Marathon (look! just put on)
Holy moly, and pass the guacamole! Now THAT was a weekend, and I have only just recovered.
Friday:
Met
mergyeugnau for dinner at Rio Grande Cafe in Bethesda for (ranked in order of importance and recommendedness): conversation, drinks, dinner. The swirled sangria and margaritas are really, really good!
Met
greckler ,
labrynthos , and
painkillerjane at Hotel Rock-n-Roll for the Cobra Kisses and Rattler concerts. Greg and his brother -- who we dropped off with his luggage at a random corner downtown at 4am -- grew up with Rattler, so it was tres amusant to chat with the band members in their normal personas and attires, and then see them on stage. Scott Rattler really is Getting Awesome, and is the perfect foil for his wife, the lead singer of Cobra Kisses. You know it's a good show when you've been burned by a cigarette, your friend is hit in the head by a beer bottle, and the floor is ankle-deep in Schlitz cans at the end of the night. Right?
Saturday:
Mummy picked me up at 9am, so thank goodness I've learned how to do restorative yoga and nap in the shower as I'm purging the smell of ciggies from my hair. Snagged Woo and RaRa, after some lazing about. Headed to Thyme Square for lunch -- the service/wait was slow/forever, juice was grrrrreat, food was ok, dessert was good. I love me some carrot and ginger juice. The Boy enjoyed drawing all over the brown paper table cover. Did a bit of gawking and shopping at the Cathedral.
The rest of the day and night: herding cats and fending off wolves.
HR57 featured three generations of jazz musicians in one quartet. Two tables, so I slouched with
kiparui and baby-faced Dan to muse the beauty of cornbread, appeal of poker, and lure of Atlantic City; watched riled-up
quarblotz herd cats; and watched Woo, RaRa and the Craptain and their crew abuse the heck out of a camera. Must say that -- upon examination of the photos the next day -- 143 tipsy photos can yeild some amusing content.
Club Five, I belive, got its name from several things: being open until five, the ratio of male to female being five to one, and the secondary validation being five times what one might want. Again with the
quarblotz , and add in eight more folks who just don't have the dance stamina that she and I had... We had a go with the dancing until about 4:30 or 5:00 a.m. We are tough -- good thing -- as some people simply won't be told. Next time, some Pinkertons on retainer? Seriously, where can a person go and dance, dance, dance without being molested or having to outmaneouver weasels on the way home? We went by CVS for snackies on the way home, and snuck into the crashpad, where we sat on the kitchen area floor and dined by the light of the microwave to the dulcet sounds of four snoring friends. Slept as the sun came up.
Sunday:
Much awesome brunchlunchness at RaRa's, which was wall-to-wall bedding, and elbow-to-elbow good-natured fun. Menu: grilled cheeses of many types (my favorite being holey country bread with scamorza, tomatos, and onions), french fries, coke, coffee, bloody marys, and ketchup. Others came over, and there was a big 90's Trivial Pursit game, where my favorite answer was Hamster Dance (remixed and updated for this millenium...).
New Year's Eve at the lovely and welcoming home of
shadowking and Tara! The food was amazing (see voice post regarding awesome honey-mustard-chicken), and dipping things (no body parts before 4 am!) in the chocolate fountain was much fun. I did fall short of my drinking goal, however, as there was about an inch and a half left in the bottom of my bottle at the end of the night in the morning. I'm not doing fifty shout outs here, but am sorely tempted ;-)
Monday:
Suffice it to say that I went to work on Monday with unidentified bruises, and reeeeeeeeking of bacon. Bart, here's how you can slow cook the bacon overnight (see method three) and not stand over the stove for two hours in the morning -- although I'll stand next to a stove with you any day!
Had to show at work for a briefing, after which I was amusingly self-conscious to ride in an elevator with fifteen co-workers ("I've showered, but I *still* smell of bacon and bourbon. They'll know... they'll know....").
Tuesday:
Up at crack of dawn to work, which involved riding a school bus (bad flashbacks!), oogling military uniforms and very short haircuts, and handing programs to big wigs. Exhibited great personal willpower not to spit on certain people that make bad choices. And despite his poor Vietnam-era foreign policy decisions, I now have an even bigger thing for Kissinger -- he could read me to sleep any night! ;-)
Had a tasty crab and shrimp quesedilla for lunch, with
nacirema_cult , Princess M, and Little Cooth
Napped, locked myself out of the house, rode the bus, retrieved the spare house key, and had 1/2 price pizza at the Stained Glass pub.
KT arrived at bedtime, in time to witness intense conversation with Sam, who was up and angry for several hours. He is so very smart and wise and aware: "I'm not mad at *you* about all this Mama, I'm mad about how it *is* and about how we don't understand why it is and why it happened."
Wednesday:
Crashed. Slept. Finally got some attention from the apartment managers to get some much-needed repairs done -- like a new mailbox lock, so I don't get more mail stolen! KT and I got a Taco Bell picnic late in the afternoon and sat in Rock Creek Park to eat.
Went to the library -- the Montgomery County Public Library's branch at the intersection of Arcola and Georgia -- where they have a used book store in the basement. For $7.50 I got seven good books: Culinary Institute cookbook, Bailey White, Neil Gaiman, M.D.Masterson, Kubler-Ross, etc. Excellent and recommended!
Up next:
Hockey!
Kiddo's birthday!
Restaurant Week! (who's in?)
Thinking about:
Reading and ruminating at the intersection of philosophy, religion, psychology, and science: the concept of self (Merton, Masterson, Rogers). My interest was piqued by Merton's words about the wrongness of defining ourselves by what we do and the experiences we seek: "...the assumption that my false self, the self that exists only in my own egocentric desires, is the fundamental reality of life to which everything else in the universe is ordered. Thus I use up my life in the desire for pleasures and the thirst for experiences, for power, honour, knowledge and love, to clothe this false self and construct its nothingness into something objectively real. And I wind experiences around myself and cover myself with pleasures and glory like bandages in order to make myself perceptible to myself and to the world, as if I were an invisible body that could only become visible when something visible covered its surface…."