hemingway saturday

We went on a quick run Saturday morning, then headed to DC for a staged performance of 1920s hedonism that wasn’t The Great Gatsby. The ballet tickets were part of our anniversary gift to ourselves (the other part being Dave Matthews Band tickets for June). I knew there was going to be track work on the Orange line, so we left plenty early and got to the Kennedy Center with an hour before The Sun Also Rises began. We spent the additional time enjoying the perfect May weather out on the balcony.

We’d been to the Kennedy Center a few times as interns for Millennium Stage shows and Mariel and I went on that ill-fated 2.5 hour tour in 2012, but this was our first trip as paying patrons. I love the building, especially the mirrored hall (which probably has another name).

I wasn’t sure how Hemingway would translate to ballet, but it turned out to be awesome.

There was a pit orchestra, which was a surprise, and giant pieces of scenery that dropped in and out of the stage. Important dialogue was projected on silent film-esque title cards and accompanying video played on a giant round screen in the back. The Paris half of the play was black and blue, and the San Fermin scenes were washed in red and green (and featured massive puppet people). The dancing seemed well-executed to our untrained eyes, and we weren’t bored at all. Two thumbs up.

After the performance, we took the Kennedy Center shuttle back to Foggy Bottom and walked up to Georgetown for late lunch. We went to Bodega for tapas, which I liked right off the bat because our waiter brought a basket of bread while we waited for our food. We tried the manchego cheese and serrano ham platter, cod and lentils in garlic sauce, albondigas, and (the best thing ever) piquillo peppers stuffed with braised short ribs served au jus. Afterward, we had to stop for ice cream at Georgetown Scoops to complete our gourmandizing.

popcorn popping

We went to the Tidal Basin after work on Tuesday to see the infamous DC cherry blossoms. We went one time way back in 2010 when we were interns, but we were too late in the season so the blooms were a little disappointing. Tuesday, however, was peak blossom–and Tidal Basin tourist–day.

The cherry blossoms really are phenomenal; they kind of look like clouds of cotton candy in the trees. It’s crazy how quickly they come and go; I ran there last Friday and the trees were bare.

As you can see, the Washington Monument is finally getting its post-earthquake repairs. Glad that’s not my job.

We wandered around the basin, dodging blossom enthusiasts and aspiring photographers, and enjoyed the first really springy day we’ve had in 2013.

I love spending time with Jason in the city and look forward to many more evening outings this summer.

13.1

I woke up at 3:00 AM race day angry because in my dream I’d missed the race start and Jason wouldn’t drive me into DC so I could rejoin the field partway through. My subconscious can be really mean.

I got a drink of water and ate a boiled egg and went back to bed–but not actually back to sleep. I finally just got up at 5:30 and started getting ready.

Because it wasn’t rainy or terribly cold, I opted for shorts (new from Old Navy. Classy.) and my race t-shirt. I ate a big bowl of oatmeal and two bananas and woke up Jason so he could take me to the Metro.

Track work on the orange line delayed my train, so I didn’t arrive at the corrals until after 7:30. The first thing I noticed about my fellow racers was that everyone was bundled up: tights, gloves, hats, wool socks, fleece, etc. the only other shorts-and-t-shirt wearer was a really little girl who was running with her dad. There was also a gal in a tank and leprechaun tutu, but I’m pretty sure alcohol had something to do with her wardrobe choice. I started to worry that I’d completely misjudged the weather and that everyone here knew something I did not. Granted, I was a little cold, but I assumed running 13.1 miles would solve that.

I stopped at the restroom and by the time I made it through the ridiculous line, corral #19 (seven behind my assigned corral) was at the starting line. I joined them and thought, “okay, this is it.”

Miles 1 – 2
The race started with a familiar jaunt up Constitution toward the Lincoln. Since this is a route I take every time I run outside, it felt comfortable and natural, like “this is my route and this is my town. I’ve got this!” I missed the first mile marker. At the second, the time clock was at 46:00. Still able to do math early in the race, I assumed if I’d had a slow start, I’d maybe been going for twenty minutes. I based the rest of my time calculations off this conjecture.

Miles 3 – 4
Great scenery and I hit my stride. Feeling great.

Mile 5
Saw a coworker in the cheering section. Still loving the Rock Creek Park views.

