Friday we’d thought about going to see Friday Night Live!, but it was cancelled due to the rain. I asked Jill what she wanted for dinner, and she wanted pizza. I heated up one and made a salad, and it wasn’t until we sat down to eat I remembered we’d agreed to have pizza the next night. Personally I prefer to not have the same thing two days in a row, but since I’d forgotten about it, I couldn’t be too upset. Saturday morning and afternoon was nice, took Illa on a long walk then relaxed.
Saturday night we met my sister at Valentino’s in Alexandria. It’s one of those places mentioned when talking about the best pizza in the area, but I’d never been there, even when I lived in Alexandria. Sharon was running late, so Jill and I ordered a salad and a large pizza for all of us. The salad came quickly and we started on that, eating about half (it was big). I was surprised that the pizza didn’t come until about 30 minutes after we ordered, plenty of time for Sharon to arrive and eat some salad. The pizza was enormous, and very good. It was NY style, and had the right amount of grease – might have soaked through one paper plate, but not two. The sauce was tangy and the crust just crunchy enough, and there were 3 slices left over – we would have been unhappy with a medium.
After that we headed over to the Rachel M. Schlesinger Concert Hall at the Alexandria campus of NOVA to see my mom and the rest of the Reston Chorale perform “Foundations of Freedom”, a new piece by David Ott commissioned to celebrate the 400th anniversary of the founding of Jamestown, Virginia. The piece wasn’t performed until later in the evening – the first half was a mixture of music and dance featuring various cultural influences with narration about Virginia’s history. I hadn’t been aware of the early German and Scots-Irish settlers in Virginia – interesting given my own German/English/Irish/French heritage. “Foundations of Freedom” was pretty good. I didn’t find the melodies used that interesting, but using writings from Jefferson and Bacon as lyrics was inspired.
Being a product of Virginia schools, we were taught Jamestown’s preeminence among American settlements, so it was ironic that during fourth grade we did family trees and we used that opportunity to verify a family legend. Francis Eaton, a passenger on the Mayflower, is a direct ancestor of mine on my mother’s side. Now I’m torn between the two, as I was taught that Jamestown was not only first but best, and my ancestors, as I now have two family
crests.
Sunday was fairly lazy. I had a couple things to take care of online, but spent the afternoon reading the paper and listening to music (lots of concerts coming up). I made tacos for dinner, and we ate in a rush because Jill had found a bookcase she wanted on freecycle. It wouldn’t fit in her trunk (she measured to determine hers was wider), so we popped it on her roof and tied it down. Luckily the folks giving it away were barely a five minute drive away, so we got it home without a problem.
Tonight I’ll make chicken pesto pasta using rotisserie chicken Jill got last week, then we’ll watch some TV as the DVR is approaching critical limits and there’s still a number of shows I’ll need to save for later as I’ll be out the next two nights.