This afternoon older son and I went down to the Browntown 4th of July celebration. The festivities are kicked off with a small but enthusiastic parade through metropolitan Browntown, followed by food, games and fireworks at the old Browntown School, now a "Community Center."

Peacock on a Sunday Afternoon

I downloaded some pictures from my wife's camera and found this one of your blogger communing with our visiting snapping turtle. (By the way, the t-shirt was a radio station freebee from last year's County Fair. If I had to hand out an endorsement, it would be Dr. Pepper or maybe the cheap diet ginger ale from Giant.)

Today would have been my father's 73rd birthday. I went down to the city for Church, and after teaching my high school sunday school class, went on to Arlington Cemetery, where he is buried together with his mother and father. Through a quirk of fate, Arlington is his family's graveyard. His father, my grandfather, died at age 48 when Arlington was just one of a number of government cemeteries and not yet our national shrine. My grandmother, left a widow with a son to support, found out that her husband's brief service at the end of the first world war qualified him for a funeral beyond what she could otherwise afford and provided a grave site only a few miles away from her home. Thirty two years later she was buried in the plot she had reserved next to him. At my father's death, his own time in military service allowed him to be buried together with his father. It is a beautiful spot with the finest company imaginable. I believe he would be pleased.

The Turtle wins!

Sheep v. Snapping Turtle

After hanging out on the lawn, our turtle friend turned and strolled over to the cluster of trees where part of the sheep flock was resting.

We had a surprise guest this afternoon when a snapping turtle walked across the lawn up to the front of the house.

Sheared sheep with lamb.

Dottie, the woollier one on the right, is a bottle lamb, hand raised by a friend of ours this winter when she failed to thrive at the barn. She is, perhaps, a little too people friendly.

Tuesday morning sunrise.

Another day down at the barn shearing sheep. It still amazes me to see them step on the stand looking like ragged clouds and step off sleek as a greyhounds. Tonight I plan to soothe aching muscles and settle down with a copy of Theodore Dalrymple's Life at the Bottom, a collection of bleak but wonderfully written essays on the life of the self-perpetuating underclass in contemporary England. After almost twenty years of the practice of criminal law on both the prosecution and defense side, I experience the shock of recognition on almost every page. The pathologies he describes may be more acute in urban Britain, but they are progressing nicely even here in rural/suburban small town Virginia. I would recommend the book, but if you want to sample Dalrymple's writing on-line, try here.

White sheep on Black sheep.

Busy day on the farm. We rounded up the sheep from the various pastures in which they were hiding and ran them down to the barn in preparation for drenching and shearing. Matters were delayed by a mid-morning thunderstorm, but enough sheep were under roof and dry so we were able to shear ten after lunch time once the drenching was done. (Yes, a professional shearer would do that many in an hour with time left over for a stretch and a cigarette, but it is an afternoon's work for us.) Many thanks to Lynn, Eleni, and Robin who came by to help out .

We have had several days of rain, with sun finally breaking through yesterday. Here is the view from the house looking east towards Skyline drive. An almost perfect afternoon, with one small dark cloud to keep us from getting too carried away.

For those who check regularly, my apologies for the lack of posts. Busy schedules in court and farm, as well as some new books by the bedside have cut into blogging time. I promise to do better in the coming weeks.

Orthodoxy has a rich tradition of choral music. Our services are chanted and sung rather than spoken, with the human voice as the only instrument. Each national church has its own musical traditions, but underlying all of them are the eight modes or "tones" of Byzantine Chant. The traditional tones can be quite a shock to someone who has only encountered Orthodox music in its lush, more westernized Russian incarnation. It is emphatically not western sounding, with a modal scale that strikes the uninitiated as sounding positively middle-eastern. Nonetheless, once you get your ears adjusted, there is a delicate and somber beauty that is hard to reproduce in Western notation. I have made a few attempts at the traditional tones over the years. The result was disheartening, rather like listening to the Lawrence Welk Orchestra working its way through the B. B. King songbook. Nonetheless, I still have hopes. The Greek Archdiocese has a resource for the do-it-yourself student at its On-Line Chapel; a whole page of links to introduce the novice to Byzantine Chant.

Today Huw links to a site on apocalyptic ideas in Old English literature. It brought back fond memories of staring bleary-eyed at my copy of Beowulf back in 1977 trying to turn the oddly familiar yet foreign phrases of Anglo-Saxon into something I could understand. Besides the links to the apocalyptic material (no, it did not start with the "Left Behind" books) there is a wonderful set of links to materials on Old English life and literature, including language lessons. The site contains my own favorite Old English poem, The Dream of the Rood, a uniquely Anglo-Saxon poetic meditation on the Cross.

It has been a while since I have put up a post linking back to one of the bloggers who show up regularly in my referrer logs. Todays link is Ever So Humble, a blog from the New Hampshire Seacoast. She has become a favorite stop for information on everything from seasonal changes to high school lacrosse to the Weekly World News.

We had planned on shearing the first of the flock this afternoon. A thunderstorm had plans of its own, so we spent the afternoon inside watching rain blowing down sideways instead. With each lightning flash, the portable phone in the kitchen would ring once before the thunderclap. Mother Nature calling!

Ready for rain.