Mile 6
Oh, this is the hill I’ve heard about. It is ridiculous. I plod up, still running (unlike many of my less-than-helpful competitors who are walking up the middle of the road. Seriously?). At the tip top of the hill, I popped out two yellow energy jelly beans. They were delicious. In training for this race, I had run six miles a lot, but only over that a handful of times this season and I was a little worried everything post-6 is going to be a battle.

Mile 7
The colorful houses are my favorite.

Miles 8 – 9
Still feeling great and I kind of can’t believe it. My shin pain is just dull, which probably has something to do with the ibuprofen I took this morning.

Mile 10
Great views of the Capitol. A guy near me is wearing a green spandex suit covered in shamrocks.

Mile 11
What? Only two more miles?

Mile 12
I run with the 4:00 marathon pace team for a little while. I am relieved to not be less than halfway done with my day’s race. I’m excited to be done, but part of me also doesn’t want this triumphant feeling to go away. I relish the last mile.

Mile 13.1
Finished! I slowed to a stop and wander toward water. I’m sweaty and thirsty but can’t stop smiling. I crossed the finish line at 2:23:30. If I started at 00:26:00 like I thought I did, I’m definitely under my two hour goal.

Jason and I met up a few minutes later at the family reunion field. He’s the best.

I found out on the way home that my official time was 01:54:50–six minutes under my Derby mini time. I was (and still am) elated.

I’m not planning to wait two years again before my next half, though.

The only bummer of the day was that Laura wasn’t able to make it. I missed having someone to talk to and keep pace with. Next time!

We went home and showered and headed to Lebanese Taverna for lunch. Afterward, we grabbed pastries at Paul. The rest of the day was spent sleeping and grocery shopping and eating and watching basketball.

three-day weekend with Renegade Roni*

Roni came to visit this weekend after an interview in NYC, which we are really hoping went well so she can move there and see us more often. I picked her up from Union Station on Saturday night.
Sometimes I get complacent about DC and then I see the capitol and go, “Wait! I live where government happens. Wow.”

I wasn’t completely familiar with traffic patterns at Union Station, so I made Roni walk toward the Maryland flag and jump in the car when I pulled over. I did not even get honked at until the next traffic signal when I didn’t realize the light was green. While Roni and I drove home, Jason preheated the oven for our taquitos. We dined on those and Mexican rice and stayed up late talking/watching the BYU vs. Portland basketball game.

The next morning, we had a pancake and eggs and tater tots feast before church, which carried our stomachs through the entire three-hour block. I made crock pot beef stew and–in the spirit of the week–cut the potatoes and carrots into heart-shapes. The carrots held up pretty well, but the potatoes had softened into deformed ovals by dinnertime.

Roni came to Primary with me and Jason stopped in for a few minutes. He told the kids that I’d gotten into law school and their reaction was: “Ew! Gross! Lawyers are mean and judge people!” Thanks, kiddos.

We ate our stew and played Settlers of Catan (because no one can visit us without being forced to play) and devoured the Junior’s cheesecake Roni brought.

When Jason’s Grandma Funny met my dad for the first time, she informed him that he looked like the man who schills Junior’s cheesecake on QVC and that he should definitely stop in at the NYC store and tell them so.

In preparation for the Downton Abbey season finale, we made some soft pretzel bites, which were amazing and salty.

This picture fails to capture Roni whacking me with her dough strand milliseconds later.

Downton Abbey was wonderful, yet depressing. When it was over (and all the pretzel bites except the ones I burned had been eaten), Jason assuaged his sadness by reading, while Roni and I drowned our sorrows in eight rounds of Boggle. As usual, we were neck-and-neck for the first while, and then Roni had back-to-back 40+ point games, leading to my swift annihilation.

Roni had to be at Union Station again by 11:30 AM on Monday morning. I accidentally slept in, but there was still time for French pastries and French braiding.

It’s always good to see Roni and we couldn’t be happier that she made time to visit. There’s something so nice and comforting about spending time with someone who already knows you well.

The house seemed quiet with her gone. We spent the afternoon reading and did the rest of our grocery shopping. Before bed, we finished off the cheesecake and played chess.

