theparkerfamily.org

Tag: Long Reads

  • Local’s Guide to Visiting Washington, DC

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    every resident of D.C. has a response prepared for the inevitable “I’ve got family coming in from out of town, what should they do?” and, after 15 years in the District, mine is pretty well thought out. an unfiltered look at visiting the nation’s capitol:

    air transportation

    dear God, please fly into DCA if you can. they say D.C. has three airports, but one (Dulles) is as close to West Virginia as it is to the District, and the other (BWI) might as well be in Pennsylvania. getting into the city from Dulles or BWI is an ordeal after a long trip, and surprisingly expensive if you’re not willing to use public transportation. and let’s face it, after dealing with airports (and airport security) you’re going to decide — at the last minute, of course — to splurge on a taxi. if you can save $300 going into one of the other airports, sure, totally go for it. but if you only save $100? it might not be worth the effort.

    also, for the uninitiated, the only acceptable title for the airport closest to Washington, D.C. is “National Airport.” it’s never “Reagan National Airport” and certainly never just “Reagan.” and, for what it’s worth, this has nothing to do with partisan politics. it ONLY has to do with home rule — the fact that Congress can impose its will on the city, telling them how to name their airports, is just as ludicrous for the District as it would be for you, wherever you live.

    if you are going to hoof it in for the outer airports, there is a bus from the Greenbelt Metro to BWI and back (the B30), and Washington Flyer runs a bus from Falls Church Metro to Dulles and back.

    places to stay

    there are no silver bullets, but obviously metro accessible is key. I would find places that look interesting to you, and then use the google maps or the metro trip planner to make sure your hotel is no more than a 15-20 minute Metro ride from Metro Center Station. if that’s the case, you’ll be pretty happy. much past twenty minutes of metro time, and I find your day starts getting pretty long because you don’t want to hoof it all the way back to the hotel just to go back out later in the day.

    personally, I send people up the red line, between Dupont Circle and Cleveland Park stations. there are a ton of boutique hotels along this corridor (here’s a list from hotels.com) that give you good options, but also gets you into some of the best walking neighborhoods (Dupont Circle, Woodley Park, Cleveland Park, Adams Morgan) in DC.

    also, it’s usually worth checking out some of the big (expensive) conference hotels, at least if you’re coming on a weekend. hotels that support business travelers through the week are often pretty empty on the weekend, and that can sometimes lead to good cheap, deals on nice rooms. Marriott Wardman Park/, Washington Hilton and Omni Shoreham come to mind and are all along that red line corridor I mentioned.

    restaurants

    there are a metric ton of great restaurants in D.C. now, and any local can give you a list of ten places off the top of their head. generally, visitors eat breakfast at the hotel, and then are fine during the day (the museums all have some type of food court attached, with the best being Natural History and American Indian). so look for restaurants closer to your hotel — part of the reason i like to stay between duPont and Cleveland Park is all the great food within walking distance.

    if you’re not willing/able to ask someone for specific restaurant advice close to where you’re staying, you can get a pretty good idea from online reservation app Open Table and from The Washingtonian.

    ground transportation

    the metro is great. it’s a 15 minute walk to something like 80% of the city, and pretty much everywhere you want to go. just, please God, stand to the right on escalators if you’re not actively walking up or down them. outside of that, I’d plan on walking and splurge on a taxi every now and again when the feet get tired. rental cars are completely wasted in DC, unless you want to go to some place distant (Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, Air and Space’s Hazy Center, Mount Vernon) because there is no parking, and what parking exists is horribly expensive.

    walking

    your feet will get tired. WEAR GOOD SHOES. seriously, not Tivas, not those silly jelly shoes kids love these days. your sense of scale will get all screwed up, because each museum is 3-4 blocks wide. so, walking two museums over is actually an 8 block walk which — given our wide avenues — would probably be a 12 block walk anywhere else. Lincoln Memorial to the Capitol is 2 miles, even though (again, because of scale) it looks less than half that. and, don’t be afraid to take cabs. happiness is inversely tied to the weakness of your shins, and that $9 cab ride is often a worthwhile investment.

    timing out your day

    in general, if D.C. is a lot like visiting an amusement park, like Disney — get up early, do something great in the morning, and come back to the hotel around lunch. take a nap, swim in the pool, read a book, or wander around the neighborhood to let the heat of the day pass when everyone is cranky and all the places are packed with other miserable tourists. then, once everyone is rested at at 3:30pm, go back out for an evening shift. have a later dinner, and go straight to bed. rinse, repeat. if you try and do everything between 11am and 4pm, you’re opening yourself up to have a pretty miserable trip during the summer.

    national zoo

    if there is one mandatory “thing to do” I would say it’s the national zoo. it’s free. it’s incredibly beautiful. it’s on a hill (see note about good shoes, above). if people don’t have a wonderful time, it’s because they’ve screwed up one of these three rules. first, go first thing in the morning (8am to 11am), or after the heat of the day (4:00pm to 7:00pm). otherwise, you’ll be miserable, and you won’t see any large mammals because they’ll be hiding from the sun. second, if you’re going via metro, travel IN to Cleveland Park station, and LEAVE from Woodley Park station. (technically, the “zoo” stop is Woodley Park, but it’s a steep hill from Woodley up to the start of the zoo — it’s about the same walking distance from Cleveland Park station, but it’s all downhill.) finally, remember it’s ON A BIG HILL. unfortunately, you end at the bottom of the hill and then have to walk up the whole hill to get back out. fortunately, there is a shuttle bus at the bottom to take you back up to the top, but most people don’t know to look for it.

    museums

    some of the museums have extended summer hours, which is a great idea because if you go during “peak” times, the museums can be a bit of an elbow-fest. I’d map out when you go to which museums based on the extended hours calendar and go to as many of them as you can between 3:30pm and 7:30pm. Air and Space, American History and Natural History are must for any schedule. I’d also add National Museum of the American Indian to the list. National Building Museum and National Postal Museum are worth the trip if the subject matter is interesting to the group.

    art museums

    there aren’t any bad art museums. National Gallery of Art gets the most play (lots of french impressionism that’s real easy to love) but several other art museums them are great, and overlooked. National Portrait Gallery and National Museum of American Art is big and wonderful. Hirshorn is very good, if you’re into modern. The Phillips Collection is great, but quirky and turns over pretty quickly (look into the exhibits before you make the trip). I’ve been to every Smithsonian museum out of the bunch, with the exception of the Anacostia Community Museum, and if you’re into the subject matter covered by the museum, you’ll have a great time at any of them.

    monuments

    here’s a slightly older run down of things to do with a focus on monuments but be sure to look into the Botanic Gardens and Library of Congress, too (there hard to categorize as monuments or museums, so I’ve stuffed them into this paragraph kind of randomly). Martin Luther King’s monument is new, so isn’t included in the post above, but well worth the trip and not too far from the Korean monument mentioned in the post. Vietnam is great, but the kids will need an explanation to be properly moved — Korean is interesting to kids of all ages and isn’t quite the same emotional lift for the young ones. all of them are even better at night. speaking of…

    the mall at night

    keep the kids up one night and wander around the mall after dark, or better yet take one of those bus tours even though I normally tell people to avoid them during the day (unless you’ve got people who aren’t great at walking). the whole mall area is 100x prettier at night than during the day, and it is WELL worth keeping kids up past their bedtimes. it’s also cooler, and emptier. If you can avoid going to the mall (outside of the museums) during the day, and just do it at night, that’s a great thing.

    out of town / short-term rental cars

    some of the bigger hotels will do short term car rentals, which might be interesting for a day or two. also, you don’t have to stay at the hotel to rent their cars, you can just walk in and grab one regardless — we do it ourselves when we need a rental. if you do get a car, the Udvar-Hazy annex of Air and Space is (literally) epic. it’s just a royal pain to get to if you don’t have a car. Mount Vernon is incredibly stuffy but equally awesome in an egg-headed history geek sort of way. depending on how long you’re staying, a day trip to Baltimore or even a one-night overnight (National Aquarium, Inner Harbor, B&O Railroad Museum) can be a heck of a lot of fun.

    free summer entertainment

    the Kennedy Center runs runs free summer shows and programs that’s worth every penny. it can be a bit remote depending on where you stay, but there are shuttles from Foggy Bottom metro. on the mall, they have the annual Folklife Festival, and during some special weekdays they project movies onto a big screen which are fun even if you’re not wild about the titles.  there are a couple of other free shows and events, with Shakespeare theatre’s “free for all” as the most popular of the remaining options.

    sports

    all the professional sports teams in DC are metro accessible, except for NFL football, which is such a pain in the bottom to get to I would just push that thought out of your head entirely. my favorites are D.C. United (soccer, tickets) and Washington Nationals (baseball, tickets) and it’s really pretty easy to get great tickets, often even day-of.

    RFK stadium (soccer) looks like a hole, mainly because it just had it’s 50th birthday, but is one of the best places to watch soccer in America. get tickets down close on the bouncy side of the stadium. Nats Park is the exact opposite (it’s gorgeous and pristine) and has some of the best ballpark food known by man. also, if you’re into tennis, getting tickets to the Citi Open up in rock creek park can be pretty fun, too.

    things to (maybe) avoid

    there is nothing in DC that I wouldn’t do. that said, there are a couple of things I might avoid unless you’re REALLY jonesing to do it.

    1. Georgetown has lots of shopping, but is a metric ton of walking, and not much else to do there if you’re not of the shopping persuasion. if you do it, let mom and daughter take the day, while the men do something male, or go see a movie at the movieplex there. it’s not something that people who don’t want to do will endure terribly well.
    2. I hesitate to say this, but it’s nearly a given that the international spy museum won’t live up to your expectations. the museum is getting older, and some of the interactive exhibits are getting long in the tooth. it’s expensive. it’s the only museum where I feel the exhibits are just a warm up for the gift shop. seriously, go if you want/need to, but keep your expectations in check.
    3. Holocaust Museum is brutal. powerful, deeply moving, but will “ruin” the rest of your day if you have even half a heart. it’s a worthy stop, but not something to be done lightly, or “fit in” to a busy schedule.
    4. the D.C. children’s museum moved 15 miles outside of the city, and was never very good to begin with. avoid. full stop. if you’re going to get a car, go to Udhar-Hazy or National Aquarium or the hands-on-science museum in Baltimore.

    cultural tourism dc

    I mentioned this before, in the “things to do post” above, but worth a reprise. the mall is, in fact, not D.C.’s best attribute — and possibly not even in the top 5. I’d think strongly about either staying (hotel) in a neighborhood or making a pointed effort to get into on or two of them on your own. for more information, check out the cultural tourism DC site — there are dozens of walking tours that you can take to get a much better flavor of the city. also, if you’re into photography at all, taking pictures of the other half of DC is a lot more fun.

    public service announcement

    you like don’t know this, but D.C. doesn’t have voting representation in Congress. we pay $5 billion in taxes (higher per capita than each of the 50 states) which Congress then appropriates back to us with all sorts of restrictions on how we can use our own money. we’re bigger than Wyoming or Vermont, but have less representation. we have a much smaller share of Federal land than Nevada (88%) or even California (50%), and raise less revenue than is our due because branches of the Federal Government don’t pay local taxes like any every other employer within our borders.

    I mention this, because it will help explain all those “No Taxation Without Representation” license places you’ll see when you visit, but also because the biggest problem is you — well, your legislators. because we don’t have the right to voice, you are the only people who can start the process of giving us the rights that you, and ever other citizen in the free world, enjoy.

    unfortunately, we’re stuck without the right to vote. and we need a couple good friends from out of town to put in a good word for us with their representatives, who control our fate.

  • Job 6.0

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    Well, after three years, I’m leaving the PR firm.

    I love the people (wonderful) and love the work (helping non-profits think through the messaging and online presences) but never could get resources marshaled at the level required to do truly exceptional work.

    Truth be told, I struggled a bit with figuring out my next step.  Before I joined the Firm, I thought my next job would be as a VP of Marketing Communications for a non-profit — and acquiring the requisite skills was a big reason that I took the job I’m leaving.

    But, as I stood on the precipice, I started to wonder if that job — the VP/MarComm job — was really going to make my life better, happier, etc.  It took me a long time to ask myself the question, but once I did the answer took about 30 seconds to come back as a big, fat “nope.”

    So, I’m leaving to join Freeflow Digital as one of their senior principals.  It’s a reunion of sorts, as I worked with over half of Freeflow’s staff of 12, including the founding principals, when I was at Carol | Trevelyan Strategy Group (CTSG).  I’ll be able to use my geek-to-English translation skills, focus exclusively on non-profits, and be one of the leaders as opposed to yet another middle manager.

    Freeflow is B Corp that helps non-profits and universities with web development, data integration, CMS/CRM strategy and big-data business intelligence — so it’s a lot of the same work I was doing, just a bigger focus on execution as opposed to strategizing about how to get the work done.

    So, I start April 1st with the new job, but I get to keep the stuff I liked most about the last job, too.  I’m keeping a couple of non-profit clients with the PR firm, and they are (generously) giving Freeflow office space in the same DC office I’ve been working out of for the last year.

    So, the grass is actually greener on both sides of the fence.

  • sparklet’s new school, same as the old school

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    after months of crazy, it looks like we’ve got a pre-school for sparklet to attend in September — and it’s Bancroft Elementary.

    the district provides universal pre-school and pre-kindergarden, but only has a set number of seats available so makes people go through a lottery process — even if you live in boundry for the school you want to attend.

    as a result, we “got” to apply to half a dozen public schools and about three dozen charters, all to make sure sparklet has some place to go in September.

    we made it into Bancroft, our first choice, and didn’t even get wait listed. we also lucked out by getting into E.L. Haynes, Appletree Early Learning in Columbia Heights, and one other whose name is escaping me, so we would have had options had Bancroft not come through.

    our favorite moment though, was the rejection letter we got from one of the most prestigeous pre-schools in the city, which read something like:

    congratulations! you’ve made the wait list for our school, and are 697th in line for a position in our pre-school class. we’re proud to say that we had over 700 applicants this year…

    think that qualifies for not understanding the audience you’re communicating with, or at least not personalizing your messages to their specific recipients.

    See Slideshow of the Photos on Flickr:
    new school

  • car, pt. 2

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    turns out that there are people in the city who are morally opposed to whole, functioning car windows.

    from our ANC representative, Jack McKay:

    Thefts from auto have been a plague here, and in many other DC neighborhoods, forever. It’s just too easy to bust into a car, snatch whatever’s there, and run off.

    No clues are left behind, and the police don’t invest much effort in trying to solve such a minor crime. Thieves breaking into cars are usually caught only when an alert neighbor happens to spot one in the act.

    Mount Pleasant averages about 10 such thefts a month. That’s about half the rate of 10 years ago. In March, there was a flurry of thefts from auto, totalling 21 for the month. That’s more than the 10 “normal”, but not spectacularly so.

    What was remarkable was a rash of 9 of these on one night, that of March 27-28:

    (1) 3402 – 3451 block of Mount Pleasant Street
    (2) 1800 – 1899 block of Monroe Street
    (3) 1800 – 1899 block of Newton Street
    (4) 3200 – 3233 block of 19th Street
    (5) 1800 – 1899 block of Monroe Street
    (6) 3200 – 3233 block of 19th Street
    (7) 3200 – 3233 block of 19th Street
    (8) 1800 – 1999 block of Ingleside Terrace
    (9) 1700 – 1799 block of Kilbourne Place

    Nine in one night – most of them within a few blocks! That’s something I’ve never seen before. This was more vandalism than theft, as the perps damaged cars that were unlocked, and cars that contained nothing of value.

    As for the rest of the month, aside from this one-night rampage, there were 12 thefts from auto, which is about average for a month.

    for the record, our the reason our car is in the shop is because we’re #3 on the list above.

    well, that and because there were two recalls on our prius, and our headlight was out, and we haven’t had an oil change or service in the last 15,000 miles.

    but, besides that, everything is great.

  • is the election over yet?

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    this feels like it has the longest election cycles of my lifetime and, regardless of what happens tomorrow night, a part of me is just going to be relieved that it is — well — over.

    like most Americans, a dark portion of my soul would love to overthrow the two party system, abolish the 24-hour news cycle, and/or give the electoral college its marching orders.

    but, without getting overtly political, here a couple of more reasonable thoughts coming out of the last 18 months:

    we must demand politicians/media stop creating facts.

    i’m actually pretty centrist (at least in principle) and honestly believe that good people will make good decisions regardless of ideology. unfortunately, this notion has been plowed under as more and more people (on both sides) make up facts to suit their ideologies versus tailoring their ideologies to meet the facts.

    a functioning democracy is dependant on an informed electorate — and that is undermined if the electorate is only “informed” by a bunch of falsehoods, quotes taken out of context, fake statistics and ideology driven studies.

    in this way, i think the recent rise of the various media “truth squads” is a promising sign.  and, while Candy Crawley is likely not going to get invited back to moderate another debate, we need more of her style “instant fact checks” from our media — not less.

    if money is speech, then disclosure is the right to face our accusers.

    i’m not a huge fan of limitless money in politics, but if money really is protected speach then i can make it work. but, the only way to make it work is for the thousands of deep-pocket donors to stand up and be counted along side of their money.

    today, we find ourselves in the unusual situation where accused criminals have a better “due process” than our candidates up for election. criminals have the right to know our accusers, and to face (and rebut) their claims.  (not to mention, they are also afforded a presumption of innocence.)

    seems like our politicians deserve at least this much — and if donors aren’t willing to disclose themselves, then we need to legislate a solution that brings transparency to the new, murky world of money-as-speech political contributions.

    finally, we’ve got to limit the election season.

    in light of the 24-hour news cycle, we’re getting to the point where all the people we would WANT to elect are refusing to run because of the impact the eleection marathon has on themselves and their families.

    to make matters worse, the 24 month cycle doesn’t even provide its supposed benefit (eg. allow us to thoroughly address issues) and instead forces us to pay attention to all sorts of silly minutia and mini-scandles that the corporate media needs to maintain our daily (hourly, minute-ly) attention.

    more than that, the lengthy election season directly depresses (and suppresses) the electorate, and requires huge influxes of cash into the political campaign arms race in order for candidates to stay competitive.

    were we to prohibit electioneering more than three months from the primaries, and schedule the general no more than three months after that — elections would be cheaper, less corruptible, more focused (eg. more meaningful debate) and less taxing on the public — not to mention we’d likely have better candidates to boot.

    somebody please find a way to make this happen.

  • the tree

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    our back yard is dominated by a large, but sickly looking maple. it hasn’t been well maintained, a second trunk has grown out of the base at almost a 60 degree angle, and the whole thing is within 4 feet of the retaining wall that keeps our back yard out of the alley.

    the tree is actually on the opposite side of the fence with our neighbor, but it turns out that it’s actually (mostly) in our yard which is irritating on two fronts — we have to chip in on maintaining the tree, and we really need to replace our fence considering it was built about 8 to 12 inches on our side of the property line.

    fortunately we love our neighbor(s) so it’s all good.

    last week, we decided to take the tree down, so that it doesn’t fall over and doesn’t push down our retaining wall. we had an arborist come out, and he said it’s just under the size (55 inches in girth) where a permit would be required.

    when he started actually cutting the tree, however, another neighbor — not on our street, but on the other side of our back alley — came out screaming.

    neither the lady sparkler or i were there for the exchange, but the general gist was that she (strongly) believed we needed a permit, and even if we had one, we should let the tree live, let the retaining wall collapse, and then just keep rebuilding everything (wall, yard, fence) as often as necessary to keep the tree alive and well.

    so, the city came out to moderate the dispute, and the tree is right on the cusp of needing a permit (of two measurements, one was above the requirement and one was below) so they’ve asked us to apply for a permit.

    the bureaucracy/paperwork isn’t that big of a deal — if you complete the form, and have a good reason to take the tree down, you can — but the permit cost will triple the price of removing the tree.

    #hippies.

  • furniture swap

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    the nesting continues…

    in the aftermath or Thing Two’s second X chromosome turning out to be a Y, the biggest shift has been in his room. No longer satisfied with peach walls, plum carpets and floral patterns, we’re in the process of repainting and redecorating.

    (I’ve also set aside the “Madeline” wall sign — though, admittedly, I’m not throwing it out until “he” pops out and I get the official confirmation.)

    Part of the bedroom reorg is that the white french provincial furniture we inherited from my grandparents is now going into sparklets room (above, top) and sparklet’s slightly more gender neutral furniture is sliding into Thing Two’s room in substitution (above, underneath).

    We’re also painting both their rooms a light green — there by reducing the 137 things they’ll argue about some day to a more manageable 136.

    This argument reduction effort was actually kicked off last week when I saw a “Thing Two” decal in Target that sparklet and I eventually put on his bedroom door. It was officially the first time I saw something in wanted for one child that made me say “oh, crap — what am I going to buy for the other.” Fortunately, there was a stack of Sesame Street decals (with sparklet favorite Abby Cadabby) on the next display over.

    That might bring the list down to 135 1/2.

    See Slideshow of the Photos on Flickr:
    nesting, part 2

  • it’s a boy?!?

    turns out thing two isn’t exactly a girl.

    mommy had a doctor’s appointment a couple weeks back, and while she and the doc were talking about the coming thing two, they noticed she was coming in pretty big and pretty fast.

    so they scheduled up another sonogram for last Friday, just to see exactly how big (and whether we’d need to adjust the delivery date, etc.) a sonogram at this point is fairly unusual — you don’t get one after 20 weeks unless the doctor specifically recommends one — but we were pretty excited to see the baby one extra time.

    so Friday morning, we walk into the exam room and met with our tall spindly (dude) sonographer who started chatting us up about what we were having (girl), whether we had picked out any names (we had) and other stuff that wasted time while he got everything dialed in.

    and then he started giggling. it wasn’t a bubbly giggle, but more like a nervous “you’re going to rip my head off” sorta giggle.

    “i’m afraid you’re not having a girl.” turns out thing two isn’t a she — she’s a he.

    and, no, we’re not kidding.

    for now, let’s just skip past 20 minutes of “are you sure?” and “no, really — are you sure?” and “well, she was pretty sure when she told us it was going to be a girl…” that followed.

    funny thing, is we remember that other sonogram pretty clearly.

    when she first told us it’d be a girl, the lady sparkler said something like “really? are you sure?” in the same way that any mommy-to-be would say after hearing pretty much anything — and she got all huffy.

    “i’ve been doing this for 26 years,” she said. “and i’ve never been wrong once in all those years.”

    well, there’s always a first.

    fast forward to now — we’ve got a boy coming, he’s got a lovely peach bedroom, with a soft purple rug, with bright flowered sheets, lots of pink clothes waiting for him when he gets home, in a bedroom filled with (hand be down) white, French Provencal furniture.

    now, mommy and me can see the future — when this all turns out great, and becomes the story that (much to thing two’s consternation) we will faithfully drag out at every holiday, graduation and meet-the-new-girlfriend occasion.

    however, in the interim, we’ve got about six weeks left to redo about six months worth of mental planning. the good news, is that (shortly before all this happened) we had basically decided on a name.

    i think he’ll make a great “madeline.”

  • eats: brasserie les halles

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    i’m slightly embarrassed to say that i’m becoming a bit of an Anthony Bourdain fan-boy.

    i’ve read several of his books (including his best known, Kitchen Confidential), his travel channel show “no reservations” is the only food show that i watch with any regularity, and we’ve just gotten hooked on his new show, “the layover”.

    not sure exactly where the allure has come from, but he’s my kind of chef — his food is relatively simple fare, and he is a chef from a time before Martha Stewart and Williams Sonoma conspired to ruin the public’s notion of the equipment required to cook and consume food “properly.”

    and he doesn’t say the word “bam!” after adding each ingredient.

    so, it was with GREAT trepidation that i booked a table for two at his Park Avenue eatery, Brasserie Les Halles. i was scared to death that it would suck, that it would be as charming as a Las Vegas themed mega-restaurant, and that i would be outed as a fan-boy to boot.

    i had no reason for the fear or the loathing — the food was outstanding, down to the smallest touches.

    we had to push the bread to the opposite side of the table, so we wouldn’t ruin dinner. the mussels had a sauce (Portuguese) that quickly caused us to break out the bread again in reckless disregard for the swelling of our stomachs. we had so many “okay, this is the last frite and i mean it” that we lost count.

    and all that was before dinner arrived.

    i had a plate of pork big enough to make a man weep — smoked pork loin, veal sausage, frankfurter, smoked bacon, boiled potatoes and sauerkraut. i don’t even like pork loin, and it was easily the best thing i’ve eaten in 10 years.

    it was legitimately outstanding, regardless of the reality television flashbacks.

    don’t get me wrong, we had our bits of celebrity worship — we were waited on by veteran waiter tim, we saw the back of long-time owner Philippe Lajaunie’s head, and executive chef Carlos Llaguno was behind the glass when we peaked through the kitchen window.

    the best bit was the restaurant itself was as unassuming as any you’ll find. if it seats 120 people, it’s not by much. decor doesn’t look like its been updated in 50 years. the floor was stuffed mostly by locals, or at least tourists who knew how to blend in. when we asked for a quiet table to celebrate our anniversary, we got (easily) the best table in the restaurant.

    and, the whole thing — two glasses of wine, one double sized appetizer, two entrees, two deserts, two coffees — was $120. i’ve paid twice as much in D.C., for half the meal.

    my existence as an anthony bourdain fan-boy continues on, unabated. a simple, dirty pleasure in a complex world of food and reality television.

    and i feel great.

  • holiday cartoon extravanza

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    If i have a “thing” over the holidays, it’s our annual holiday cartoon extravaganza.

