back and forth back and forth

The guys are in my apartment doing some painting so I grabbed my laptop and am down here in the lobby hanging out while they finish. Right down the hall a married couple owns two units that are across from each other.

They do a lot of going back and forth and seem very anal about locking the doors.

This is what I've been hearing pretty much constantly for the past 25 minutes:

Person leaves Apartment #1: Deadbolt turns from the inside, door opens, shuts, keys in, lock deadbolt. Two steps across the hall, keys in, turn deadbolt, open door, close door, lock deadbolt.

Person leaves Apartment #2: Deadbolt turns from the inside, door opens, shuts, keys in, lock deadbolt. Two steps across the hall, keys in, turn deadbolt, open door, close door, lock deadbolt.

Person leaves Apartment #1: Deadbolt turns from the inside, door opens, shuts, keys in, lock deadbolt. Two steps across the hall, keys in, turn deadbolt, open door, close door, lock deadbolt.

Person leaves Apartment #2: Deadbolt turns from the inside, door opens, shuts, keys in, lock deadbolt. Two steps across the hall, keys in, turn deadbolt, open door, close door, lock deadbolt.

Seriously?!?! If you are going to be going back and forth so rapidly, just leave the freaking deadbolt open! Honestly! This is not Beirut, no one is going to storm in, the building is secure, it's 4:12pm, it just seems like such a hassle to deal with the deadbolt when they're obviously making MULTIPLE trips and back forth.

Sheesh!

Holding Hands

Natasha napping with her little paw wrapped around my finger.



She's been sleeping all day long! Lucky girl.

Misc Musings

1. Where is this year going? I can't believe the 4th of July - and my 30th not too far after - is next weekend. Yikes! I feel like summer should just be starting but we're already closing in on July.

2. As an early birthday present from my father I got a Roku! This thing is awesome. It's a little box that you connect to your TV and allows you to watch your Netflix Instant movies and TV shows on your TV! I feel like I basically have HBO. You start it up and it conencts to your queue and the rest of Netflix's Watch Instantly inventory. Right now I'm watching some old episodes of Law & Order: SVU, earlier I was watching old episodes of The Office. It's GREAT, just like channel surfing except with wayyyy more choices. Thanks Dad!

3. Today we met up for lunch at a place called Locolat Cafe and had a great meal. I had savory herb waffles with prosciutto and parmesan cheese. He had a smoked salmon and cheese panini with spinach. We passed on dessert - the summer slimdown is in full swing.

4. My bookshelves... omg... so close and so far! My carpenter came over yesterday to take one final measurement. Construction has started but he needed to confirm one detail and talk about some of the finishings. He said it should only be another day and a half for construction, then we have to figure out where to do the painting - either in the workshop or at my apartment after installation, or a combination of the two - and then we're done! I can't wait. Pictures will be posted.

Sailing

Kicked off the summer solstice with a nice long sail down the Anacostia following by amazing steaks, pasta salad, corn on the cob, and beer grilled at the marina. And I'm not even sunburned!

It's been so hot here - in the mid-90's for weeks on end, and DC always seems to just miss the thunderstorms! They brush right by the city and give us a half-hearted mention but nothing satisfactory and nothing to break the heat.

MS White House

This humidity is really crushing my runs. I just find it very difficult to run strong in the heat and humidity. I know it takes time to acclimate and I'm working on it, but in the mean time, discouragement sets in. So I took advantage of cooler temps and cloud cover to run the long way home from work today.

First I jogged up to Meridian Hill park, tackled a whole bunch of steps, quads screaming! I made sure to do some work along the way:



See the MS 13 carved into the bench? Second rung from the top.

Then I headed down 16th St to the White House and cut across the Mall, taking Independence Ave to Washington Ave and around to my home.



Overall the run was just under an hour, which is the longest I've done since the weather turned. I was sweating and tired when I got home but encouraged and sunburn free.

Splurge!

I did something today that I have rarely done since discovering coupon savings... splurged on groceries. AND I did it quite cheaply! I'm proud of myself... I got some necessities for the week and a couple of nice treats and still stayed under $25.

Necessities:
2 red bell peppers
2 heads garlic
1 package baby spinach
10 Dannon yogurts
1 vidalia onion

Splurges:
Mixed olives from the olive bar
Hummus
Italian sausages
Raisinets

Subtotal: $34.19
Coupons: $10.00
Total: $24.19
Savings: 29%

Not the best savings rate but I'm very happy with my overall out-of-pocket total!