*I can’t remember where that nickname came from, but I am pretty sure in my iron-on transfer heyday I gifted Roni a fishing hat with “Renegade Roni” on it in block letters. Oh youth.

44

I could also call this post The Lazy Girl’s Guide to Attending an Inauguration. We decided Sunday night that we couldn’t miss this once-in-a-lifetime-unless-we-live-here-long-term experience and set our alarms for 6:30 AM. I think I finally got up around 7 AM, and got ready at a leisurely pace. I’m perpetually cold, so I bundled up in many layers: running tights under jeans; turtleneck that used to be Jason’s before I stole it for running, sweater, and coat; regular socks under wool socks under warm boots. The most weatherfearing part of Jason’s ensemble were his mission-era boots.

We left the house at 8:30 AM and proceeded to the metro station. I was (maybe overly) concerned that the parking lot would be full and we’d have to go home and take the bus to the metro and be late and miss the whole entire thing. Instead, there were lots of available spots and we easily got seats on the first train into town.

We emerged from the metro (on my recommendation) at Metro Center. This turned out to be the worst plan of the day. My thought was that it would get us moderately close to the mall and save some walking time. I hadn’t taken into account the post-inauguration parade, the route for which went straight up Pennsylvania and of which we were now on the wrong side. Eventually we made it through parade security and were instructed by a red-pinnied volunteer to cross at 11th street and exit the south side of the parade route. This seemed easy enough, but we were told at 11th that we wouldn’t be able to cross after all and would have to go up to 17th and walk around the White House complex. We returned to the original volunteers who assured us that yes, we would be able to cross at 11th, so we tried again and were permitted to cross and exit the seventh circle of parade-watching Hades. (Incidentally, I have no idea how parade-goers lined up in the early morning and waited around all day long without dying of boredom. No parade is worth my time unless it features someone dressed as a golden onion.)

At last, we reached the mall.

We wandered around and saw the news crews (including the back of Anderson Cooper’s head) and took in the excited atmosphere.

At this point it was about 10:45 AM, so we staked out a spot just about even with the original Smithsonian building. A couple asked us to take their picture, which Jason did and they were mightily impressed with his fine camerawork. We were nearish a jumbotron and industrial speakers, so we could actually hear and see pretty well once things got going (and after the too-old-for-that chica in front of us got off her boyfriend’s shoulders).

The inauguration ceremony itself was awesome. I loved the poem. I loved the speech. I even loved Beyonce’s rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner” (though admittedly not as much as some apparent Beyonce afficionados in the crowd did). The whole thing was very faith-in-democracy-affirming and I’m very glad we went. I’m also very glad we didn’t get on the metro at 4:00 AM when it opened as I thought at one point we should; no need to get there early if you’re resigned to being an unticketed mall stander anyway.

The weather hovered around 35 and it was a little overcast, but I only felt really cold when the breeze picked up in the middle of President Obama’s address.  

We wandered around post-program and walked up Constitution toward Foggy Bottom.  On the way, we saw an array of laughably hideous commemorative merchandise–all now very cheap. Cold and hungry, we stopped at the GW Potbelly’s and had a quick lunch before continuing to Foggy Bottom. (Fun fact: we ate breakfast at the GW Dunkin’ Donuts adjacent to that Potbelly’s on Jason’s 24th birthday).

The platform at Foggy Bottom wasn’t too crowded, but every single outbound train was bursting with inauguration revelers. After probably six trains went by, we hopped on an empty inbound train, rode it a few stops, then hopped off and got on an empty now-inbound-headed train going toward Foggy Bottom. We Frosts know how to work the system. 

We arrived home without further incident around 4:30 PM and turned on CNN parade coverage. We had curried coconut butternut squash puree  (was supposed to be soup, but I think I underestimated the weight of my squash) and biscuits for dinner and got completely caught up on Downton Abbey. Happy Inauguration/MLK Jr. Day!

bookish 2012

As I’ve said before, my many commuting hours and lack of small children have enabled my most productive reading year in recent memory. This year I discovered Stegner and tried out Berry and exhausted Jason’s more accessible political science books. I joined the library and ward book club. During my five-week stint of unemployment, I read my first electronic book (Mockingjay) and loathed the experience; there’s something about the weight of a book in my hands that I love, but maybe I’d be more inclined to like ebooks if I traveled more. I’ve read on planes, trains, automobiles, buses, benches, beaches, balconies, and best of all, on the couch nestled in Jason’s arm crook. It’s been a good year.

