When I got back to the inn, I changed clothes and came downstairs to head out for dinner.  I’d planned to wander a little and then eat a light dinner and come back early so I could get a normal night’s sleep.  (Last night was not normal, and not long enough.)  I ducked into the parlor to grab a cookie (they set out tea and they have the BEST cookies), and I met two women who had just checked in.  We chatted a little, then a little more, and before I knew it, it had been an hour.  I decided not to keep them any longer, since I knew they wanted to head out for dinner, and they invited me along, so we continued chatting for the next three hours.  They’re staying in one of the other houses here, so I’ll probably see them again.  Hope I do.  I liked them. 

(We had dinner at Puerini’s, and I had garlic sauteed with garlic, shallots, garlic, butter, garlic, herbs, and garlic in a white wine sauce.  With clams.  And garlic.  That’s how it feels (and tastes) now, anyway.  But it was good.)

I finished my Dresden Files book while waiting to board.  I have another one with me, but I’m going to try a new mystery writer first.  New to me.  Has anyone heard of Lawrence Block?  I read about his books somewhere (almost everything I buy comes from a recommendation now), but I can’t remember where.  So far so good.  The book is called “The Burglar in the Library”, the main character owns a used bookstore, and he’s heading to an English-style bed and breakfast to look for a possibly non-existent rare book.  Just my cup of tea.

Yesterday, John and I went to Erik’s place to help him celebrate getting his Masters degree in International Commerce and Policy.  (Erik, did I get it right?)

Hey, ten-minute warning.  I’ll finish that later.

Much later:

I’m in my hotel room after a trip to a nail salon (yay for pretty toes) and a trip to Kroger for breakfast and lunch supplies for the week.  Food and relaxing are at the top of my list for right now, so, um, bye.

(This is me putting off thinking about tomorrow.  Except not really.  Just burying it.)

Oh, and Spokeit, guess what song was playing on the radio as I left DC?  That’s ri-ight, the ubiquitous (big word points) “Hey, Soul Sister”.  The universe is telling me (and everyone within range of a radio, Sirius or otherwise) to go to the Train concert this summer.

Last thing about yesterday: as I left the restaurant and headed across the street, a guy I’ve never seen before flagged me down and tried to pick me up.  !  He was carrying a couple of cloth Safeway bags full of groceries, and he started chatting me up as we walked down the block.  !!  Was I from around there (no, I told him practically West Virginia), could he have my phone number (“Well, I’m married…” “You’re married?!?”  “… and I was just on my way to pick him up.”), can he call me anyway and we’d just be friends and do I live with my husband (“Of course I live with him.”  “Then I guess I shouldn’t call.”), and then he chatted about the party he was planning for the Lakers game tonight, and then he crossed the street to his apartment building.  And I heaved a sigh of relief because I really don’t know how to handle that kind of situation.  That sounds ridiculous, I know (it’s just talking), but people don’t approach me on the street and start talking unless they need directions or something.  And people certainly don’t hit on me.  Or whatever that was.

And now, let’s add to the list of, shall we say, interesting people I meet on airplanes.  On my flight to Atlanta today, I had an aisle seat in an exit row that only had one other seat (on the window).  A quick glance at my seatmate showed a guy a little older than me, tall, slender, with majorly muscled arms.  (He was wearing a black tank top.)  He was on the phone and was doing that thing some guys do with their voices when they’re talking to women, sort of softening it.  (Did I mention he was good-looking?  He was.  Very.)   Of course I was eavesdropping (it only looked like I was reading), and it sounded like he was talking to his mother.  The flight attendant came by to make sure we were comfortable with the responsibilities that go along with sitting in an exit row, and as she left, he turned to me and said (with a very cute grin), “If it comes to that, I will eat that door.”  It was funny, we laughed, and it turns out he used to be a Marine.  Recon.  Badass.  That helps to explain the tattoos on his arms.  He didn’t seem like your typical macho Marine, though.  He came across more like the perfect sensitive Marine, the ones that only exist in the movies.  He said he was a writer and had recently been published.  What kind of book?  Philosophy.  Oh, and he’s a physical trainer?  I can see that.  And an actor?  Busy guy.  Anything I might have seen?  HBO and The History Channel?  Wow.  And he works for veterans’ groups.  And plans to start a gym in New York that will double as a rehab/counseling center where ex-soldiers conditioned to violence can work on moving past all that.  And apparently, he’s for real.  I wasn’t sure for a while.  He’s this guy.  Also, this guy.  And he’s trying to decide whether he wants to work on a Discovery Channel project next (“One Shot, One Kill” – he was a sniper) or something with Spike TV or one of three other TV projects.  And all of that came AFTER he talked about the training and the killing people and the violent episodes and close calls and how he worries about the guys in his unit who may not have been as strong as he is and can’t break away from the mercenary work they’re doing now that they’re out of the military.  WAY more information (and way more intensely delivered) than I was expecting to take in from a guy I’ve never met before on an hour and a half-long flight to Atlanta.  But he was nice, and he’s got a lot of projects going on, but the ones he seems to take the most seriously are the ones helping his friends and helping veterans.  He was sincere and had been through a lot, and I got off the plane wanting to help him (after I talked to John to hash out how strange the whole experience was).  Oh.  Oh!  How could I leave this part out?  So he’s worked with HBO (he played himself in “Generation Kill”, which started as a book by a reporter who was embedded with his unit in Iraq), and he’s met Ridley Scott and he’s done work in England and HE’S FRIENDS WITH EMMA THOMPSON!  He was her personal trainer for a bit.  How cool is that?  I’m two degrees away (or is that one?) from Emma Thompson!