    Each year we throw a party withe free food, free alcohol, and all the holiday specials you can stomach. In exchange, you just have to bring a plate of whatever Christmas treat you’re making for friends and family this year.

    2011 is the fifth year that the lady sparkler and I have done it, but the tradition actually goes much, much farther back.

    When I was at the college of William and Mary, the students of the theater department threw a party each year called “the grinch” — which ended the night with a showing of the dr. Seuss animated special during which you were expected to drink each time the word “who” was sung or said.

    Every who down in whoville liked Christmas a lot.
    But the grinch who lived just north of whoville did not.

    For the record, there are 39 uses of “who” but that ignores homonyms like “hoo” but also the songs and choruses, like:

    Fah who for-aze, dah who dor-aze, welcome Christmas, Christmas day…

    needless to say the winner was whomever was still standing after the first commercial, which was pretty much limited to the people who weren’t playing along.

    Over the years, the format of our party has changed, but we’ve developed a couple rules:

    • pick no special that lasts more than half an hour, and that includes rudolph which is remembered more fondly that it was ever experienced.
    • pick no special based on the gifts of the magi, beit ernie selling his rubber ducky to buy Bert a box for his paper clip collection or emmitt otter’s jug band christmas –you will cry, and it kills the mood.
    • the star wars holiday special isn’t so bad it’s good — it’s so bad it’s horrible, and it will clear the room.

    and, we still close the night with the grinch in honor of our holiday party ancestors — long may their livers live.

  • transoms & chimneys

    []
    []
    turns out climate control in a 97 year old house is a bit of a challenge.

    who knew.

    it’s that time of year finally, and we’ve started to do the things i sincerely hope to be doing in this backyard each October for the rest of my life — pulling in the porch furniture, turning off the outside spigots, and firing up the radiators.

    the boiler that feeds the radiator turned out to be a bit of a problem — it’s 40+ years old, and seems to be throwing a lot more heat back into the unfinished basement than it’s putting up the pipe to the main living areas. when we called a chimney person to investigate, it turned out that the chimney has collapsed, so the heat just has no where to go.

    needless to say we’re getting that fixed. actually, we’re probably just going to replace the 40+ year old boiler while we’re at it.

    in other news, sparklet’s room has become a bit of an ice box — which is (mostly) as we expected. it’s on the north side of the house (so gets very little sun) and has a door, a window and a transom — all of which are 97 years old and all seemingly more proficient at escorting the outside in than keeping it out where it belongs.

    so, i spent last weekend opening up the transom windows to let some hot air circulate between the rooms. of course, i was doing this with a chisel, a mask and a hepa-rated vacuum cleaner just in case our 97 year old paint had some heavy, metalic surprises inside.

    regardless, i think we’re all setup for the winter on Monroe Street — the first of many, i hope.

  • edgar and emily: caterwauling

    []
    one more edgar/emily story, and then i’m done.

    fast forward a couple of years from the last story, after the “previous administration” and i had moved up to savage, maryland (2000?) and into a little three bedroom house across from the historic Savage Mill.

    we known since day one that Edgar had a rather robust set of vocal chords, and had a constant struggle trying to get him to shut the heck up. (Emily, for some reason another, was as quiet as her brother was annoying.)

    shortly after we moved into the new place, the problem escalated to the point that he was waking us up at 2am every morning — just parked outside the bedroom door, caterwauling in what was obviously an attempt to raise the dead.

    after about of month, we finally got fed up and talked to the vet out of sheer exasperation. she calmed us down, and recommended we get a spray bottle, fill it up with water, and put it by the door. each time Edgar caterwauled, we were to open up the door, give him a squirt or two in the face, and firmly say: “No.”

    she said within a week or so, Edgar would learn.

    that very night, i woke up at 2am to Edgar caterwauling — i grabbed the bottle, i opened the door, i gave him a squirt, and told him “no.” the next night, i did the same. and the next night. and the next. two weeks later, i was still getting up, still opening the door, and still hosing down the cat. (NOTE: my way of saying “no” may have become more crass as the days turned into weeks.)

    by the third week, i had developed insomnia (wonder why?) and was up working on the computer in the front room when the 2am caterwauling began. caught completely off guard, i ran towards the bedroom just in time to see …

    … Emily caterwauling …

    … the bedroom door handle turning, Emily running off, the door opening, and finally Edgar getting hosed down with the spray bottle for the 21st consecutive night.

    It had been Emily all the time.

    Interesting to note that Emily was smart enough to run away when the door started to open, and Edgar was stupid enough to sit there and get hosed down each night. He probably though we were giving him a bath.

    The next night we started sleeping with the bedroom door open, with Emily asleep (soundly, quietly) under the foot of the bed.

  • emily and edgar: homecoming

    you’ll forgive me but after all of yesterday’s drama and moroseness, i have to blog out one of my two favorite Emily the Cat stories — and i promise they are happy/funny.

    back in 1998, when i was living with the “previous administration” in bethesda, maryland. (it’s stunning to me that i’ve gone 1,480 posts and never mentioned that someone existed before the lady sparkler, but stick with me.)

    we had been talking for some time about getting a cat or two, and over the next couple of weekends we hit just about every animal shelter adoption between here west virginia.

    finally, at a petco out in fairfax, we were looking through the temporary kennels from the local shelter when we stumbled upon an enormous, beautiful, jet black cat — all you could see was two stunning yellow eyes peering out of the back of the cage.

    i stopped and watched a bit, partly because the cat was so enormous, but mostly because the cage was dark enough that i was having a hard time making out what was shadow and what was cat.

    finally, as my eyes adjusted, i started to notice that the rather large, black cat’s hindquarters were moving — and moving quite independently from his front half. i called “previous administration” over to show her, and by the time she made it over the back half of the cat was shaking violently up and down.

    after a few seconds of increasingly bizarre movement from the black cat, a second set of yellow eyes appeared from underneath the black cat’s bottom.

    turns out there was a another cat in that kennel, and the second cat was so freaked out by the attention that she was literally crawling under the black cat looking for a place to hide.

    that was Emily. the black cat was her brother, Edgar. they both came home with us that night.

  • emily the cat

    []
    after 14 long years, Emily the Cat has passed away.

    when i got home from work, sparklet and i spent about 45 minutes searching the house for Emily. after calling and getting assurance from mommy that Emily was around this morning when she left for work, we sorta gave up and sat down on the couch in the basement.

    … when we noticed her tail peeking out from under the couch.

    within seconds it was pretty obvious that Emily was no longer with us, but we still had that time-speeds-up-so-much-it-slows-down period that seems to happen when you’re operating outside of yourself.

    within a couple of seconds, the couch was jacked up onto a milk crate, Emily was in the carrier, sparklet had both shoes and a stack of empty carbohydrates for dinner, mommy was on the way to the vet, and we were away in the car. everything, and everyone, was strangely calm.

    a couple of uncomfortable songs later — i remember sarah harmer’s capsized, and kathleen edwards’ 12 bellevieu — we were out front of the vet, mommy was pulling the cat carrier out of the back, and i was rushing off to park the car in the closest illegal-but-not-dangerous spot i could find.

    by the time i brought sparklet inside, i could see it on mommy’s face that this trip to the vet wasn’t going to have a particularly happy ending — at least not for us.

    we actually thought we were going to lose Emily back in 2006 — at one point during that ordeal we were told she wasn’t going to make it through the night. fortunately she did, and it made the last five years kind of like “bonus” time.

    she had been on the same medication, twice a day, ever since — tapizol, prednizone, flagyll, vitamin B shots — so we had a daily dose of “it could happen at any time” to remind us of how luck we were to still have her.

    now, Emily wasn’t exactly the friendliest of cats. some of our friends had no clue we had a cat until they had come over the twelfth or thirteenth time. even when she had warmed up to you, she would only let you pet her with one hand — the minute the second one came out (to pick her up) she was gone under the closest bed, couch or table.

    we couldn’t tell if she was getting better with people — or just getting old — but she started showing up a bit more once the baby started moving around. sparklet would insist on kissing Emily on the top of her head several times a day, and at first you could see her recoil in horror, but after a few months she finally gave in and stopped trying to run away.

    (sparklet held my hand the whole way from home to the vet — something just as out of character for her as taking kisses from babies was for Emily.)

    the Emily that i will remember the most is the cat that would come out when the house had finally settled down to a managable din. in the thirteen years we had together, across six houses in three states, you could always count on her to come jumping up on the couch to say goodnight once everyone else had gone to sleep.

    goodnight, Emily.

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  • 9/11

    it’s been ten years, and i’m sure i’ve already forgotten a lot of how that day went.

    i was working for a small online political consulting firm at the time, the carol | trevelyan strategy group. i had left my job on capitol hill (for cong. bernie sanders, i-vt) maybe nine months before, but was consulting for a number of congressional offices, so was still back on the hill quite a bit.

    and while i worked in dc, our offices were at the foot of adams morgan (18th and U) so quite a bit away from downtown.

    our political director, the only one on staff with a television in her office, was the first to spread the news. we all crowded around her television hoping that it was just a small plan that had made a tragic turn, but most of us knew it was something else.

    shortly after the second plane hit, the group broke up and started bracing for the worst.

    a lot of people forget that, in the immediate aftermath of the towers, there were reports of a whole host of other attacks in DC — the mall was on fire, there was a bombing at the state department, the metro was considered unsafe, the supreme court was evacuated for national security reasons, and the pentagon was hit by a third plane.

    of course, the last was the only one that turned out to be true.

    while all this was happening, i was a pretty long way from home — i lived about 45 minutes north in a sleepy little town called Savage, Maryland. with the metro supposedly out of commission, and the knowledge that it doesn’t go all the way out to Savage anyway, there wasn’t a lot i could do other than stay put — what they would later deem to be “harbouring in place.”

    we also had vague notions of a dirty bomb, in which case the staying north and west of downtown was a good idea — and that’s exactly where i was. the trains home all went down into the city (south and east, two blocks from the Capitol building) so that was absolutely the wrong direction to be evacuating.

    i honestly have no idea what i did for the next five hours. i certainly didn’t watch the news (i knew enough to know that i didn’t want to know any more) so i suppose i must have done something that approximated work.

    around 2pm a co-worker of mine who live out in Annapolis offered me a ride home. the city had quieted down, and the streets were completely deserted. i took her up on the offer.

    my most vivid recollection of 9/11 is actually that ride home. we drove out Route 50 (probably the main route north from downtown) and the entire road was deserted. we probably saw one other car every few minutes, during a period we normally would have seen a couple hundred.

    when i finally heard that a plane went down in shanksville, pa there was little doubt in mind where it had been going, and only nine months removed from working on the Hill, i was profoundly grateful when the stories came out about the passengers and crew.

    now that the flight 93 memorial has opened, we’ll be making the drive out there to thank them in person.

  • earthquake damage assessment

    []
    []
    one letter off the wall, one photo slightly askew — not exactly something to write home about, but certainly a good deal more severe than the last one.

    i was actually in new york for work, so missed most of the excitement. what i got was a strange surge of vertigo (i was on the 18th floor) and didn’t realize it was an earthquake until my knees started bouncing half a beat later.

    the lady sparkler had it the worst, being forced to walk the mile and a half home because the District (as expected) lost it’s collective minds.

    most buildings downtown were evacuated, traffic was at a standstill which put a kaibosh on the bus, and the metro ground to a halt under unprecedented ridership and speed restrictions through the whole system.

    unfortunately, none of this is terribly surprising. given how badly we handle snowstorms, i expected the District would see roving packs of bureaucrats in ripped suites — with bandanas made from yesterday’s ties — ransacking local stores for water, plastic sheeting and duct tape.

    sparklet, for her part, was walking down the street and didn’t seem to have a problem with the quake itself, but more the fact that each and every front door within view immediately popped open and all at once people started flooding the/her street.

    so, what’s next — a hurricane?

  • shuttle

    i was a shuttle baby.

    my brother grew up with a photo of the dave scott and the apollo 15 lunar rover tooling around on the moon. (the landing happened on his birthday. for the record, the evacuation of saigon happened on mine.)

    The apollo program was long since gone by the time i was born — but the first launch of the space shuttle Columbia happened a week after my sixth birthday, prime timing for me to become a space junkie.

    By the time the challenger disaster happened — my generation’s analog to the “where were you when Kennedy was shot” question — I was 10 years-old, and well aware of what was going on in the world.

    To answer the “where we’re you” question, we had gotten four inches of snow the night before, so school was cancelled and I was home for the day. my brother and i had just come in from sledding, and had sat down to hot chocolate and the 11:30am showing of “Scrabble!” on NBC when the dreaded “we interrupt this program…” broke into the television.

    i say dreaded, not because we dreaded the news of the disaster — but we dreaded the interruption. at the age of ten, it seemed like the networks were always breaking into my tv shows to cover some boring, only-adults-would-be-interested news event or the other.

    And I remember saying as much when they broke into the programming, closing my mouth just in time to see that twisted, y-shaped smoke trail that came after the explosion. even as a snotty 10 year old, i stopped complaining pretty quickly.

    by the time the second (Columbia) disaster happened, i was just as checked out from the shuttle program as everyone else. the space shuttle was now (wrongly) dismissed as just an elaborate, expensive fedex truck shipping goods between earth and the international space station, and logistics missions weren’t considered news anymore.

    (not to mention, that week I was neck deep in a divorce, selling my home, and moving into my boss’ basement in the city. It was a tough week.)

    that said, by this week i had enough sentimentality to shed a tear while I watched the last launch from my computer at work — with a bunch of 20 year olds who didn’t know why I was so emotional about something that should have already been in a museum.

    I was pretty worked up this morning for the landing, too. I had forgotten it was happening, until I woke bolt upright at 5:45 am, and wondered why I was awake. After a few minutes, I ran downstairs just in time to catch the last glide in towards the last shuttle landing ever.

    If I have a regret on my bucket list, it’s that I never got to see one of the 135 launches or landings in person.

  • the next horizon

    []
    after six and a half years in conservation, i’ve got a new job.

    starting july 19th, i’ll be the vice president for digital at a pr-firm based out of boston. (in the non-profit industry, they’re best known for their work on american cancer society’s more birthdays effort, which is more or less the gold standard for a cause-based marketing campaign right now.)

    on the off chance you have questions, here are some answers in no particular order:

    • no, we’re not moving — the firm’s headquarters are in boston, which means i get to visit often, but their digital team is are all based in DC as it gives them access to a lot of the government/non-profit/corporate clients they have and hope to grow.
    • no, i won’t have to wear a suit and tie — i wore a tie for my interview with the president/ceo and was ribbed mercilessly for it. during my final interview, my direct boss was wearing flip-flops.
    • yes, my wife and i will now be competitors in the same field — and, yes, i’m not sure that’s such a good idea either because i know how competitive she gets too.

    so, i’m everything you’d imagine right now — i’m excited, i’m terrified. mostly, i just want to launch one last campaign for the Conservancy (more soon) and then hit the ground running.

    it’s such a great opportunity, and sounds like it’s going to be a lot of fun — albeit, a lot of work, too.

    in an odd coincidence, the above photo was featured as the Daily Nature Photo on my.nature.org this week. in an even stranger coincidence, it’s the first time i’ve ever been featured on the site even though i conceived/built/launched it myself.

    it’s just more proof that good things happen all at once.

  • journey’s end

    []
    well, i’m not doing that ever again.

    my wife is calling the new place our “twenty year” house, because she says that is the minimum we’re going to be here. i call it our “you’re going to have to take my cold, dead corpse out of here” house, because … well, you get the picture. (i told sparklet earlier this week that the next time i move is when *her* kids move me into a home for the mentally addled.)

    all told, the move actually didn’t go too badly.

    my wife and baby made it to Tejas, had a great time, and returned on time, alive, with all eight limbs. (they took lots of pictures which, given my track record, it’ll take a month for me to sort though.)

    for the move itself, our POD was delivered right in front of our door step with everything present and accounted for. we had movers who came in underbudget and early, and didn’t break or lose a single thing. even our cable company hit their installation window (tho i’ll politely ignore the fact that their window turned out to be 24 hours later than what they told me it was going to be).

    by day three, all boxes were unpacked on the top two floors, with the exception of the lady sparkler’s clothes. by day nine, there were no boxes left in the entire house.

    i’ve had a string of little projects to keep me busy, but nothing major — took down a tree in the backyard, filled in the coy pond of death, put up a railing in the basement, hung temporary shades in sparklets room, wrapped sparklet’s porch in wire fencing, and hung a Texas flag for Memorial Day (above).

    we’ve already met (and love) our two closest neighbors on the west side, and our three closest neighbors on the east side. oh, and one of them has a 15 year old that is on the lookout for baby sitting gigs in the neighborhood.

    and all happened while i wasn’t blogging for six days consecutive days — and the stoppage didn’t blink me into nothingness. (who knew?)

    but, even though it went well, it’s just not worth risking doing it again. now, if you’ll excuse me i’m going to sit down in my beautiful, ninety seven year-old backyard and do nothing for the next decade or two.

  • how i met your mother: house 1.0

    []
    dear sparklet,

    this is the nineth in a series of letters from daddy about how i met and married your mother.

    it has been quite some time since your mother and i started living together — and for some reason daddy wasn’t smart (or brave) enough to blog about it at the time.

    so, now that we’re all getting ready to move into house 3.0, it seems like a good time to flashback to the house (or two) that started it all.

    when mommy and daddy met back in 2004, daddy was living unceremoniously in his boss’ basement in a place called “Glover Park.” it was in a neighborhood that was a lot like Mount Pleasant — only filled exclusively with 25 year old female interns from the midwest whose daddies were determined that their daughters would be geographically removed from anything that might possibly resemble a city.

    (oh, and the 45 minute walk to the nearest metro stop, and the $30 a plate restaurants, and the whole foods, and the small children running around wearing designer toddler clothing that they would out grow in the next two weeks — other than that it was exactly like Mount Pleasant.)

    mommy, on the other hand, lived about 30 feet from the (literal) wrong side of the tracks in “old town” Alexandria, Virginia.

    on the rare occasion where it made sense for daddy to spend the night in Alexandria (read: we were flying out of national airport the following morning) it was a lovely experience (sweating, with no air conditioning) through the parts of the night (those without gun shots) through which we would sleep like lambs (in between freight trains).

    considering that mommy had (obviously) even worse taste in living arrangements than daddy, i tried desperately to convince her to move into D.C. with me — not into my boss’ basement, somewhere else — but she’d have none of it. her love of strip malls and horrible drivers was just too strong.

    the one legitimately nice thing about our living arrangement was the drive — daddy lived a couple minutes off the rock creek parkway, and mommy lived a couple minutes off the george washington parkway, a pair of beautifully scenic roads connected by the (equally stunning) memorial bridge.

    so, when i came time to develop some kind of master plan for our residential future, we picked a neighborhood in Arlington (called “Rosslyn”) pretty much entirely based on the fact that it was located just off our beloved parkways, halfway between our two houses.

    now, i actually remember precious little about the moves (plural, there were two houses after all) themselves. i remember that it was July, hotter than blazes, and mommy had managed to find a new job the week before and “just couldn’t take time off work to help out.”

    the apartment (and the complex) was a pretty unremarkable place — probably best illustrated by the fact that we never bothered to take any pictures of it.

    fortunately, the apartment complex’s website hasn’t been updated since the hoover administration and just happens to have pictures of our exact model:

    so, there you go … the “house” that started it all, and the one that set us up for the first home you ever knew.

    and with that, good night. ’cause daddy has to go pack. ’cause daddy is moving y’all into a new house in just 19 days.

    love,
    daddy

  • inspection for park

    []
    first time home buyers are so cute.

    the inspection for our sale of park was tuesday, and by the end of the day some of the sparkle had started coming off of the prospective buyers for our place on park road.

    i should start by saying that we we’re a little cranky to start.

    part of their original offer to buy our place was “complete flexibility” for our settlement and move out — they were living somewhere month to month, and just needed to give 30 days notice. however, by the time the contract came, that had been revised down to “no flexibility what-so-ever” and we had to move out the same day as we settled on Monroe, which is a logistical nightmare.

    (in the end, we negotiated a scant 7 day rent back, but thankfully it’s all we needed.)

    as a result, we decided to be a little more proactive with their inspection of our place — we tried to gave them a bunch of information on our place up front, in an effort to make sure they got everything they needed out of their morning kicking our tires.

    unfortunately, they still couldn’t find our water heater — even though we had done everything short of drawing them a map based on our own journey of water heater discovery.

    they gave us a provisional list of issues they wanted addressed — including two that to this day i have no clue what is broken (and neither of those are the one where they want something “adjustmented”):

    • tiles near the base of the washer dryer to be regrouted.
    • gaps in the floor of the utility clause to be closed.
    • closet doors in both bedrooms to be adjustmented to close fully.
    • bathroom light to be replaced with wet area rated fixture.
    • high loop for dishwasher to be adjusted.

    (we opted to give them $500 to fix the stuff themselves.)

    as for the “missing” water heater, they asked to extend the inspection another five days — just long enough to put our purchase of Monroe in jeopardy. instead, we gave them a day extension, and Brandon suggested that I be there the next morning to talk them the place everything myself.

    what followed was a lesson in the power of eye contact — as it turned out that they were legitimately nice people, doing exactly the same sort of thing the lady sparkler and i would have done.

    mr. firsttimehomebuyer was detail oriented and focused on making a great investment decision (not unlike my own beloved). mrs. firsttimehomebuyer was a neo-hippie (much like myself) who was excited primarily about the community and the neighborhood.

    we talked about our place, the building and the neighborhood — and in the course of 20 minutes they went from inexperienced ogres who we’re screwing up the purchase of our dream home to people we’d totally have over for dinner.

    if the lesson of the last two weeks to our real estate agent is to take all his places off the market to make them sell quicker, the lesson for us is to meet any prospective buyers ourselves and take them out for drinks.

  • house 3.0

    []
    things are starting to sink in a bit, now.

    the contract on our new place has been fully signed and ratified (tho, i have no clue what that means, unless it involves a 2/3rds majority of the U.S. Senate).

    we’ve got our home inspection this saturday at 2pm, and the lady sparkler has been furiously working on financing and spreadsheets to make sure we’re all good there (and we are).

    assuming that everything goes well with our purchase and our sale, we’ll have a very busy Memorial Day. we’d settle the sale on Park Road on Monday, May 23rd. we’d settle the purchase on Monroe Street on Wednesday, May 25th.

    then we’d rent back our current place on Park Road from the new owners through Sunday, May 29th, so we’d have about 5 days to swap everything between the two places.

    in the meantime, we’ve been watching a lot of tv — the “worst” being holmes inspection on HGTV.

    the basic premise of the show is to find “homeowners facing massive repair bills and dangerous living conditions due to incompetence within the unregulated home inspection industry,” and then call in Canadian construction foreman extrordinaire Mike Holmes to “make it right.”

    about a month ago, we saw an episode of holmes inspection where all the supporting walls of a 100 year old row home had been taken down, causing over $300k worth of repairs to restore the collapsing floors — which is exactly what we thought had happened to the very first monroe place we looked at.

    this week we saw an episode where termite damage had done $150k worth of damage to a the first two floors of a different, but similarly aged rowhouse. the next day, we found out that the current owners of our future place have been monitoring termites on one of their neighbors’ front porches.

    (the current owners have been treating “our” new porch regularly for the past couple years to prevent the issue from jumping property lines, and the faulty porch is “due” to be replaced this year.)

    it’s nice to know that when the real stress starts settling down, we have some good “hypothetical” stress ready and waiting in the wings.

  • or, maybe not

    []
    well, that didn’t work so much.

    shortly after the post about us putting down an offer on a place on the 1800 block of Monroe NW, we got word from our real estate agent that a grand total of two people saw our place over the weekend.

    the market has judged our sale price, and found it wanting.

    they love our particular unit, they just hate our building. and the high condo fees. and the dated common areas. but mostly the high condo fees. which, of course, are the two things we technically can’t control.

    fortunately, i’m on the board of our association and there have been a LOT of conversations about dropping our fees this year. and the dingy common areas are up for renovation this year, too. so, hopefully i just have to nudge those conversations along a bit.

    it turns out that we are actually an old school condo board in that we have pretty consistently high monthly fees, but not a single special assessment in memory (because we always have money in the bank). unfortunately, every other association on the planet has swapped to a different model, dropping their fees dramatically and just expecting that big expenses will mean big(ish) special assessments.

    i know which one i’d prefer — but i guess that’s why i’m trying to move into a house.

    it also turns out that our building isn’t pre-approved for FHA loans, which means that people can’t buy into the building with federally backed loans that require as little as 3.5% down payment. instead, our buyers right now need to get traditional bank loans, which require 10 to 20% down.

    so it looks like i’ve got a couple “special” projects on my hands for the next month.

    regardless, we backed out of making an offer on the Monroe place — and plan on doing what we can with the condo fees, common areas and the fha pre-approval process in (hopefully) the next month. that’d mean we (again) can go gangbusters with the selling and the buying in the first week of April.

    for those of us playing along at home, we’ve now looked at a more than dozen properties, and have “tried” putting an offer down on a five of them:

    … but haven’t actually bit the bullet on any.

    i guess the good news is that places keep coming on the market. now, if we can get that one extra-special one off the market, we’ll be all set.

