it’s the most wonderful time of the year again — when summer flex hours start, and good conservationists get every other Friday off.

a couple months ago, the lady and i were looking for photographs of mount pleasant to hang on our walls when i realized that i hadn’t taken any — like none in the four years i’ve been here, outside of a couple batches from snowstorms.

so, during my flex days this year i’m going to spend some time wandering around the neighborhood.

this week i knocked off all of ingleside, 18th and 19th streets, most of lamont street and half of newton. map of the route here, and photos below.

not sure what the heck we were doing, but we completely flaked on the cherry blossoms this year.

mount pleasant is a lot of things, but “hot bed of Yoshino cherry trees” is sadly not one of them — though i guess that means it’s also not a “hot bed of tourists in ugly shorts jacked up to their necks.”

you win some, you lose some.

why, yes — that is a bicycle painted blaze yellow and hung from a tree. oh, and a three-wolf-moon-worthy mural painted on a garage door.

i [heart] mount pleasant.

anybody looking for a two-bedroom condo in dc? if so, boy, have i got a deal for you …

we’re adding some local flavor to our place, celebrating how awesome mount pleasant is.

considering i’ve take over 9,000 photos since i’ve moved here, i figured it would be super easy — but it turns out exactly three photos of them depicted mount pleasant (well, and didn’t include either baby sparklet or snow).

i need to get out into the neighborhood more.

the photos we used are above — with special thanks to the photographers.

we might be in the market for a house.

we’re not moving — at least, not moving out of mount pleasant — but there are a couple things going on that make us (er, the lady sparkler) think that it could be time to upgrade.

• interest rates are down 2+ percentage points from when we signed a last mortgage. when you add that savings to what we pay each month in condo association fees, we can have about a 50% larger place without paying a dime extra per month.
• we were planning on moving in the next 2 to 3 years anyway, and *man* our place seems a lot smaller than it did, saaaay 16 months ago.
• the market has stabilized enough that we’re sure we can get all our money out of our current place.
• the economy is starting to show signs of life again, which means that housing prices only have one direction to go (and that would be “up”).

that said, if we can’t find a nice little fixer-upper row house in mount pleasant that we can afford now, we’ll just stay put until we’re on the other side of our daycare payments.

we love our neighborhood, and haven’t given up on the idea that we can raise baby sparklet here. we love our friends, we love our nanny. we love the fact that our vote for federal office is basically meaningless (wait, scratch that last one).

and, besides, there aren’t a lot of other options …

within D.C., we certainly wouldn’t move east of 16th street (too speculative), nor south or west of mount pleasant (we couldn’t afford it), and there really isn’t much in D.C. that’s north of us (all residential, little commerce, reduced transit).

outside of D.C., we have the same problems we’ve always had: new england and chicago are too cold (for my beloved); texas is utterly without seasons (for me); the pacific northwest is really far away and people there actually slow down at yellow lights (the latter is a “third rail” for the lady sparkler).

and besides, we all know how much my beloved likes change.

our neighborhood takes halloween very seriously.

kids flock in from all around the city. streets are shut down to make room for the hordes. there is even a certifiable street-to-street rivalry to see who’s going to throw the biggest block party.

sparklet spent her first real Halloween — last year didn’t count for obvious reasons — over on hobart street where every house was open for trick-or-treaters, at least one in every three houses was decorated, and one house even had a fully scripted halloween performance (“haunted hobart street has talent!”) with scheduled showings at 7 and 9pm.

unfortunately, sparklet’s wasn’t doing so well.

it’s officially 7 to 10 days after her first year vaccinations, which is when all the nasty side effects are supposed to kick in — and boy are they kicking in. she made a good run at trick or treating, but just didn’t make it very far before the crankiness consumed her.

she did, however, get her first real lick of candy — eg. not through a wrapper or cardboard box — a cherry dum-dum lollipop which mommy dutifully unwrapped for her.

she made it through three of four licks before she took it out of her mouth … by the wrong end … got her hands all sticky … got the lollipop stuck to her hands … and spent 30 seconds trying to toss it on the ground, to absolutely no avail.

priceless.

sparklet and i were in samber market today — buying our usual array of beer and ice cream — when sparklet started flirting with one of the incredibly nice korean owners of the place.

the nice lady grabbed a little bear keychain from off the wall, and gave it to us gratis.

i love mount pleasant.

p.s. sometime when i’m feeling brave, i’m going to ask the owners about their life story — their english isn’t great, but there is a picture of the husband in full marine dress uniform behind the cash register.

something tells me there is a great story there.

i was walking around the neighborhood today, trying to get baby sparklet to take a nap, when i passed a stressed out mom dealing with three boys on bicycles.

one of the boys was babbling about how his bike was a rocketship, and how he was having a really hard time making sure it didn’t explode.

i smiled, inwardly, thanking heaven for little girls.

half a block later, i see a 6 year-old girl in a fancy pink fairy dress, pell-melling down the hill at full speed, oblivious to the traffic, screaming:

i … am … SUPER PINKY!!!!!

now *that’s* more like it.