This year I finished sixty books: 23 non-fiction and 37 fiction. This comes out to over 23,000 pages and comprises far more total titles than I read in either 2010 or 2011 (which is as far back as I have accurate records). Interestingly, the ratio of fiction to non-fiction remains about the same from year to year: my reading list was 60.7% fiction in 2010, and 68.7% fiction in 2011. This year: 61.6%.

Where I get my book recommendations can be categorized into four sources: me, which includes any book I’ve discovered from a non-friend source (i.e. NPR), Jason, my dad, and other, which encompasses all other friend-recommended titles including book club.

Perhaps next year I’ll break out the “other” category more. I’m not at all surprised that Jason is still my top non-me source for new material.

I also looked at authors by gender and was kind of shocked by how few women writers I read this year. Barbara Kingsolver is counted twice, and four of the thirteen female authors are Hispanic. Of the fourteen books I read written by women, only three were non-fiction; of those three, one was a memoir, and the other two were biographical sketches of women: Henrietta Lacks and Hadley Richardson Hemingway. Not one of the nine political science books I read this year was written by a woman.
Goal: read more books by women (not necessarly for women) next year.

Barbara Kingsolver isn’t the only author I repeated. The most common writer was Wallace Stegner, of whose titles I read four. I read three each from Wendell Berry and Ernest Hemingway and two each from Barbara Kingsolver, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Steve Martin.

This next chart took too long to make, but I loved doing it. I marked the geographic setting of each title I read in 2012; blue dots are fiction and green dots are non-fiction. The first book I read this year of each genre is marked by the lightest colored dot of each color. Each successive title (chronologically) is marked with a slightly darker monochromatic dot. Thus, the last books I read in 2012 are denoted by almost black dots. I didn’t happen to read a bunch of books set in the southish Pacific; that area west of Peru was a dumping ground for books that did not require a primary setting.

As you can see, I skipped around Europe for the first part of the year, which I blame on three Hemingway and some Camus. In the latter portion of 2012, I returned to some of Jason’s books (D.C.-based non-fiction) and migrated back to the U.S. with a raft of “regional” authors. There’s some Hispanic literature sprinkled in there as well. I cut off the map to make it fit a little better, as I only had to go as far east as Pyongyang.

A quick breakdown. This is by no means an unqualified recommendation of any of the following titles. Read at your own risk.

Books that made me cry: Every Stegner, That Distant Land and Hannah Coulter (Berry), and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Smith).

Books I loved: All the ones that made me cry. Also, One Hundred Years of Solitude (Marquez), The War of the End of the World (Llosa), Just My Type (Garfield).

Books I expected to like but really didn’t: The Fountainhead (Rand) which I used to love and now can’t stand; Life of Pi (Martel) of which the first half was awesome and the second half didn’t do it for me; and The End of Influence: What Happens When Other Countries Have The Money (Cohen and DeLong) was poorly written.

Books I was surprised to love: Henderson the Rain King (Bellows), Rough Stone Rolling (Bushman), Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (Le Carre). Interestingly these were all recommendations from my dad. I guess I should give him a little more credit.

Strangest book I read this year: The Unconsoled (Ishiguro). I expected it to be like Never Let Me Go or Remains of the Day and it was not even close. 500+ pages of existential surrealism…I think.

Books that made me think: The North American Idea (Pastor), The Very Best Men: The Daring Early Years of the CIA (Thomas), Lincoln’s Virtues (Miller), and What Are People For? (Berry).

One I’ll reread: All the Little Live Things (Stegner).

Biggest victory: Finally finishing Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader!

Favorite scene: Okay, I can’t choose a single scene, but Angle of Repose and All the Little Live Things each feature one perfect scene near the conclusion. If we take all of Stegner and Berry and Hemingway out of the equation, I loved the feel of House of the Spirits (Allende) and Paris Without End: The True Story of Hemingway’s First Wife (Dilberto), especially when Hadley leaves all of Ernest’s manuscripts on the train. So painful.