  • coming unglued

    well, i think i’m about done with the real estate thing.

    this afternoon we took a long second look at a house on the 1800 block of monroe street nw, and the details didn’t look so good upon closer examination.

    it had been recently renovated, but the finishing just wasn’t where we’d have liked it to be — and if what we could see gave us pause, we were pretty nervous about what was hidden behind the drywall.

    this is the third place that looked at where all the original character was gutted during a recent renovation and replaced (seemingly) by whatever home depot had on special that week.

    our real estate agent calls it a “gaithersburg remodel” — gutting a District home and treating it as if it was just another townhouse in the suburbs — which would be funny if we weren’t absolutely weeping inside at the loss.

    so, after this round of bad real estate karma we’ve started coming a bit unglued — enough that we actually ventured over to capitol hill to check out a place (400 block of 6th Street NE) that just came on the market there.

    it was stunning and had everything that the last couple of places in mount pleasant have lacked — original woodwork, original layouts, period decor.

    to make matters worse, it was in our price range, had big beautiful bedrooms, was in the absolute best part of capitol hill, and was surrounded by excellent elementary and middle schools.

    we thought long and hard about putting an offer on it — even though we haven’t seriously been considering moving to capitol hill.

    but during the drive home to mount pleasant — along the tree lined streets, around the zoo, past our favorite restaurants and playgrounds — we realized we just couldn’t do it.

    our neighborhood is just too awesome to be replaced by even a spectacular home somewhere else.

    we’re not ready to give up on mount pleasant — not yet.

  • twitter saves the day, again

    I’m starting to think the office tweeter is the most powerful person in any bureaucracy.

    The internet is littered with stories about regular people getting their offline problems solved after complaining to corporations online.

    Heck, we did the same thing in the aftermath of a certain automobile recall last year.

    Turns out that corporate tweeters aren’t he only ones saving the day — the District government social media teams are jumping in, too.

    Our permit application to park a mobile storage container on city street this weekend mysteriously stalled earlier this week, and all of the lady sparklers efforts ended up in voicemail-laden dead ends.

    So, late last night I tweeted to the Districts official Department of Transportation account.

    hey, @DDOTDC – we have a POD permit app that’s been stalled/ignored for a week. who can help fix tmrw before it’s delivered this weekend?

    By 11:00 pm, I had an email address for the guy behind the twitter account, asking for details on our problem.

    By 7:30 am, I was CC’ed on an email from him, forwarding our problem on to a team of people to solve.

    By 8:30 am, the lady sparkler got a call on her cell phone from someone from DDOT saying they would clear everything up for us within the hour.

    At 9:04, my wife had the permit in her hot little hands.

    I don’t know how much of this little bit of awesomeness was caused by the social media phenomenon in general, or the epic person behind @DDOTDC in particular, or about just tunneling through the bureaucracy to find the actual human beings inside.

    Either way, whatever is responsible — thank you.

  • goob

    we’ll, we’ve been bouncing around a little bit with nicknames for sparklet — not that we’re giving up on sparklet for external marketing purposes, but it’s a little harsh/abrupt/awkward to use in daily life.

    for now, we’ve settled on some variation on the word “goober” — including goob, goober bear, and goober nut. (it’s important to be nimble.)

    now, on the surface, i can see how this might sound odd, but in our defense the the urban dictionary — one of the least polite chroniclers of slang on our fine planet — defines goober as:

    a goober is just a kindhearted, rather oblivious goofball. it’s term of endearment really. it comes from the ancient scottish verb “to goub”, which has to do with doing a dance and smiling sheepishly while doing so, exposing the goubs in one’s teeth.

    so, it’s actually kind of appropriate.

    i wish i knew exactly how “goober” worked its way into our collective vernacular — i have a feeling it was because we were calling her doofus during her “running into walls” phase and decided we should shoot for something a bit more charitable.

    either way, the nickname was cemented about six months ago when we first watch disney’s meet the robinsons — one of the two lead characters’ nicknames is goob, and he has that sort of sheepish, lovable quality that we see in sparklet at this age.

    of course, he also turns out to be the arch-villain of the story, but that’s for another time.

  • mount pleasant-er

    []
    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.

  • you suck, montgomery county

    []
    just got a “notice of delinquent parking ticket” in the mail from montgomery county, maryland for parking at an expired meter on november 12th at 5:17pm.

    there are a couple of problems with this scenario:

    • we never got the original notice of the parking violation for which we are now “delinquent.”
    • i wasn’t in montgomery county that day — twelve minutes before our “violation,” i took these pictures of kate at our home in mount pleasant and proceeded to upload them to flickr four minutes *after* our violation.
    • my wife wasn’t in montgomery county that day — thirty minutes after our “violation,” the lady sparkler stopped by pupusaria san miguel on her way home from work (for the best latin food in D.C., incidentally).
    • the “infraction” occurred on a federal holiday (Veteran’s Day) when parking restrictions don’t apply.
    • the citation *does not* list a make or model, so there is no confirmation that it was our car and not just a typo of our license plate.

    however, the only recourse Montgomery County provides is to appear — in person — before the 6th District Court in Rockville.

    given the cost of the ticket (at least in relation to my wife’s billing rate) and the distance between my work and the courthouse (55 minutes in decent traffic) there is no way in h-e-double-hockey-sticks that we’re going to contest the citation.

    you suck, montgomery county — yet another reason i’m never moving to the suburbs.

    PHOTO: Uploaded to Flickr by eddie.welker on 7 Sep 09, 12.59PM EST, via Creative Commons license.

  • Is there a Wedding Photographer in the House?

    []
    Steph and Jorge’s wedding photographer is going to be a no show tonight — so it looks like I’m going to “get” to shoot my first wedding.

    The maid of honor (not ours, but theirs) mentioned it in passing to the lady sparkler and my beloved volunteered me for the job — not that I wouldn’t have offered myself, but it’s awesome that my bride came up to me at the pool bar and said:

    Hey, I just told someone you could be the wedding photographer tonight — hope that’s okay.

    UPDATE: I’ve collected my thoughts and all my gear, and i’m actually feeling pretty legit — I’ve got the same camera a wedding photographer friend of mine uses for her weddings, four memory cards which can hold about 1200 photos, two batteries, and two pretty serious-grade lenses (both normal, and wide angle).

    That said, I’m seriously freaking out shot two things — well, three actually: 1) I’m shooting a wedding; 2) I’m going to blow through 1200 photos before the reception even starts which means I’m going to have to empty memory cards onto my computer while I’m still shooting and my laptop doesn’t have a battery; 3) I don’t have a legitimate flash, so shooting the outdoors-afterdark reception is going to suck something fierce.

    UPDATE 2: The “shoot” is over, and I have to say that wasn’t nearly as stressful as I thought it would be — though through no part of my own:

    • one of the bridesmaides had a professional grade flash (not to mention my exact same camera) which is the only reason we have photos from the reception.
    • that same bridesmaid was able to shoot the bride getting ready, so we got pictures from both halves of the preparations without it getting awkward or me being on two places at once.
    • friends jumped in several times throughout the night, dumping photos onto the computer and picking the camera themselves. and at one point we had amassed enough equipment that we had all three of us all shooting at once.
    • the bride and the groom were both incredibly flexible and were eager to line up the shots themselves, so all we had to do was point and shoot.

    I haven’t run through them all yet, but between the four of us we amassed over 3,000 pictures, and they all look pretty good considering.

    I promised the couple I would post everything by Christmas, but here are a few of the ceremony in the meantime.

  • parents of the year

    []
    at dinner tonight, the waitress came running up to us:

    excuse me! excuse me! nuestros cuchillos muy afilados!

    we look down at sparklet, and she is knawing on a set of cutlery wrapped up in a napkin, which is a relatively normal part of her dining routine.

    we were just about to say, “oh that’s okay” when we noticed instead of the usual table knife (the ones that can’t cut butter) she was gnawing on a steak knife.

    frankly, i’m surprised that the waitress didn’t call the costa rican version of Child Protective Services.

    she watched us let sparklet eat a steak knife, spoil her dinner with a blackberry smoothy, and adhere loosely to our version of the “five second” rule (which really works out to be more of a “minute and a half” rule).

    not our finest moments — but also sadly not our first.

    this morning on the trail to arenal, we had three separate groups of people stop us to “let us know” that sparklet was chewing on a stick (yeah, we knew).

    to make matters worse, perhaps you’ve noticed a new gash on sparklet’s head from a couple of days ago? yup, she ran into a wall in our hotel room.

    there’s also a (less noticable) bruise under her chin, which she got when she tripped over her own feet and landed chin first on the tile floor. oh, and when she fell she bit her lip, so that’s been bleeding on and off, too.

    and then, of course, there was that double gainer off the deck into the pool.

    come to think of it, maybe i should call CPS myself.

  • hike: parque nacional volcon arenal, costa rica

    []
    []
    []
    we are lucky people.

    putting aside the fact that we can afford to come to costa rica, that we both work with such awesome people that we can just dissappear for 10 days during the run up to year end, and that we have a (mostly) happy, healthy and charming little girl …

    … during the roughly 108 hours that we’ve been in Arenal, we’ve been able to see the very top of the volcano for exactly six hours — and three of those hours happend to be when we were hiking around the base of the volcano.

    i don’t want to run the statistical odd of this ever happening again, but i do feel like i should buy a lottery ticket.

    the main hike in the parque is about 2km from the primary parking lot to a (now fully cooled) lava flow from the 1993 eruption, which goes through a whole series of overlooks of both the volcano and the lake beneath.

    we knew nothing about how strenuous the hike was, but started feeling good when we saw two Russian grandmothers hobbling off the mountain as we made our way to the trail head.

    sparklet was a happy (and well fed) camper in throughout — and even hiked a bit herself on the way back.

    she’s a good egg.

    See Slideshow of the Photos on Flickr:
    hike: parque nacional volcon arenal, costa rica

  • the pizza garden

    []
    []
    our nanny share nanny doesn’t speak english. the lady sparkler and i haven’t spoken Spanish since high school.

    if that’s not a recipe for a laugh-track worth sit-com, i’m not sure what is.

    about six weeks ago, our nanny started saying how much sparklet loves running around “the pixa” — “the pesca” we ask?

    “no, the pixa” she she replies. “pixa! pixa!”

    “oh, of course — the ‘pixa!’” we finally replied, without an ounce of comprehension. “boy, does she love that!”

    over the next six weeks, we proceeded to ask every native Spanish speaker we’ve ever known what “pixa” meant en Español.

    not a clue.

    i Google translated about a dozen different spellings — pisca, pixa, pitsa, pesca, pixza.

    nothing.

    we finally decided that she meant either “pesca” which is Spanish for “fishing” or PISCA which is the Paranormal Investigation Society of Central Alabama.

    we were pretty confused about where they could possibly go fishing in northwest D.C., much less the intricacies of travel to Central Alabama, so we gave up and called it a day.

    fast forward to yesterday, when our beloved nanny share partners came to the zoo for sparklet’s birthday, and they said:

    hey, have you guys been over to the pizza garden yet? it’s a giant pizza that the kids can climb all over. maria says that they really love it.

    pizza. pixa. pizza = pixa.

    (cue laugh track.)

    See Slideshow of the Photos on Flickr:
    the pizza garden, national zoo, washington, dc

  • marketing 101

    dude.

    late last month the formula we’ve used since month one to supplement mommy milk — similac sensitive r.s. — all of a sudden disappeared from the shelves, without a trace.

    we tried all the usual stores — empty shelves. the lady sparkler and i both went online to the manufacturer’s site, and it was gone like it never existed in the first place.

    after about two weeks, the empty spaces on the shelves suddenly filled up with a new flavor of formula in a baby puke green color.

    after two more hours of digging — er, googling — it appears that the new flavor (similac sensitive for spit up) is actually just a re-branded old flavor.

    only a different product name. and a completely different color. and a different safety seal. and no reference to the previous brand.

    how did we know? i had to compare the UPC codes off a bottle of the old formula.

    now, i’m not much of a marketer, but if they had kept any one thing from the previous design — keep the red bottle, keep the product name, keep a reference to old product — we wouldn’t have missed a beat and would have kept buying the “new” stuff like lemmings off a cliff.

    seriously, people. marketing 101.

    P.S. sparklet is just about off formula entirely (and mommy phased out of pumping late last month). starting this week we’ve got her on a mix of milk and lactaid — the latter being a holdover over from similac sensitive r.s. being lactose free.

    once she gets used to the whole milk thing, we’ll start phasing out the lactaid, and viola — high cholesterol, full lactose baby.

  • accident vs. incompetence

    []
    soooo, i rear ended someone today in our (somewhat) new (to us) prius. i’m fine, and *certainly* wasn’t at fault, but it reminds me how much i hate driving on the wrong side of the river.

    here are the things that the driver (from Virginia, natch) did wrong (with a photo illustration in case you get confused):

    1. he was coming from alexandria, so in order to be where he was he had to illegally cut across at least one lane of traffic to get there.
    2. he ignored a “circle traffic must stay in the circle during rush hour” sign, and pulled out into the flow of traffic.
    3. he cut across four lanes of traffic — four! — including three lanes with solid white lines.
    4. he cut me off, and then immediately slammed on his breaks for a pedestrian in the crosswalk.

    the only good news is that he stopped, and didn’t hit the pedestrian (who was emerging from behind a big lumbering passenger van).

    that’s when it got fun.

    he blamed the van driver for “letting” the pedestrian use the crosswalk, and then eagerly blew off the damage to his car (you can make out the outline of my license plate on his rear bumper) to get the heck out of dodge.

    i double checked The Prius soon after i started breathing again, and no damage to my car — or me, for that matter. he did give me his information after i took a picture of his license plate, but strangely didn’t seem interested in waiting for mine.

    wonder if he’ll do that little stunt again.

  • hike: piedmont/gap run trails, sky meadows state park, virginia

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    []
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    []
    damn, i’m out of shape.

    i haven’t looked it up yet, but the 2 mile trail we just did had enough altitude gain that it might as well been the north face of mount everest, as least as far as my frail body/flabby midsection was concerned.

    and, sparklet was unkind — providing very verbal feedback every 10 feet when her daddy/sherpa stopping to suck wind.

    the big news of the morning came on the way back down, when we ran smack into a herd of cows — animals, i should point out, that didn’t seem to be having a problem with the altitude.

    we ran into them right as we were coming over a blind rise, so by the time sparklet saw them they were maybe 10 feet away, and she was utterly confounded about how a whole pack of her friends from the petting zoo got up here (and how she got on the wrong side of the fence, i’d imagine).

    after about 10 minutes of staring (with a competition between sparklet’s eyes and her mouth for which could be open the widest) we finally said goodbye to the cows and continued on.

    sparklet wailed, until we turned back.

    after 5 more minutes of staring (and waving, and giggling) we once again said goodbye to the cows and continued on.

    sparklet wailed.

    it wasn’t until three more rounds of this that the cows were far enough away that sparklet finally lost interest in her first official “wildlife” sighting.

    and, being the out-of-shape/selfish nit that i am, the whole time i was wondering why we couldn’t have seen the cows on the way UP the mountain, when i could have used the excuse to stop.


    trail information:
    Trailhead: 38.992886,-77.967272 (Google Maps); Length: 2.1 total miles; Elevation Gain: 360 feet; Trail Type: Out-and-back; Skill Level: Moderate.

    See All the Photos on Flickr:
    sky meadows state park, delaplane, virginia

  • mother’s day, mostly

    it’s possible that i am hardwired to be susceptible to guilt trips.

    even if that’s the case, however, nothing in recent history has beaten the one that i got from our beloved m.o.h. (maid of honor) three days after the mother’s day that the rest of the planet had back in May.

    (and by “rest of the planet” i mean “all you crazy people who have enough spare time to keep track of these things.”)

    from the m.o.h., i quote:

    Where was the sweet first Mother’s Day post on your blog?? Didn’t [Sparklet] give her mommy a present? I know [The Lady Sparkler] doesn’t celebrate Mother’s Day, but I was hoping that [Sparklet] would.

    well, funny you should ask, because instead of celebrating mother’s day this year we were in williamsburg, virginia celebrating the wedding of a very good friend.

    (and by “very good friend” i mean “high school girlfriend.”)

    so tonight, a scant 59 days after it occurred, we finally went out and celebrated mother’s day the way mommy sparkler intended — dinner at hank’s oyster bar, drinks at bar rouge and then desert at local 16.

    a couple of things, for the record:

    • [insert sweet first Mother’s Day sentence]
    • m.o.h. is dead on when she says that mommy has no interest in celebrating mother’s day, and she isn’t opposed in the “you better want to celebrate it anyway, bub” sort of way.
    • sparklet’s first gift for mommy was a digital picture frame for mommy’s office, chocked full of mommy-and-sparklet pictures.
    • daddy’s first gift for mommy actually happened last year, but his second gift was 59 days of insistence that we were going to celebrate mother’s day whether mommy wanted to or not.

    but, i digress.

    in all do seriousness, we do love mommy and are VERY lucky to have her. she is the omni-energetic ying to daddy’s thirty-minutes-of-action-tuckers-me-out-for-a-month yang, and a boundless source of love and wonderfulness for both daddy and child.

    there, i said it. (thanks m.o.h.)

  • babyproofing

    []

    photo of the week // week thirty-seven
    if friday morning wasn’t enough of a wake up call for babyproofing, sparklet decided to up the ante on sunday and pull herself up on the toy box, the couch (to reach the cat) and one of our arm chairs (again, for the cat).

    so, i spent the rest of the day at home depot.

    shortly after the first burst of pseudo-crawling back in may, i spent a weekend tidying up the electrical cables and generally trying to make some more space for toys and movement.

    with her doing pull-ups, however, we’ve had to start strapping down all the tippy furniture we have and trust me when i say, it’s all tippy.

    a by-product of living in a smaller space is that everything we own is a normal height, but only about half as deep (and we all know that height + depth/2 = tippy).

    to make matters worse, we have no overhead lights in our living room or either bed room, and have to rely on those tall “urn” floor lamps — which give us all the same tipsiness as the furniture, but with the added bonus of lots of shatter-upon-impact glass.

    so, we’ve bought a metric ton of straps designed to prevent furniture from falling over during earthquakes (“quakehold!“) and have been using them to secure pretty much everything to the wall — three lamps, a desk, a television cabinet, the hall table, and the ever important toy box.

    top that off an improvised latch (adjustable bungee cord fastened around the closet door handle) to keep sparklet out of the litter box, and we should be good to go …

    … except she just knocked the bejeezus out of her head on the toy box, so i’m off to the store to buy a swimming pool noodle to pad the box’s front edge.

    who says necessity is the mother of invention?

  • why i’m not as excited about the U.S. as you are

    []
    i’m as happy about the united states making it through as everyone else within a 3,000 mile radius of my door step, and the nation-wide elation that’s come from landon donovan’s extra time goal has been really pretty awesome to behold. but, here’s my problem:

    that was way more exciting than it needed to be.

    unlike most years past, the U.S. men’s national team is legitimately good. the team is easily in the top half of the countries participating in the Cup this year, and they have a class of players that (while not the super-elite) they are certainly regularly competing in the top tier of football/soccer.

    so, while the U.S. advancing to the round of 16 is great … it’s also the bare minimum of what they should do this competition.

    a united states draw against england would normally be a good result, but considering it was (at the time) the worst game england had played in the last two years, a draw just isn’t good enough for the talent that is on the U.S. squad.

    they should have won, and won outright.

    during the next match (against slovakia) they again fought for a draw against likely the 6th worst team in the competition. commentators can say all they want about the (wrongly) disallowed goal that would have give then U.S. the win, but that misses the point — they should never have been in the position to need that winner in the first place.

    the coverage of the final match especially drove me crazy, the now “legendary” 1-0 win over Algeria (the 8th worst team in the competition). commentators referred to it as the U.S. “superbowl” of the Americans’ world cup, and landon donovan’s winner as the “greatest goal in the history of U.S. soccer.”

    rubbish.

    our “superbowl” at a minimum is the upcoming match with Ghana — even though our opponents’ are ranked worse than Algeria, they should have a strong home continent advantage being the last African team in the Cup.

    our “greatest goal in the history of U.S. soccer” will be the goal donovan scores to win a (still hypothetical) next match with Uruguay or South Korea to send the U.S. to the semi-finals.

    one of the things that drives me the most batty about U.S. Soccer, is that we always play down to our competition. we fight, we work hard, we run everybody else to the ground. but, in the end, we don’t think we’re good enough, and everybody else is all too happy to help make that come true.

    don’t get me wrong — it’s good that the boys advanced through the group stage, and even better that they finished at the top of the group. but “top of the group” should have been with two (or even three) wins, and “advancing” is what we knew we should do way back in early June.

    for the U.S., the “real” world cup starts now.

    PHOTO: by g55 (Ginger Gregory), courtesy of a Creative Commons license.

  • the beautiful game? hmmm.

    [Group A encounter, Uruguay vs. France at Cape Town Stadium.]
    the most telling social media clip from the world cup so far was a friend’s status update at the end of day one:

    Why is this the ‘beautiful game?’ Two ties. No score in the second. They ran around in circles for 90 minutes. Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

    as the dutiful, soccer-educated elite in the relationship, i jumped to the world cup’s defense.

    “they only call it the beautiful game if certain teams are playing it,” I said. “And France is decidedly not on that list.”

    but, then i watched the rest of the weekend, and you know what? she was right. Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

    i watched most or all of seven matches this weekend (missed Ghana’s 1-0 win over Serbia) and while there was some great moments, by and large the matches were all ugly babies that only their mothers would love — with the possible exception of Argentina’s 1-0 win over Nigeria, whose scoreline sounded more boring than it actually was.

    the world cup. less than perfect. suddenly, my life was without meaning.

    i played soccer for most of two decades (keeper for all but a couple years in central defense) and have clear recollections of watching the last 6 or 7 world cups.

    if the world cup isn’t the greatest sporting event ever, how could i have invested so much effort learning the game? what am i going to talk about on monday with the rest of my over-educated urban elite friends? how am i going to demonstrate my complete personal superiority over the great unwashed masses in the fly-over-states?

    and so, in a vain attempt to deal with this loss of identity, i’ve come up with a couple theories about (a) why the opening weekend wasn’t the paragon of sport it could/should have been, and (b) why we all will have forgotten this crisis even happened by the time the cup is raised in four weeks time:

    • not every team has played their first match — and the teams who haven’t played yet (spain, brazil, holland, portugal, italy) reliably give us a much better-looking brand of footy than even the best of the teams we’ve already seen (england, usa, france).
    • no one wants to lose their first game — only 8% of world cup teams advance from the group stage after losing their first game, which means teams will do pretty much anything to avoid losing. fwiw, playing not to lose isn’t much fun to watch.
    • a rash of last minute injuries — last minute changes in personnel means lots of teams are shifting players and tactics, and new people (or old people playing out of position) means crappy football until the new ‘plan’ becomes as familiar as the old one once was.
    • top-shelf goal keeping — from what i can tell the goal keeping this far has been outstanding (from the usa and nigeria, in particular) and good goal keeping can turn potentially offense-laden showcases into nasty, defensive stalemates.
    • the new ball — it seems like addidas can’t stop screwing with the ball (this one was called ‘horrible’, ‘rotten’ and ‘erratic’ by starting keepers in the run up) and while players can (and should) adapt, rewriting the rules of physics for the ball is going to take some real world, high pressure game experience to sort out.
    • vuvuzelas — those #$%@ south african fog horns have got to be driving the players nuts, and there are plenty of complaints that the players can’t hear each other on the pitch. and while i never liked talking to *my* teammates, it seems (in hindsight) it might have been a good thing to do occasionally.

    hollow excuses? maybe. complete and total bunk? probably.

    am i going to bury my head in my pillow and pray for better games this week? most definitely.

  • transitions

    []
    like the crazy, measures driven parents we are, we’ve been so focused lately on young sparklet’s developmental milestones (almost crawling! she knows her name!) that we’ve totally neglected some of the “other” news in our lives.

    namely, we have a new nanny, a new nanny share family … and the lady sparkler got a new job.

    i’m not drunk enough to publicly explore the reasons behind the nanny transition — if you’d like to contribute to the drinking fund, i’m happy to talk in person — but the important things are that (a) sparklet’s still great, (b) we still love the talimo’s (bff!), and (c) during the transition, the bff’s got an offer of free familial child care that they just couldn’t refuse.

    the new nanny share is working out great. the nanny is über comfortable with a kid on each hip, and the share has been going on for more than a decade (tho, obviously, different families have rotated through).

    the new share baby is a boy, is exactly sparklet’s age (have i mentioned that i strongly support arranged marriages?!?) and lives within walking distance (over by auntie melissa).

    as if that wasn’t enough excitement for sparklet’s first summer, the lady sparkler went and got herself a new job.

    she wasn’t looking (decidedly not, actually) but got contacted by a head hunter and took the interview for reasons somewhere between being polite and making new contacts in the industry. but, four interviews later, the company made the proverbial offer-she-couldn’t-refuse (salary, seniority, benefits) and as of June 14th, the lady sparkler has a new job.

    still doing mostly the same thing, just a couple of blocks farther away — which pretty well sums up the nanny situation, too.

  • i’m watching the world cup, and you can too

    []
    despite all the salivating about you’ve probably heard from soccer geeks recently about “tables” and “group stages”, watching the world cup over the next four weeks is a pretty simple affair.

    teams start by playing each of three teams, with the two best teams from each group advancing into a simple bracket tourney, not unlike the ncaa’s march madness.

    all you need is a team to follow, and here is a quick primer:

    who to follow

    if you are new to the non-american brand of football, you want to pick one that you can watch deep into the world cup. as much fun as it would be to root for some of these tiny up-start countries (new zealand springs to mind), you’ll be pretty bored once they get eliminated in the second week. so, you probably want to pick from the main contenders.

    Spain — currently the best team in europe, spain balances a beautiful brand of football with some physicality that is missing from other “pretty” teams. this team has a fanatical fan base, and some of the best attacking players in the game. they are also the bookie’s best bet to win the whole enchilada, so (hopefully) you’ll have a team to follow in weeks three and four.

    Argentina — has the best player on the planet (lionel messi), plan on starting three attacking forwards (most teams use two, some only one) and a coach who is desperately trying to translate his own brilliance as a player (see his goal of the century) into brilliance as a coach (and failing pretty miserably). but who knows … they could just as easily flame out in the group stages (they barely qualified) as they could win the whole thing, but either way the fireworks should be pretty spectacular.

    Brazil — normally, you’d never catch me pushing brazil (it’s the equivalent a new immigrant to the U.S. announcing they’re going to root for either the yankees or the patriots) but this team isn’t the same purvayors of “the beautiful game” that’s won the world cup five times. this brazil is much more blue collar, physical, jump-in-the-trenches then their predecessors, while still keeping the incredible individual skill for which they’re known. should be fun to watch.

    honorable mentions — everybody wants an african team to do well this world cup, but all six of them are facing a pretty steep up-hill battle. while hosts south africa will have ridiculously fun, pro-bafana bafana (their team’s nickname) crowds, they are the lowest ranked team ever to host the world cup and aren’t figured to make it out of the first round. côte d’ivoire had a great shot, but lost their star goal-scorer to injury. i have no idea which, if any, of the african nations will advance, but many people (myself included) will be rooting for the whole lot of them.

    teams you may think you want to follow, but really probably don’t

    United States — sure, there are dozens of reason to root for them. civic pride. names that you (might) have heard of. dozens of blogs saying “this is their year.” it’s not. i’m not sure it ever will be. expect one good game out of them, one mediocre game (where the result is closer than it should have been), and one shameful game (where they vomit on themselves). they’ll likely get to the sweet sixteen, but it almost certainly won’t be pretty, and they’ll break your heart eventually … they always do.

    England — see above, “united states”.

    Italy — while a fun, attacking team when they have to be, italy regularly lapses into putting all 11 men behind the ball when they are ahead (“parking a bus in front of goal” as it’s called) which makes them prone to stunningly dull results. that, coupled with the fact that the current coach seems to be infatuated with coupling “old” with “slow” and calling it a day, means italy isn’t a great team for newbies.

    Germany — about as fun to watch as a team of german accountants competing in the actuarial olympics. see also, “holland”.

    France — where to begin. they (a) cheated their way into the world cup with a dirty, dirty goal from a blatant hand ball, without which they would be back home underachieving, (b) the team they cheated out of the tournament was Ireland — who are much more fun to drink with — and (c) because of the way the group stage works out, rooting for france means rooting against south africa. oh, and if that’s not enough, remember that they’re french.

    kickoff on friday

    it all starts tomorrow morning at 9:30 am EST on ESPN. if you want to do some light reading before then, steven goff’s soccer insider blog is surprisingly readable for the lay people, and ESPN is desperately trying to hook the generic american sport fan on the Cup with their coverage at ESPN.com.

    as for me? i’ve followed the england national team for the last couple of decades, and am not going to stop just because that the united states is finally fielding teams that might actually win a game or two. it also doesn’t hurt that my club team (tottenham hotspur) has five players in the england squad, and it’s more fun to root for people you know.

    appalling, i know, but i’m okay with it … i have a feeling my ancestors were on the wrong side of the revolutionary way, anyway.

    PHOTO: Soccer-City-Stadium-outside-view by Shine 2010 – 2010 World Cup good news.

  • goodbye, iphone

    Well, it had to happen eventually.

    After 20 long months of AT&T suckage, i have finally taken my iPhone back to that great Daisy Hill Puppy Farm in the sky.

    While the death-throws of our relationship have been well documented, baby sparklet was the two-ton brick that finally broke the camel’s back.

    One afternoon in March, baby momma thought she was playing phone tag with me about some scheduling — she left me two voicemails and three text messages — but AT&T didn’t deliver any of them until it was too late to do any good.

    Turned out it was nothing important, but neither of us particularly wanted to discover what it felt like if it *had* been something more life-or-death.

    i got the HTC incredible — is one of the new-fangled google android phones. it has all the applications i used on the iphone, and has got some crazy social media integration (my address book entries link directly to their corresponding facebook and twitter accounts).

    but the think i love most about my new phone is that it rings when called, and voicemails don’t get lost for days on end. i know it’s crazy, but it’s kind of nice having a phone again.

    goodbye, foursquare

    speaking of saying goodbye, when the iphone died we kicked foursquare to the curb as well (foursquare was the location-based social media application that made her “mayor” of her favorite playground).

    in the end, it was just too darn competitive.

    while we thought it was fun to keep track of where we had been, foursquare is setup to be a game, and the person who checks in the most wins. this was cute and all, but we apparently live within blocks of the #1 foursquare user in D.C. — with an average of 20 check-ins per day — and so our mayorships were under constant threat.

    eventually, when I found myself making decisions on where to go based on where our mayorships were threatened, it struck me as the time to call it quits.

    instead, we’ve swapped over to Gowalla which is waaaaay more low key. there are no mayorships, just rewards for going places and trying new things.

    i’m saving up sparklet’s competitive streak for team sports.

  • awkward prom date

    i’m embarrassed to say, but i’m a chickfila mobile insider — which basically means i’m addicted enough to the deep fried chicken sandwich that they send me special offers to my mobile phone.

    this week they’re rolling out a new spicy chicken sandwich, and giving it away at special events in food courts across America — each decorated with all the fanfare of an awkward school dance.

    nancyfromwork and i went over during lunch and we were paralyzed by the throwback awkwardness.

    oh, and the sandwich was fine and all but — nothing can top the original.

  • your seat isn’t bolted to the floor

    []
    well, koons screwed up again … they had told us that our plates and registration would be mailed to us, only to find out that a “new” law (effective 2002) requires us to get the car inspected first.

    their incompetence doesn’t leave us with much time to dilly-dally — our temporary plates expire in two days — so i got to spend an otherwise glorious saturday afternoon at the dmv.

    favorite part: while i was waiting in the dmv office, a woman came in and started screaming at the guy behind the desk.

    woman: “i don’t understand why you won’t inspect my car!”

    manager: “ma’am, your seat isn’t bolted to the floor. whoever gets behind that wheel is going to get hurt as soon as they have to use the brakes. we can’t be liable for that.”

    woman: “brakes? but i don’t drive the car *that* often.”

    all of a sudden, the manager was *very* interested in helping me with my situation.

    turns out that hybrids don’t have most of the usual “stuff” that emits (catalytic converters, gas vapor recovery systems) so there isn’t a need to check to see if it’s working.

    the manager took as much time as he humanly possibly could explaining all this to me, glancing every couple of seconds to see if angry lady had left yet.

    then, he handed me an emissions sticker that doesn’t expire until 2017.

    woman: “2017?!? must be nice to not have to see these @#&%$ for that long.”

    or, you could just bolt your seat to the floor. whichever.

  • koons doesn’t seem to be taking the toyota recall very more seriously (updated!)

    []
    UPDATE: after some legalistic-sounding resistance (saying they were only obligated to fix the pedal, not do anything with the floor mats) they have agreed to get us the correct floor mats, and properly secure them. yay!

    we just bought at used 2008 prius from koons toyota in tysons, and have already had two vaguely disturbing experiences about the on-going “unintended acceleration” recall already.

    first, before we even bought the car, we asked them about the recall … and the salesperson said that, since our car didn’t have all-weather floor mats, it wasn’t subject to the recall.

    unfortunately for that claim, the next day we did a quick “check your VIN” search on the toyota recall site which reported that the car was not only subject to the recall, but that the remedy work hadn’t yet been completed.

    fine, no big deal — especially as the car was missing its floor mats when we test drove the car. no harm, no foul.

    we pushed the issue with koons, and they replied that it was just a misunderstanding, that the accelerator pedal recall on the 2008 Prius was “just issued late last week” and that they would certainly fix the issue before we came back to buy the car the following night.

    (according to Toyota, the 2004-2009 Prius was part of the November 2, 2009 announcement to address floor mat entrapment — but i’m not an expert in the nuances of the recall, so i’ll give them the benefit of the doubt.)

    the next night, we went back, asked if they had done the work. they replied they had.

    we asked for documentation, in case there were questions if we ever tried to resell the car. they said that they couldn’t print it out that night because the service department was closed, but that we could pick it up the following week.

    we asked if they had found the car’s floor mats. they replied they had.

    fine. great. we bought the car, joined the cult of the hypermiling prius, and were happy.

    fast forward to yesterday, when we got around to taking up the paper, temporary, “we respect your car” floor mats up from the floor.

    first, i noticed that the floor mats were the wrong color, and has wear that was entirely impossible for a two year old car (worn all the way through the carpet to the rubber backing) so were obviously from an older model year.

    (koons seemingly grabbed some other floor mats they had lying around, and tossed them into our car. that’s borderline scummy in my book, but not out-of-line for what i’d expect from a used car dealership — even for a car with the “certified pre-owned” label.)

    but then i noticed that the floor mats were unsecured — which is what led to the recall in the first place.

    (did i mention we have a 6 month-old child?)

    now, either of these situations alone — saying our car wasn’t subject to the recall vs. “fixing it” with incorrect, unsecured floor mats — and i’m thinking it’s just a bad day at the car dealership.

    put the two together, and koons doesn’t seem to be taking the toyota recall very seriously.

    now i’m nervous that maybe they didn’t even replace the accelerator pedal — i mean, heck, how the would i know if the work was done or not? — and am more than a little nervous asking for the documentation that the recall work was done.

    so, i’ve sent emails to one of koon’s managers and to our sales consultant — haven’t heard back yet — and we’re going back into koons on monday for some light repairs the agreed to make during our test drive.

    with any luck, they’ll have our floor mats waiting for us. i hope to god that they aren’t going to give us any grief — give us our proper floor mats, and actually secure them this time.

    until then, we’re removed the floor mats and are again using the (now oddly ironic) temporary “we respect your car” paper mats.

    we’ll see what happens — and report back once we hear back from them.

    based on what i’ve seen so far, i’m not particularly optimistic.

    UPDATE: after some legalistic-sounding resistance (saying they were only obligated to fix the pedal, not do anything with the floor mats) they have agreed to get us the correct floor mats, and properly secure them. yay!

  • our new prius overlord

    []
    it’s no secret that the jetta has been wearing out its welcome, so this past weekend we started doing some old fashioned car shopping.

    part of our thinking in selling the jetta now, is to unload it while it might still have some value … so we trucked up to CarMax, where the jetta was appraised for whopping $1,200 more than any independent car-value-resource would give for the car if it was in *excellent* condition.

    bear in mind why were were selling the car in the first place — transmission, bushings, air conditioner all failing — and that we’ve done ~$8,000 worth of work on the car in the last 24k miles.

    so, armed with a ridiculously overvalued appraisal — and one that’s set to expire in 7 days — we went shopping as quickly as our little legs would carry us.

    while we needed a car that wouldn’t die in the next week and a half, we wanted some more room in the back seat (even if it meant giving up some space in the trunk) and we liked the idea of a hatchback (for ease of access and maximum flexibility).

    once we started looking around, we quickly tossed a ton of models due to fuel economy / street parking concerns (including the mazda5, any SUVs, and all minivans) and then ruled out dozens more with headroom issues (including the hyundai elantra touring which we otherwise loved).

    and then there was the prius.

    we test drove a brand-spaking new 2010 prius on sunday afternoon, but it was a little toooo space-age-y for us, and a *lot* too expensive for the features we wanted.

    we liked the headroom, and all the space in the back seat, and the fact that it was a hatchback. and the fuel economy wasn’t bad either.

    of course, we didn’t much like the seemingly incessant “unintended acceleration” recalls washing over the Toyota product line. or the fact that there is a de facto “prestige” tax, not unlike when you buy anything that everyone else seems to want (ie. something from Apple).

    but, it turns out that prius batteries don’t degrade with age, so there is actually a market for used priuses (priusus? prii?) — who knew?!?

    we found a couple from 2008 that looked more like a car (and less like a spaceship), that had all the right bells and whistles — bluetooth/hands-free phone interface and satellite navigation to eliminate any lingering need for my iphone while driving, and the lady sparkler wanted leather seats that are easy(er) to de-babyify.

    there was still, however, the matter of the recall.

    unfortunately, the dealer denied (at first) that the 2008 priusesus cars-we-were-looking-at were subject to the recall (for accelerator pedals getting stuck on improperly installed floor mats). when we pushed the issue, and pointed to their own website, they “discovered” we were right, and quickly replaced both the floor mats and the accelerator pedal.

    and so, we now welcome our new prius overlord.

    it’s hard not to feel like we’re joining some kind of cult (likely because i think that’s exactly what we’re doing).

    i’ve already been honked at / passed angrily / verbally abused because i was “hypermiling” (maximizing gas mileage by making fuel-conserving adjustments to one’s driving techniques) by pulling out of a stoplight without the level of lunacy Virginians deem proper for the streets of their Commonwealth.

    it almost makes me proud.

  • the jetta is dead, long live the jetta

    with us running out of space in the back seat, the volkswagon jetta is running out of time … which means it’s about time to update the automotive c.v. once again:

    • 1978 Oldsmobile Delta Eighty-Eight (burgundy) — a big hunk of classic detroit metal that regularly seated eight for late tuesday night college trips to the beach. mostly totaled when it had an untimely meeting with a 12 point buck on the highway one sunday afternoon. the survived, the car not-so-much.
    • 1994 Dodge Spirit (maroon) — a graduation gift from college from my parents (above, right) the little spirit-that-could survived ridiculously long commutes up and down both sides of I-95. effectively totaled with the transmission, steering and a/c all collapsed at the exact same time, after almost a decade of service.
    • 2000 Mazda 626 (silver) — the first car i ever bought with my own money. sexy. looked like a jaguar from the sides (above, left). my ownership was tragically cut short when i met/married the lady sparkler, and it became ridiculously clear that we only needed one car between us.
    • 2001 Volkswagon Jetta (silver) — the car that killed my beloved mazda. the good: it was newer, had less miles, and was fully paid off. oh, and *fun* to drive. the bad? made soon after VW exported their manufacturing to nafta mexico, and a complete lemon in every sense of the word.

    so, what’s next? a car that works would be nice …

    right now, the jetta’s transmission is failing, the front bushings/suspension is creaking, the air conditioner only works at highway speeds, knobs are falling off the dashboard, both wing mirrors have broken off/are held on by duct tape, the stereo occasionally stops working for days-on-end, one of the fold-out cup-holders doesn’t fold out anymore, and we’ve done ~$8,000 worth of work on the car in the last 24k miles.

    outside of that, the lady sparkler wants a car where i can sit farther from the airbag in the steering wheel (because the seat is jacked forward to make room for the big child seat in the small back seat).

    personally, i’d like something with better gas mileage, so i feel less guilty about driving to work everyday — i stopped bicycle commuting not long after the lady sparkler got preggers — a guilt made worse by working for one of the planet’s largest conservation organizations.

    oh, and we’d both like a car that we don’t have to panic/worry/gnash-our-teeth about over the next, say, 6-8 years.

    the excitement starts tomorrow.

  • uncle paul, pt. 2

    []
    we’re back in the district after a trip to new hampshire for my godfather’s funeral — an event that i still haven’t fully figured out how to talk about, which explains all the photo-only posts (sans commentary) last week.

    part of my problem was that everyone had a favorite childhood story to share — and as i’ve mentioned once or twice before, the arrival of baby sparklet has temporarily destroyed any sense of a long-term memory that i might have had.

    over the last week, a bunch of snippets have popped into my head … an inevitable turn at the helm of his boat, riding on the back of his motorcycle (and leaning away from the turn because i was scared we were going to flip), seeing the inside of a movie projection booth for the first time, working his radio or in his workshop, and stopping for ice cream on the way home even though we both knew we we’re supposed to.

    but the thread from those childhood memories — and all those created since — is a quiet feeling that i was at the center of the universe.

    this weekend was also the first time most of my new england family got to meet baby sparklet, so there was a little bubble of “new baby” around the lady sparkler and i that even grief had a hard time pushing through.

    one simply can’t understate the medicinal effects of baby.

    sparklet was a little “emo” on the flight home, but this was to be expected given how crazy her schedule had become while away from home.

    and, after being held by different family members every ten minutes for three days, she was more than a little put-out today that she had only mommy and daddy (and aunt melissa for a bit) to bask in her unflinching glory.

    i have a feeling that all this will add up to our nanny simply *loving* us tomorrow.

    See All the Photos on Flickr:
    picnics, washington, dc

  • william and mary’s new griffin mascot is really a pant-less eagle

    after more than two decades battling with our own consciousnesses, college of william and mary students and alumni have a mascot to call our own … an eagle that has misplaced its pants.

    back in the 1980s, the school realized that the then current moniker (the “indians”) wasn’t going to cut the social mustard anymore, even if one of our original mandates was as a school to educate those who had the alleged misfortune of being born non-european.

    at the time, the school boldly chose to drop the nickname, but curiously insisted on keeping an obvious indian-derivative (the “tribe”) in its place, and then fought tooth-and-nail to keep an indian feather on the school logo (a fight they eventually lost).

    (note to school: that last part about the tribe and the feather might have tarnished some of the nobleness of the re-logoing effort.)

    anyway, a multi-year lack of identity ensued, which included a couple of dark years where we had an asexual amorphous green blob as our mascot.

    but then … the same branding geniuses that sacrificed a beloved president to appease out-of-state christian fundamentalists came up with an *even better* way to market the school:

    instead of coming up with a new mascot that matches the “tribe” nickname (or, you know, changing our nickname to something that matches our new mascot) the college of william and mary now has the very worst of both worlds …

    … we’re a tribe of eagles that have misplaced our pants.

    in due fairness to the administration, the creature is apparently a mythical Griffin, “a mascot that unites strength and intelligence, recalls our royal origins and speaks to our deep roots in American history.”

    unfortunately, that still doesn’t explain to me what happened to the dude’s pants.

  • humanity, pt 1

    there are times where i’ve been sad to be a human being, and watching the uneducated, partisan response to the health care bill is near the top.

    it’s hard to imagine what’s bad/unconstitutional about:

    • New health insurance subsidies would be provided to families of four making up to $88,000 annually, or 400 percent of the federal poverty level.
    • Health insurance exchanges would be created to make it easier for small businesses, the self-employed and the unemployed to pool resources and purchase less expensive coverage.
    • Total out-of-pocket expenses would be limited, and insurance companies would be prevented from denying coverage for pre-existing conditions.
    • Insurers would be barred from canceling coverage for sick people, as well as charging higher premiums based on a person’s gender or medical history.
    • Insurers would be required to provide coverage for non-dependent children up to age 26.
    • The Medicare prescription drug “doughnut hole” would be closed by 2020.
    • A 40 percent tax would be imposed on insurance companies providing “Cadillac” health plans valued at more than $10,200 for individuals and $27,500 for families. The tax would kick in starting in 2018.
    • The Medicare tax would be imposed on investment income for individuals making over $200,000 and couples making over $250,000.
    • The federal government would assist states by picking up 100 percent of the costs of expanded Medicaid coverage between 2014 and 2016, and 90 percent starting in 2020.
    • Individuals would be required to purchase coverage or face a fine of up to $695 or 2.5 percent of income, whichever is greater, starting in 2016. The plan includes a hardship exemption for poorer Americans.
    • Companies with more than 50 employees would be required to pay a fee of $2,000 per worker if the company does not provide coverage and any of that company’s workers receives federal health care subsidies. The first 30 workers would be subtracted from the payment calculation.
    • States could choose whether to ban abortion coverage in plans offered in the health insurance exchanges.
    • Illegal immigrants would not be allowed to buy health insurance in the health insurance exchanges.

    Is it the mandates to have insurance that is so evil? I’m mandated to subsidize people who don’t have insurance now, through higher premiums and higher taxes. Seems like this is something “anti-everything” white people would be crawling all over themselves to support.

    Crazy.

    Source: Bill Summary from CNN; Photos by Matt Dunn, from City Paper.

  • how i met your mother: the battle for evermore

    []

    photo of the week // week twenty-two
    dear sparklet,

    this is the eighth in a series of letters from daddy about how i met and married your mother.

    recently, the most important battle in your life-so-far has broken out … the battle for your taste in music.

    for the record, daddy is feeding you a steady diet from indie pop types (the kind who wear witty, ironic t-shirts) or girl rockers … such as Band of Horses, A Fine Frenzy, your partial-namesakes Kate Earl and Kate Nash, Regina Spektor, and The Killers.

    mommy, however, keeps slipping you music from country and christian artists — George Strait and Jars of Clay, to name a few — when she thinks daddy’s not paying attention. even the nanny has gotten involved, though her choices seem to be much more age appropriate (which unfortunately removes her from the pettiness of this conversation).

    but this battle for the scrobbler betrays two sad little facts … your daddy has horrid taste in music, and mommy isn’t much better.

    for my part, I don’t exactly know what happened … the first album I ever owned was Sychronicity by The Police. my second, however, was the early-80s equivalent of Now That’s What I Call Music.

    I suppose some of it is your uncle Popcollin’s fault — he went through a Debbie Gibson/Euro-pop phase during my most impressionable, formative music years — and I obviously never recovered from his influence.

    i have, though, learned how to cover up my horrid taste somewhat. for example, the title of this post, for instance, the is *not* the Led Zepplin allusion a music aficionado would expect … i would have never known “The Battle for Evermore” if it weren’t for the HeartLovemongers’ cover on the (shudder) Singles motion picture soundtrack.

    anyway, all this got me thinking about music from when your mother and i were younger:

    • my earliest memories of mommy is her belting out songs during road trips, without any sort of notion that she was horrifically off-key.
    • road trips only got better when mommy realized that kelly clarkson’s one-octave “range” was just as limited as her own, and was much more suitable for mommy’s irrepressible sing-a-longs.
    • right before we got engaged, mommy announced that her favorite song was “Foundations” by Kate Nash … a song about a woman holding on to an dysfunctional relationship.
    • right before we got *married*, mommy announced that her *new* favorite song was “Still Sweet” by Benjy Davis Project … a song about the joy that follows the end of an empty relationship.
    • and, of course, one of the very first things we did with you (before you were born) was take you to a U2 concert.

    so, even if i’m ultimately proven wrong about what you should be listening to as a toddler (and i am sure i will be) … i’m going to keep feeding you a steady diet of Ida Marie, if only so that i can film you running around when you are three, singing the chorus to “I Like You So Much Better When You’re Naked.”

    you won’t have an older sibling to corrupt your taste in music … so mommy and daddy will have to do the best we can.

    love,
    daddy

  • fire al trautwig

    it’s winter olympics season at the sparkler household, and that means it’s time to get angry and the god-aweful commentary for olympic sports. here are some of my favorites:

    for some, this morning started with agony and shock.

    someone had fallen off the cross-country track.

    these are biathlon fans. they know when to cheer … when the target is hit!

    piercing insight there, friend.

    spillane looks solid for the gold if he can stand up right here. spillane’s got it … america breaks through!

    actually, spillane did *not* get it. in all the jingo-istic excitement, the commentator seems to have missed that a frenchman came in first.

    in the previous three olympics, this man has left with nothing but the memories.

    … nothing besides a gold medal.

    we have a deep russian team. then, the americans. then, the russians … that’s your trilogy.

    russians, americans, russians. yup, that’s three.

    he’s a bit the germaphobe … always taking purell around with him. he doesn’t drink except for the occasional swig of cognac to cleanse his mouth of germs.

    tmi. not quite to the clintonian/jacksonian/woodsian level, but seriously … he can sleep upside down in a hyperbolic chamber, and it’s none of my/our/your business.

    i wish i could just blame NBC as a whole (and i may later) but each one of these linguistic “gems” was said by the same man … NBC olympic commentator al trautwig.

    if the name sounds familiar, it should.

    he is the same #*&%$ who brought you grotesquely over-wrought commentary for NBC’s gymnastics coverage in Beijing (including his 2008 pièce-de-résistance, lamenting “a catastrophe of epic proportions” when Alicia Sacramone fell on a floor routine).

    seriously, NBC … you’ve paid $3.5 billion for the rights to cover the Olympics since 1999, so maybe it’s about time you read the founding principles of the Games:

    The most important thing in the Olympic Games is not to win but to take part, just as the most important thing in life is not the triumph but the struggle. The essential thing is not to have conquered but to have fought well.

    i don’t think it’s much of an exaggeration to say that mr. trautwig’s over-wrought hyperboles are undermining the very games he’s covering.

    exiling trautwig from gymnastics to cross-country/biathalon coverage (while quite the statement about his perceived worth) isn’t enough. the problem is, he doesn’t have the commentary skills to cover little league matches in the Parkersburg, West Virginia.

    if he’s under a contract you can’t get out of, let me suggest you transfer him to KXGN in Glendive, Montana. as a parking attendant.

  • dear kate

    []
    dear kate,

    well, it’s the last full day of our paternity leave together.

    we’ve spent the morning at the ice skating rink on the National Mall — where we saw an ice skating Nun, and the four foot tall snow drifts that kept you in Texas for so long — and the afternoon at the Natural History museum.

    of course, after spending the last 10 nights sleeping in a flimsy pack-and-play, you’ve been asleep pretty much non-stop for the last 18 hours, so I’m not banking on you remembering much.

    so, just in case you don’t remember our wonderful talk today, I want to thank you again for the last four weeks. i don’t toss out religious imagery much (I’m what your Mom would call a stuffy-bottomed Episcopalian) but our time together has really been a blessing.

    due to your Daddy’s inability to sit still, we’ve done an exhausting metric ton to keep us busy: a week home sick; trips to American Indian and American Art museums; walks around the Georgetown Waterfront and the National Aquarium; not to mention that “bonus” week we had in Austin.

    however, the parts that I have loved the most are the little things in between … like today sitting together at a cafe, making goofy faces on the Metro, watching your face light up at every kind of light source you can imagine.

    part of what made today extra special was that, after carrying you around for much of the day, you started wailing each time I tried to put you down. i am sure that it was just gas, or maybe a diaper rash … but i’m going to pretend that you knew this time together was coming to an end, and wanted to be held just a little bit longer.

    you are just a good-natured baby, and have been incrediably patient with Mommy and Daddy as we’ve been broken-in as parents.

    people told us from the very beginning how babies put everything in perspective, and while Mommy and I smiled and nodded at the advice at the time, the last four months with you have shown this to us in ways words could never explain.

    with that in mind, let me say that we love you in ways that you may never fully understand, at least not until you have a little sparklet of your very own. (and if that’s the case, that’s fine with us.)

    we both know that things will change over the years — we’re guessing you’ll hate mommy at the onset of puberty, and daddy once you start dating — but our love for you will be as constant as the stars you seem to love so much.

    all the love in the world,
    mommy and daddy

  • out: barton creek (the mall not the, er, creek)

    []
    if DC wasn’t in the middle of it’s third big snowstorm of the year, i’d be complaining about the weather in austin right now.

    in fact, auntie nadine’s got to be feeling pretty good about her warm, sunny wedding day because the three days before and the five days after have all be 40 degrees and rainy.

    of course, that beats 20 degrees with 24 inches of snow, but i digress …

    sparklet and i are trying to keep up our daily outings, but between the weather and random february closures of tourist attractions (austin museum of art, elizabeth ney museum, zilker botanical garden) we’ve been having have a bit of a tough “go” lately.

    so it was only inevitable that after yet another cultural attraction with redeeming value turned out to be closed, we found ourselves at the last refuge of the american consumer desperation … the mall.

    the big surprise? i was by no means alone. there were quite literally a dozen (or more) adult/stoller pairs, pushing laps around the mall with no discernible interest in spending money.

    the least surprising surprise? sparklet loves the mall.

    it took her about 30 seconds to realize what window displays were, and from that point on she couldn’t rip her eyeballs away … well, not until about 45 minutes later when she had become so over-stimulated as to render her wholly non-functional.

    the only store we actually went in was cryptically called “the longhorn’s shop” and sold a bunch of stuff in burnt orange.

    i went in with every intention of buying sparklet a university of texas onesie, if for no other reason than to alienate the many baylor fans that seem to dominate (my life by way of marriage).

    alas, there was no onesie to be had, so i grabbed myself a sweatshirt ($12!) and called it a day. i’m already working on my defense:

    “hey, if the weather had been nicer…”

  • the blanton museum hates babies

    []
    i’m walking into central stairway of the blanton museum today — the art museum attached to the University of Texas at Austin — when a guy jumps out from behind a column and says, peering down the length of his rather long nose:

    “excuse me, but diaper bags are *not* permitted in the museum. please use one of the many lockers we have provided for your convenience.”

    i have a half-dozen retorts in my mind — “if she spits up, can i borrow a 17th century masterwork?” or, “my convenience would be to keep the bag,” or, leaning over to sparklet and saying, “if you have any poo, fling it now” — but i decide to play along.

    as i am walking to said lockers, he calls out after me: “and there is *certainly* no food or beverages allowed in the museum.”

    now, i’m even more confused. i check my palms for frosty cold beer-verage. none. i look for a taco platter from taco cabana. nope.

    when i make eye contact with he-who-shall-be-annoying, he is giving the stink eye to baby sparklet’s bottle of breast milk.

    ah.

    well, it’s a damn good thing that the lady sparkler wasn’t there, because she would have said “fine,” stripped off her shirt, and sparklet would have started breastfeeding right then and there.

    and i would have *loved* to see him try and stop her.

    now, at this point, i’m irritated, but not irate. i just know exactly what is going to happen (and they did, in turn):

    sparklet poo’ed when we were the farthest we could have possibly been from their lockers. instead of ducking into another bathroom, i got to track a rather uncomfortable (and expressive!) baby through twelve galleries to retrieve the diaper bag.

    then, sparklet wanted to eat, and, unlike every other museum we’ve visited, we didn’t have the option of her nursing while she stared intently at the paintings, or even us stopping every once on a bench for a couple ounces.

    instead, she would cry for five minutes while we went back to the locker to feed, she would lose interest (remember, i’m feeding in a locker room here), we’d go back to the exhibit where we had left off, sparklet would remember that she wasn’t eating, and she would scream for five minutes while we went back to the locker.

    rinse, and repeat.

    now, through most of this, i was in a pretty okay mood with the blanton. it’s their collection, if they want to do it this way, then that’s completely their call.

    what irritated the bejeezus out of me, was when i realized that a dozen other people were carrying bags around the museum that were *all* bigger than the diaper bag i was forced to lock up.

    there were big dallas-housewife-sized shoulder bags, there were camera bags, there were satchels and laptop bags. a student even had a backpack stuffed with what looked like four years of science textbooks.

    all of this, however, misses the point.

    i guess it’s possible that i just ran into the one docent with an over-developed sense of enforcement, but if that’s not the case … then i am honestly embarrassed for the blanton.

    this thick-headed, anti-family crap is what i would expect from a hoity-toity gallery in some uptight, old-monied art gallery in the northeast. it’s not what i would expect from texas, much less from austin, much less from UT.

    and, truth be told, the up-tight art gallery in the northeast would just post a sign by the door saying “we ask that you do not bring children younger than five into the exhibit space” which, while also being honest about the gallery’s intent, also allows you to not waste your ticket money.

    (when i asked guy-with-long-nose-to-stare-down about getting a refund on my admission based on my new understanding of his rules, he turned on his heels, lifted his nose, and said “enjoy your visit.”)

    so, i won’t be going to the blanton again with sparklet … and while i wish it was a high-minded boycott, it actually comes down to their collection.

    their masterworks are almost exclusively morose (highlights include two severed-john-the-baptist-heads, one saint agatha with a forced masectomy) and the modern exhibits relied too heavily on items from the looks-like-it-was-painted-by-a-three-year-old school.

    blanton. if you are listening … much “bigger” museums seem to find ways to be family friendly. i hope you’ll figure out something, too.

  • miracle baby

    baby sparklet slept until 10am this morning, which isn’t exactly news …

    … except that at 10am we were taxi-ing down the runway on a flight to Austin, Texas.

    that means she slept through (1) getting dressed at 6am, (2) loading the car and unloading at airport parking, (3) boarding and offloading the airport shuttle, (4) being taken out of her car seat and passing through security, (5) preboarding the aircraft, and (6) the aircraft pushing away from the gate.

    actually, it wasn’t until the safety briefing ($@&#% volume-deaf stewardesses) that she finally decided to open her eyes and wonder what the heck was going on.

    speaking of, I wonder if she is going to develop a complex about sleeping … it seems like each time she wakes she has a reasonable chance of being in completely different place than when she went down (museum, park, airplane, etc).

    back to the miracle … due to her sleeping so well we didn’t have to start her feeding until after “wheels up,” which means we sidestepped the whole ear-pain/pressure thing and we’re halfway through the flight with nothing louder than a gurgle.

    in semi-related news, we’re on the way to aunt nadine’s wedding to soon-to-be uncle nadav.

    I started packing sparklet at about 10am yesterday, and by 2pm we were we were running to Target to buy the biggest suitcase they had in stock.

    even so, we still look like we’re on a month-long trek through Nepal, and without the benefit of a legion of Sherpas.

    we’ve got the new suitcase (packed exactly to the 50 lbs. limit), a roll-y bag complete with bridesmaid dress and approximately 237 diapers, a bag full of enough pumping equipment to empty the panama canal, the diaper bad, a car seat and a stroller.

    next time, I’m getting a C-130 cargo plane to “advance” (pre-stage?) our trip.

    now, normally, I’d bring a laptop to blog/upload photos over the weekend … but my back started weeping at the thought of another 15 lbs bag.

    unfortunately, that means I’ll be blogging/uploading baby pics via the iPhone and its 36-dropped-calls-in-one-day, who-cares-about-3g-if-you-can’t-get-reception network brought to you by AT&T.

    I’m not sure I’d expect another update before hell freezes over, or Luke Wilson gets his self-respect back … which ever comes first.

    UPDATE: we landed, in heavy turbulance. still not a peep. it’s hard to refrain from being cocky … but I persevere, mostly so I don’t jinx us for the return.

    See all the Photos on Flickr:
    baby’s first flight

  • man on the street

    []
    i had a math teacher in middle school who said she hated being fat, because everybody in the supermarket assumed that you were a friendly person who like to be talked to by strangers.

    i think having a baby is the new fat.

    today, in the national american indian museum, a woman alone with five kids (yes, that’s “one-two-three-four-five”) looked at me in exasperation when she noticed sparklet was asleep, and blurted out “well that’s a great way for her to see the museum” while she rolled her eyes.

    yesterday, in the american art museum, two women stopped us in the cafe and asked how sparklet was enjoying the museum. i smiled while i said that she was doing great in the large format landscapes, but seemed to start loosing interest (i.e. fall asleep) once we got into the American portraiture. she scoffed, barked “yeah, right” and then stomped off.

    monday, a random guy on the street — looked like a typical D.C. community activist, business casual, with dreads held up in Jamaican rasta hat — called out to me, saying “great job, father! great job!” while he applauded. fwiw, i was crossing the street … and doing it *exceptionally* well.

    but really, besides the random activist, the only reliably positive people experiences have been security guards and cafeteria workers, especially the ones that are 35+ year old women. they just light up when they see someone alone with a baby, and are elated to have 2 minutes with the sparklet.

    biggest observation so far? don’t talk to white people.

    so far, without exception, white people think your baby is either (a) in direct competition with their kid/grandkid or (b) their question for you is just a thinly-veiled ramp to help them launch into a 10 minute soliloquy about their own.

    either way, from here on out i’m dropping them like their hot.

    P.S. there is an interactive “our universe” exhibit on the fourth floor of the national museum of the american indian, which has a ceiling (see photo above) designed to look like the night sky. it is now officially baby sparklet’s favorite place on the planet.

    See All the Photos on Flickr:
    out: national museum of the american indian, washington, dc

  • outings

    []
    it’s day three of the non-sick portion of paternity leave, and sparklet and i are starting to settle into a rhythm … tho, admittedly her front end, back end, and sleep schedule are driving pretty much everything.

    • sleep until 10am, with an occasional interruption from 6am ’til 7am.
    • suck down 7 oz. of breakfast.
    • sleep 11am ’til 12:30pm.
    • suck down 8 oz. of lunch.
    • sleep 2:30pm ’til 5pm.
    • suck down 6 oz. of dinner.
    • sleep 7pm ’til 8pm.
    • suck down 4 oz. of dessert.
    • asleep between 10pm and midnight.

    so her stomach/sleep-cycle doesn’t leave much time for futzing about, but we have about two hours of wakey-wakey time in the noon-ish ’til two-ish period after lunch that we can squeeze something in … but that’s only if we “commute” during her 11am/2pm naps.

    i wish i had some sort of noble intention by helping her “explore the world,” but i’m afraid it’s just my ridiculously short attention span trying to save me from clawing out my eyeballs out from daytime TV (regardless of the awesomeness that is Nash Bridges).

    that said, sparklet is really digging getting out of the house.

    she’s all about paintings in the museums we’ve hit, so long as they are large format (loves those enormous english/american landscapes) or large blocks of color (presumably because most contemporary pieces look like they could have been painted by someone her age).

    sculpture is fine, though white marble holds her interest much better than dark stone/iron. once the pieces dip towards the smaller side, it’s game over … and her attention quickly shifts towards the nearest light source (windows, track lighting, etc).

    speaking of, the big wins so-far have been the stuff that hasn’t been on display … the skylights in the smithsonian american art museum and the national gallery, the tunnel of LEDs in between the gallery’s east and west wings, and pretty much anything with stained glass.

    i’m not sure what’s on-tap next … but for the first time in my life, i am choosing things to do based on whether there are cool things that light up.

    See the Photos on Flickr:
    out: smithsonian american art museum

  • how at&t has made me hate my iphone

    I think I should have guessed something was wrong last fall, when i accidentally left my iPhone in the car overnight. the next morning, when i realized what i had done, i secretly wished that my window had been smashed in and my iPhone taken.

    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.

  • make your own christmas television special, in five easy storylines

    the lady sparkler and i are watching our way through our annual list of christmas specials, and as far as i can tell, there is a grand total of five unique storylines:

    • cute [animal/small child/old person/magician] is [sick/growing up too fast/angry], and [believes/is recently doubting/never believed in] Santa’s existence, and [protagonist] goes on a crazy caper which saves Christmas, and proves Santa is real in the process.
    • [protagonist] is a [cute child/bumbling adult/cartoon character/muppet/angry hermit] who [finds out Santa is sick/finds out Santa is in trouble/accidentally injures Santa/un-does all of Santa’s work] and goes on a crazy caper involving a unique but belittled talent, which saves Christmas.
    • [protagonist] is [home for Christmas/someone who never understood Christmas/haunted by three ghosts/a disgruntled relative of Santa or Rudolph/sent to an alternate world where he had never been born], and is driven by a dysfunctional but ultimately well meaning [self/family member/group of friends/unwitting arch-nemisis] to go on a crazy caper in order to save Christmas, and thereby remembering the meaning of Christmas in the process.
    • [protagonist] is [looking for the perfect gift/concerned someone’s list didn’t make it to Santa], but doesn’t have any money, so he goes on a crazy caper where he [sells his favorite possession to get the money/earns the money through some crazy scheme/steals the present/builds the present from scratch] and even though the [attempt/gift exchange] is ultimately unsuccessful, he remembers the true meaning of Christmas and [Santa/intended gift recipient] saves the day.
    • [protagonist] is disilusioned by the commercialization of Christmas when he [goes on a crazy caper/directs a school pageant, often with repetitive dance moves] and thereby remembers the true meaning of Christmas.

    i’ve run through a list of 54 christmas specials and movies, and each one falls into at least one (if not more) of these five buckets. if i am missing a storyline, i can’t come up with it …

  • first christmas tree

    []
    ECPA20091128_2885, originally uploaded by [ecpark].
    turns out, we might have been a little too eager to get a christmas tree this year.

    we started thinking through how we were going to fit one in the house back in October, and rearraged the furnature by mid-November. and then, come the first day after Thanksgiving, the lady spakler, baby sparklet and immediately jumped in the car and roared off in search of something tall, skinny and green.

    finding a tree lot in DC is about like finding a gas station … they are around, everybody has their favorite, but you never can seem to find one when you are looking.

    we started off looking in glover park, and the lot over there that we usually use still hadn’t opened for the season. we then drove out connecticut avenue to a stand i had last used in 2005 … only to find that the whole area had been plowed over and turned into a gas station.

    by the time we crossed into maryland, we were feeling pretty good … because soon after we passed an SUV going in the opposite direction with a tree strapped to its roof like road kill.

    and sure enough, after 15 minutes and trying two more “known” lot locations (from when i lived in bethesda, circa 1999) we finally found a lot that was open.

    we bought the lot’s third tree of the season.

    and, given how hard it was to find a christmas tree that was open, i’m guessing we bought the city’s third tree of the season as well. now we just have to dig out the hot chocolate maker, and we’re all set for the winter.

    Explore the Photo Set:
    Christmas Tree 2009

  • oh, poo.

    []
    ECPA20091111_0658, originally uploaded by [ecpark].
    someone just poo’ed in someone else’s hair. i’m not going to name names here, but it wasn’t me.

    here’s the story.

    our heroic protagonist, let’s call her aby-bay arklet-spay, was minding her own business … hanging out on the changing table, wondering what life would look like on the “other” side of yet another diaper.

    our incredibly omniscient narrator was assisting aby-bay with her diaper transition when he discovered that she (aby-bay) wasn’t quite done “negotiating” with the old diaper.

    the third character in our little drama is the (mostly) innocent bystander, let’s call her ady-lay arkler-spay, was wandering around the room, looking to be useful, trying to distract from the fact that the only time aby-bay poops is when the incredibly omniscient narrator is on diaper duty.

    before long, ady-lay arkler-spay bent down at the end of the changing table, rummaging through some bags of diapers on the floor, when … the incredibly omniscient narrator covered up aby-bay’s rear just in time to stop something really, very bad from happening.

    ady-lay arkler-spay then started chatting with the incredibly omniscient narrator, while he stood there, releaved that he had just save her noggin’ from an inexplicably grotesque catastrophe.

    after a few minutes of wanton distraction, the soon-to-be-no-longer-very-omniscient narrator decided aby-bay was finally done, and took his hand off her bum in order to bend over to get a new diaper.

    at this exact moment, two things happened in perfect unison.

    first, ady-lay arkler-spay decided she hadn’t fully rummaged through those bags of diapers on the floor and, second, aby-bay arklet-spay decided she wasn’t quite finished “negotiating” and decided to took advantage of the fact that her old diaper was no longer held in place by the now-not-really-omniscient-at-all narrator’s hand.

    suffice it to say that badness ensued or, more specifically, long distance badness ensued with startling accuracy.

    half an hour later, everyone was in great spirits. aby-bay arklet-spay was done negotiating so that she could happily start another two hour feeding, and ady-lay arkler-spay had just taken a nice, warm, satisfying, if unexpected, shower.

    and the incredibly-omniscient-though-obviously-not-omnipotent narrator? he’s just happy to have a story to tell aby-bay’s first serious boyfriend when the time comes.

  • birth weight

    []
    ECPA20091028_0505, originally uploaded by [ecpark].
    i think we’ve totally become some of “those” people — the kind of people who do nothing but talk about their kids, and (worse yet) their kids bodily functions.

    i think this puts us right along side senior citizens who only talk about their latest surgeries (which is probably exactly what people like us become in 30 years) or New York Yankee’s fans who only talk about their 26 27 world serieses (decidedly not what we’ll become, unfortunately).

    with this realization, however, comes expectancy — and news about sparklet’s bodily functions.

    we had our fourth pediatrician appointment today, and sparklet has packed on nearly a whole pound (15 ounces) since the last visit two weeks ago. this is a huge relief because she had lost a ton of weight by the time we left the hospital (~8%) and she’s now back above her birth weight finally … albeit by only three ounces.

    the driving force (obviously) is that she is downing milk like it’s going out of style. she’s doing about six one-hour feedings a day (6am, 10am, 2pm, 6pm, 10pm, 2am) and is up to about four ounces at each. this is *ALOT* of milk, and we’re still having to supplement with some formula to cover the massive and sudden jump in sparklet’s intake.

    the (mostly) great side effect of all this is that her energy is through the roof, which means that she is regularly staying up for an hour or two after feedings … and is particularly active after the ones where we want her to go to bed straightaway (eg. the 10pm/2am feedings).

    soooo, the lady sparkler and i have rotated our schedules around a bit to manage. she goes to sleep now at 7pm, i cover the 10pm, we swap places midnight, she covers the 2 am, she grabs whatever sleep she can, we both handle the 6am, after which I go to work, and sparklet/mommy get a couple more hours of sleep before the 10am.

    before this weekend, we had been doing a lot of joint feedings (mommy is the starting pitcher, goes deep in the game, i’m the closer for those last essential outs) but the added “awake” time has forced us to rethink exactly how important it is for us to bond over babies, bottles, and … well, you know.

    i hear all this settles down at month three, or maybe four. of course, i’m pretty sure that’s in 2010 … so, thank god she’s so damn cute.

  • first halloween

    []

    photo of the week // week three
    well, a month ago, we certainly had a different image of halloween.

    we obviously didn’t think that we’d have a sparklet to costume … and we really thought that the lady sparkler could go dressed up as Juno, or maybe a pregnant Mary Magdalene to my Jesus.

    our beloved m.o.h. (maid of honor) actually went out and bought sparklet a pumpkin costume, but it unfortunately didn’t live up to its advertised sizing (it was “one size fits none” not “all”).

    so, yesterday when we were in dupont circle, we ran to the local children’s boutique, and bought the last decent costume off their shelves (giraffe) at 40% discount.

    if anybody from work asks, we picked out the costume as an ideological statement … and she’s dressed up as either (a) the Conservancy’s adopt an acre in africa project, or (b) the number one teething toy in Paris.

    halloween is quite a big deal in mount pleasant, and our neighborhood shuts down streets to make room for all the trick-or-treaters who come in from around the city.

    we wandered around a bit with the baby giraffe-let in her stroller, but it was way too early (5:00pm) and it was raining to boot. even so, we saw tons o’ princesses and vampires, and more than a few ninja outfits from a children’s television show that i couldn’t figure out.

    no candy was purloined (she’s too young for us to keep a straight face) or purchased (our building requires card key access, and has no other kids) but it was a lovely afternoon none-the less.

    oh, and a nice warm up for next year …

    Explore the Photo Set:
    photos: first halloween, washington, dc

  • how i met your mother: delivery day

    dear sparklet,

    this is the seventh in a series of letters to baby sparklet about how mommy and daddy met and woo-ed each other.

    up til now, these posts have been about how mommy and i met, wooed, and married … but i’m running out of good stories from the early years, and i’ve decided that the run-up to your birth is worth it’s own edition in the series.

    it all started on Sunday.

    your mommy and i had just spent the last couple of weekends getting things squared away for your arrival, and that night we sat down, kicked our feet up and said:

    “You know? I think we are in a really good place. And, tomorrow Sparklet will be 37 weeks into her pregnancy, which means that she can’t be born premature.”

    needless-to-say, that’s when all heck broke loose.

    i had the next day off (it was Columbus Day) and spent the day hiking, but mommy had to pull a full day at work. that night i had a condo meeting where the board joked about how to schedule the next meeting around your delivery … and soon afterwards mommy and i ate a late dinner together and went to bed.

    i was lying in bed writing a blog entry about the day’s hike (i’m *so* far behind in my entries) and mommy was doing her patented “flip-around eight times and squirm for ten minutes” to get settled for bed … when all of a sudden, she shot out of bed, said she “had to pee,” and ran to the bathroom.

    about three minutes later, she came back to bed … and two minutes later, she ran back to the potty.

    by the third time this happened, i was up and at the computer, googling. first came “how do i tell if my water broke” which yeilded all sorts of interesting stories about people who mistook their water breaking for peeing. hmmmmm.

    by mommy’s fourth trip to the bathroom, i started googling “what do i need to pack for the hospital,” because it turns out we weren’t quite as prepared as we thought.

    see, you weren’t supposed to be here for another three weeks, and mommy (especially) didn’t think you were coming for even a few weeks after that. we hadn’t yet packed a thing.

    but by about 12:15 am (on the morning of the day you were born), and after an hour of running around like a chicken-sans-head, we were in our little Volkswagen Jetta, car seat in the back, and puttering off to Sibley Memorial Hospital.

    soon after we arrived, we had a labor and delivery nurse looking at mommy, asking lots of questions. it turns out that only about 15% of moms’ water breaks before contractions begin. and, it turns out that you were one of those lucky 15%.

    the contractions did started over night (they woke mommy up at 3:45am) but by sunrise the doctor decided she needed to help them along a little bit.

    we’ll skip over the uncomfortable stuff, but suffice it to say that the drug used to induce contractions (petosin) fundamentally changes the birthing equation, and makes the notion of an optional epidural to be much less optional.

    mommy was a little bummed about the change in plan — she was born in your grandparent’s kitchen, which is about as “au natural” as it comes — but less than two hours later she was pushing, and thirty minutes past that you were gurgling in mommy’s arms.

    the best part? i got to see the whole thing.

    and, as if one milestone wasn’t enough, that night we “formally” celebrated out 2nd wedding anniversary, with you in our lap.

    we were sick of even the notion of hospital food, so daddy ran out and got mommy’s favorite pizza (goat cheese and bacon) from our favorite pizza place (listriani’s — there was one next door to our first place in Arlington) while mommy visited with Uncle Cole and Aunt Skye.

    to this day, i can’t think of a better way we could have celebrated.

    love,
    daddy (& mommy)

  • #500

    [Hurricane Andrew Relief (circa 1994), Homestead, Florida.]
    ECPA20070918_x021, originally uploaded by [ecpark].
    it’s hard to believe, but this blog entry brings me to 500 posts over the last five years. so it’s navel gazing time, although i certainly don’t mean to imply that my previous 499 were directed anywhere other than my midsection.

    i started blogging back in 2004 … i was bored, i was recently single, and i had just survived a near death experience at the hands of a happy young Christian soccer mom driving a hummer.

    when i started blogging, i held absolutely no pretense that anybody was reading. i blogged purely for myself, to give my future self something to look back on and remind me of the things i had seen, the places i had been, and the things that i had done.

    that still (mostly) holds true even today. i have an absolutely horrific memory, so need to write things down or they are lost for good.

    don’t get me wrong, i’m absolutely cheesed that other people are joining in the fun as i chronicle all sorts of embarrassing stories about the lady sparkler, but in the end … i blog because i never want to forget what happened, or the look in her face or what i was thinking at the time.

    with that in mind, i apologize for the banalities that are coming down the pike. with baby sparklet, i have doubled the wonderful women in my life, and will certainly be doubling the silly, stupid things that i want to write down so i don’t forget.

    here’s hoping that the next 500 will be as much fun as the first.

  • the next chapter

    [Susquehanna State Park, Havre de Grace, Maryland]
    ECPA20091012_2439, originally uploaded by [ecpark].
    i had the day off today (some kind of national holiday honoring the beginning of the end of Native American civilization) which conveniently doubled as one of my last chances for a solo hike in the near- to mid-future.

    I’ve often joke with the lady sparkler that boys have it harded than girls getting ready for a baby. girls have a constantly growing reminder that something is about to change. boys just have longer-than-usual home improvement list, and the odd sensation that their wife is putting on a couple extra pounds.

    not to mention, boys aren’t that good at sensing or reflecting anyway.

    but, that’s why i’m at susquehanna state park. located about 30 miles north of baltimore, it has always been my favorite hike, and i’ve been so many times — half a dozen in the last decade — that it’s become a place for me to measure the passage of time, relationships and all sorts of personal milestones.

    as our due date edges close and closer, it’s been dawning on me that somethings are about to change. I’ll no longer have the lady sparkler all to myself. I’ll probably be way more focused on other’s bodily functions than my own.

    that being said, I will soon have a beautiful daughter to share beautiful places and beautiful afternoons just like this one. I’ll also have a dumptruck-sized load of perspective that I’m pretty sure I’ve lacked up til now.

    but the beautiful hike has cleared my head, and even if there are a couple small things left to wrap up before sparklet arrives, I’m ready. I have a wonderful wife, we have a wonderful family, and are surrounded by wonderful friends.

    I can’t think of a better world to bring our little sparklet into.

    Explore the Photo Set:
    Susquehanna State Park, Havre de Grace, Maryland

  • how i met your mother: date shirt (special 2nd anniversary edition)

    photo-2
    dear sparklet,

    this is the sixth in a series of letters to baby sparklet about how mommy and daddy met and woo-ed each other.

    today is mommy and daddy’s second wedding anniversary, but (as you you’ve probably noticed by the time you are old enough to read) we’re not very good at celebrating these things.

    on our very first anniversary, we were supposed to go camping in Delaware, but bailed at the last minute and instead had dinner at a roadside mexican restaurant somewhere out route 50.

    this year, we were going to go to our favorite restaurant (Acadiana) but it turns out the whole place was rented out for some kind of event. so instead, tonight i put on my “date shirt,” took mommy out for BBQ at the site of one of our earliest dates, and we’ll save Acadiana for next week.

    (which is kinda funny, because that’s exactly what happened to mommy and daddy last year, too.)

    which reminds me …

    a long, long time ago, your mommy and daddy were just two nervous people who were trying to figure out how to talk to each other. which, i’m sure, must seem *really* strange to you by now.

    before we were dating, your mommy asked me to come over to a dinner party she was having at the house she shared with Auntie Melissa.

    it turns out that one of her previously invited friends couldn’t make it (thank you, Gannon!) and since mommy was looking for an excuse to ask daddy out, it seemed like a good idea at the time to invite me in his place.

    unfortunately, i looked like a mess. i hadn’t cut my hair in about two years (so i guess i didn’t look all that different then i do now) and hadn’t bought any “impress a girl” clothes in in that time either.

    naturally, i did what any boy in my situation would do — i turned to a female friend to bail me out.

    Emmy and i setup a time to get my hair cut (by about 9 inches) and she even tagged along for moral support. in fact, your mommy ended up coming, too … i think mainly because mommy wanted to make sure that daddy and Emmy didn’t develop a “thing” before she could have her dinner party.

    the following weekend, right before the party, Emmy and I took an emergency trip to Friendship Heights (the Gap) and she helped me find something that looked nice, but not *too* nice.

    the shirt we bought? it’s daddy’s “date shirt” (which you can see in the photo above).

    dinner was great. Uncle Cole and Aunt Skye were there, and the four of us talked for hours, and then I stayed behind to help mommy with the dishes.

    By the time we were done eating, talking, cleaning and talking, it was 6 am the next morning. Not wanting to end the the “evening” quite yet, we walked down to the Alexandria waterfront, and then had breakfast at Table Talk (which is still one of our favorite’s).

    At that point, I knew your mommy was something special … and had a feeling that your mommy and i had a nice future ahead of us. i didn’t know quite how long it would take, but I knew she would be worth the wait.

    love,
    daddy (& mommy)

    UPDATE: no Acadiana for us quite yet…! the restaurant called to confirm our reservation as we were sitting in the labor and delivery room, waiting for you to be born.

    so, instead, we “formally” celebrated our anniversary with you in our laps, eating mommy’s favorite pizza (goat cheese and bacon) from our long-time favorite pizza place (Listrani’s).

    and while it certainly wasn’t what we were expecting, it was a perfect way to celebrate none-the-less.

  • the name game

    ECPA20070918_x006
    after months and months, the lady sparkler and i have finally narrowed down the potential names to just three, and we’ve started to “crowdsource” them — mostly to check for any negative pop-culture allusions that we might have missed, but also to make sure we aren’t ignoring one of our own rules for baby names.

    it’s technically possible that we’ll come up with something thats not on the list, but that’s unlikely … it’s been 8 weeks since we added anything new, and we certainly won’t be adding anything once labor starts. if it’s not on the list before, we aren’t sure being sleep-deprived/overly-hormonal will help avoid naming mistakes that will haunt baby sparklet for decades.

    we don’t have a leading candidate (which is actually a bit maddening) and both seem to have a new favorite each week. but, here they are, listed in the order that we thought of them (the oldest one’s first).

    feel free to share your thoughts.

    Kate Elizabeth Parker

    this one is the very first name that went on the list, maybe a month into the process. we aren’t a huge fan of the longer name (katherine) so it’s really just kate. for a long time, it was the prototypical name (ie. “we need a strong name, like ‘kate’”) before we added it formally.

    popularity — ranked 243rd (1978), 139th (2008). origins — Greek, meaning “pure” (Kate, Katherine); Hebrew, meaning “consecrated to God” (Elizabeth).

    pros — Title character from Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew; Evangeline Lilly’s character on “Lost”; actress Kate Beckinsdale (Underworld, Serendipity). added gravitas — Katherine the Great; designer Kate Spade; three of Henry VIII’s six wives. curiosity — Kate Winslet (of Titanic fame) is actually Kate Elizabeth Winslet by birth.

    cons — “Jon and Kate plus Eight”; Kate Moss; Kate Hudson.

    literary — Kate Chopin. music — Kate Nash; Kate Bush; Katy Perry; Kate Earl; Kate “Songbird of the South” Smith.

    googling “Kate Parker” — 41,200 hits, including a wedding planner, a couple photographers, a florist, and lots of 18th century geneology references.

    in short — fun-loving rock/movie diva.

    Elizabeth Anne Parker (“Ellie”)

    we came at this name sorta backwards. we loved the nickname “Ellie” but didn’t like any of the names it’s usually attached to (Eleanor, Elena) so we hemmed, hawed and came up with Elizabeth instead. which is also convenient, because we aren’t a real big fan of Elizabeth’s “actual” nicknames either, such as Liz, Lizzy, Beth, Betsy, etc.

    popularity — ranked 14th (1978), 9th (2008). origins — Hebrew, meaning “consecrated to God” (Elizabeth); Hebrew, meaning “gift of God’s favour” (Anne).

    pros — The wife in Pixar’s Up is named “Ellie”; Jodie Foster’s character from Contact; there’s a 2005 movie called Ellie Parker, with the title character played by Naomi Watts. added gravitas — Queen Elizabeth (I & II); Elizabeth Ann Seton (the first canonized American saint); Empress Elizabeth of Russia; the mother of John the Baptist. curiosity — “Elizabeth Anne” is the name of the girl that Tommy Lee Jones left behind in Men in Black; also, “Ellie” was the asteroid’s nickname in Deep Impact.

    cons — The large, flakey wooly mammoth in Ice Age 2 (voiced by Queen Latifa) is called “Ellie”; “Elly” was the name of the dumb blonde from “The Beverly Hillbillies.”

    literary — Elizabeth is the protagonist of Jane Austen’s novel Pride and Prejudice; Elizabeth Barret Browning (poet). music — “Goodnight, Elisabeth” by Counting Crows; Folk musician Elizabeth Cotten; Ellie Greenwich of the 60’s “girl groups” the Ronettes, the Shangri-Las.

    googling “Elizabeth Parker” — 125,000 hits, including an artist, poet, composer, jeweler, and lots of facebook entries.

    in short — holier-than-thou, daddy’s little angel.

    Allison Grace Parker (“Allie”)

    we aren’t really sure where Allison came from, but *everybody* seems to love the middle name Grace. seriously, no one really seams to bite when we say “Allison Parker” but say “Allison Grace” or just “Allie” and suddenly it’s the best name ever.

    popularity — ranked 75th (1978), 32nd (2008). origins — Germanic, meaning “of noble birth” (Allison); Latin, meaning “a blessing” (Grace).

    pros — Jane Curtin’s character from TV’s “Kate and Allie”; Rachel McAdams character from The Notebook; Jessica Biel’s character in I’ll Be Home for Christmas; Allison Janney (“West Wing”). added gravitas — Not much, though Allison Taylor was the fictional President of the USA in the television series “24.”

    cons — A character on “Melrose Place,” played by Courtney Thorne-Smith, appears to have been an alcoholic; Tropical Storm Allison struck Houston in 2001, killing 41; our child will be the farthest thing from “grace”-ful; nickname (“Allie”) confusion with dirty city sidestreets (“Alley”).

    literary — None. music — “Allison” is a song by the Pixies from their 1990 album Bossanova; Alison Krauss; Allison Crowe; Alison Goldfrapp (of rock duo Goldfrapp).

    googling “Allison Parker” — 66,100 hits. mostly personal social media profiles, results from sports competitions, and a “famous” Australian endurance motorcycle rider.

    in short — everywoman, or the smart/pretty girl next door.

  • strange things

    IMG_0060
    strange things are afoot at the circle sparkler.

    two nights ago, my cat, my wife and I conspired to pour half a bottle of wine into my laptop. fortunately, it fried the keyboard and not the whole computer. unfortunately, it was really good wine.

    meanwhile, an electrician came this morning to replace our electrical circuit breaker box of death, which apparently has a bad habit of not tripping when small kids put their fingers in associated electric sockets. needless-to-say, the lady and I have decided that this is (in fact) a bug, and not a feature, and decided to replace.

    back with the laptop … after I got the electrician settled, I started a long drive towards Suburban Maryland to drop off my computer with the people who we contract to service it when stupid people do stupid things. (did I mention it was my work computer?)

    once I got to beautiful, non-historic Lanham, I went to where Google Maps said the repair service was. Found the road, found the street number, pulled into the parking lot. No computer repair people. I whip out my handly iPhone, double check where I am. then I double check where I am supposed to be. both are right, except they obviously aren’t.

    fifteen minutes later, I realize that even though I am on Nicole Road, the building number i found (4421) is technically on Forbes Road, a street which (i should note) three blocks away. the 4421 I need is actually across the street from the 4421 that i found. there are two 4421s, on opposite sides of the same road that shares two names.

    this, unfortunately, is the part of the day that will end up making the most sense.

    back at home, we already know that we are getting a bigger (wider, taller) electrical panel box than what we had before, namely we had to rip out a kitchen cabinet to acommodate the new sized box. which we then had to special order a (smaller, daintier) replacement because our cabinets had been discontinued.

    in the process of ripping out our old electrical box, our fearless electrician discovered that there is a pipe running along side the old box. a pipe that can’t be moved. on the other side is a door jam, that also can’t be moved. so our box won’t fit. and it’s the smallest box they make.

    they suggest we put the box on the other side of the same wall, which, i should mention, would be in the living room. about four feet off the floor, right next to the couch. all I can hear in my head is future prospective owners having a conversation like, “do you like the first place we saw, or the one with the electrical box in the living room?”

    I ask for other options.

    at the same time, at the other end of the living room, another electrician is installing a light in our hall closet, which is both the most important room in our house (storage) but also the darkest. turns out that our closet is surrounded on all four sides (and ceiling) by concrete. turns out it is also hard to run wires in and through concrete.

    back in the kitchen, our fearless electrician has decided we can put the box in the kitchen if it isn’t fully recessed. meaning it will stick out from the wall. meaning I am glad I’ve been too lazy to return my friends compound power mitre saw, because I will be putting a wood facing around our new electrical box this weekend.

    they go about their business.

    with the pressing computer and electrical stuff actively being resolved, I finally settle back to work. I use the term “back” because last night I had nightmares about elevator outages/accidents in the Capitol building, which got me out of bed at 5:00 am. for the record, I have no idea what that dream means either but, I was working at my desk by 5:30 am.

    back to present day: I sat down in baby sparklet’s room, with my battery operated phone and my battery operated computer, and settled in for a long day’s work. it was only then that I realized I didn’t have a battery operated cable modem, or a battery operated router. so i wouldn’t be doing any battery operated work today.

    so I headed off to find a café. I chose starbucks, entirely because they have ATT wifi, which I get for free because I have an ATT iPhone. turns out, free wifi is only if you access the Internet from your iPhone. so it turns out that i had to pay for access. at a place I hate. to a company I despise.

    the rest of starbucks went better — I just had to fight for a table, fight for a plug, and then sit across from a random guy off the street who was rocking back and forth, talking to himself. this was fun and all, but I had to hop on a couple of conference calls for work, and didn’t want to givecrazy rocking guy a reason to think I was talking to him. I walked back home.

    did I mentioned I hate ATT? that’s because I can’t really use my phone at home. I often have to go down to the courtyard in front of my building to use the phone, which is unfortunate because my coverage is especially bad when it’s raining and that’s not a fun time to be outside.

    so, it was raining. and I couldn’t be in the courtyard. so I went to my car, and sat in the front seat for the next three hours. never once thinking of the ramifications of carbon monoxide in enclosed spaces. promise.

    the good news is that my iphone sometimes drains quickly if I am doing network heavy things, like checking email or reviewing documents … otherwise known as working. well, to be fair, *that* wasn’t the good news, the good news is that in my car I could plug my iPhone in to a car charger, which should stave off my power problems.

    but, I learned something new today — namely that my phone won’t charge (in the car) if you are talking on it. which is what I was doing. for three hours. in my car. because it was raining. and I had no power at home. or cell coverage.

    I don’t remember much about the rest of my day. I wrote a large check to our fearless electrician, I finished up some work, I started prepping the electric box for my new weekend project, and finally took my morning shower around 6:00 pm.

    the one thing i *haven’t* done today is try to install the new kitchen cabinet that we had to special order to replace the one we ripped out to make room for the new electric box. I think I might be stalling because, while the new cabinet is two inches smaller, and our new electrical box three inches farther out from the wall.

    I think that might just about finish me off for the day.

  • crown molding

    ECPA20090826_0041
    when we moved into mount pleasant, the lady sparkler and I quickly noticed that there was one room in the house that didn’t have crown molding.

    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.

  • i do elevators, too

    ECPA20090820_0036
    I’ve spent the better part of the last two weeks on crown molding in thhe nursery, and just as it’s winding down … I find out have to recarpet the elevator.

    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.

  • and the winners are …

    ECPA20090805_0762
    today, the lady sparkler and I started spending the $340,552 it’s going to take to raise baby sparklet until she graduates college.

    I feel strangely proud.

    we’ve been futzing around for *months* on the three “big” purchases — the crib, the stroller and the car seat — going baaaack, and forth, and baaaaack, and forth. but today, after nearly two months of researching, six weeks of trips to the suburbs, and three weeks of dithering, we finally pulled the trigger. on something. eventually.

    and the winners are …

    bonavita_peyton_07116_2bonavita peyton classic crib — a lot of decisions about baby sparklet have terrorized us, but none quite like this one. we’re in a small, small space in the city, so wanted to avoid all of the giii-normous “lifestyle” cribs on the showroom floors.

    unfortunately, all anybody sells are giii-normous “lifestyle” cribs.

    occasionally, you would see a couple of normal looking cribs in a store. in the back corner. under a sign that says “you hate your baby if you get one of these.”

    living in the city, the tween edition of baby sparklet is going to need a loft bed, or is going to have about 2 square feet of floor on which to play. getting a lifestyle crib that converts into a twin bed is of no use to us.

    eventually, we found a crib we liked (bonavita peyton) that had a version (classic, not lifestyle) that was just a crib. not a burr grinder. or a lifeboat. just a crib. it seemed very sturdy in the one showroom (out of six) which featured the model that did *not* convert into a dishwasher.

    the issue that sealed the peyton classic for us was that it was made from good, hard wood … where most of the competition had soft finishes, and were seriously scuffed up from people window shopping. (really, if a crib can’t survive life in a showroom, what’s it going to look like after a couple of years of teething?!?)

    41LiILMKDBL._SL500_AA280_city mini stroller — got a super recommendation from a friend on this one (mightybabyboig) as the stroller they wished they had bought back at the very beginning. it’s light, folds up ridiculously small (important for the bus) and has one of the narrower wheelbases (important for navigating the drunks passed out on District sidewalks).

    another crib, the uppababy vista, went deep into our decision making process when it got a strong plug from the baby bargains book (the guardian of my sanity for the last two months) as the best stroller for “hip urban dwellers.” the vista *was* pretty freakin’ cool as a full strollerpalooza system (included with bassinet, raincover, blender, etc.) but was much wider (2″+) than the mini and no where near as compact folded (might need to be strapped to the roof on a city bus).

    so, i’m not sure how the city mini didn’t get the top pick for my demographic (maybe its just a definition thing — i’m pretty sure we aren’t hip) but i guess it’s a little much asking one little book to make EVERY decision for me.

    of course, none of the stroller models we looked at had either (a) air bags or (b) a star wars missile defense shield, so I’m sure we are recklessly sacrificing baby sparklet’s safety every time we think we even think about leaving the house.

    ECPA20090817_0033graco snugride infant car seat — ah, yes. the Honda civic of car seats. the snugride was at the top of every ranking, and the only thing we really did was shop for the color.

    the lady sparkler hinted that having a car seat that matched the stroller would be a good thing, because apparently the two can plug together into some sort of voltron-like super-combo-robot-stroller.

    speaking of … i wonder if they sell flaming sword attachments? if they did, i’m thinking it would capture the “early-pubescent teen daddy” market that seems to be blooming lately. just a thought.

    on the more boring side, the snugride we got appears to have side impact protection … which is great, because I am pretty sure our car (which cost 200x more) does not.

    i take this fact as yet another sign that I hate my unborn child, as we haven’t dropped everything and bought a tan Volvo station wagon … yet.

    but, then again, tan wouldn’t match.

  • nice rack

    photo
    the lady sparkler and I had a very early realization once we got pregnant — that our poor little Jetta was going to have problems coping.

    first, we have the smallest trunk in the free world (or so it seems…) as when we put two small roller bag in the trunk, there isn’t room for much more. and by “much”, i mean “anything bigger than my self-esteem.”

    next, we have a sick cat whose meds require that she travel with us every time we leave for more than a day. that means a procession of (at minimum) a cat carrier, a cooler for meds, a litter box, a water fountain, replacement litter, not to mention the vaguely mental cat at the head of the entourage (who i am beginning to think has a future in pop music).

    now, we are facing a new baby, the very thought of which fills our back seat and trunk with crap: strollers, clothes, books, bags, diapers, not to mention whatever mommy and daddy needs to not be naked and insane.

    suddenly, getting an SUV doesn’t seem quite so crazy.

    we love our little (fully paid off) Jetta, and specifically how easy it is to street park in DC (and how fully paid off it is). so, instead of downgrading our beloved to a big suburban monstrosity, we decided to experiment with a roof rack for some added storage.

    to date, we just have the a “base” unit that you’d find at REI — a couple of poles running across the roof which other stuff is lashed down to — but we have a low-profile basket (which we can remove and store in the trunk) shipping to us in the next couple weeks.

    the system (it’s a Yakima) is admittedly a little pricey, but we figure we have a long way to go before we spend the cost of a new monthly car payment, so it’s worth a shot.

    here’s hoping.

  • release the $&@#%s list already

    manny_papi
    I hate blogging about sports, but nothing is frustrating me more than steroids in the baseball right now. and that includes my complete inability to sleep, AND all the trips to the suburbs baby sparklet’s pending arrival is requiring.

    once upon a time, there was no steroid testing in baseball … but in 2003, the league and the players agreed to do a pilot testing program to discover if there was really a steroids problem.

    turns out there was. (“Shocked! I am shocked to find gambling going on in this casino!”)

    over a hundred players failed the supposedly confidential 2003 tests, and now two more names have been leaked from the list (bringing the tally to seven). and yet, the sanctimonious morons who cover this sport in the press are saying it is our duty to protect the rest.

    it’s not our duty to protect idiots or cheaters. that’s their lawyer’s problem, not ours.

    you see … in 2003, everybody in baseball knew the “random-in-name-only” tests were coming, and knew that the whole testing regimen would die an unceremonious death if there weren’t enough positive tests to justify further testing. so, it was in the dirty bums best interests to clean up just this once to pass their tests, and yet they still couldn’t stay off the juice long enough to protect their own long-term interests.

    on the other hand, let’s think through this from the point of view of someone on this list: in the last six months, seven names have been leaked at a slow trickle, giving each perp the limelight-of-shame all to themselves for the few weeks that followed. given the choice between this spotlight, or being “outed” at the same time as 96 other players, I’m taking the latter … and banking that there is at least one person more famous on the list than I to distract the press and public.

    we as a country, as a sport, and as a civilization have spent enough time being concerned about protecting the rights of the guilty in baseball. this is a sport, we’re not negotiating world peace.

    how about we *out* these schmucks, and finally remove the cloud of suspicion from those innocent players who have done nothing except play clean ball next to a bunch of dirty teammates.

    keeping the rest of these cheats anonymous isn’t helping them, it’s ruining everyone else.

  • the ‘burbs and the baby

    photo
    for the uninitiated, i really can’t explain the horror that is Babies ‘R Us.

    our m.o.h., foster mom, is in town this weekend, and we’re taking advantage of her unbridled enthusiasm to travel across the vast wastelands of the D.C. suburbs looking for baby crap.

    the store seems to have been organized via the detonation of a low-yield nuclear weapon, and then ravaged by whatever rampaging, post-apocalyptic hordes survived. there is no sign of intelligent life to explain to you what you really need, just clerks saying what will happen if you don’t buy the most expensive device they have in stock. to make matters worse, only the most overpriced items are readily available, and all the “reasonably priced” merchandise is either out-of-stock, or hidden in some dark ghetto corner-of-shame in the store.

    admittedly, i might not be qualified to judge fairly — i hate the ‘burbs, i hate driving in the ‘burbs, i hate big box stores, i hate backward “R”s, and i get claustrophobic when surrounded by lots of 200 lb pregnant women using strollers as cow-catchers.

    none of this affords me an unbiased platform from which to judge.

    that being said, there is at least one good thing about these monuments to baby-spending-excess: you can touch the items. before you put them back down. and buy the same thing online. for 20% less.

    fortunately, friend and co-worker Papa Bradstein (unwittingly) gave us sage advice about a book called Baby Bargains, which is a kind of Consumer Reports for baby stuff.

    (actually, Baby Bargains is better, because while CR rates baby products, they don’t give much insight into why they rated one product better than another.)

    the book has been great, and i’ve been reading it non-stop … taking away solid info on not only which particular product is best for us (ie. one car seat vs another) but what types of mass-marketing bunk we can avoid entirely (diaper-stackers) without it triggering a child endangerment persecution or (worse yet) nasty looks from our parenting peers.

    luckily, as we slog through the baby shopping, the lady sparkler and i are on the same page about this breed of baby consumerism and she is every bit as exasperated/angry as i am.

    the only difference? i know more about breast pumps than any human possibly can with out getting his man-card forcibly revoked.

  • karma: chinese zodiac

    chinese_ox
    the lady sparkler and i did our second consecutive date-night tonight … a movie (“up”), then dinner in Chinatown at one of the few real Chinese restaurants left in the city (“full kee”).

    the food was great, but the best part was the chinese zodiac place mats, which gives little personality sketches based on the year of birth. obviously, this got us thinking about Baby Sparklet’s personality, which
    (apparently) will be guided by the chinese sign of the Ox.

    Bright, patient and inspiring to others. You can be happily by yourself, yet make an outstanding parent.

    feeling like we were on a roll, when i got home i found a couple of sites that walk through the signs a little more. that’s when things got interesting:

    Ox people are hard-working and persistent, they can stick at a task longer and go at it harder than anybody. They believe in themselves and tend to classify almost everything into two basic categories, bad and good. They hold up their high standards as a model and severely judge those who don’t aspire to maintain these same ideals.

    Although appears to be tranquil, in fact, Oxens are ponderous but impulsive when angry. They are capable of fearsome rages, therefore, it is better not to cross an Oxen. Ox people are observant, they have remarkable memories and are good at reporting on absolutely everything they observe.

    that’s one heck of a way to start the description, but the rest gets a little better (“kind, caring souls, logical, positive, filled with common sense”) … right up until the end where it says that the Ox’s “childhood and youth will generally be without incident.”

    note the use of the word “generally.”

    for the record, it turns out that I am a Rabbit (“quick, clever and ambitious”) and, while my money was on the lady sparkler being an Ox — just like our baby girl! — she ends up being a Snake (“not to be ignored”).

    and while their “compatibility” estimates are really designed for life partners, it turns out that an Ox, a Rabbit, and a Snake can live pretty happily under one roof … so long as the Rabbit (me) and Snake (the lady sparkler) aren’t romantically involved.

    can’t wait to see how that all pans out.

