I spent nearly all day in this room and only toward the end did my brain reach saturation. Great conference. Favorite quotes, presented entirely out of context and so they will be meaningless to just about everyone who reads this blog, but oh well: “Nearly everything is art, but not everything is interesting.” –Daniel …

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Molly and No-name doll (notice– she has eyes now!) get all tucked into the hotel hours before any of us got to sleep. We came up to Dulles, VA outside Washington DC for the annual Mid-Atlantic region of the Society of Children’s Writers and Book Illustrators conference tomorrow. The plan is for me to learn and absorb …

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Let me tell you, that is one high bridge! 2400 feet long and 125 feet high above the Appomattox River. We rode bikes about 7 or 8 miles along the High Bridge State Park rail trail from Farmville to Rice.

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Third time’s the charm! The first time we got tickets to UVa’s Fan Mountain Observatory public night, it snowed. We had a tour of the facilities, but no chance to look through the 40 inch telescope. The second time it was clear skies, but we were stupid. We rolled up the mountain around 9PM, just when it was getting …

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Do you live anywhere in or near Virginia? Do you have kids? Make a trip to Boxerwood Garden in Lexington. It’s worth it. Frankly I’m surprised any of us got our kids to leave it.

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That’s the Hiram M. Chittenden locks, where we also saw salmon swimming up a fish ladder to spawn and die.

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The Bodyworlds exhibit at the Science Museum of Virginia is freaky and fascinating. I think we’re so used to seeing plastic models of things that it was easy to forget that we were looking at the insides of real bodies–plastinated. It was even easier to forget or ignore that these bodies had once been living people. …

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