Baltimore the Beautiful

     Spring has sprung in Charm City. A few pictures are worth a lot of words.

                                             A house on St. Paul street near Uncle Jack's condo.

                                                         Same house. More bushes.

The Johns Hopkins campus was in fine floral fettle for this weekend's Alumni gathering.

The JHU bluejay was all puffed up after the lacrosse team's win over Loyola Saturday afternoon.

This gigantic tent was the scene of some lavish alumni stroking over the weekend.  Mayor Bloomberg of New York City is one of the alumni who have contributed many hundreds of millions of dollars to the school in recent years.  Most of the students' $45,000 a year tuition money goes to pay for extravagances like this tent which make the alumni feel important and loved.

And here is where some of the alumni contributions are going.  Steelworkers have taken over this phase of the construction of the Brodie Learning Commons next to the Eisenhower Library.

Same structure a few days later.  It will provide the connecting link between the old building and the new.

The roof girders on the main building will probably come next.  Stay tuned.


Uncle Jack didn't feel like writing anything this week so he drug this golden oldie out of the archives:


                                                                                                                   
                                                    Tempis Fugits

As Uncle Jack grows older he is seized more and more often by uncontrollable fits of philosophizing. He never knows when these attacks will come and he is as helpless to stop them as an epileptic is to control his convulsions. Fortunately these spells of pontificating usually pass before he has time to bore more than a few close friends and relatives.
Uncle Jack has been afflicted most recently with deep thoughts about the nature of time. He has reached an age that enables him to confirm the widely held belief that time seems to speed up as one grows older. He has often heard this said by older persons, but older persons have told him so much that turned out to be wrong that he has never been sure he could believe anything they say.
But now he knows from his own experience that time does indeed pass more rapidly as one grows older. It took approximately 25 years for Uncle Jack to get from age l2 to age l8 but it took only about two weeks to get from his 50th birth to his 80th. At this rate he expects to turn 95 sometime around the middle of next week.
   This amazing speeding up of time, which seems to be a fairly common experience of middle-aged people in our time-conscious society, can be scary enough to cause folks  in Uncle Jack's age bracket to do some fairly weird things. Men and women who have been dutifully trudging down life's highway for half a century or so sometimes accidentally look up just long enough to see a tractor trailer with a skull and crossbones on it bearing down on them.
Some folks go trudging on and don't even try to get out of the way, and for the rest of us it's probably a good thing they don't. Others make some remarkable moves in an effort to dodge that truck, like the folks he met on the waterfront in Manteo last week.
This couple, on the early side of middle age, took their big leap about a year ago, divesting themselves of cars, televisions, lawnmowers and mortgages---all the encumbrances of solid middle-class existence. They used the proceeds from their years of straight-arrow effort to build themselves the pretty sailboat you may have seen at the Manteo dock last week.
They live on their boat now, going wherever they please whenever they please. Sooner or later, when their money runs out, they'll be back in the middle of the road with the rest of us, but what memories they'll have on those nights when there is nothing to watch on TV.
Uncle Jack must say, however, that he felt not even the slightest twinge of envy when the intrepid couple sailed off to New York City yesterday. Why anyone would voluntarily go to New York City when he could stay in Manteo is beyond his comprehension.
The other event of last week that seemed to trigger this fit of deep thinking was the sunset last Thursday evening. Uncle Jack will wisely refrain from attempting to describe that sunset; it was truly ineffable (a word he learned in high school knowing that some day it would come in handy). Suffice it to say that the sunset was so magnificent that it started Uncle Jack philosophizing so hard he thought he was going to have a stroke.
The message in all this, he thinks, is that as we trudge down life's highway we should not be afraid to look up once in while. We might see a big truck bearing down on us but on the other hand we might see a sunset that will knock our socks off.
Whew.
Whatever this is Uncle Jack hopes he will be over it soon.