Moore Family of Crofton, MD
News and Views

2003 Dec 29: Season's greetings from Santa's elves

Here's wishing you all peace and joy for the holidays and a peaceful and rewarding new year in 2004! It's great having Whitney home from UNH, and gives us some photo opportunities, as you can see here. Interesting how color-coordinated Roxie managed to be for this shot, though she didn't much appreciate the hat. After a snowy start with two storms before the holidays, and two of our most valued trees knocked down by ice accumulation, it's been unseasonably bright and warm ever since. Bodes well for a mild winter...

2003 Dec 20: Potomac River Cruise Dinner and Dancing

There's a new photo album at the right, called "2003 Potomac Cruise", with over a hundred photos of fun times for the Crofton gang, on a river boat. This was a special fantasy for Tom, who still vividly recalls a dance band river cruise during his high school class trip. We had a blast all over again, and I doubt any of us will ever forget this one either; least of all singing Don Maclean's "The day the music died" as we came back to port! Sorry the photos are a bit small. It was necessary to fit them all on our web site!

2003 Dec 20: New Albums Posted

I've finally posted a couple of new photo albums. The first is a photo album of Fall activities this year, most of them mentioned in previous news items. The next is an album of photos from the 80's that I scanned for a in honor of Roger Arnoldy for his nominal retirement party at UNH. I was unable to actually attend this function, but had a lot of fun digging up old photos of our sounding rocket days. This particular shot is of a sounding rocket in Andoya, Norway, taken from the top of a nearby mountain. See if you can find Craig Pollock, Paul Kintner, Ralph Varney, Jim Ryan, and Roy Torbert among these photos.

2003 Oct 18: Hunting Colleges

We all, including Jessica's friend Christina, packed in the van for a college hunting adventure. Less than four hours later, here we are in Greenwich Village, sampling lunch at a real Italian Cafe near New York University. After lunch we toured the city campus, centered around Washington Park, with a huge library more than a dozen stories tall, many other beautiful buildings (including the Courant Institute of Mathematics, where John Nash did game theory), and old hotels turned into dormitories, where the rooms have private baths. After the tour we drove around Manhattan past Times Square, Radio City Music Hall, the Empire State Building, Central Park, etc. and then headed north in rush hour traffic through Connecticutt toward Boston.

Staying overnight at a forgettable motel in Newton, MA, we next toured Boston College. It was like a trip to the Hogwarts School set for Harry Potter! Every building is a gothic cathedral, with the possible exception of the library. Beautiful, cloistered, Jesuit, and a tad snobbish; this is a gorgeous campus, with a huge football stadium, as well.

In the afternoon we toured Boston University. The city campus is long and linear, with high rise dormitories holding thousands of students, but rumored not to hold enough of them, with overflow going to nearby hotels. We didn't actually get inside any buildings here except a dormitory, which was unremarkable. BU is in the process of submitting to the leadership of one Daniel Goldin, well-known to those of us in NASA as the longest-tenured NASA adminstrator, who endured through two Bush adminstrations and a Clinton.

We departed Boston in rush hour traffic as well, arriving at UNH for a visit with Whitney on Friday night. It was off to Newicks for seafood, followed by early to bed at the New England Center for mom and dad; in Stoke hall to get a real taste of dormitory life for the girls.

2003 Sept 2: Stoke Hall, UNH

Unbelievable! Whitney has landed in the same dormitory that her parents stayed in when they were beginning college students at the Univ. of NH! The move was made this labor day weekend, driving in the family van with the xCarGo on the roof as if we were headed back for another vacation. Only this time we detoured to UNH and moved Whitney into that infamous Stoke Hall. Since Tom and Gwen were there, the rooms have been remodeled just slightly, cutting up a central closet and bureau island and distributing the pieces around the walls. They're much roomier and more open this way. As we hooked up a computer and a phone (that would only ring if placed upside down!?), we marveled at the communication changes since the days when our only link to the outside world was a pay phone closet down by the elevators, and of course postage stamps! We drove home and began chatting online with Whitney the following evening! The James Dean quote is courtesy of sister Jessica...

But before returning to Maryland, we did head up the coast to Maine for an overnight at the beach. There we were treated to dinner with family, and an absolutely spectacular sunset, which Denise put to use as a photo backdrop for a picture of Gwen and Tom. This photo seems a fitting reminder of 20 years of married life on Higgins Beach, where it all began for us...

2003 July 25: Survival in the Wilderness

This year's side trip from Maine was an over- ambitious three day hike along the New Hampshire Presidential Range, with overnights in AMC Huts, featuring dinner and breakfast family-style, bunk bed accommodations with toilets, but no showers. We began near the Mt. Washington Cog Railway Base Station and hiked in on the Ammonoosuc Ravine Trail, which leads directly (think "stairmaster") to the Lakes in the Clouds Hut in about 5 km, after some interesting clambering over steeply sloping, slippery ledge that Gwen characterized as "beyond our skill level". There was a nice pool along the Ammonoosuc that made a great lunch spot, as seen in the photo. And we made it to the hut in about 4 hours, in good spirits, considering everything.

The next morning, in light rain, we headed north toward our goal at Madison Hut, about 11 km away, but beginning with an ascent of Mt. Washington, in a gradually increasing gale wind. By the time we reached the summit, we were wondering if this had been such a great idea, but took shelter in the lodge facility there, shopped for memorabilia for "proof of climb", and girded ourselves for more of the same in the "home of the world's worst recorded weather". Descending to the north across the path of the Cog Railway, we started to get breaks in the clouds and began shedding foul weather gear. By the time we reached Mt. Jefferson, we had a commanding view of the Great Gulf and Mt. Washington Auto Road to the east. As we headed on to Mt. Adams, however, we began to run out of energy and legs were getting wobbly. And time was running out to make dinner time at the Madison Hut. That's when Paul grabbed a second pack (!) and hustled out ahead of us to reserve a table at dinner and bunks for the night, also returning for another pack! Meanwhile a couple of us took a wrong turn down a steep trail for extra challenge. We all made dinner somehow, though...

