Alive

I'm alive. My phone has been in quiet-and-ignored mode since Emma got here, and my laptop has been off. This was meant to be no slight to anyone. I simply wanted to prioritize my focus, and it was refreshing. I'll start returning calls and texts during my lunchbreak today.

We ate at El Ranchero, an Italian restaurant, Nathans (in Georgetown), P.F. Changs, and Andy's Bed and Breakfast. These are places in which dining alone would be somewhat awkward, but with Emma they couldn't have been better.

Emma seemed to get a kick out of Georgetown. It's a scenic area with plenty of interesting shops and well-dressed and exciting passers by. We stopped in at a few and thoroughly soaked up the atmosphere. Since we drove, we took an evening motor tour of the District passing by the Whitehouse, the Supreme Court, the Capitol, a brief and not necessarily planned excursion by the FDR Memorial, the Pentagon, the Air Force Memorial, and an inventive detour through west Arlington.

Then we drank whiskey that we finally managed to procure from the state-run Alcohol Beverage Control stores. It is located half a block from my workplace and closes early, so I prognosticate some lunchbreak liquor runs when I run low in the coming months; I can only hope I run into my colleagues while I'm there.

During our visit to the National Mall, we managed to cover the Hirshhorn Museum of Modern Art and then the National Gallery. We saw a variety of cool pieces at the Hirshhorn though were occasionally faced with the typical dilemma of modern art appreciation: are you looking at a work of art or a fire code regulation? We made sort of a whirlwind tour of the National Gallery seeing several rather old busts of important people (Washing-ton, for example) and a few positively grand paintings (Lake Lucerne being my favorite).

The Spy Museum and the Newseum are planned for the next trip.

Emma has photos, and she left me her pink point-and-shoot camera (the one that has incriminated so many of us on Facebook). I'll take higher resolution photos from now on.

It was a fun visit and I can't wait to fly her back here sometime soon. Now that she's back in ATL, your lives can go back to being interesting again.

Heh. You know you like abuse, gentle reader.