A good book quote from Wendell Berry:

Works of art participate in our lives; we are not just distant observers of their lives. They are in conversation among themselves and with us. This is a part of the description of human life; we do the way we do partly because of things that have been said to us by works of art, and because of things that we have said in reply.

And one from Wallace Stegner:

There is another physical law that teases me, too: the Doppler Effect. The sound of anything coming at you- a train, say, or the future- has a higher pitch than the sound of the same thing going away. If you have perfect pitch and a head for mathematics you can compute the speed of the object by the interval between its arriving and departing sounds. I have neither perfect pitch nor a head for mathematics, and anyway who wants to compute the speed of history? Like all falling bodies, it constantly accelerates. But I would like to hear your life as you heard it, coming at you, instead of hearing it as I do, a somber sound of expectations reduced, desires blunted, hopes deferred or abandoned, chances lost, defeats accepted, griefs borne

I’m putting together my To Read in 2013 list and need some help. Let me know (in person or message or comment or text) your favorite book ever and I’ll add it to my list. I’m interested to try some new authors that are important to my family and friends. Happy reading!

Oh, and in case you’re super curious, here’s the full list from 2012 (in reverse chronological order):
The Book of Mormon
What Are People For? (Berry)
So Brave, Young, and Handsome (Enger)
A Room With A View (Forster)
That Distant Land (Berry)
I Still Dream About You (Flagg)
The Very Best Men: The Daring Early Years of the CIA (Thomas)
24/6 (Sleeth)
Life of Pi (Martel)
In the Time of the Butterflies (Alvarez)
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (Foer)
The Poisonwood Bible (Kingsolver)
The Night Circus (Morgenstern)
All the King’s Men (Warren)
To Have and Have Not (Hemingway)
Gardens of Water (Drew)
Atonement (McEwan)
One Day
Chronicle of a Death Foretold (Marquez)
Crossing to Safety (Stegner)
The Cult of the Presidency (Healy)
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Smith)
The Lacuna (Kingsolver)
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (Le Carre)
Shopgirl (Martin)
One Hundred Years of Solitude (Marquez)
Like Water for Chocolate (Esquievel)
An Object of Beauty (Martin)
Lincoln’s Virtues (Miller)
Republic, Lost (Lessig)
Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs (Stegner)
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (Skloot)
The Fountainhead (Rand)
Hannah Coulter (Berry)
Rough Stone Rolling (Bushman)
All the Little Live Things (Stegner)
The Beautiful and Damned (Fitzgerald)
The Hot Zone (Preston)
The House of the Spirits (Allende)
Henderson the Rain King (Bellows)
Dancing in the Glory of Monsters (Stearns)
The North American Idea (Pastor)
Martin Luther (Martin E. Marty)
A Moveable Feast (Hemingway)
Angle of Repose (Stegner)
The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All The Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better (Cowen)
The End of Influence: What Happens When Other Countries Have The Money (Cohen and DeLong)
North and South (Gaskell)
Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief (Riordan)
The War of the End of the World (Vargas Llosa)
First Stop in the New World: Mexico City, the Capital of the 21st Century (Lida)
A Homemade Life (Wizenberg)
Paris Without End: The True Story of Hemingway’s First Wife (Dilberto)
The Stranger (Camus)
The Unconsoled (Ishiguro)
For Whom the Bell Tolls (Hemingway)
Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M.: Audrey Hepburn, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and the Dawn of the Modern Woman (Wasson)
Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader (Martin)
Mockingjay (Collins)
Just My Type (Garfield)

christmas at the capitol, in the capital

When the Newseum closed, we walked to Good Stuff by way of the Capitol, a.k.a. my favorite building in the city, which also has a Christmas tree.

It’s not really visible here, but in person you can see where the dais for the inauguration is being installed.

We met the Carters for dinner (Happy birthday, Elayna!) and peppermint-chocolate shakes. Jason wisely let me down approximately 80% of ours. December has the best food.

While loitering outside the restaurant before dinner, Jason and I noticed an earpiece- and suit-wearing guy making plans on a cell phone for somebody important to eat at We The Pizza. We never saw who the mystery guest was, but I craned my neck whenever a black suburban approached.

Post-dinner, we hiked down to the White House, passing some pretty stellar Christmas decorations en route.

