As long as their soada cans are red, white, and blue ones

We had a lovely Sunday with mum and Don. We had all agreed just to do small presents, so after brekky that is what we did. For lunch we roasted the leg o' lamb that I had gotten from Costco on Friday. Mum showed me how to prepare it nicely. Don carved. In the evening we played Trivial Pursuit. The copy we have dates back to the days of the Soviet Union, so you have to calibrate your answers appropriately. We played the usual teams, Mum and I vs. Don and Lena. Don and Lena were victorious.

Monday was Boxing Day, which isn't usually a holiday here, but since Chrissy was on Sunday, it was the day we got off. We were in negotiations to see a movie, but since we couldn't decide on one mum suggested going up to Harpers Ferry instead. I have been meaning to go to Harpers Ferry since 2010, when I did my road trip^[1] from Salt Lake City to DC. We were hungry by the time we got there, so we went to Bistro 1840, which was delicious. A tad heavy on the cheese though. Then we climbed some rocks for a view and crossed the bridge to the Maryland side for fun and then came back to the West Virginia side to visit the John Brown museum. There was a poignant moment when we were watching national park videos talking about the disunity^[2] that was brought about by John Brown and his followers when we looked at each other and considered the political climate and uncertainty on the horizon.

When we got home, we planned out our Tassie trip^[3]. We are going to visit the island state for about a week as a subset of our Aussie trip in February.

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1. That trip was routed to add as many new states to my list of states visited as possible. I did one weird thing in each state by researching weird things on the internet. The John Brown Wax Museum in Harpers Ferry was supposed to be my West Virginia thing, but after Kentucky I was exhausted of driving and went as directly as possible to Springfield, Virginia where I stayed for about a month before moving into Maryland. I figured from the DC area it would be easy to visit Harpers Ferry at my leisure. Had no idea it would take six years. I still haven't been to the Wax Museum. Also, I still have eleven US states to visit.
2. In fairness, John Brown was the spark that erupted into the Civil War, but but all the political munitions that had been stacked up for him to set alight have to take some responsibility too.
3. Incidentally, once complete, this will leave just the big WA as the only Australian state I haven't been to. WA is the size of Texas, California and Alaska combined.

canadian exceptionalism

Definitely my least favorite thing about America is its exceptionalism. I was trying to explain to someone how much more amazing the original House of Cards was than the American remake. She told me that she wouldn't be able to figure out all the parliamentary stuff. In the 538 postmortem of the election somebody said “I still believe that America is better than Canada”. More on principal than actaully knowledge of anything Canadian. On listening to The Big Listen (podcast) tonight in the car, they interviewed an American who wanted desperately to dismiss a CBC podcast because it was Canadian. That is code, btw, for: not American. Tonight we went to see Doctor Who chrissy special in the theatre, and apparently the cast and crew of the show flew all the way to Bulgaria to pretend they were in New York. All so that American audiences could understand. Because it wouldn't be understandable if an Alien came to Earth and didn't visit New York or Los Angles now and then. They can't spend all of their time in London and Cardiff.

I like to think that Americans really are able to grasp the subtle nuance of parliamentary democracy, and that they don't hate Canada the same ways a Red Sox fan hates the Yankees. I like to think that Americans can enjoy something that wasn't pre-packaged specifically for them. After all, the rest of the world does it! I am reminded of a lion named Alex telling a giraffe that he wanted to know about things outside of New York City, and the giraffe pointing out that was only one subject.