Any more than I needed her too?

It is time for partyz.


Someday my roommate will find out that I put a picture of him wearing an apron with no shirt on the internet, and he will make me take it down.

Until that day, please feast your eyes on this piece of wonder. By that I mean the goat ribs on the grill.

Leave it there for safekeeping

Certainly one of the greatest nights of my life.

(my new bride)

Themselves in Rockband / Guitar Hero? version. They made jokes about how AC Newman was only 85% of ... himself. On the song that he wrote.

(The New Pornographers at DC's 9:30 Club - June 23, 2010)

Things For Which I Am Eternally Grateful, episode II

Kisses from babies.

Free stuff at baseball games.

Popsicles in summer (not serial killers, though).

Beautiful women.

The flea market at approximately New York Ave, NE and Florida Ave, NE, and also the wholesalers around there.

Fresh mangoes. $7 a box!

My ticket to the New Pornographers show! which is 27 hours in the future from now!

Kisses from babies. Back me up on this one, they're just that fantastic.

Things To Which I Am Morally Opposed, episode IV

The neighbors having a disgusting pond of water in their front yard, which really is just a massive breeding ground for mosquitoes

Things that make my feminist brain hurt

People who care about Elena Kagan's sexuality, or anyone's for that matter

Busting a hole in my ballet slippers 7 minutes before the end of class, placing me in the inconvenient situation of having to dance on Thursday with a giant hole in my shoe before my new ones arrive in the mail

This, which I absolutely know I signed up for:

The Letter C

I finally figured out how to keep score at yesterday's Nats-White Sox game... Except not until halfway through the fifth inning, so there's a scorecard that doesn't make any sense for half the game. I moved around a bunch and decided Section 416 is where to be when I'm alone and want to keep score. At least 'til I move down to the 100s in the 7th inning.
Demonstration:


I feel like such a nerd going to the games alone, mostly because I laugh out loud at some songs that the organist plays. Yesterday I texted him and asked him to play Hey, Soul Sister (my favorite guilty pleasure song, as has been previously demonstrated), and he was all "Oh man I don't know if I can fit it in today, I'm trying to play songs that fit with Father's Day! but I'll try to squeeze it in" but then, there in the middle of the 8th inning, at double speed, were the tiny electric notes of Train! And then I laughed, and looked at the audio/visual box grinning, and everyone thought I was insane.

In other news, I have unmistakable tan lines on my feet from the sandals that I've been wearing every single day, which is pretty crazy, because I have never been tan in my life. I also still have tan lines from this time, in which I am wearing convertible tights from ballet class that stop mid-calf. I burned slightly from that mark down, though the rest of me was not burned, thankfully, because burns are bad. Instead of just going back to white like normal, it turned into tan, which now looks like a reverse sock tan on my legs. With sandal marks on my feet.

Here is a present for Solstice: the blog of my friend James! Read it, it's real real good, and also funny, and I'm not just saying that because it's my friend writing it. Especially read this page.

fireflies and cherry pies

I no longer have any sort of reasoning behind titles of blog posts.

Last night I ate a mango right before bed while watching Thursday's Daily Show, and now my computer has sticky yellow goo on it. Mmm mango goo.

Now, I am eating a mini cherry pie from Dangerously Delicious Pies, and on the hexagonal bar / coffee table next to me - don't worry, it's on a coaster - is a pint of chocolate milk from Clear Spring Creamery, which also provided me with the quarter pound of quark that is waiting in the fridge. My farmer's market is small but tasty!

Bad Decisions Dinosaur

That fried chicken sandwich after my first ballet class in 3 months may not have been really smart.

Looking at wedding photos while already in a weird alone-mood also may not have been that great an idea, either.

Letting Stellina walk to Eastern Market pushing her bebe strubber! bebe strubber! (baby doll in the toy stroller) in 85 degree weather - maybe should have thought twice about that one.

Choosing to work Saturday night - leaving me with no free nights this weekend! - instead of going to the Nats-White Sox game which will be broadcast nationally on Fox, I might end up wishing I had made a different choice.

Making another blog post that is yet another list, yeah, I really shouldn't have done that.

Awesome Shit that I Have Already Done in DC

1) Sunrise Easter service at Arlington Cemetery

2) Midnight Mass at the National Cathedral on Christmas

3) Easter mass at the National Cathedral

4) Various Smithsonians - Air & Space, American History, Natural History, American Indian, Castle, American Art

5) Inauguration of President Obama

6) Inaugural Concert!

