Tale of Two Cities

            This has been a busy week in Charm City and in Nags Head, too, from what he has seen on the internet.  It was one of those weeks when he wished he could be in two places at the same time---and he almost was, actually, through the miracle of streaming video.
             On Friday morning he was surfing the web looking for pictures and accounts of the storm on the Outer Banks when he ran across a link to a website called hurricanetrack.com which sounded promising.  He clicked on the link and shortly found himself  looking at a live, streaming video of a car driving down a street that looked vaguely familiar.  It was when the car passed the South Nags Head fire station on the right that he knew exactly where he was---driving south on Old Oregon Inlet Road---virtually---and in real time.  The driver kept up a running commentary as he drove, mentioning that he was looking for "Oregon Street" where he wanted to make a video of an oceanfront  house that had apparently collapsed in that vicinity.
             Uncle Jack waited while he parked his car on the berm and went up to the beach to make a video with his camcorder and then suffered with him for at least twenty minutes while he struggled to upload the video to a server in the clouds whence it could be viewed later by storm fans like Uncle Jack.  After a while he turned around and headed north on Old Oregon Inlet Trail, resuming live, streaming video as he went---right past Uncle Jack's house at Ciltvaira street and on up to Cahoon's store at Whalebone Junction where he turned around again and headed for Manteo.  Uncle Jack stayed with him across the causeway and onto the Virginia Dare bridge where he apparently lost connection with the Sprint satellite.
            Needless to say, this was a weird, eye-opening experience for Uncle Jack.  It wasn't quite like being there but it was unlike anything he had experienced before.  The static webcams at places like the fishing piers and the S-curves in Rodanthe are fun to look at once in a while but driving around the Outer Banks in real time is something else.  (The trip that Uncle Jack dropped in on had actually started at the northernmost part of the Beach Road in Kitty Hawk and continued south through Kill Devil Hills and Nags Head before he joined it around milepost 18).  He still knows next to nothing about hurricanetrack.com but you can be sure he has bookmarked it and he recommends that you check it out at www.hurricanetrack.com  It's a great resource.
          Meanwhile in Bawlmer the cultural scene was almost as exciting as the northeaster in Nags Head.  Thursday last featured a doubleheader in the form of a jazz concert at noon by a quintet of very talented Peabody Conservatory students followed by all-Gershwin evening with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra.  The latter included two of  Uncle Jack's all-time favorite compositions, the Rhapsody in Blue and the piano concerto in F, both of which swing like crazy.
         Sunday morning they paid their first visit to a remarkable Baltimore institution called "The Book Thing". It's a short walk from their condo and it consists of a large, one-story warehouse full of used books---tens of thousands of them,  all free for the taking. (Limit---1500 books per day.  Just kidding---you can take as many as you want).  The Book Thing is a non-profit labor of love for a Baltimore man who cannot stand to see books thrown away so he asks people to donate them and with the help of  volunteers he sorts and shelves them and makes them available to all comers on Saturdays and Sundays.  Uncle Jack and Mrs. U.J. between them took home a dozen excellent books to put on their new secondhand bookshelf (pictured above) and they will surely be going back for more (as well as donating).
        Sunday afternoon they attended a free concert by the Pavel Haas Quartet from Romania at the Baltimore Museum of Art and yesterday Uncle Jack took the Mini in for its 70,000 mile required maintenance which should ensure a trouble-free trip to Nags Head on Saturday, four days hence, where they will spend Thanksgiving Week walking the beach, or what is left of it, in South Nags Head.  Check in again in about a week when Uncle Jack will blog again.

P.S.  They picked up the handsome mahogany bookshelf at a going-out-of-business store on "Antique Row".   They can now brag that their bookshelf is bigger than their TV (but not by much).