I've been craving fat lately hence the olives and hummus, and also eating a ton of roasted veggies over greens and/or pasta. So it looks like I'm set for the week and not too far off of my target $40/week budget.

Rave Run

My latest favorite place to run is the National Arboretum. The Arb is a serious gem, a large swath of trails and gardens in the middle of northeast DC. The main loop is about 3ish hilly miles of paved road, with plenty of little offshoots if you want to check out the fern valley, the Asian collections, the conifers, or any other little spot along the way.

At the welcome center is a great koi pond with fish all too accustomed to being fed! For a quarter you can get some fish food out of the vendor and don't the fish know it! They all crowd toward the wall closest to the vendor and look up at you with gaping mouths. Worse than a dog at the dinner table!

Another favorite spot of mine is the bonsai garden. Some trees are over 100 years old. How do you get the job of bonsai curator?? Sounds awesome to me.

Here are some photos (not mine) of the Arb. Can you believe this is right in town? And less than ten minutes by car from my condo.

All Dressed Up and Someplace To Go

Tonight the four of us went to see the Capitol Hill Chorale perform the Georgian Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, the first time this liturgy has been performed since it was written by Zakaria Pavliashvili in 1909.

Unbelievable. Dark, haunting, with harmonies of the type I'd never heard before. The chorale learned the music from a photocopy of a photocopy of the microfilm on which the score was being stored at the Lenin Library in Moscow. The ambassador to Georgia and his family were in attendance; it was a full house!

I dressed up a little bit and even broke out a rarely worn necklace that I picked up in the Yuruan Market in Shanghai a few years ago.

File Under PITA

I came home from work today and there was water all over my bathroom. Turns out something is wrong with my air conditioner unit and it leaked through the trapdoor and into the bathroom itself. Investigation revealed and rusty and potentially cracked condensation pan. The repair guy is coming tomorrow. In the mean time my windows and thrown open and I'm thankful for a little storm that came through and cooled things off.

Unfortunately cleaning up and trying to solve that mystery took a bit of time and by the time I could sit down and think about dinner, I was way beyond starving. I chopped up some peppers and garlic and threw them into the oven to roast and have over greens. Yesterday I purchased a huge tub of salad greens (not cheap!) and was hoping to have healthy dinners for the next week. Well, I opened the tub and all the greens were slimy and gross. I was able to pick a few good ones out but the slime is pervasive. They must have been old - I'm meticulous about storing greens and can usually get them to last over a week.

Sigh... I'm taking tomorrow off for the repair guy AND some good news (my carpenter is coming to take hard measurements for my shelves!) so at least I can look forward to a leisurely morning and an extra hour or so of sleep.

Decisions decisions

Well up until a few days ago I was pretty much set on going back to Asia next year. I've been dying to see the temples in Cambodia.

But now I'm thinking I might like to tour Italy.

Could I have two options on the table that are any further apart? What do you guys think?

What does $14.50 worth of stuff look like?

1 bag Hershey's dark M&Ms
1 12-pack Cottonelle toilet paper
2 bags veggie pasta
1 bad Snyder's pretzels
1 package Sesmark rice cracker
2 Bumblebee tuna bowls
1 2000 Flushes cleaner
1 Satin Care shave gel
1 Tampax
1 4-pack Yoplait yogurt
1 Clearasil face wash
TOTAL BEFORE COUPONS: $43.35
COUPONS AND DISCOUNTS: $28.85
------------------------------
TOTAL: $14.50
SAVINGS: 67%

Bullet Points

Lots of little things to report!

-My dear friend Lezlie moved to Capitol Hill today! Yay! I'm excited for her to be close by... let the happy hours commence! Plus she has a fireplace AND patio at her new place... I can't decide which one I want to make use of first. Um, can I be the third roommate? I'll sleep on the patio :-D

-My dear friend Rosie is moving to Arizona for grad school right after spending the summer in Ireland. I'll miss her but am very excited for this new chapter in her life. Once she gets used to feeling baked (as in an oven, not as in marijuana!) all the time I know she'll enjoy AZ and having all the time she needs to foucs on her photography. Yay Rosie!

-My custom bookshelves are officially in the works! I had the carptenter come by yesterday to go over the plans one more time and take some soft measurements. We talked about shelf depth, spacing, number of shelves, all those fun things. Now he needs to get estimates for the materials and take hard measurements... then build, paint, and install. Shouldn't be long now!