Packing out on the third day we faced only a short hike of 5 km downhill to the parking lot, much of it through shady primeval forest and a relatively easy walk. However, yours truly managed to step on a wet log less than a km from the trailhead and sprained an ankle, marring for myself what was otherwise a very successful trip through some very challenging wilderness. The hut visits are themselves well worth the trip, as the huts are run by recent college grads who are engaging, helpful, and entertaining. Rules are explained by means of short skits complete with costumes, and morning reveille is done with an aria. Short self-introductions are routinely done to break the ice. It's a great experience for the hikers, and also a great opportunity for college age summer employment.

Note: after a little over two weeks, the ankle is feeling strong again!

2003 May 24: Whitney's a Graduate!

Whitney reached that sublime state of having graduated from high school, in a ceremony at the Cow Palace, no, I mean the Show Place, in Marlboro, MD. We haven't seen her since! Well, that isn't strictly accurate. We of course had a big to-do for this occasion, and Whitney's Grandparents came to visit. Saturday was the big day for about 450 grads to receive their diplomas. After a delicious brunch, and an afternoon spent preparing, we all headed down to the Show Place way ahead of the door opening at 6:30pm, so that we could stand in line and perhaps get good seats. That worked out pretty well, and we were just above where Whitney eventually sat in the sea of graduates. It was a long graduation, but the highlight was the valedictory speech, by Ryan. He's really an outstanding kid, and he was spellbinding. He began by taking off a shoelace, then continued with a discussion of the shoelace from the perspective of each class in a Senior's schedule, the best of which was the physics take on the resonant frequency of the shoelace as a function of the tension put on it; then concluded with the observation that "if you remove your shoelace, your shoe will fall off". His did, and he marched out with it under his arm! It was very funny, and just the right way to top off a ceremony that had gone on too long by then. On Sunday afternoon, we had an open house for the neighborhood and gathered family, and then folks began to depart on Monday. Pretty soon, Whitney was gone, too; to the senior beach parties at Ocean city. When she came back from that, I think I saw her once, and she was off to Huntsville, AL to seek her roots and old friends. Maybe she'll be around some this summer, before heading off to UNH in the fall?!

2003 May 11: Have a Fun(ny) Mother's Day!
Cartoons from Slate.com

2003 April 27: Fowler Cousins Visit Maryland

The Kevyn Fowler clan headed back toward Maine in their Ford Expedition land cruiser, after spending the week in sunny (NOT!) Maryland. As you can see from the photo (L to R: Ethan, Duncan, Whitney, Jess, Kevyn, Amy, Aubrey, Lori), we did have at least one day of beautiful sunshine, though they will spend this sunny day driving. At least they had a warmer vacation that they would have back home, but it was kind of a drizzly week. That didn't seem to dampen their spirits at all, and they made numerous Expeditions (!) to a variety of (natural) historical sites in the DC area, including Mount Vernon, the eastern shore of the Chesapeake Bay (a comet impact crater), Calvert Cliffs (fossils), the Baltimore Museum of Science, and more. Watch for a photo album to appear soon in the links on this page. The natural history theme culminated in a visit on Saturday to Boonesville MD, home of the Crystal Grottos (official motto: "this is it!"), where a syncline fracture created lots of underground caverns with tons of cool stalagmites and stalagtites (and even a tiny hanging bat!). We also visited the Antietam Battle field about 5 miles from there, the place where Union Gen. William McClellan's timidity cost him a decisive victory, an inspection visit from A. Lincoln, and then his job, about a month later. He was replaced by Ulysses S. Grant. End of history lesson!

2003 April 19: Amy at Zutopia

On saturday, February 22 Amy got a taste of modeling at the store Zutopia in the mall. "What we did was pick out an outfit (whatever we wanted it didnt matter), then put it on in the dressing room, and stand on white lite up boxes with other girls and pose in front of the windows. there were about 6 other girls so it wasnt that crowded. you would pose for about 15-20 minutes than go pick out another outfit and put the outfit before on a rack so the people working there could put the clothes back where they belong and start posing again. i made friends with a girl names Haley. she was about 10 years old (i was the oldest and not 2 mention tallest one there) she was very friendly..we talked while posing and she had told me how she had done this before and how people crowded around the window 2 watch them. Well that didnt happen this time, but many people pointed, smiled, or waved. One girl came in the store and poked me and was like hey they r real...but im pretty sure she was just joking. it was a lot of fun. there were a lot of cadets from the naval acadamy walking around and one of the guys yelled yo whats up to us. it was funny. at first i was nervous but then i got used to it and had a great time! i only saw a few people i knew.. but o well. i modeled for 2 hours...my legs hurt really bad afterward but i really didnt mind cuz i had a great time modeling and thats all that matter 2 me. well i guess thats it...ill send u another email if i think of anything else."

2003 Jan 4: Peace Dawning?

May the holidays brighten your life, and a dawning of peace brighten your new year. Though current indicators are not encouraging, we can hope that cool heads will steer us and others away from unprovoked confrontation.

This is a near-solstice sunrise at Higgins Beach, Maine, looking toward Richmond Island. It appeared last month at Steven Seabury's site, also linked at the top right. Our 2002 family newsletter (in PDF format) is linked there as well.

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