We were right on schedule to get out of the house with plenty of time to get to DC (I’m meeting some people – details will follow after our meetup), but then John checked his work email.  Apparently, something didn’t go quite right after an update and everyone’s panicking (probably unnecessarily), so John’s trying to calm them all down.  I’m waiting to find out if he’ll be stuck working or if he can still go with me.  End result?  We’re running late.  But, since this is a group party-thing I’m going to, it’s not that big a deal if I’m not right on time.  And since I’m leaving tomorrow for a week, I plan to only spend an hour or two at the thing anyway.  I’ll probably want to stay longer (I already want to stay longer), but I don’t want to leave tomorrow feeling like I hardly saw John this weekend.

Oh, we’re going.  More later.

TV, anyone?

I love the theme song for Treme (on HBO).  John and I haven’t decided if we want to keep watching it, but we had to watch the first two episodes.  Required viewing in this family.  Why?  Check out the concierge in the second episode.  She’s related to ME!  How cool is that?  The concierge in question (who Steve Zahn waved at!) is my soon-to-be-famous sister-in-law.  So, you know, kind of related to me.  Close enough.

Candy, I thought you were great.  Even though we were watching for you, we were caught by surprise when you did appear, and then there was much squealing and pausing and rewinding and rewatching.  (I’ll take credit for most, if not all, of the squealing.)  We couldn’t possibly delete the episode from our DVR, of course.  We’ll have to show it to everyone who comes over.  And we started with Jess on Saturday night.  So for the next…I don’t know how long, everyone who enters the house will have to watch Candy’s scene in Treme.    You think I’m kidding?  Just wait.

Go visit Curiosity. She’s listing her priorities for life (and making fun of Victoria’s Secret models).  Who can resist?

You know what bugs me?  (In a little way, not a big way.)  Finding a blog I like, and then realizing they don’t update every day.  And it’s not just that they don’t update every day (’cause that’s okay.  People are allowed to lead busy lives and do other things and NOT update the blog every single day.  Yes, you have my permission.), but then they don’t update every few days, and then it’s been a week, and then two months.  It’s so disappointing!  I bookmarked you because I liked you!  I liked to read you!  And then you abandoned me.  How could you?  *sob*  (Mom, I’m not talking about you, since I talk to you every day, and you tell me the things you would blog about.  I feel up to date on you.  But if I didn’t actually know you, and I found your blog some other way, then yes, I’d be talking about you.  (Was that too harsh?  I didn’t mean to be harsh.))  I have five or six blogs bookmarked that fall in this category, and since I already don’t have the time read all the blogs I bookmark (but I really want to), I may have to clear those few out.

“Zannah, why haven’t you gotten me a Les Paul?”

“Clearly, I don’t love you enough.”

We watch a lot of TV.  Not as many movies, but we’ve seen a few lately.  We watched Broadcast News last weekend.  Both of us confused it with Network (another one we haven’t seen), and we didn’t figure out that we were thinking of an entirely different movie until Broadcast News was over.  Where was the rant?  Oh, right.  Wrong movie.  We watched Some Kind of Wonderful tonight, but I was a little disappointed by it.  I’m not sure what I was expecting.

List for this weekend:

• Run
• Clean
• Groceries
• Swing by the office to drop this week’s evaluations off and make some copies (Yes, I peeked, and yes, they were nice to me again.    Thankfully.)
• Make sure Jess is okay after Chuck gets on the plane (he’ll be gone for three months)
• CATCH UP WITH MY BLOG FRIENDS
• Library (to get a new book to listen to during my commute)
• Bank

Roxy (who’s doing well, thanks for asking) just gave me a look that said she wished we’d just go to bed already.  Don’t we know we’re keeping her up?

*Edited to add the last two items on my list.  I remembered them this morning.

