This weekend had us making a loooong drive to Spokane and back for a family function. The driving was tedious, but Washington State is georgeous: from the Puget Sound to Snoqualmie Pass to the Columbia River basin and on to (almost) the Idaho border, a sequence of ecosystems following each other in sometimes abrupt succession.

We got to witness first-hand a group of awfully nice, Republican-leaning, small-town folks of all ages (read: people with a socially conservative, non-peripatetic bent) dancing, nay, really getting into, the Village People’s YMCA. Knox and I shared a chuckle as we wondered whether they were aware of the subtext or were simply unconcerned….

Another highlight of the weekend was staying up way too late to watch HGTV. As new homeowners with burgeoning house pride, we were spellbound by one show after another featuring half-hour makeovers in which preternaturally cheerful design types take homes from drab to fab. The secrets to the makeovers, I suspect, are having a whole team of workers at the ready to supervise the work, and having a TV program provide the budget… The secret hook in the network’s programming is that the last segment of one show flows directly into the first segment of the next without a commercial break: once you see how one remodel turned out you are immediately presented with another seemingly hopeless case that you simply must see through resolution.