7) Inaugural Ball! Western States reppppresent

8) White House tour

9) Nats games at both RFK and Nats Park

10) Pride Festival (though not the parade, boo)

11) Cherry Blossom Festival

12) Flown into and out of all three airports (lame, I know, but it's a thing)

13) Lunch at the Senate cafeteria

14) Experienced a summer thunderstorm on top of a house in Columbia Heights

15) Tended bar at a DCWeek event

16) had days where I go to all four quadrants

17) eaten at Ben's Chili Bowl

18) mini-golf at H Street Country Club

Ok! some are boring. but there are some things that I think are cool because they can only be done in this city. SUCK IT, OTHER, LESSER CITIES.

there's lots of other stuff I can't remember right now

It's List Wednesday!

I am bored, and don't want to work on things that I need to work on, so I decided to finally put down my DC Bucket List - stuff that I haven't done yet in DC and really need to do before I move away. I don't know when that is, but it is at minimum a year, so just to be safe, I want to start making sure I can take care of business and do everything.

So here is my list of shit that I haven't done yet in DC but want to do / places I haven't been but need to, in no particular order.

PLACES:

1) Roosevelt Island

2) National Arboretum

3) Hirschhorn Gallery

4) FDR Memorial

5) Air & Space Museum at Dulles

6) Frederick Douglass House

7) Pentagon Memorial

8) the museum in Katzen at AU

THINGS TO DO:

1) Sunrise at the Lincoln Memorial

2) Caps game

3) DC United game

4) Watch the drag race in Dupont

5) Screen on the Green

6) Roller derby (uh... watch, not participate, as much as I love Whip It)

7) train to Baltimore for the day (I know that's not DC, but, it starts at Union Station!)

8) a sport on the Mall! frisbee, bocce, softball, croquet, etc. doesn't matter which one.

9) go up the Washington Monument

10) Embassy open houses, EU and others

11) Paddle boats in the Tidal Basin (except this is so romantic I might barf)

What am I missing? It doesn't need to be all national shit, it can be like "hey you totally need to go to Sticky Rice on H Street, NE! and have omakase, and a carafe of sake. Then, go to the Biergarten Haus and drink whiskey while rooting for the Celtics, as your roommate shuns you in his ugly-ass Laker hat."

Well, I did that last night, so, think of something else.

OK well we also have a list of Awesome Shit that I Have Already Done in DC, which will be the next post, for ease of editing.

How 'bout them Uruguayans?

An email

From: Mo

To: Sexy Steve

1:10pm

WHAT IS GOING ON IN SOUTH CAROLINA

DID YOU VOTE FOR ALVIN GREENE

WHYYYYYYYYY

----------------------------

From: Sexy Steve

To: Mo

1:28pm

I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT IS GOING ON! AND OF COURSE I DIDNT VOTE FOR GREENE! IM NOT INSANE! I VOTED FOR RAWL!

Mental Forces

Prince Philip and Captain Bananio, who I get to see tomorrow, too! Maybe we will do Play-Doh for TWO WHOLE HOURS again.

I played in the water in the backyard with Stellina today. Splash splash splash! When the UPS man came and rang the doorbell with a package for Stellinadaddy, we answered the door in our swimsuits.

And then I ate a bacon cheeseburger at the Nats game, and we beat the dread Pirates, and it was great.

He's confessing his undying like for me

Strasburg delivers! 14 strikeouts, every single member of the Pirates' starting line-up, in 90ish pitches. I'm glad I didn't buy his jersey in vain. Well.... so far. Chickens still have some hatchin' to do, but it looks like we're off to a good start.

I took a stinging nettle to my right heel yesterday evening, just where the scar is from my slice-on-the-bed incident. Let me inform you, that plant lives up to its name. It should be called "omg don't ever accidentally briefly touch this plant just trust me don't do it stay awayyyyyy" - that would be even more accurate.

I suddenly feel like I have started something in the middle and am struggling to figure out what the hell is going on so I can try to catch up, and in the meantime, I'm just faking it and hoping eventually it will turn out real. As though me trying to learn how to ride my new bike, clipless pedals and all, is a giant metaphor for my life. I get going for a couple blocks or so, and I know I look like a total badass on my sweet retro road bike, and I feel like I know what I'm doing and I look like I know what I'm doing, and then I get to an intersection, and have to stumble off in an undignified and sometimes painful fashion and walk for a few blocks, until there aren't many people to see me try and awkwardly get back on and get started again.