The National Christmas Tree was a bit of a zoo. There were a zillion kids and haggard parents and giant strollers crammed in the inner circle to see the trains. We ventured in, but decided to make a quick exit to the safe outer walkway while we still could.

ME: This is so fun! Maybe it can be a family tradition. We can bring our tiny children someday!

JASON: Did you not see the chaos around the tree?? Can you imagine trying to squeeze a carriage in there?! (I love how Jason calls strollers “carriages”; it’s almost as proper as “perambulators”.)

The big tree is surrounded by a bunch of little trees that represent each state, D.C., and all unincorporated territories. We found Connecticut (pretty), Kentucky (paying homage to UK on an ornament, of course), and Utah (ornaments decorated by a school in Kamas, apparently).

We also checked out Santa’s workshop, where I was happy we were all adults and could avoid the forever-long line to sit on Santa’s lap. There was also a nativity and a Christmas carol-ing choir.

We walked around the OEOB and to the front of the White House, where the viewing stands (or “reviewing” stands, according to the placard) for the inaugural parade are in process.

Jason and I needed to get back to Georgetown to get our car and offered to bring the Carters home with us so they wouldn’t have to deal with the obnoxious metro closures. I think they probably regret taking us up on our offer. We walked to Metro Center, but discovered the next red line train wasn’t coming for a long while (at least, that’s what I gathered from the disgruntled metro employee. Can WMATA hire some pleasant people, or does working there make you sullen?). We decided to walk the rest of the way.

The night was warm for December and the walk was nice and there are always interesting things to see in the city, like six people dressed as bananas and a man wearing a Chewbacca-esque bandalo studded with what appeared to be essential oils. Weird. We made it to the law school and my ID let us in (thankfully. I was a little nervous because my card seems to work only half the time) and we made it through the labyrinthine parking structure to faithful Swift (our car, which is named after the fox in David the Gnome, a children’s television program from the early nineties that I didn’t actually believe existed until Jason showed me the opening title sequence on YouTube when we were dating). We dropped the Carters at their car in VA and made it home safe and sound.

(Since I like to know these things, Jason and my Saturday walking totaled 7.5 miles across the city. Not too shabby.)

all the newseum that’s fit to print

I felt worlds better on Saturday morning, so we headed out to the Newseum. It’s one of the few DC museums we haven’t hit yet, mostly because of the (kind of steep) admission price. We secured some complimentary tickets, though, which had to be used by the end of the year.

We normally (every day, if your name is Amanda) metro into the city, but there was a ton of track work going on so we decided to drive and park at Georgetown. I embarrassed myself more than a little bit when I couldn’t figure out the ID card swiper and we had to go around the block and re-enter the structure, but all worked out and we parked successfully and walked the

Our Newseum experience began with the 4-D movie (apparently the fourth dimension is moving seats) about the history of news and an FBI exhibit, after which we headed to the top floor and worked our way down.

The view from the sixth floor was phenomenal.

“I can see Russia from my house.”

Both of us were impressed with the scope of the museum. We could have spent hours in any one exhibit, except maybe the presidential pets. We especially enjoyed Tim Russert’s office and the presidential photography hall, but I think the 9/11 section was the overall favorite.

Social media interactive station. How web 2.0 are we?

Right before leaving we saw the eight sections of the Berlin Wall and East German guard tower and the (unpictured) fallen Lenin statue. Very cool.

Overall, the Newseum rocks and made me secretly long to be a journalist a la His Girl Friday (or maybe All the President’s Men).

xhdlkfjsplkdjf = head hitting the keyboard

I would really just like it to be Saturday, thankyouverymuch. This has been a long week. Part of the problem is that I’ve stayed up late every night catching up on my current Law & Order (1995) habit. I’m constantly baffled that scrunchies were once considered appropriate professional wear for an A.D.A.

Here’s how the week went (post-lame-commute-but-awesome-art Monday):

On Tuesday I went grocery shopping. This is by no means a comprehensive list, but sometimes I just really love my handwriting.

When I got home, I fixed two of my dresser drawers with gorilla glue, which made me feel like the Wonder Woman of household repair projects. I got together later that night with my friend/visiting teacher from our ward. She’s hilarious and lives close and we had a good time.