One week ago today, John and I got up ridiculously early (for a Sunday morning) (no, 5:20 is always ridiculously early) in order to get to DC (via metro) so he could run in the Cherry Blossom Ten Mile Run.  His training had completely derailed, since we had three feet of snow clogging all the paths and streets, and then when it finally melted, he got sick, he was working late, he had schoolwork – everything came together to make it hard for him to be ready.  He ran the Army Ten-Miler about three and a half years ago, but he hadn’t hit that distance since then.  And since he didn’t feel prepared, he was half-convinced the sweeper bus was going to pick up and take him out the race.  He had to keep up a 14-minute mile pace to avoid being picked up.  He knew (and I definitely knew) he’d do better than that, but that didn’t stop him from being nervous.

We go to the metro at Dunn Loring and got on the train.  Everyone who got on that train, at every stop, was a runner.  (They’re the only ones crazy enough to be going to DC that early.)  By the time we got into the district, the train was packed, and we all got off at the Smithsonian stop.  I wish I’d had my camera out because I looked back over my shoulder as we rode the escalator up and saw that the platform next to the train was one solid mass of people.  It looked really cool, but since I was part of that mass, I couldn’t get into my bag.  (I was playing sherpa, so I had the backpack to hold all sweatshirts, towels, water, etc.)

We followed the crowd from the metro to the grounds around the Washington Monument.  The race started in waves, so they didn’t expect all 15,000 people to be at the starting line at once.  The first wave was scheduled to go at 7:40, with the last wave at 8:00.  John was in the red wave, which I think was the second one.  All John had to do was pin on his number and go.  Of course, we’d just commuted in for more than an hour, so John (and every other runner) needed to find a port-a-potty.  Fortunately, there were tons of them.  Unfortunately, probably 7500 other runners had the same urge.  We joined one of the REALLY long lines and started to worry.  It didn’t look like it’d be possible for him to make it to the front of the line before the last wave started.  (It didn’t matter which wave he joined, so missing his wave wasn’t part of the worry.)

We waited in line for a while, and then he sent me off to find any alternatives.  I ran across 14th Street (near the starting line) and found another row of port-a-potties with NO LINES.  I raced back to John, waved him out of his line, and sent him running in that direction.  Feeling much better, he found me again as the next to last wave was starting, and we got him in the crowd.  And it was a crowd.  SO many people.  They were sent off, but they were packed in so tightly that they all walked for another few minutes.  So I walked along with them, outside the railing.

John in that crowd. The race has started, but nobody's running yet.

There they go.

I found a great spot along the rail right by the finish line (I was already there when  I look that last picture), so, along with some other very enthusiastic spectators, I shouted myself hoarse cheering on the finishers.  Long before John came in, Erik and Margaret joined me at the finish line, bringing much-needed caffeine.  We cheered John across the line, and then headed for our meetup point.  Here’s Erik, convinced he can spot John in the sea of people:

And here’s John, triumphant and sweaty.  He finished almost four minutes faster than his last 10-miler time.

From there, we hopped the metro out to Ballston to have a yummy brunch with Erik and Margaret at Whitlow’s, and then we went home, where both of us collapsed of exhaustion, even though only one of us deserved the rest.    Go John!

Actually, here’s a before picture, no trellis yet, with John hard at work doing…something.  On a ladder.

And here’s the finished product.  From the yard…

…and from the deck.

Since I had my camera out, I figured I’d take some pictures of the yard when it’s at its best.  And the dogs.  So here’s most of the backyard, with my flower bed in need of mulching.  Maybe next weekend.

Here’s the rose bush that’s trying to take over the deck.

Technically, that’s two rose bushes.  Here are few pictures of the dogs taking advantage of the shade.

It’s breezy and the wind chimes are…chiming, I guess, and we could hear them clearly if the windows were open, but did you see how high the pollen count was today?  My car is covered, and even though I was outside most of the day, there’s no way I’m letting clouds of pollen get into the house.

Most of the day got away from us, but all the chores are done (minus the grocery shopping) and John asked for two hours to himself so he can concentrate on his project for school before we settle in with dinner and maybe a movie.   He’ll have to spend much of tomorrow on his project, too, but at least he’ll have done something today, and he won’t have to worry about the lawn and stuff.  And tomorrow morning, we can catch up on the four hours of Lost we have saved on the DVR.  Hopefully, the rest of my weekend will include nothing more taxing than a morning run tomorrow, catching up on TV, lots of Internet time (I have to get my fix in on the weekends, now that I know what my weeks at work look like), a trip to Wegman’s (hardly a chore), and some play time outside with the dogs.  Maybe at the dog park.

For now, I need a shower.  And comfy clothes.  And I’m in for the night.  Oh, one more thing for tomorrow – set up a couple of lunch dates with a couple of friends.

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