My Abbreviated Summer

I’m not in school anymore but Mr. R, here is my “What I did this Summer” report. 🤪

Since my last life blog post, I have graduated and a lot more. This is a catch-up post since then.

The same night as graduation, I posted the first of the Amish novels since my teacher mentioned it that night.

We went to The Greenbrier on Memorial Day. The Greenbrier is a fancy hotel owned by the Justice family. It was originally started in 1778 so it has a long and storied history. It has changed ownership and use multiple times. We went, not to stay, but to tour the bunker underneath. The bunker was built to withstand nuclear fallout during the Cold War. At the time, it was ideal because it was close enough to D.C. to get politicians there quickly but far enough away to be safe. It is also buried in the mountains making it harder to find and more favorable in the air currents and such. It was a fascinating tour that I definitely recommend if you are interested in that kind of thing. It is now used as secure server/document storage for Fortune 500 companies which is fascinating to me. The C&O Railroad rents the bunker to do this. Sadly you can’t take pictures inside the bunker for security reasons but there are videos on YouTube that show some of the insides.

We went camping in our new-to-us camper during the third week of June. Our extended family started out the week Sunday evening and they left on Thursday morning. The church came Friday and we left Sunday. We had church down there which is a new thing.

We had a fun fourth of July weekend with lots of fireworks and friends. We went to Lake Anna with friends to watch fireworks and that was really fun. The fireworks over the water were amazing!

We went to the local firemen's and antique parades. Well, I went to one because the next day I went to a Sacred Harp singing which was so fun! If you’ve never heard it a wonderful example can be found here. Sacred Harp is basically normal acapella singing except for a few twists. 😏 The first verse is sang as loudly as possible and in solfege. To give you an idea of how loud it was, my watch gave me a ninety decibel warning. Ninety decibels is basically as loud as a mower! All of this volume came from twentyish people. The difference with their solfege you may notice is that it has only four notes. There are still the same amount of pitches as we with eight notes have, but their scales are something like fa, so, la, mi, fa, so, la, mi. I plan to go back! From what I understand, Sacred Harp and Harmonia Sacra were at one point similar but the Mennonites ended up with Harmonia Sacra, and the rest with Sacred Harp. Some of the Sacred Harp tunes are from the Harmonia Sacra.

We went camping the beginning of August with some friends which was fun. We even had Low Country Boil which was delicious! When we camp we camp right! 🤣

Other than that very abbreviated recap, I’ve went to a few weddings, worked, did a work event, and probably some other stuff I’m forgetting