The ward book club’s annual pick-the-books dinner was on Wednesday at House of Fortune. I triple-checked the start time so I wouldn’t turn up an hour early like last time. 2.75 hours and a table-full of tasty Chinese food later, the club had selected twelve books for the coming year. I’m presenting The Sun Also Rises sometime in the summer (July, maybe?) because they’d already read my first-favorite book, Angle of Repose, a previous year. Also: though no longer an integral part of my life, the Sanders-Brown dinner was Wednesday night in Lexington!

Thursday I got up early to rock my long run, which always makes me feel great the rest of the day (but obviously not at 5:30 when I’m rolling out of bed)

I had delicious leftover Thai green curry (simmer sauce from Trader Joe’s + chicken + yukon gold potatoes + pineapple) for lunch and a busy day at work. When I got home, I made a quick pasta with red sauce and loads of fresh mozzarella for dinner, binged on leftover Michelle Obama’s cookie dough (which, Roni, is now gone without ever being baked!), then drove out to Leesburg. Rashelle, Patience, and Rashelle’s mom and sister-in-law and I got frozen yogurt, then went to the ten o’clock showing of Twilight: Breaking Dawn Part II. This was my first ever Twilight movie experience and I’ve not read the books, so I was a little confused. Rashelle answered my questions in furitive whispers, though, and I got the gist of what was going on.

I was feeling pretty alert after the movie, so I drove home around 12:30 AM instead of crashing at the Oswald’s. Of course, when I got home I was really awake, which called for more Law & Order! It’s this sort of irresponsible behavior that makes me feel like I’m actually fifteen years old.

Now it’s Friday! I woke up surprsingly early and squeezed in another good run at the gym, bringing my total mileage for the week to seventeen. I can live with that.  I thought about taking myself out to dinner tonight, but I think instead I’m going to throw together some pasta and eat the rest of my 72% cacao Swiss chocolate bar.  I need to do some cleaning and maybe some laundry and go to bed early.

Saturday will be my favorite day of this week…and of November so far.

Other things to which I am looking forward:
- Picking up our new phones. My current one has lost the ability to vibrate. (Aside: you know what kills me? My MacBook laptop, which I received in 2006, only has 60GB of memory. You can get an iPhone 5 with 64 GB! Technology.)
- Thanksgiving. Having the day after Thanksgiving off to lounge about in a turkey coma and not even think about going Black Friday shopping.
- Only two more full weeks of work in 2012, thanks to some schedule-finessing by yours truly.
- 37 days until Christmas Eve (which I might like a little more than Christmas Day).

lots of walking (for a monday)

My commute is usually easy. Shuttle to metro + orange line to red line + <5 minute walk = 50 minutes of all-to-myself reading time.

Today I drove to the metro (since my spouse did not need the car today), parked, and was surprised to find a mass of people on the platform. I boarded a train, but it was offloaded at the next station because of scheduled track maintenance between the next three stops. I hadn’t even thought to look online, but apparently Veterans’ Day is a low-capacity commuting day perfect for weekday repairs.

My fellow work-goers and I were herded onto city buses bound for Clarendon, where I jumped back on the orange line and sat for fifteen minutes until the train was crammed full of people. I assumed the rest of the commute wouldn’t be bad. Wrong again. I reached the red line and learned that the next train (which usually comes in less than three minutes) wouldn’t be along for twenty minutes. I gave up and walked the remaining 1.2 miles to work. Total travel time = 2 hours (much of it spent reading 24/6. More on that later).

This morning was beautiful, though, so I didn’t mind the walking so much. Maybe if I ever wake up early enough I’ll do it again sometime.

Next year I’m taking Veterans’ Day off.

It’s a crime to stay inside all day when the high is 72 degrees (on doce de Noviembre!), so I went back to the National Gallery today at lunch to see the Roy Lichtenstein retrospective. It was pretty awesome.

Granted, I did think after three rooms that I’d seen the entire exhibit and was disappointed. Then I realized I’d actually come in halfway through, so I went back and saw his earlier work, which took up something like six additional rooms. I did a quick run-through of the other upstairs modern gallery and got a drink next to the Dali Last Supper (worst display location ever, but stellar piece).

I get the feeling we won’t have many more days like this in 2012.