I haven't been good at bikes in a loooong time, if I ever was. I have a very clear memory of remembering to brake at the last minute and stopping with my front wheel an inch away from falling in the duck pond at Westmoreland Park, just when I had recently gotten to a point where I felt a mastery of no training wheels. I was ... nine? ten? Only now, a decade and some odd later, instead of the duck pond, it's traffic, and kids with grandparents, and stone retaining walls, and hot dog carts, and construction workers, and that curb, and trees, and more retaining walls, and I have to remember to relax my grip on the handlebars because I'm holding too tight, but don't relax too much or I'll forget to steer and end up in the duck pond.

Yeah, that Giant Metaphor of my Raleigh Technium TriLite.

My polka-dotted skateboard helmet is securely fastened.

This is it

I got all excited 'cause on my dashboard, it said I had 151 posts, and I was very pleased with myself, and then I realized several were drafts, and so I actually have about 145 total posts on this blog.

Yesterday's 2:20pm to 2:23pm thunderstorm finally cooled the city down after a long string of 85+ degree days, with humidity. Last night, not only did I sleep wearing clothes for the first time in at least a week, I also slept without an ice pack, and by the middle of the night I actually got under the covers!!! it was AWESOME.

Then today, I got my haircut, had a brief spa appointment, had lunch with Uncle Sexy and his friend at this Salvadorean place I've always wanted to try - and definitely should have tried sooner.

The cats somehow stopped begging for food at 3am. I don't know how it happened. Right now they're eating at 10am and 10pm and not begging me for food in the inbetween times. It might be that they're getting into Sawyer's food, but I think they're still too scared to go into that room because there's a hissing smaller version of Zoe that guards it. They ALSO have been leaving food in their bowls for later! Which in the past has been totally unheard of. I think it's probably too hot to eat. Really, who wants to eat anything other than Otter Pops? Which I did actually stack on Rhett for a bit on Friday, which was a super hot day, and he did not protest, and in fact looked pretty happy about.

I got to take a really awesome nap this afternoon, with the breeze coming in the window. And then I got to have tomatoes, mozzarella, and balsamic vinegar, and then leftover Ethiopian food, and then a mango for dinner. Everyone else had pizza, because our gas got shut off, apparently we were using it illegally? I don't really know. But we all sat on the porch, covered in bug bites and bug spray, with the Jesus candles lit, and talked about Snowmaggedon and Snowpocalypse and Snowverkill, and decided to have our housewarming party on June 25. This is a natural choice, as it coincides with the first anniversary of Michael Jackson's death, and we live half a block from the Michael Jackson Shrine House. And Sawyer pranced around in the backyard catching fireflies.

Contra

I will get back to posts that are not just giant lists of stuff ... shortly. Now things are starting to feel settled and I think this will be the first week of real normalcy? So that's pretty great!

So here is a list of Things That Have Happened.

I graduated from college! That's fun. It was really stressful but nice to see everyone.

I moved across town! This is a big big big thing. The chaos started a little over a month ago, when I was hung out to dry by some folks that I was potentially going to live with, and then I wasn't sure if I was going to have to move back to Oregon, or what. Then, I got freaking lucky and two of my new roommates found me, and then some more chaos happened regarding my old apartment, and then I moved into my new house, and then my new roommates moved in about a week later, and now our fourth roommate is in, and everything is fantastic! Actual moving really sucked, but packing was not terrible, and unpacking was also not terrible. I had lots of help from really great friends.

More on the new house and new neighborhood forthcoming.

Somewhere around moving time I got a bunch of new jobs, and also a new phone, and all of those are great.

Then it was my birthday! I turned a different age than I was before. That was fun. I got drunk and busted my knee on the balcony of my old apartment, and it's almost all better now but still kind of gnarly.

Then I helped clean the house of my friend, whose other housemates left him totally screwed and responsible for cleaning the entire house where seven boys had lived. That was fun, because I like cleaning, even though it was gross. I miss that house a lot, it very much defined last summer for me. Now I have a new definition.

And then today! I bought a bike! It looks a little something like this:

the green-looking bit is more blue than what it looks like in this photo, more like in this photo. It is pretty freaking rad. I have to switch out the pedals for regular platform pedals but the pedals (clipless? I need to learn a lot about bikes quickly) that are on it are not too terrible to ride with. The front brake needs aligning, which some random bike co-op folks that I ran into showed me how to do, and they also filled my tires which was so nice of them! Bike is super '80s and very rad. hardxcore rad, even.

And then I bought a fan for my room and a ton of Otter Pops from Rite-Aid, which is two blocks from my house, and a bunch of summer clothes from oldnavy.com. I am done stimulating the economy for a while.