2000-08-15 - 12:32pm

On the internal soundtrack: "Old McDonald". No kidding. "Here a moo, there a moo, everywhere a moo moo..."

So, I have been very, very busy. Lots going on at work and at home. I'll probably have to write a couple entries to talk about it all.

WEDNESDAY 8/9

Went out to dinner with R&R at Jaleo. This was great! We hadn't seen them in nearly 6 months and we had fun catching up. The food was fun -- we ordered 12 tapas and shared them all. My favorites were the orange duck and a diced cucumber/tomato/bell pepper salad.

R&R were our next-door neighbors when we were still on Harrison Street. They bought the house next door just after we signed the contract on the house we live in now. Just when we decide to leave, some people we really like move in. Figures.

In the past we haven't had as much luck with neighbors. We could never make eye contact with the Harrison Street neighbors. In our apartment before that, there was a couple across the hall that had very loud fights, and when the guy would leave the apartment, she'd throw his clothes over the balcony at him. Back in San Jose, we had "The Bradys", Greg and Cindy, living beneath us. They also had knock-down drag-out fights, usually at 3am. Now my hearing sucks, but even I could hear the Bradys screaming at each other and slamming doors and it was scary.

Anyways. Jaleo is in a building called the Lansburgh, which appears to have apartments or condos in it. I got all excited and suggested to Poindexter that we could live there if we don't like Philly. He fussed a little about the MCI center traffic, but there was an event there that night and it wasn't too bad. The location of the building is great -- right near the two exits off I-395 that nobody seems to know about, so it's quiet and convenient to everything.

FRIDAY 8/11

Shortly after Poindexter got home, I "attacked" him, as he likes to say. After that he forced me to take a nap with him. I find a nap with Poindexter very, very hard to resist and he knows it. I was good and only napped for 15 minutes -- any longer and I would have missed the Friday skate and the weather was too good to pass it up.

Somehow after all this indulgence I still had the energy for the skate. Amazing. I met a girl there who was from Sweden and is absolutely nuts about DC. She says "There's so much to do here! So many different people! Last night we were skating around and happened upon a concert on the Mall and we stopped to listen and talked to some people from Georgia..."

That's what it's like here. I think DC is underrated and misunderstood because people associate it with the federal government and coke-snorting mayors. Well, we've got that, but there's so much more here and I'm just beginning to discover it all. Culture, great food, architecture, beautiful parks and gardens, all crammed into one small city. The more I learn about it the less I ever want to leave it, although family is a pretty strong pull and Poindexter refuses to pay the DC taxes. I can see his point, but still...

SATURDAY MORNING 8/12

I actually managed to drag my ass out of bed at 8am. I had told A and her mom (Aunt J) that I'd be over to help with packing and the babies around 9. I would have been on time, too, except that I got all sidetracked with last-minute preparations for S & B's arrival.

There wasn't a whole lot of packing left to do -- M had done most of it, really. We packed all the books in the basement and a few other odds and ends and that was it.

The twins are hilarious. They both smile constantly, hold themselves upright, and make a lot of noise. B in particular likes to sit and kick his legs and just yell. He was sleepy while I was there and was a little cranky, so I gave him a bottle and he fell asleep. Just like my mother told me a few weeks ago, he gave a big, heavy, shuddering sigh and then he was *really* out. It was so amazing.

S absolutely adores standing. If you hold her up in front of you, she'll stand on your lap and put her arms straight out on either side and look around her. Then a smile grows and grows on her face, a look of rapturous delight -- "Hey! Wow! I'm standing!" It's so funny. I propped one of her hands on the back of the chair we were sitting on, and she used her other hand to grab a spoke on the chair back. Later on Aunt J came by to pick her up and she did NOT want to let go.

Crawling time is coming up soon (they're 5 months old tomorrow), but I wouldn't be surprised if S skips that and goes straight to crawling. She's been into standing since before she could hold her neck up.

I told Aunt J I was trying to keep a journal, so that I could have something to look back on and remember each stage of my life. I said that I was having trouble finding stuff to put in it -- that getting excited about my parsley growing on the porch didn't seem exciting enough.

She said, "Well, think of it this way: If you were reading a journal kept by a pioneer woman as she crossed the wilderness on her way to a new home, and she wrote about growing her parsley, would you think it was boring?"

I guess I wouldn't. History used to bore me to death in school because it was all about wars and governments. What I'm interested in is the history of *everyday life*. What did people do on a daily basis? What did they think about? How did they interact with other people and their families? It may seem boring to me today, but who knows what the world will be like 25 years from now? By then growing parsley could be an antiquated exercise.

Anyways. We finished up the books, had lunch, made A go take a nap, convinced S to do the same by sticking her in the swing, got B happy and then I went home to see our weekend houseguests.

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