Tom, Ludvík and I hiked around Dutch Gap on Sunday. It was a nice walk, about four miles, but overcast and not a pretty day.  We saw lots of herons, and an osprey nest and several people fishing, though I have no idea what kind of fish they were going for. I took only  a couple of pictures. Here's a picture of Tom on an oddly shaped tree:

 Pictures from the trip to D.C. we took during spring break are now  available for your viewing pleasure. I love walking around the monuments and prowling the Smithsonian, but I've taken pictures of those before, so I took pictures of Tom and the kids instead. I did take a few snapshots in the Museum of Natural History, but they were terrible, so I included only a few. ( I've got much nicer pictures from the Museum of Natural History in New York City. )

Ellen got a digital camera for her birthday, and Ludvík is an inveterate shutterbug, so most pictures I took caught them with a camera in hand. Ian mostly looked kind of bored. Tom, as usual, wore his sunglasses, so who know what he was thinking at any given moment? There are a couple pictures of me, too: proof that I was there.

-- Jean

Remember when  Ian spent a few days as an extra on the HBO mini-series John Adams? Last night we finally spotted him! It was definitely a "Where's Waldo?" experience. In one scene, Adams and another man converse as they walk into a building, and we saw Ian walk from right to left behind them. We could only see his back, though. In a mob scene, we saw his face in a crowd for maybe a second or two, but he's facing the camera.

And that was it.

The kid was fitted for wardrobe one day, worked on set three days (in full wardrobe and makeup, which took close to an hour), was fed and housed in a huge tent (complete with constructed plywood floor), and driven around by union drivers. He made over three hundred dollars.

All that for a handful of seconds on-screen. And he was one of nearly two hundred extras that day. I'll never wonder why movies cost so much again!

As for the rest of Sunday, this picture of Ian (taken by Ludvík) sums it up: