our entrance to the zoo (the bridge, by the petting zoo) has been closed for construction since february, which has put quite the crimp on our spring. wondered by today, and its all back to normal. of course, we didn’t have enough time to make it past the sign, but maybe next week.

my favorite is the guys with the lightsaber in the middle.

while we were out, one of our favorite ways of keeping up with the snow was by following darrow montgomery’s photos at washington city paper’s blog. the above photo was taken about 100 feet from our place (for those who know Mount Pleasant, that “open” sign is at Heller’s Bakery) during the height of the second storm.

i can’t really fathom what it must have been like.

in the end, our long weekend in Austin for Auntie Nadine’s wedding turned out to be an 11 day journey. and, based on the size of the snow drifts, it seems being “stuck” in 40 degrees-and-rainy Austin was probably the best option.

still, it’s good to be home.

PHOTO: the above photo is courtesy Darrow Montgomery and/or the Washington City Paper. check out the rest of Darrow’s work, and the City Desk blog.

Rock bottom came two months later, when I dreamed that my iPhone was stolen … and i woke up bummed that it didn’t actually happen.

Don’t get me wrong, i love my iPhone. It’s arguably the best thing that I have ever owned. it’s just not a phone — because for it to be a phone, i’d have to occasionally get AT&T coverage within the borders of Washington, DC.

It turns out that my problem is a mixture of the science behind AT&T’s network, and location-location-location. The range of each cell tower shrinks as more and more people us that particular tower. In DC, all the towers are on the beltway. When the network gets busy, the coverage retreats from the center of the city towards the edges … which is exactly where I don’t live.

So, once the new version of the iPhone came out (and another gazillion people started using AT&T’s network) my reception went from spotty to non-existant.

When I walk around Mount Pleasant on an average day, I get limited, spotty access to AT&T’s vinatge EDGE network. I’ll average about two hours of cell coverage a day in my house, but more often than not those tenuous bars disappear as soon as I try and make a call.

In Columbia Heights, I don’t even get that … my phone tells me I’m roaming. Last week, I actually ducked into the Columbia Heights metro station because I needed to make a call. As far as i can tell, the best chance of getting a signal up here is to go underground.

To date, my only hope for salvation comes because Gizmodo.com is giving away a new Google Android if you write in to them and tell them why you deserve one. Which I did.

I need it because I’ve had 36 dropped calls in one day … because I regularly get voicemails a week after they are sent and text messages the following morning … because I now give my wife’s cell phone number out to friends and family … because I can’t stand the thought of riding out the last 6 months of my current phone contract.

So far, they have had 12,000+ comments, so I’m guessing i’m not going to be first in line to win. Either way, my contract with AT&T is up this summer, and once it expires, i’ll be long gone.

It turns out that it doesn’t matter how great your phone is, if your network blows chunks.

PHOTOS: Street in Mount Pleasant, DC by Chambo25 via a Creative Commons license; Darth Phone image courtesy Gizmodo.com.

Sparklet’s First Pub: Holiday Party w/ Ashley, Sarah, Jennifer and Ryan @ Tonic, Mount Pleasant, Washington, DC.

we didn’t really care (because we were planning to redo the room anyway, once we got pregnant) and just chalked it up to the previous owner having a short attention span. 

but, I’ve recently discovered that none of our walls are flat.  and our ceilings sag.  and the corners of our walls aren’t actually square.

and now I’m starting to think the previous owners might have known what they were doing (er, not doing) by loosing inerest in molding before all the rooms were done.

I’m not exactly a slouch with wood-working, from a father who raised me with power tools in the garage, to 15 years of theatrical design, and a groomsman generously let me borrow a power mitre saw to do the heavy lifting…

but nothing really prepared me for putting up straight boards around a room with nary a straight line in sight.

it took two weeks to put up forty feet of molding. it took two and a half tubs of wood putty to fill in the gaps between the molding and the ceiling.  it took four sanding blocks to get the joints in the molding to look like someone this side of a three year-old did the carpentry.

in the end, it looks pretty okay … and thank the good sweet lord that I decided against covering the bottom half of the room in wainscotting.  

(I would have been %#$&ing about how hard that was until baby sparklet turned at LEAST 16.)

everything is finally starting to come together.

yes, the elevator.  

shortly after we moved into our building in mount pleasant, I was elected to our unit-owner association’s board.  i wish it had been some Capra-esque moment, but I was the only one at the annual meeting who wasn’t already a board member.

long story short, our management company misplaced $30,000 in funds … money which we had already spent to replace our 30-year old elevator.  now we are short on funds, don’t have a functioning elevator, and even the hippies in the building are starting to riot.

last night I discovered that the only thing separating me from a functioning (though still not entirely paid for) elevator was a 55 by 80 inch fire-resistant carpet, required in order for us to pass inspection.  

not sure why it fell to me (the rest of the board lives two flights of stairs farther up than I) but I decided I couldn’t risk going into november without a functioning elevator.

the lady sparkler pitched in and called five different carpet vendors, one of which had something suitable that fell off the back of his truck, and would be waiting for me after hours at their family’s Afghan-Pakistani restaraunt in northern Virginia.

I picked up the rug and a pound of baklava (the lady sparkler dropped ~27 hints about how good the desserts’ reviews were) and settled in for a long evening of carpet installation.

turns out my carpeting skills gives my talent for breakdancing a real run for their money, but it went down with two tubes of construction adhesive (replaced duct tape as my universal repair tool of choice) which got our elevator inspected, and back in service.

in the meantime, i’m glad that my life is going to settle down this winter, and become moderately less bizarre.

our building is replacing each of our 35 year-old (single-paned, leaks like a sieve) windows, and workers are up and moving (and banging, and crow-barring) at 6:45 each morning.

as if that wasn’t enough excitement, D.C. has decided to rebuild Park Road between us and Columbia Heights as part of a streetscape project. We’ve got new storm drains going in, new (shiny!) marble curbs, and sidewalks are being widened for better pedestrian flow.

of course, that’s another cacophony of sound each morning (7:00ish) as the jack-hammers, earth movers and angry commuters all battle for auditory supremacy.

obviously, the lady sparkler and i are adult enough to see the benefits coming after the passing trauma, but the big loser in all this is Emily the Cat.

the poor thing thinks she has been shipped off to a war zone.

we took her to the vet today, and no kitty prozac for now … but she has a follow up appointment this weekend, so she may still get the good stuff if keeps at it.

so, i’ve been fibbing about how idyllic our life in dc’s mount pleasant is …

sure the neighborhood is great, and the food authentic, and everything is walkable. our space is big, with lots of windows and beautiful hard wood floors. sure, we’ve decorated and painted just about every square inch of our abode.

but, our ac/furnace sounds like you are living on the deck of an aircraft carrier.

… right at the base of the aircraft catapult.

… during the first 24 hours of the Operation Desert Storm.

so, i did what any reasonable home owner would do, which is coincidentally what the lady sparkler did when she wanted a new coffee pot: i bribed our cat to destroy the heat exchanger with an acetylene torch so that it “had” to be replaced by a quieter model.

(and, by “bribing our cat” i mean “it was at the end of its lifecycle” and, by “destroy the heat exchanger” i mean “it apparently kept catching itself on fire.”)

being the expert and savvy city-dweller that my wife is, we quickly came to the conclusion that uncontrolled fire in our home was a bad thing, and that we should (indeed) replace our beast with a model whose white noise wouldn’t encourage me to kill the Beatles.

so, we solicited ourselves some bids (by “we” i mean “she”), selected a vendor who ridiculously underbid the job for the equipment they were giving us, and i stayed home from work today to see it through (by “see it through” i mean “sat here and stayed out of the way.”)

cropp-metcalfe was great. our home inspector couldn’t believe their price, and we had a friendly install team comprised of a 60-year old west african who couldn’t really speak any english and a 20-year old latin american who couldn’t really speak any english.

the language barrier was funny enough during the installtion — they seemed to have fundamental differences of understanding on the words “up” vs. “down” and “back” vs. “forward” — but the situation became farcical when it came time to explain to me the many features of our brand spanking new (and shiny!) Carrier Infinity Series 2-stage, variable speed high efficiency furnace (58CVA).

but, it’s up and running, works like a champ, and the whole unit makes just a whisper of a hum, compared to our old unit’s voice of God which passeth all understanding and causes our frail human melons to explode.

if i sound giddy … it’s because i am. it’s like christmas, only in october. it’s like that independence day movie when the fireworks going off after the alien ship blew up, only better. or like when hellen keller learned to sign the word “water,” only more poignent.

so, i’m going to celebrate tonight by (a) sleeping through the night, (b) watching TV with the sound about 20 decibels lower, and (c) going out with my wife to celebrate our anniversary.

good night, and god bless you, and god bless the United States of America.

it turns out that rock creek park (of Chandra Levy fame) has a network of trails … *actual* trails with switchbacks, elevation gain, wildlife, streams, and mud. not just the paved rec paths or glorified sidewalks you would imagine in a city park.

it amazes me that residents of Mt. Pleasant won’t shut up about the glory that is the National Zoo — though it is pretty awesome — and yet they neglect to mention the National Park-grade liking trails less than three blocks away.

even more stupefying is that we had the trails to our selves. sans a couple or dog owners and a pair of septuagenarians warning us about the perils of poison ivy (they had just been interviewed by News Channel 8 on the topic) there was nary a human in sight on a stunningly beautiful Sunday afternoon.

there are two main trails around the park … the western ridge trail and the valley trail. we looped through the bottom third of both in about two hours. the trails go from the Zoo all the way up to Maryland, but we weren’t that brave (and, frankly, should have been in better shoes).

we did get lost (yes, in rock creek park) and used my fancy-pants new iPhone’s GPS locator-thingy to save our bacon. I’d like to think that the coolness of the iPhone balances embarrassment of actually using it in the “wilderness” … but, sadly, it’s still just humiliating.

speaking of maps, those provided by the Park Service show the trails as one unintelligible smudge, which makes navigation (without an iPhone) that much more exciting. there are larger, more printer friendly rock creek trail maps here:

Map: Hiking Trails in Rock Creek Park (South)
Map: Hiking Trails in Rock Creek Park (North)

Explore the Photoset:
Hiking in Rock Creek Park, Washington, DC

Well, it’s been exactly one year since we moved to D.C. proper, after a combined 20 years of living around the periphery (well, I did 2 years in Glover Park, but that hardly counts). so, in the spirit of the new(ish) local blog We Love DC, the lady sparkler and I spent a walk through the neighborhood recounting why we love this place.

National Zoo
Denizens of Mount Pleasant refer to the Zoo as their “backyard” and in a lot of ways it is. I know more about the Prairie Dogs than I do some of my friends. Free summer concerts on lion hill, winter solace because the tourists stay away, spring babies, and the best fall foliage in the city.

Free Stuff
It’s easy to take this for granted, but we are reminded everytime we leave the city … everything in D.C. is free. From concerts, to movies on the mall, to museums, to monuments. The first time the lady sparkler and I went to NYC together, we just couldn’t shut up about the $18, $25, $30 tickets to see anything of culture. No wonder they are so grumpy up there.

Kennedy Center
Truely the greatest “monument” in D.C., the Kennedy Center presents an amazing array of theatre, music and culture to the city. Sure, we should give a shout out to the Woolly Mammoth, Arena, Signature and Shakespeare Theatres too, but the top class productions in D.C. are good enough to rival those of other major cities around the world.

Food
A decade ago, “food” would certainly not make an area top list, but D.C. is now home to quite a few decent restaurants. Maybe they aren’t the most daring menus on the planet, but the food is top-shelf and the service is legitimately okay. Going out, we have had as many great meals as we do mediocre, and that’s a step in the right direction.

Urban Parks
It’s hard to believe in a city, but we really have trees and parks all over the place. Rock Creek is enormous, and just about every intersection of the big avenues has a park of some kind. Large and small, these parks are one of the reasons DC-ites are out and about so much.

RFK Stadium
While a source of scorn for a lot of people who just don’t get it (D.C. United’s owners to name a few), RFK Stadium is the last great municipal stadium in use in the country, and one of the truest places to watch a ballgame in the country. No doubt: we will cry if it ever gets torn down.

Meridian Hill / Malcolm X Park
Parisian fountains in the middle of the District … who can argue with that? Almost by definition, spring starts in the city when the park’s fountains are turned on, and it plays host to everything from picnics to drum circles. The best news, is that ten years ago it wasn’t save to think about entering the park. Now? Oasis in the city.

Mount Pleasant
I loved Mount Pleasant before I even knew what it was. I got lost here in the late 90s and again in 2005, both times thinking it was the most beautiful neighborhood in the world. I’m here for the amazing. She is here for the farmer’s market. It’s a win, win.

Now, the one reason we hate this place: no one stays here … in the last 4 months, we’ve lost a handful of our closest friends to Seattle, Boston and now Mississippi. Mississippi?!? When you start losing people to the deep south, you have to wonder how great your city actually is … but why we hate D.C. (politics, interns) is a posting for another day.