  • the five rules of baby names

    []
    photo.jpg, originally uploaded by [ecpark].
    there has been a lot of talk about baby names, now that we know the gender of baby sparklet.  

    we have our favorites, but are very much in the “exploratory” stage of the naming process … and we are still adding as many names to the list as we are removing.

    before last week, we had only discussed one rule of baby naming: 

    • the “last name” test —  each first name has a last name, and it’s got to match.  with a last name like “Parker,” that means the first name needs be something from the same Anglo school … and while “Mariella” is a beautiful name, “Mariella Parker” is just crazy.

    originally, the lady sparkler and i thought that one rule would guide us home, but now that we have spent some serious time talking about names, we have a couple new rules to add to the collection:

    • the “CEO” test — sure we want the baby to have a cute name worthy of babydom, but will it look rediculous on business cards in twenty years?  for some reason “Kaylee” comes to mind.
    • the “elementary school” test — will the child be able to spell her name by the start of school?  will the teacher be able to call her name without a phoenetic guidebook?  I think “Nevaeh” manages to fail both at once, as I can’t spell or say without serious assistance.
    • the “gift shop magnet” test — while personally i hate those personalized rainbow magnets you find in gift shops, I fervently believe sparklet should have the ability to find her name if she’s looking.  this means no bizzaro names (“Estrella”, “Willow”) and no bizzaro spellings (“Nataly”, “Madisyn”).
    • the “place in the family” test — if history (or the lady sparkler) is any indication, baby sparklet will be a force of nature … and likely the alpha dog of the household.  as a result, we can’t use any flowery names (“Lily”, “Emma”, “Ashley”) that are ultimately better suited for a second baby sparklet.

    I think those are all the rules, though there are one or two corollaries we are also keeping in mind:  

    • there has got to be a workable nickname (all I ever wanted in life was a nickname);
    • have to watch those initials (“Isabella Constance Parker” would have the initials “I See Pee”);
    • there will be no gender ambiguity (“Chris”, “Taylor”);
    • and no stealing names from nieces/cousins (which is a shame, because I *love* the name “Natalie”);
    • our M.O.H. won’t let us name the baby after the cat (which is also a shame, because “Emily” is my favorite name ever).

    aside from that, it’s open season.  let me know what you come up with … 

    Explore the Photo Set:
    Album: the lady sparkler, Sue and Jeremy (facebook)

  • how I met your mother: engagement, part 2

    (continued from part 1)

    this is the fifth in a series of letters to baby sparklet about how mommy and daddy met and woo-ed each other.

    immediately after the lady sparkler’s crazy Texas friends started haranguing her into haranguing me into marrying her, I thought to myself “you know, I do love her, and want to spend the rest of my life with her…”

    and so i decided to get a ring. that was December. I had the ring two weeks later.

    we were already talking about going to new York for my birthday (April) and it seemed like (at the time) my beloved’s marital haranguing might actually die down by then, at least long enough for me to propose uninterrupted.

    not so much.

    by February, i was sufficiently badgered to explain to her (in no uncertain terms) that from now on, each time she brought up engagement, i would move the “hypothetical” proposal back another month.

    by April, she had managed to add *fourteen* months to the engagement time line. so, while i hadn’t succeeded in her stifling the running of her mouth, i at least knew that a proposal was the farthest thing from her mind when we pulled into NYC’s Penn Station the second week of April.

    the same, however, couldn’t be said for me…

    I was a wreck, and constantly obsessed about the ring — where it was, and whether it had fallen out of the triple-bagged cocoon in which it was placed. to make matters worse, on the day i was going to propose (april 14th) it rained, and rained, and rained, and rained.

    i had already decided I couldn’t propose to the lady sparkler inside some silly, human-built structure because whatever we were inside could be torn down, or worse, turned into a starbucks.

    so, i decided i would do the deed in Central Park, which (obviously) wasn’t particularly rain-friendly, which meant that april 14th became april 15th, and engagement day became tax day.

    that afternoon, i marched my beloved around central park for over an hour, mostly because i couldn’t find a place to propose. i know it’s crazy, but there are a *lot* of people in new york — who knew? — and every single one of them seemed to be lounging around central park.

    before we left DC, i had asked my best friend from college (and future bridesmaid) if she had any suggestions about the whole engagement process. it turns out that her husband was such a mess when he proposed, that she was convinced (right up until she saw the ring) that he was dumping her.

    her solution? pull the ring out first.

    and, when we finally found a secluded spot, i did just that. the lady sparkler was resting for a moment on a mostly horizontal tree, when i pulled out the ring, and sat down beside her.

    she didn’t hear a single thing that i said. she was like the crow from the secret of n.i.m.h., when he sees mrs. frisbee’s medallion and says: “ooooooooooo, SPARKLY!”

    interestingly enough, to this day, she has no idea what *she* said either. (for the record, it was: “oh. my. god. are you, like, serious?”)

    i have what i said written down somewhere, but it was exactly what you would expect: “love, blah, blah, blah, so happy, blah, blah, life together, blah blah.” she replied, “yes, yes. oh my god, yes.” which — i would surmise — is just about as good of a response as you can get.

    speaking of which, on our way out of central park we ran into the back of another boy proposing to another girl, and it looked like he had arranged for a photographer and her parents to join in the festivities.

    unfortunately, she looked abjectly horrified. yeeeesh. at least *we* lived happily ever after.

    PHOTO: tulips, new york, new york.

  • how I met your mother: engagement, Texas-style

    dear sparklet,

    this is the fourth in a series of letters to baby sparklet about how mommy and daddy met and woo-ed each other.

    there are some stories that get better with age … and then there are stories that start out really $&#% funny, and stay really $&@#% funny.

    I hope this is the latter.

    a few years into the relationship, we made the honest mistake of going to Texas. sure, the lady sparkler’s parents were great, and her sisters were awesome … but her friends? lunatics.

    apparently, something in the water down there causes people to think that 18 months of dating is the maximum allowable before some kind of engagement is necessary, beit of the voluntary or shotgun variety.

    the sparklers, being a bit past that “threshold” had apparently tripped some kind of Texas state-wide alert system, where friends hold waves of rolling interventions to make sure “everything’s alright” and that the boy doesn’t have any “problems” that needed to be addressed (likely by overwhelming displays of machismo, or belt buckles, or both).

    by the end of the year, after a couple of months of interventions, the lady sparkler was in a tizzy … and her occasional, badly disguised, open-ended questions about an engagement timeline started getting more and more pointed (and more and more badly disguised).

    each time she would tizzy, we would talk … and each time we’d agree that *we* needed to have a timeline that worked for *us,* even if it was at odds with the posse was forming along the Rio Grande.

    I should pause.

    sure, Texans are ten-gallon-hat-sized-crazy for thinking 18 months of dating is suitable for long-term mate selection (which leads to all sorts of redneck/missing teeth/social Darwinist jokes which I will forgo due to likely readership demographics) …

    … but it is possible that my people (from the opposite side of the “war of northern aggression”) just might fall off the other end of the commitment scale. I have friends that dated for 8 years before the topic of marriage even came up, or (worse yet) were engaged for 5+ years before deciding whether they should actually tie the knot.

    so, from my worldview, i thought that I was being carefree to the point of reckless abandonment by thinking of proposing to a woman I had been dating for *only* two years. yet, all the while, the great state of Texas was negotiating with Chuck Norris to come shift my worldview for me.

    I digress …

    by February, my beloved had become as subtle as a three year old in the aisle of a toy store … and I was started to dig in, solely as a matter on principle. by the 27th time the issue was raised in those three months, I sat my beloved down, and we talked. it went something like this:

    me: “you know i love you. and i want you to know that you can propose to me anytime you like …”

    the lady sparkler: “ummmm.”

    me: “no, seriously. I know how much you want to get engaged… so you are welcome to go ring shopping, pick out something nice for me, and then get down on one knee and propose. I promise I’ll wear the ring everyday.”

    her: “uhhhhhh.”

    me: “what’s wrong, sweetie?”

    her: “I think I’d prefer if you proposed to me.”

    me: “interesting. okay, here’s the deal. let’s say we have a date for the hypothetical engagement, let’s call it X.”

    her: “is X soon?”

    me: “well, interesting that you mentioned that … each time you ask when it is, or suggest that X should be coming sooner, the hypothtical engagement date becomes X + 1 month.”

    her: “so, when is X then?”

    me: “i’m not sure, but it’s now TWO months later than it was three minutes ago.”

    of course, I didn’t have the heart to tell her that I had bought an engagement ring two months earlier and was just waiting for her to shut her yap about it, so it could be a surprise.

    continued …

    PHOTO: Statue, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York.

  • the clothes don’t make the (wo)man

    photo
    well, another weekend, another closet redone. this time mine (I hate being left out) and on the cheap (spent $39 on wood, saw-ed and installed myself).

    i have this pathological need to be doing stuff now, which i understand is probably a flavor of nesting … only coming from the more-militant-yet-somehow-less-productive wing.

    but the real news comes from the lady sparkler, who is showing enough (understatement!) to start considering actual maternity clothes instead of continuing to accessorize her regular jeans with rubber-band-as-belt-buckle.

    unfortunately, part of said awakening is finding out how much of a pain it is to shop for her new situation. truth be told, she hated shopping for regular clothes, so I guess no one was expecting her to suddenly hit a clothes-buying stride now that she is, er, buying for two.

    honestly, she’s a clotheshorse in her new found state, and looks great in everything she’s brought home. however, she’s begun complaining that certain clothes that lack definition (mommy mumu’s as it were) make her feel like she’s smuggling a watermelon out of the produce aisle.

    I’m sure I don’t know what that means, but I’m equally sure that she is sticking to a-lines and tailored-style clothes from here on out. (personally, I’m guessing that the maternity industry keeps some mumu’s on hand just to make sure the more expensive, tailored clothes fly off the shelves faster.)

    all that said, other than clothes and me pretending to be useful, we’re really just biding time until we know the gender.

    next sonogram is june 19th, and baby sparklet be well past the point where we can stare uncomfortably at his/her/its lower regions and make some sort of guess … provided, of course, that sparklet isn’t being bashful.

    16 days.

    PHOTO: recovery dinner from the weekend that was @ the heights, columbia heights, washington, dc.

  • how i met your mother: the first dates

    []
    dear sparklet,

    this is the third in a series of letters to baby sparklet about how mommy and daddy met and woo-ed each other.

    it’s pretty difficult to pick out one event that would qualify as a first date.

    the first thing we did together outside of work was go to Ben’s Chili Bowl. however, it was for lunch, and bridesmaid Mel was nice enough to chaperon that little event.  i am pretty sure those two things disqualify Ben’s from the “first date” competition.

    (that was also my first hot dog is several years, and i can still remember how my stomach ached after that was all over…)

    several weeks later, the lady sparkler and i went for a hike in Shenandoah national park … and barely survived. we made the mistake of hiking down (to some waterfalls on hazel mountain) instead of up.

    hiking downhill seemed like a good idea for the first six miles, and proved to be easy enough that we kept going farther than we had planned. we were having a great time talking, laughing, and poking t.l.s. with a stick (well, that last part was mostly me…)

    unfortunately, the six miles back uphill to the car sucked most of the will to live out of our poor, frail, out-of-shape, trying-to-impress-each-other-with-our-outdoorsyness bodies.

    we stayed on the trail two hours longer than we had planned, which meant what had been planned as a day event now required dinner, which was a first for us.

    and so, our first dinner date (however accidental) was at a ruby tuesday’s in warrenton on the way back to DC. to this very day, the sonora chicken pasta i had that night is just about my favorite comfort food on the planet.

    now, i was mostly a vegetarian when i met the lady sparkler … i did eat some meat (almost all of it was chicken), i never cooked any dead animals at home, and never ate meat more than once or twice a month (i guess you could say that i was a social carnivore.)

    so it was much to my surprise that after our hike, i found us talking about barbecue — which is not something I talk about much, so i’m guessing the lady sparkler must have brought up.

    to keep up with the conversation, i found myself telling her that she should come up to Glover Park to try the ribs at Rockland’s, regardless of the fact that i had no earthly idea what they tasted like and would probably faint watching someone eat them.

    she thought it sounded great.

    so, while i had successfully arranged our first “alone” date back in DC, i had also managed to create a rather awkward situation. whatever meat i was eating at the time, i can assure you that it wasn’t anything that looked like it was once alive, much less slaughtered, cooked over an open flame, and hacked into little strips.

    that next weekend, we met at Rocklands, and ordered at the counter.  me: a cute little array of sides (coleslaw, mac and cheese, potato salad).  my future wife: a huge slab of meat.

    and so, i watched my wife-to-be pack away half a rack of ribs.

    when finished, she proceeded to suck the marrow from the bones, and then lick her fingers clean. i kissed goodbye whatever vegetarian tendencies i had, right then and there.

    and the rest, as they say, is history.

  • the end of baseball in washington

    []
    photo.jpg, originally uploaded by [ecpark].
    i might be about done with the washington nationals.

    the austin spaklers are in town for the lady sparkler’s birthday, and to get some some quality time with her belly. it’d been a year since we saw a nats game, so we tossed in one of those for good measure.

    it turned out that we had three sets of friends there, and we had a great time all around. the food — ben’s chili bowl, again — was fantastic. the stadium is beautiful.

    but the game was awful.

    of course, part of that might be because the nationals are awful. luckily, they were facing the orioles … who are equally awful.

    the two teams are averaging 6 runs allowed per game. together, they allow more people on base than any other teams in the league. washington leads the league in errors, and baltimore is close behind. both are in last place in their division.

    all that futility should mean a scorcher of a game. but alas, did i mention it was awful?

    i swear, there was 20 minutes between each inning. it took until the 5th inning for washington to score its first run (which would also be the last). the game was over in two hours and 31 minutes, but i would have guessed it was twice that.

    in fact, when nat’s shortstop Cristian Guzman homered in the 5th i was excited … until i realized that it tied the game, vastly increasing the chance it would go into extra innings.

    (not to worry, tho, as baltimore “stormed” back to win 2-1.)

    but worst of all, we had to watch all the happy O’s fans … who have to win the award for most socially awkward fan base in the country.

    i know that baseball is a game of stats (which is probably a polite way of saying math geeks) but O’s fans makes red sox and yankees fans look normal by comparison … preppy or thuggy, as the case may be, but without that certain “a/v club” veneer.

    but, at least the O’s have fans.

    honestly, the nats would have better success if they built a giant bar, with great food, a huge HD television, and a $25 cover charge. that way DCers could come and socialize, without feeling guilty about paying attention a baseball game.

    (wait, that’s actually what they did …)

    in the end, the two-plus hours where i didn’t watch the game was great, but the 20 minutes of the game i watched during pauses in the social agenda felt like an afternoon at the dmv.

    it took forever, and no one was particularly happy with how it turned out.

  • how I met your mother: the first kiss

    [Evan and Tasha]
    dear sparklet,

    this is the second in a series of letters to baby sparklet about how mommy and daddy met and woo-ed each other.

    if be lying if I said that I wasn’t interested in the woman who would become the lady sparkler soon after we met, after two years of being telephone-only business chums…

    but, I was coming out of a bit of a rough patch as far as the fairer sex was concerned. point of fact, I had sworn off women all together after the excruciating demise of two (and a half) relationships in an 18 month perod.

    but, to be frank, swearing off women wasn’t quite what the lady sparkler had had in mind.

    those days we spent a little bit of time out of the office together … but completely plutonic, in the “hands off like plutonium” sort of way. I didn’t want to have anything to do (romantically) with women, and she didn’t want anything to do (romantically) with anyone who had such a luminous recent history of spectacularly-demising relationships.

    but all of a sudden, something changed. after, say, four months of plutonic nirvana, she came up to my place in Glover Park on a Friday night for an early dinner, before I was to drive to Williamsburg (and the family) later that night.

    as I was packing, she sat on my bed — it was a studio apartment so there was no couch, you perverts — going ON and ON about how she was happy we were just friends, and that while she could see some thing happening romantically, it was waaaaaay off in the future, and that we should take things slowly, and that I needed time, and that she needed time, and how special male friends were, and how she had a lot of them, and how people often misconstrued that, but she was glad that I didn’t misconstrue that, blah, blah, blah-blah, blah-blah-blah.

    she was preaching to the choir (nay, the clergy) as far as i was concerned … so i said “you are exactly right” for twenty minutes, packed quickly, went with her for a quick bite of Indian, decided her Native American name translated to “she who insists on stating the obvious, over and *over* again,” and drove to Williamsburg.

    She suggested that I stop by on my way back after my trip, which i did, and we ended up going for a walk, I’m guessing to give her roommate a break from the Evan-induced insanity.

    not twenty minutes into the walk, she asked if she could hold my hand. not twenty-one minutes into the walk, she asked if she could kiss me.

    we did, on the corner of Buchanan and Boyle streets, in Alexandria, Virginia.

    to this day, I have no idea what happened between Friday at 8pm and Sunday at 4pm. but, whatever it was, I would like to officially take credit for it here and now.

    all along, it was *obviously* my masterplan to drive her to do this switch-er-roo, and she was just powerless in the face of my onslaught of charm.

    I promise to only use my powers for good from here on out.

  • how I met your mother: the beginning

    []
    dear sparklet,

    this is the first in a series of letters to baby sparklet about how mommy and daddy met and woo-ed each other.

    one of the lady sparkler’s favorite shows these days is “how I met your mother,” whose premise includes a dad explaining to his kids (through flashbacks to modern day) all the zany hijinks that led to him meeting (and marrying) their mother.

    you’ve seen it if you have been on an airplane in the last five years, or have a thing for doogie howser/ buffy the vampire slayer alumni.

    anyway, the premise got me thinking I have a certain moral obligation to document all the embarassing stories I have about the lady sparkler, to make sure you (dear sparklet) have a full understanding of your antecedants.

    so, I’m not sure how many people know this, but I knew my future beloved for about two years before we ever met. she was the head of communications for a small progressive non-profit, and I handled a web consulting contract they had with CTSG way back when.

    it’s reasonable to say that I had a “client crush” on her — hard to explain, but that’s a commonish term that consultants have for clients that they don’t try to avoid at all costs. it happens a more often than you’d think, especially when your “relationship” is limited to whitty banter on the phone.

    the funny part is that I assumed — for two years, up until the day that she started working for at CTSG — that she was 45 years old, married, with two or three kids.

    whoops.

    one day I hear “new girl” is coming by for some social event because she was going to be starting with us in a few weeks, and two hours layer I realize it is (a) her, (b) that I have talked to her for years but never met, (c) she is decidedly not 45, and (d) had cornered me in the office kitchen in such a way that I was fairly certain I had best cooperate with her and whatever her vision of the world might be.

    the part of the story that doesn’t get told all that often is that I inadvertently seduced her under completely false pretences … namely in a suit and tie.

    the day she came to visit just happened to be the only day in four years of political consulting that I had a meeting with a member of congress (nick lampson, fwiw) so had dressed up for work in black tie, black suit and black overcoat.

    (she said I looked dashing … I think I probably looked like John Cusack from Grosse Pointe Blank.)

    regardless, it was one of maybe four times I got that dressed up in the last six years (poor thing).

    looking back, she says it was love at first sight … I’m not sure I was so eloquent, but absolutely thought she was hot, had potential, and was going to kick my #%$& if I didn’t comply with her every demand.

    mmmm, young love 🙂

  • white hart lane

    [Tottenham Hotspur vs. West Bromwich Albion, White Hart Lane, Tottenham, London, England, UK.]
    [Tottenham Hotspur vs. West Bromwich Albion, White Hart Lane, Tottenham, London, England, UK.]
    [White Hart Lane, Tottenham, London, England, UK.]
    i love my wife.

    she’s barely 14 weeks pregnant, just spent seven days gallivanting around scotland with my family, and wraps it all up by going with me (split seats mind you) to see tottenham hotspur at white hart lane.

    i’ve been following tottenham since i’ve been following the premier league — and the thought of seeing them in their 110 year old stadium has been clattering around my head ever since we bought the ridiculously overpriced tickets six weeks ago.

    it’s crescendo-ed to the point that this morning i was certifiably out of my mind — giddy enough that i managed to lose my wallet touring st. paul’s cathedral, but barely even noticing the rather large problem as my tickets to the lane were locked away elsewhere.

    we had planned on taking the tube to Seven Sisters, and making a twenty minute hike up hill to the stadium — but there was some variation on london’s perennial track work, so we detoured to another line and cabbed over.

    (speaking of, when the lady sparkler and i were buying tube tickets, our cashier was an aresnal fan — tottenham’s arch nemesis — and she was utterly unable to say either “tottenham” or “white hart lane” outloud without cringing.)

    (seriously, she kept starting to say something … catching herself … stopping … and saying “your destination” instead.)

    when we got to the lane, we walked a couple of laps — soaking it all in. by the time we actually entered the stadium it was already time for player introductions.

    i walked through the tunnel to the orchestral magesty of John Williams “Dual of the Fates.” it was glorious.

    it’s been a day, and i honestly don’t remember much about the match itself.

    i remember being in the front row, with a bunch of 20-something men. i remember screaming my head off. i remember being told to sit down by the extraordinarily polite stewards, a dozen times or more.

    and, i remember tottenham winning off of a curling 25-yard effort from Jermain Jenas.

    but, most of all i remember the chants, and the whole stadium — 35,000 strong — singing “oh when the spurs go marching in” in unision. i can still hear the glory glory ringing around in my ears.

    glorious.

    See a Slideshow of the Photos on Flickr:
    tottenham vs. west brom, white hart lane, london

  • so, a funny thing happened

    [Castle Stalker, near Port Appin, Scotland, UK.]
    so, a funny thing happened at the car dealership.

    i rented a car from whatever the nationwide/generic car rental place was, and the only thing i asked for was for it to be an automatic. i’ve done the wrong side of the road thing before, but had little interest in doing it on hills with a clutch.

    turns out that the only automatic that they had on the lot was a Mercedes E-Class Wagon, which the guy described as being worth more than his annual paycheck (it costs $49,250 in the States).

    he gave it to us for the rate we already agreed to for what we thought was going to be a crappy Scandinavian four-door, and tossed in a GPS to boot. the lady sparkler said to decline the insurance to use our own, and i drove the really expensive car off the lot like a scared little boy.

    when we got back to the apartment (we’re in a two-bedroom for our stay in Edinburgh) i made my wife call our insurance, just to be sure we were okay. it went something like this:

    We just rented a Mercedes wagon, and want to make sure it’s covered under our insurance.

    What do you mean when you say that you don’t cover “certain” luxury vehicles — like what, Ferrari’s and Lambroghinis?

    So, I started walking back to the rental place — and told him either to give us insurance or to walk over and pick the car back up himself.

    Long story short, we got insurance — and my parents just got upgraded from riding around in the back of a Ford Mondeo for a week.

  • there and back again

    gi_overviewthe lady sparkler’s had a busy week of interviews. la madre de la sparklet has been shopping for a new baby doctor ever since he/she/it announced, “oh, by the way … I don’t deliver babies anymore.”

    mental note: add that to the list of things you could have mentioned three months ago …

    it’s a little early to be doing dry runs to the hospital, but all the practices that baby mama interviewed were out of sibley memorial hospital here in DC and we had only the faintest idea as to where that was.

    and, knowing that i was going to be the one driving her raging hormones around in case of emergency, i convinced her that we might want to discover whether we can actually get to this uncharted hospital in a hurry or not.

    what can I say … I’m a planner.

    it turns out that “we” have picked the farthest-away hospital in the District (at least that doesn’t involve crossing a river, thank god).

    to be more specific, there are six hospitals that are closer — though admittedly two of them you could go in pregnant and come out missing a kidney.

    I digress…

    so, we took a little drive to sibley. I offered to strap a watermellon to her waist and dump a gallon of water on her lap … you know, for authenticity.

    she declined — unless I let her wail hysterically, dig her fingernails into my arm while I drove, and leave at three in the morning … you know, for authenticity.

    I declined.

    so we hopped into our little jetta, and meandered our way west through the city: Cleveland park, van ness, tenleytown, American university, spring valley. (we passed like 200 churches, which I think is a good sign.)

    five miles, twelve stoplights, three stop signs and a traffic circle later, we arrived at sibley.

    the lady sparkler announced that the trip went “pretty good.” I announced that she better be planning to be induced at a time of our choosing.

    it only took 12 minutes, but it felt like thirty … and that was without sparklet trying to bring an abrupt end to his/her claustrophobia.

    oy.

  • yup, we’re pregnant

    well, looks like we *are* pregnant … the lady sparkler went in for a blood test early this week, and it came back a big ol’ thumbs up!

    we’ve already told the future grandparents, but have managed to track down any of the aunts and uncles quite yet. it’s hard to get peoples attention without ruining the surprise.

    the Virginia parkers were in town this weekend (for my father’s birthday) so we got to tell them in person. the Houston spindlers got a phone call, but it turns out they already knew she was pregnant by the time they picked up.

    so, now begins the long wait … we’ve got 64 days until we reach the 12 week threshold where it becomes safe to blab about sparklet (temporary nickname for currently genderless future sparkler) publically.

    speaking of which, yes, we are going to find out the gender before hand, though TLS “feels” like it will be a girl. (and, no, I don’t know what that means either…)

    speaking of which, we just found out that the lady sparkler’s ob-gyn no longer delivers babies, so we have to come up with an artful way of getting our friends to recommend someone without letting on that we have an eminent need to act on their suggestion.

    two other things of note: we’ve started compiling a list of “must do’s” before the baby pops out… including redoing the closet in the second bedroom (which TLS has annexed as her own) and replace the death trap of an electric curcuit-breaker box our home inspector warned us about.

    we’ll probably be fine on furnature to start (sans crib, natch) and we are going to try and avoid getting a bigger car (though may need to invest in some kind of luggage rack considering we max out the trunk when travelling already).

    oh, and the lady sparkler keeps talking about painting, so that’s probably coming, too.

    second item of note: we’ve agreed on the fact that a last name like “Parker” needs to have a fairly conventional anglo first name to “match.” (for instance, Andrew Parker works … Enrique Parker does not.)

    with that already established, I’m thinking the name thing will actually be bearable, and maybe a little fun.

    last thought … we are legitimately super-excited about raising sparklet in the city. everythin within walking distance, the zoo, the limited space that win let us over-accumulate baby crap … everything.

    these are exciting times!

