre and seeing this cartoon pop up between the coming attractions and the news reel. And it even ties in with yesterday's topic...
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