Tag Archives: Andrew

A Bit of Culture

We spent a fabulous day exploring the Hirshhorn Museum on the National Mall. We were wowed by sculptures by Simone Leigh, Yayoi Kusama, and Rodin. We also explored other worlds through an exhibit of contemporary Chinese photography, Laurie Anderson’s “Four Talks,” Mark Bradford’s 400-foot long “Picket’s Charge,” and John Akomfrah’s “Purple.” And food trucks. Obviously.

More Pizza!

Sarah and the kids surprised me with an early father’s day present this year: a wood-fired pizza oven! We’ve loved the green egg grill for pizza, but it takes a while to get up to temperature and it takes longer to cook a pie. This sleek thing heats rapidly and cooks a pizza in 60 seconds flat. It’s amazing.

Cookies

Believe it or not, when Sarah and I went to the fair on Labor Day, it was the first time that we ever bought Sweet Martha’s cookies. They are a legend at the fair and we’ve always seen people walking around with their pails or cones of cookies, but we’ve always been drawn to other foods. We couldn’t justify the pail, so we got a towering cone (the smallest size you can buy). They were good, but very sweet. We only managed to get through about half of them.

Sweet Martha’s Cookies

Courage Retreat

Every fall, my school hires Youth Frontiers to conduct a day-long activity for our eighth graders called the Courage Retreat. I was skeptical about it the first time we ran it in 2010, but they won me over because they were able to win the students over.

This morning, while discussing the retreat with some new faculty members, one of my colleagues discovered a video on the Youth Frontiers site that features our school. These were our eighth graders three years ago, so they are in eleventh grade now. It was a great class.

The video is obviously an advertisement, but it warms my heart nevertheless. I thought some of you might enjoy catching a glimpse of one of the many things we do at SPA. Sharp eyes can even spot me in the background in a few shots.

In case the YouTube link above ever goes defunct, I made a personal copy of the video that should work in perpetuity below. (My guess is that YouTube’s streaming protocols are far more efficient, though, so I would watch the above copy as long as it is working.)