It is now Monday afternoon, and I am in recovery mode. Thanksgiving, birthday, house guests. All good, but when you are 80 ……….

Well, yesterday ended with a bang and a whimper. For those of you who are not in this area, you may not know that early yesterday evening a two seat, one engine airplane crashed into an electric power station tower, knocking out power for about 100,000 PEPCO (that’s short for Potomac Electric Power Company) in Montgomery County, MD. The plane, which was to land at a nearby small airport in Gaithersburg, not only crashed into the tower, but got stuck. Power went out, and all wires that could cause a shock had to be grounded. The pilot and passenger, both men in their sixties, were seriously injured, but couldn’t be removed until the airplane was stabilized, so that it would not fall during the rescue. The entire rescue took about 7 hours, and the physical damage is now being repaired. Our house was not affected, but I know several people who were. The picture of the plane stuck on the tower looked like it came from a graphic novel.

OK, accidents will happen. But it gets you thinking about our entire infrastructure. If a small, single engine plane could do this, think what an enemy, or terrorist, or deranged attacker could do. We have the power to cut off power to almost any country in the world, if we wanted to. And other countries, and non-governmental organizations as well, could do the same.

But no one would really do that, would they? Nine months ago, we would have answered “no, we don’t think so”. But when you look at Vladimir Putin, who seems to be enemy, terrorist and someone deranged, and Russia’s actions in Ukraine, your answer today might be very different. And of course, it is not only electricity – it could be water, or gas, or food, or even air.

Life is fragile, whether you are 8 or 80. We have no idea what the future might bring. Or how to prepare for it. But we stay alert, improve our technology, and train our people on proper responses, right? Oh, we don’t?

On a lighter note, you want good Thai food? Not too hard to find in this area, and we found a new one for lunch today as we took Michael and Wendy to the airport. We went to Neramitra, a two minute drive from National Airport. I had roast duck red curry…..it was excellent. The hostess and waitresses were Thai, and their English was limited. We asked why the restaurant was called Neramitra, and the answer was “Surprise”. That was the answer from the hostess three times to the same question.

Neramitra does not appear to mean “surprise”. So maybe it means “I don’t know”. One thing seems clear, and that is that Google doesn’t know, and if Google doesn’t how could a waitress at a restaurant in Arlington VA be expected to know?

Finally, we did see another film last night. “Where the Crawdads Sing”. On Netflix. Edie and Wendy had read the book, which they liked, and didn’t think the film was as good as the book. I thought the film, although not hard to sit through, was not very good. And I don’t know what I would have thought of the book.

The plot concerns a young girl (Kya), youngest of several siblings, living in the marshes of North Carolina, whose family leaves the family house one by one, leaving her to fend for herself. She is a very young girl, but she does fend for herself, never going to school, somehow keeping her house together and getting enough to eat. She is taken by the nearby small town as a fool. She attracts two boy friends. One (Case) is, at the same time, engaged to someone in town, and one (Tate) leaves town to attend college and stays away for years. Case is found dead in the marsh, and the Kya is accused of murder, tried, but exonerated. Tate returns to town and “marries” (not officially) Kya and they live to a ripe old age. She in the meantime has become a respected artist and expert on marshland animal life, and publishes several illustrated books. That is the general plot.

When the film ended, I looked up to see where it was filmed. Nothing is being filmed were it is set. This film was made in Louisiana. Louisiana has marshes with live oaks and the like. But I have never seen live oaks in North Carolina. And, in the film, people tend to “go over to Asheville”. In real life, Asheville is a long day’s drive from the coast.

Secondly, there was no case again Kya for the murder. In real life, she would not have been brought to trial. She was at a book party in Greenville the night of the murder, there were no fingerprints or footprints. No one saw her that night with Case. He died when falling through a grate on a metal observation tower – he could have been pushed, but he could have just fallen, etc. She had to be found not guilty and she was.

Finally, she turned into a sophisticated lady, being taught to read and write by Tate, and finding ways to look like she would be at home anywhere. That, too, stretched credulity.

If someone thought differently, let us know.

Well, there were pretty scenes of the Louisiana bayou country, just like there were beautiful scenes of Georgia in Ozark, of North Carolina in Three Billboards in Ebbing Missouri, and beautiful scenes if Lithuania in The Forgotten Battle that I mentioned the other day about the end of Nazi rule in Holland.

So it goes.