-I am STILL dealing with water damage to my wall from the snow storms. The first painter/repair man didn't get all the wet plaster out so the new paint just bubbled right back up. I had a different person assess the damage and he ended up opening my entire wall all the way down to the brick. Yikes. But seriously, this is what I kinda thought should have happened the first time... so... it's very unselling to look at a torn-apart wall, but we're on our way to FINALLY having this fixed for good.

-The weather has been beautiful and I'm stuck with an injured foot. I've been RICEing it (Rest-Ice-Compression-Elevation) all week and will be ready to go out for a test spin tomorrow... wish me luck. Being laid up is really tough. Running is therapy!

Things Unfinished

I hate having things unfinished. I do not like items pending. I very much enjoy finishing a project (quickly!) and crossing it off the list. Well, it looks like my comfort zone is being pushed in this area, and I don't like it.

I'm still dealing with my water-damaged walls from the snowstorms in February. The roof leak was fixed and the wall scraped and re-painted, however, the paint has bubbled up again and when the painter came today to look at it, he determined that the plaster was still wet. Whether it's still wet because there's still a leak or whether it just hadn't dried before he plastered over it remains to be seen. Right now there's a big splotch of scraped paint and plaster on my kitchen wall. It's a test to see if it bubbles up. Meanwhile, I'm trying to get hold of my management company to get the roofing contractor out to search for leaks.

I just want the wall fixed and painted and to not have to think about it!

I'm also in the process of having some custom bookshelves made. I have a contract, made a deposit, and am waiting for the building to come take measurements. In the mean time, my books are overflowing the bookshelves I have and are piled up on the floor. I hate it, it looks ugly and disorganized. I just want my nice new custom shelves and to have some semblance of order in my library!

All these unfinished projects are enough to give me an anxiety attack!!

April Savings Round-Up

Not a bad month!

Grocery:
Total: $157.89
Savings: $79.35
------------------------
Out-of-Pocket: $78.54
Savings: 50%

Pharmacy:
Total: $20.11
Savings: $8.03
------------------------
Out-of-Pocket: $12.08
Savings: 40%

Ask Tom

The Washington Post food critic is Tom Sietesma. He's a fascinating guy. I want to figure out how to be his friend - or at least his dining companion!

Every week in the Post Magazine, after the weekly restaurant critique, Tom fields a question from a reader. Well, I just sent one in!

Good evening,

I have a question I'd like to ask Tom Sietsema! As an occasional solo diner, I try to be cognizant of the impact that my lower tab has on waitstaff. I don't linger and I tip well. I sit at the bar when I can to keep tables open for larger, more lucrative parties. However, now that the weather is getting nicer and outdoor seating areas are open, I'd like to know Tom's take on solo diners sitting at outdoor tables. Often, outdoor seating is at a premium and I feel guiltier about taking a two- or three-top table outside than I would inside. Does it go against dining etiquette for a solo diner to sit outside? Do waitstaff look down on this practice?

What do my faithful readers think? Much has been writting about the etiquette of solo dining but nowhere have I seen the particular aspect of outdoor dining addressed.

I will be sure to post back if my question gets answered!

Hockey Helplessness

I don't have cable. I love not having cable. I get all the local channels plus a couple of news channels and the CW free over the air through my digital converter box and antenna. I even get Al Jazeera (which is excellent for international news, by the way). I can watch the news, many sit-coms, some sporting events, and am blessedly saved from the irresistable quick-sand that is the Real Housewives series (except when I catch reruns on hulu.com)

This frees up much of my time to read, crossword, exercise, cook, listen to music, play my banjo, and generally lead a more peaceful and productive life that I would if I were glued to the cable for five (plus!) hours per day.

The only time that my cable-free life becomes a burden is during hockey playoff season! Now, I can catch certain games on NBC or watch the good ones at my SO's place. But, most often, I'm relegated to listening to them live on streaming radio.

There's really nothing wrong with this. I've been watching hockey for a long time (over 20 years) and at this point I need to see a game OR hear it, but not both. Watching and listening to games at the same time is considered a luxury at this point!

The downfall of listening to games is the feeling of helplessness that comes with not being able to see things like the teams' energy, the coaches' expressions, all those intangibles that go toward how optimistic I feel about the game.

For example, last night the Wings shot a puck into the Coyotes' net but apparently the entire thing didn't go over the line. NHL rules state that the entire puck must cross the goal line in order for the goal to be counted. Well, it was a close call so the referees had to review the play to make their determination.

