h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I don't know why I never dropped in over the summer - I had so little to do and so much time to do it in. But there was a certain lethargy that came with having nothing to do that left me spending my time doing relaxing things like watching the rabbits hop across the front lawn, floating in the local swimming hole with a dragonfly perched on my nose, and watching a lot of Seinfeld while sampling my own cooking.

Yes, Leo has been Out Of Town. For the first time in about... six years, I spent a significant amount of time outside of NYC, and for the first time in my life, that much time outside of a metropolis.

There were some distinctly different species of life out there. In the urban, downtown area, all the local dwellers were black. The suburbs and surrounding areas were white, dark-haired people, with a solid smattering of Asian, Indian, and international types. A subclass in this region wears a mustache, drives a pickup, and has an accent. And then out in the rural areas everyone was white, either blond or pretending to be, and startlingly overweight. And they had even heavier accents.

It kinda gives you a different perspective on this country. And life in general.
It was enormously pleasant to be a five-minute bike ride from a state park. Or any park, for that matter, that doesn't have more bodies per square foot than a rabbit hutch.
It was enormously annoying to be within walking distance of absolutely nothing - not even the bus stop. (Not that it mattered, since the bus only came once an hour and didn't go anywhere useful.)
It seemed an oversight that there was no free Shakespeare performance for miles around.
But you could buy sweet corn from a stand on the side of the road, and that was certainly worth the trade-off.

Entertainment was definitely different. Not too many cultural events, and obviously lacking in Broadway, variety of museums, and so on, but there was plenty of local history, a demolition derby (the first of my life!) and a county fair (also a first!), and a polo club (yep, first for that too), and a renaissance faire (we have a Medieval one in NYC).

Remind me, one day, to do a post on things for an intern to do while in Wilmington, Delaware for the summer.

Delaware? Leo in Delaware. It will take a bit for me to get used to the idea.

Nice to hear from you again. People worry, you know.

Wilmington Delaware?! Har!

(I spent many of my formative years there)

Do they still have a sign up as you enter downtown that says "Wilmington - A Place to Be Somebody"?

If you are interning, I'm going to hazard a guess it's with DuPont or Hercules?

Have you caused any unintended explosions in the lab yet?


It's still early enough (ie not too cold yet) to go tubing down the brandywine starting from Chadds Ford.

Hercules! How'd you know? Did you also intern there? Or is that where you became a Somebody? (You should have told me about the sign beforehand. We were quizzed on it.) I have spilled, banged, almost lost an arm, and had other charming laboratory fun, but nothing exploded. Could be that paper chemicals don't explode for a reason. Dull, I know, but a necessity.


I'm not in Delaware anymore. Didn't know they had tubing on the Brandywine. I remember looking at it from the Hagley and thinking it must be good for something besides gunpowder mills. At the moment it was 96 in the shade, though, so I was thinking more along the lines of swimming, not tubing.

Hey, Hyp - someone suggested I try to get a job at the Sam Adams brewery in St. Louis for next year. I don't think they take interns, but if a stranger shows up in your garden one May morning and asks for the crabby librarian, it's me.

Hey! I may be cranky, but never crabby.

Hagley - I'm nostalgic now and teetering on verklempt ...

...ok

Wilmington is one of those places where there's nothing at all and yet there's everything too. It was compared in a not entirely flattering way to Gopher Prairie by the none other than Sinclair Lewis himself - so there's a kind of unwanted notoriety I suppose.

Tell me - did you find the northern delaware accent funny? (funny haha, not funny odd)?

*jots down in notebook* "Cranky librarian." Got it. And, er, pardon my lack of fluency in dead languages, but what does your status mean?

Is it just Northern Delaware? It was funny, a little. What with a colleague going out in his bo-awt on weekends. I read that the "Delmarvian" accent is supposedly untouched since the days of exploration, and may be the closest we've got to Shakespearean accents. Kinda makes it even funnier.

It's Portuguese, Leo. 'Living each day as if it were my last.' Because at my age, who knows? Yep, I'm on a mission to enjoy myself. In a dignified way of course.

Portuguese. Why are you quoting things in Portuguese? Is it part of enjoying yourself?

My RL married name is Portuguese. I thought it would be appropriate and a change from the Latin I've used off and on over the years.