I'm sitting here in my living room feeling totally out of control. At least if I could see the game on my TV I could maybe read lips or watch their body language. But having to rely solely on the announcers, as they babble away about various rules and regulations was absolutely driving me nuts!!

These are the things I ponder here in the evenings as I contemplate my life choices and their impact. As seeing as how hockey playoffs are the most important event in my life right now, I figured it was worth a post.

PS, they determined that the first goal was no good. Later in the second period we scored again and again the refs decided to review the shot. They said it was a good one and we ended up winning the game, but it was definitely a stroke-worthy couple of moments.

Back on my Feet

A certain someone is out of town this week and I am taking the opportunity to run every day, go to bed early, eat salads for dinner, and abstain from alcohol. It's amazing how much I can eat and drink when I'm out at a neighborhood bar with excellent company! But no. I've gotta rein it in and get my life back under control after a more-than-slightly indulgent weekend in Atlanta.

"Charge it to the room" are words that are all too easy to say as you see no reason why not to have that third or fourth drink. No credit card to be swiped, nowhere to go except up the elevator... and yikes. Food and drink go down way too easy!

Yep, I'm back on track. How many times have I said that before?

Strangest Phenomenon

I'm heading out of town for the weekend and I thought I would leave you all with a strange, somewhat creepy, and probably paranoid post. Yes, I have nothing better to do than to notice and wonder about these weird things.

I've noticed lately that some Walk/Don't Walk signals that were previously lined up with crosswalks, and thus in full view and facing crossing pedestrians, are now tilted. They don't face the crosswalks anymore and make it impossible to see whether a pedestrian has the walk signal. As some of these intersections have one-way left-turn signals, crossing safely isn't always as obvious as simply waiting for the opposite light to change.

I photographed three of these signals. These are intersections that I walk through on a regular basis and only recently have they not been lined up with the crosswalks. I snapped some photos with my cell phone but it's difficult to tell what I'm talking about. Just look at the actual crosswalks and you'll see that the Walk/Don't Walk signals don't line up with them. They're pointed sort of at the oncoming traffic instead of at the pedestrians across the street (i.e. the perspective of me taking the picture).

20th St & N St (downtown):


16th St & New Hampshire Ave (U St):


1st St & East Capitol St (Capitol Hill):


I know this is a weird thing to notice. But I swear the tilt is recent. Any ideas WHY or HOW these signals have become skewed so they don't line up with the crosswalks??

For the Love of Hockey

My favorite time of year is coming up - NHL playoffs! It hasn't been the best year for my Red Wings. We were sidelined by massive amounts of injuries for the entire first 2/3 of the season and were placed in the middle of pack, standings-wise. But recently we've had our full lines again and shown our true colors, recently winning seven straight games and ten out of thirteen, rocketing from tenth place to fifth, well within the playoff berth.

This average standing actually poises us for playoffs quite nicely. We're matched with the Vancouver Canucks for the first round, another middle-ranked team. But, since we're playing well above our standing, we should have no problem eliminating the Canadians in Round One.

The only annoying thing is our strange placement in the Western Conference. Detroit is so far east yet we're in the Western Conference, so the first round of playoffs tends to be against Vancouver, San Jose, Anaheim, Phoenix... all those teams on the east coast. We basically have to travel all over God's creation and deal with jet-lag issues that other teams don't... but alas, we're quite accustomed to it, and there are no plans to redraw the conference boundaries. So we deal with it.

Right now I'm watching the Capitals vs. Bruins on network TV. I don't care much for the Capitals but I adore two Bruins - Zdeno Charra and Miroslav Satan. I can't get enough of watching them play together, and I'll be especially ecstatic if they beat the DC team.

It's a nice afternoon of hockey watching and Sudoku before I head off for the evening. Windows thrown open, cats lounging around, feeling relaxed and ready for the week. Doesn't get much better than this.

Spring blues?

We've all heard of (and experienced) the winter blues but is it possible to have a touch of the spring blues? The weather is gorgeous, the blossoms are blooming, and yet I have no motivation to run and would love nothing more than to take a nice long nap (except that I have mysteriously lost the ability to nap in the past 6-months).

Maybe I am burned out at work? I'm not particularly bored at the office, nor am I (more) short-tempered (than usual), but I haven't had a break in a while. Well, that's not true, I had two days off in a row in February during the snow storm.

Oh well, I guess there doesn't always have to be a reason to feel down. Just having a low-energy couple of weeks, I guess.