  • well, here we go — a.k.a. the lady sparkler thinks she might be pregnant

    l5885028630_8698so, the lady sparkler thinks she might be pregnant. and while those words strike terror into my heart, it’s not for the reason you think.

    the last time she thought she was pregnant, I decided it would be a good idea to draft up some blog entries, with be idea that they’d be embargoed (ie. not published) until after the 12 week don’t-tell-a-soul period has passed.

    unfortunately, as I was jotting down my thoughts, I came to realize that something was wrong with our blog which cause unpublished drafts to be, well, published.

    and so, in the first week of January, maybe 50+ people who read the blog via RSS feeds (like, through google reader) got this message:

    “tasha thinks she might be pregnant …”

    so, when T.L.S. delivered the news today, after the obvious “yay!” response one would expect from me (closely followed by “let’s wait a few days to be sure”) my next thought was “how can I make sure I don’t embarrass myself again with another premature post.”

    the answer? low tech. I’m drafting this in notepad, and won’t upload anything ’til I’m ready for them to be published. I don’t that even I could screw that up.

    as an aside, thank you to all of you who either (a) didn’t make a big deal of my obvious mistake and pulled me aside quietly, or (b) just ignored the mistake because you knew I was just being a complete idiot. bless you all.

    so, if you are reading this, I guess that means sparklet’s due date is Nov 8th, based off Feb 2nd as the start of T.L.S.’ last period.

    (btw, sparklet is the insider name for the baby — it’s all we’ve got until there is at least a gender to work with.)

    oi! i just looked at the calendar saw a vision of the future: one day in junior high health class, sparklet will count back 38 weeks from his/her birthday and pick Feb14th as the likely conception day.

    even worse, sparklet will be totally grossed out, thinking mom and dad got tanked on Valentine’s Day and couldn’t control themselves … even though it’s been well documented that the only elixer of love we had on that day was ben’s chili bowl.

    btw, remind me to delete this post before sparklet can read … okay? I probably can’t afford the therapy bills this post would cause.

  • dear mr. alex rodriguez, sir …

    arodpursei have to confess, that up until this moment, i’ve hated you. i’ve hated you as long as i can remember. heck, before i knew you … i hated the idea of you.

    a bloated contract from the yankees that signifies everything wrong with modern baseball. a personality uniquely unsuited to (and unappreciative of) the public spotlight. a track record of behavior on (and off) the feild that is awkward at best, or painfully embarrassing at worst.

    but, with this week’s revelations about your steroids use you have a chance to turn a new leaf, and the respect of an entire nation of baseball fans.

    in short, it’s up to you to save baseball.

    baseball needs *you* to come out of this latest round of steroid rumors better than you went in. the public can’t handle ten years of continual reminders of the steroids era as you bat your way towards the top of the home run list.

    we need you to hit this one out of the park for us. the key? a good, thoughtful, honest response from you.

    first off, let’s see what you don’t do … let’s look at how everyone else took their turn at the steroids plate. barry bonds lied (that didn’t work out so well). roger clemens denied (and is still digging his grave). mark mcgwire refused to talk (good luck with your next 10 years in new york if you choose that path). rafael palmeiro’s “i didn’t know what i was being injected with” defense has proven to be less then effective as well.

    so, let’s try something different … like, being honest.

    yes, you used steroids, but it was only one season (right?) way back in 2003. since then, you’ve been the most tested athlete on the planet, so people will be reasonably receptive to the notion that you aren’t still using.

    so, let’s get a head of this thing and say:

    • i did it. i was stupid. i used in 2003, but realized that using is a betrayal of the game and an offense to my fans. i saw all the big boys using around the league, and gave into the excuse that i needed to keep up … i have wanted to be the best for as long as i remember, but steroids just aren’t the way to do it.
    • with a steroid test on my record, i know that i have a lot to prove to get into the hall of fame, but i am committed to working everyday for the next ten years to earn my way back in.
    • i believe that my record can stand without the 2003 season, which is why i am voluntarily returning back to the league the (now tainted) awards i got that season, including the MVP trophy, and the award for being the best hitter in baseball. those awards are not a reflection on who i am, so i don’t want them a part of my resume, or sitting on my mantle.
    • yes, the tests that “outed” me were supposed to be confidential, and yes i am the only one out of the 104 who has been identified, but there is absolutely no reason to breach that confidentiality by releasing the rest of the names. two wrongs do not make a right, and i will take this round on my shoulders.

    • players and owners need to rededicate themselves to testing. our fans are rightly skeptical each time they hear another steroid denial, and we need to test early and often, to prove everyday that we deserve their respect.

    i know that’s a lot to say, but you have the chance to quite literally shift the landscape of baseball with just one press conference.

    please, mr. rodriguez … as the biggest figure in baseball, and the idol of everybody this side of boston, so you are uniquely positioned to save baseball from the steroids era.

    and, who knows, if you do this right … you may just earn your way back into the hall of fame at the same time.

    sincerely,
    baseball nation

  • the darker side of the inauguration

    we had a lot of time to think about the inauguration on our way out of the mall … it took us over an hour to go two blocks, and then another couple to get back to civilization (or lunch, at least).

    ironically, the thing that stuck with me — more than the speech, the people, the hope — was the complete lack of respect the people on the mall had for the President until around 12:03 pm.

    living in my own little world, I’d never really thought it through … sure, he had bad approval numbers, sure my hippie-prog friends had little respect for his policies on, well, anything.

    but he was still President, right? i have always firmly believe that you have to respect the office, even if you believe the occupant doesn’t respect the office himself.

    there is a basic level of civility that is needed to maintain ourselves as a nation, and violating that civility doesn’t no good in our efforts to establish a new tone of mutual respect in the nation’s Capitol.

    now, don’t get me wrong … i didn’t hear anything that wasn’t shouted at Clinton eight years ago, but that’s not the point.

    it’s very difficult to take the high road on an inclusive society, when we are exclusive ourselves. in the same way, we can’t fight intolerance with intolerance, regardless of how intolerant we feel the last eight years have been.

    i already have conservative friends predicting assassinations, preaching the apocalypse, and plotting out their future lives in foreign countries — which is ironic because the best place for conservatives right now is probably France.

    by being intolerant ourselves, we not only excuse this type of behavior, we encourage it. now, i’m about as opposed to neo-cons as anyone, but even I was able to give Bush the benefit of the doubt for his first two years in office.

    if we really are going to bring change in Washington, it can’t just trickle down from the top. this started as a grassroots movement, and that’s the only way real change is going to succeed.

  • ben affleck likes having his picture taken, and other life lessons

    we scored some tickets to the “google ball” through the lady sparkler’s work — she actually asked *whether* i wanted to go (crazy lady!).

    it wasn’t a ball as such (no obamas, so no dead swan dress) but was instead billing itself as a sort of pre-/post-ball party for the other (more official) balls.

    the space was gorgeous. big enough to be spectacular, but small enough to be (surprisingly) intimate. and, to be fair, i didn’t even know the space existed (it’s in the old IRS building at the corner of 15th and Constitution).

    we heard rumors that fancy-pants people would be there, but assumed they would be all roped off in some back room. it was great enough to have an excuse to dress up, but … i mean, JOHN PODESTA was there. and *WOLF BLITZER*!!!

    anyway, the conversations were progressing along nicely, when the lady sparkler suggested our little group take a lap around the place. in a back room, the lady sparkler spotted ben affleck, and then it was all over …

    i felt safe in my relationship, because i knew that she was only talking to him to get matt damon’s phone number … but it turned out that she wanted a picture, too.

    she negotiated her way up to him, and tugged on his shoulder. i have no idea who he was talking to (someone later told me it was his brother Casey) but he barely broke (conversation) stride as he turned around, looked dashing for the picture, and went back about his business … not at all disturbed to be accosted by my wife.

    john cusack, on the other hand, turned out to be a bit of an #$%. my beloved slid in for the kill, and he started negotiating with her about whether he would take the picture or not … i finally just took it, and think the expression is, well, perfect.

    we actually ran into good friends shortly afterwards who gave us their tickets to a real, official ball (dead swann dress included). we headed over not too much later, but it turns out that the obama’s were gone even before we had the tickets in our hands.

    still, one heck of an evening … especially riding home on the metro in our prom attire, with not a single raised eyebrow.

    damn, i love DC.

  • inauguration tickets

    n5409143_32670501_3448i’ve got a nice pair of inauguration tickets in my hand, courtesy of the immortal jojo, who will *easily* go down as the very best middle sister in the history of the sparkler family.

    we headed over to Capitol Hill today, a little after lunch, to pick up said tickets from jojo’s member (who is super cool himself, and someone i worked with a lot back in the days of comrade bernie sanders).

    we got there a little after 2pm, thinking it would be an easy in-and-out before they shut down around three … but instead, we walked straight into the fourth circle of hell.

    the metro platform was backed up, with an easy hundred people waiting to just get *out* of the turnstiles.

    it only got worse when we got topside.

    there are probably three entrances to each of the three house buildings, so a total of nine different paths to get to your tickets. when we arrived, each of the lines had hundreds (if not thousands) already lined up.

    i was surprised, but then i started doing the math … 435 members of the house (times) two-hundred tickets per member (equals) approximately 87,000 tickets.

    factor in that (a) everybody had to be present to pick up the tickets, (b) they only allowed one day to pick up the tickets, and (c) there was only six hours in which to distribute them …

    a little more math reveals that the powers that be thought *each* door/security queue/metal detector could move just about 2,000 people *every* hour.

    i’m sad to say they were wildly, and stoopidly optimistic.

    now, there is a happy ending … because we lucked out. i worked in said house office building for four years and i knew it had a back door … and thought to check to see if there was a line there.

    we also lucked out, because the throngs were so bad at the front (it went up and down the length of the building twice) that they decided to open the back door (where we were looking) at the exact moment we arrived.

    we were (maybe) fifty or sixty people back from the door when it opened.

    after that, it was all gravy.

    we just had to find our room, the lady sparkler had to pretend she was her sister (we had an old passport for ID that it turned out we didn’t have to use) and i had to smile, nod, and say “duude” a lot (trying to pass myself off as a left coaster).

    it wasn’t until we walked out the front that we realized how incredibly fortunate we were. there was an easy two thousand people waiting to get in just that *one* entrance.

    i would love to know how late those offices had to stay open tonight. my guess was that there was a line well past dark.

    first the bus yesterday, now the tickets today. let’s see if the luck holds through tomorrow …

  • knitting and snowing

    100_0074two signs of the coming apocalypse: it’s snowing at the beach, and i’ve learned how to knit.

    the weather down this way has been crazy. in the last month, we’ve had just as many days above 60 as we had below freezing. it’s rained, it’s typhooned, it’s snowed, it’s blizzard-ed.

    i wouldn’t be surprised to see dennis quaid snowshoe by, murmuring about having to save Jake Gyllenhaal (tho, to be frank, i would toss Jake back and focus my attention on saving Emmy Rossum).

    i digress.

    the lady sparkler and i are spending the long weekend on the coast of Delaware with Lighting Chick Knits, whose sister happens to have a house out here with a spectacular view of the sound (pictures of the view on facebook).

    much as her blog would suggest, Lighting Chick Knits, well, knits. and, being the Renaissance man that i am, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to add another tick to my “wide, not deep” resume of skills, probably best symbolized by my musical skills (guitar, bass, piano, violin, and harmonica) or my interest in foreign languages (russian, arabic, spanish) — all of which i can “do,” just none particularly well.

    and so it is with knitting … i am neither exceptionally good or exceptionally bad. knitting fits nicely into my need for immediate gratification, but my skills are no where near the point they’d need to overcome my internal demand for perfection.

    we’ll see. so far, i’ve made it through 20 rows of a scarf, which is just enough to make smallishly-sized bookmark … which seems like a just reward for annihilating the last remaining shred of my masculinity.

  • a (mostly) friendly Christmas competition

    working in online fundraising, the fact that the end of the year is coinciding with the complete and utter collapse of our economy is casting a bit of a pall on what would otherwise be a festive time of the year.

    this minor set back (alone) could have be taken in stride … but, when our philanthropy department neighboors started getting all up in our grill about how they were going to out “festive” us for the holidays, it was game on.

    i mean, we can handle trying to compensate for the decline of western civilization, but to be called out for decorating supremacy was just a bridge to far.

    we responded to this tyranny with resolve. we raided our collective attics, mobilizing all sorts of lights, ornaments, bows and garlands towards the decorating war effort (photos of the mobilization above).

    but, in the end, it was over before it really even began … and philanthropy surrendered before we had the chance to get much past the “shock and awe” stage:

    ok ok, you guys win this one. you really went above and beyond. I apologize for the trash talk and concede the title to you guys.

    i’m a tiny bit sad they caved so quickly, because we had one more salvo of decorations we could have deployed had we needed the reserves to secure our merriment objectives.

    i love the smell of trash talk in the morning.

  • lost license: airport security without an ID


    airport security, originally uploaded by d5o3

    so, a funny thing happened on the way to the airport …

    we had a rental car for the first half of thanksgiving week, so that we could drive down to eugene, and so that i could spend a day hiking around central oregon.

    unfortunately, at one of those trailheads, i stuffed my wallet in the glove compartment … and then never bothered to pull it back out again. and then i returned the car. and then Enterprise re-rented the car.

    obviously, much madness ensued — calls with Enterprise, arrangements with the sparklers-in-law to forward a photocopy of my passport, and discussions with TSA and United.

    long story short: i got to go through security at the airport without a government-issued ID.

    we weren’t able to get much out of TSA or United before we got to the airport, but pretty much everybody said to get there early. our flight was at 7:45 am, so we got to the airport when it opened at 5:30.

    the aforementioned photocopy of my passport was more than enough to convince United to give me a boarding pass … though, in retrospect, I could have side-stepped their ID check completely had i thought to check-in online.

    the TSA-manned security checkpoint weren’t quite so ready to accept copied documents that (admittedly) had no security value what-so-ever.

    after meekly presenting by situation to the ID checker, i was waived out of line (expected), but the lady sparkler was sent on without me (not so much).

    now, i would have thought that TSA would want to use her (or at least her ID) as some sort of corroborating identification, but they were just as uninterested in her as they were in the photocopies i had of my passport, social security card and birth certificate.

    i was let off to a secure, undisclosed location.

    now, when i get nervous, i get chatty … so i started talking up the nice young lady who was escorting me. turns out, people try and fly all the time without identification … and most don’t even have a good excuse.

    she guessed that she sees 15 or so people try and go through security each day without an ID, and only one or two of them have had their identification lost or stolen. most just left it at home, and didn’t have the time or inclination to go back and get it.

    we arrived on the admin floor of the terminal building, and i was ushered into the one small room that functioned as TSA headquarters for the airport.

    It had a faux-command center feel: plasma screen televisions were showing security cameras and CNN, and a military-style bank of clocks allowed them to monitor the passage of time in such disparate locales as Tokyo, Portland, Washington, London and Riyadh.

    I sat down with two very nice TSA security ladies, who absolutely had the “Cagney and Lacy” flavour of retired police officers. After introductions, they dialed up Homeland Security central for a teleconference, and asked me an quick series of questions.

    Three minutes later — and one amusing retelling of my rental car experience — I was on my way.

    Back at the metal detectors, I was taken to my very own security line where I got to go through a puffer and my baggage got hand searched and sniffed for explosives before they sent me through.

    couple of thoughts if you decide to lose your wallet, too:

    Get there early — the first thing the TSA officer said to me was “what time is your flight” and “good, you’ll still make your plane.” they had no doubt i was getting through, so long as i had enough time.

    Ace the interview — TSA didn’t (seem to) care about anything except the interview. They didn’t care that I was on a round trip fare (so I obviously made it through security once), they ignored my wife (who had ID, and shared my last name, and my home address), and wasn’t interested in any cooroberating evidence that I was me (I had a bank statement addressed to me, and photocopies of my passport, social security card, and birth certificate).

    Be friendly — I took every moment I could to chat up those escorting me and interviewing me, and it was a surpisingly posative experience. They seemed very interested in getting me on my plane, so I was very interested in not being an @$%&.

    The whole event took less than 20 minutes, on the busiest travel day of the season. I’m not sure I could have expected a better ending.

    UPDATE: I got my wallet back. Enterprise (who was great through this all) tracked down the people who had the car, while the new renters were unable/unwilling to find the wallet … it was there in the glove compartment when they returned the car.

  • happy beginnings

    [Photo]
    IMG_5705, originally uploaded by [ecpark].
    some of you may have been following the saga of foster mom adventures, an absolutely courageos friend (and m.o.h.) of ours who ignored her own sanity and has given over her life for two children in need of sanctuary.

    we were their neck of the woods this weekend, and got to spend some time quality with our maid-of-honor-emeritus and her charges. and by “quality time” i mean “lots of piggy back rides.”

    it’s really a beautiful thing how a person can give over her life to children in need, and even more beautiful to see how resilient and wonderful children can be in even the most adverse of circumstances.

    it sounds like it’s going to be a long week for the girls, so keep the whole fostermom clan in your thoughts and prayers.

    update: turns out there is a happy ending (er, beginning?) to the whole situation. if you haven’t been following, now is the time to start.

    Explore the Photo Set (Flickr, friends only):
    foster mom’s adventures

  • three reasons why it sucks to be a Republican right now

    for me, this election cycle has highlighted three glaring reasons why the Republican party should be more than a little worried about 2012:

    first problem: party unity

    the party illuminati are already deconstructing the election, and half the party is saying they lost because they pushed away minorities and the intellectuals by pandering to the conservative base. of course, the other half says they lost when they left the party’s traditional base and moved towards the center (where the minorities and intellectuals seem to be hanging out).

    this argument is going to resonate well beyond 2012, but the next nomination cycle is going to be an ugly battle for the Repubs … between a candidate who energizes the party’s base, and a candidate who energizes the party’s intellectual / policy / more progressive center.

    that bruiser of a process is going to disenfranchise half the party, and make it very hard the nominee to win out. for those who weren’t paying attention, sarah palin brought about party discord, not party unity. her presence in 2012 is only going to make the situation worse.

    second problem: policy not security

    we are starting to see the signs that simply changing the subject isn’t going to work anymore. Republican candidates are going to have to retrench to a time when they had holistic policies (contract with america, anyone?) and didn’t just rely on national security to win the day.

    sure, it’s great to have two wars going on, and to be under attack by the terrorists, but eventually the repubs are going to have to get comfortable on a new set of issues and not just keep changing the subject to national security.

    (oh, and taxes… dems are starting to figure out how govern without raising taxes, so the “all dems raise taxes” line ain’t going to work forever.)

    third problem: the “other” conservatives

    the republican party seems to be defining itself only through religious and social conservatives. under Reagan, there was room for every flavor of conservative under the big tent (fiscal, pragmatic, progressive, military, intellectual).

    today, people who don’t meet the strict social/religious litmus-test are either tossed out of the party (for not being “right” enough) or are forced to assimilate in order to stay. the world is becoming way to diverse (ethnic, religious, cultural) for the Repubs to rely on owning the white, conservative, and evangelical votes.

    here is the problem: 89% of mccain votes were from white voters, but they represent only 74% of the electorate. 58% of mccain votes were from conservatives, but they are only 34% of the electorate. 42% of mccain votes were evangelicals, but they are only 26% of the electorate.

    this isn’t a knock on any of the above demographics, just a recognition that winning these demographics isn’t likely to be enough moving torward. it’s also a classic sign of “engaging the base,” and not competing on the field of ideas and policies.

    well, good luck, my republican friends — it’s going to be an interesting time in the wilderness for you. may you come back in less time (and maybe a little more progressive?) than the dems last time around.

  • some assembly (not) required

    well, i’m officially old now. interestingly enough, this realization didn’t come from a mortgage, or a life insurance that gives the lady sparkler financial incentive for my death, or from friends having wedding after wedding after wedding, or from going to a party and being the only one there without kids.

    it came, instead, from pottery barn.

    last week, we went anniversary present shopping and settled on a 33%-off console table to replace a piece of crap we bought at Ikea five years ago. it wasn’t in stock, but they had extras at the big, bad warehouse in the sky, and promised to ship one over to a store-near-us as soon as they could.

    well, we got the call yesterday, crossed the bridge into rural Arlington to go pick it up. when we pulled up front, a very nice boy wheeled the box out to our car … and that’s when all hell broke loose.

    the box was enormous. like really big. like “size of a piece of furniture” big.

    there are apparently places in the world where you can buy furniture that doesn’t require assembly. more importantly, there are apparently places in the world where you can buy furniture which requires something bigger that a Volkswagen Jetta.

    now, don’t get me wrong … i had heard rumors of such extravagance, but bushed them aide as if tales of the fortress of Atlantis, or a land filled with Unicorns, or a country of people who’d reelect some one from the Bush family. i mean, really … would would have thought such a place existed?!?

    after getting a grip on our new found alternate reality, “very nice boy pottery barn boy” led us to the conclusion that the Jetta just wasn’t going to cut it (and we galloped off to rent a pick up truck from ZipCar).

    but, let this serve as a cautionary tale for the youth of america. there comes a time when you will be allowed to vote, sent to war, drink, and afford to buy furniture that comes assembled — assuming that you catch a really good sale.

    so, excercise your rights (responsibilities?) with caution …

  • i love hope solo, and harry redknapp, and not necessarily in that order…

    after a lovely Saturday of belated anniversary present shopping (we settled on a one-third off console table from pottery barn) the lady sparkler and I settled in for a long evening at home … watching two-month stale coverage of the Beijing Summer Olympics.

    a couple things, looking back two months:

    • it’s been at least a week since I had heard any one say “michael phelps,” which made me wonder if he had fired his agent considering his best post-Olympic gig has been for Rosetta Stone.
    • It seems like (back then) John McCain actually ran ads that weren’t entirely focused on trashing Barack Obama. heck, August was so long ago that I didn’t even know that MILF had a political context.
    • I once again contemplated changing my celebrity exception clause to be U.S. Olympic indoor volleyball team silver medalist Logan Tom, but quickly realized I am already married to some one who can kick my @$& so what would the point be?
    • Whichever Olympic scheduler put synchronized swimming, canoeing, water polo, and rhythmic gymnastics in the same four hour block should be fired … or shot.

    • I got to thinking about politics, the economy and my 401k, and actually got nostalgic for a minute, thinking “wow. that was a simpler time, wasn’t it?!?”. yeah, way back in august.

    so, back to the present. much of our weekend was spent on the couch watching soccer.

    the taped USA vs. Brazil woman’s gold medal match was one of the best this year. goalie hope solo (I heard she is Han Solo’s niece) pitched a shut out over 120 minutes, making her world cup benching last year — and USA’s subsequent 4-0 drubbing at the hands of Brazil — that much more inexplicable.

    but perhaps the best news of the weekend came from the English premier league, where my team (Tottenham Hotspur) finally won their first game after nine attempts (that, and the midnight firing of the entire management structure.) while the win wasn’t enough to get them out of last place, they are now just one win away from a once unthinkably-good 15th place. (weeee!)

    to be fair, Tottenham could have actually been the second best news of the weekend … the best may have been the news that the Anchorage Daily News endorsed *Obama,* saying something about “putting her one … heartbeat from the leadership of the free world is just too risky at this time.”

    in the words of conservative blogger Andrew Sullivan, the Anchorage Daily News editorial board is obviously filled with “goddamn East Coast elitist hippies.”

  • home installation: cropp-metcalfe vs. the aircraft carrier furnace

    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.

  • confessions of a (late blooming) red sox fan

    the red sox pulled another rabbit out of a hat, last night, and their improbably run through the playoffs continues.

    i hate to say it, but i didn’t think they’d make it out of the first round this year … with Manny almost single-handedly destroying the team and the team bogged down with so many injuries.

    So, when new kid Jed Lowrie slapped in new kid Jason Bay last night at the bottom of the ninth, the moment was that much more magical. and, all this excitement …

    … just made me feel guilty.

    earlier in the day, i had (yet another) water cooler conversation about playoff baseball.

    one was a brewers fan, who was (mostly) content with Milwaukee’s valiant run to the playoffs, which would have been the envy of every small market team in baseball if the Tampa Rays weren’t still in the thick of things.

    the other was an orioles fan was reminiscing about the last time they had young, promising talent good enough to win the rookie of the year award (answer: never) and bemoaning the groundswell of “fans” jumping on the red sox band wagon since ending their 86 year championship drought in 2004.

    that’s when i felt the guilt … i was an orioles fan (*gasp!*) as recently as 2002.

    it all started in earnest when i moved to a place about eight miles from Camden Yards. growing up, i had been raised to root for the home team: my Vermont brother (red sox), my Maine father (Boston braves, and then red sox) and my new york grandfather (Yankees) all supported the local teams. I’d argue that it’s your civic duty.

    but then 2003 happened. i moved to dc (who was desperately trying to get their own team, one which i root for in the National League) which relieved the Orioles of their position as the team next door. I also came to the realization that Peter Angelos, owner of the Orioles, was actually the anti-Christ based on his sad attempts to keep a team out of DC (a rant already rant-ed at length).

    so, without a team to cheer for (the Nats hadn’t arrived yet, and i had blacklisted the O’s) i started shopping around.

    basically, everyone in my family who follows baseball, follows the red sox … so there was some attraction there. also, i had already built up a healthy, low-boiling hatred of the Yankees (sorry, grand-pa) based lightly on those annoying 25 championships, but mostly on their thuggish jersey-based fans who streamed into Baltimore for the games each year. (if there is one thing the red sox and orioles share, it’s an un-abiding hatred of the Yankees.)

    so, after spending most of 2003 without a team to cheer for, the post-season saw me rooting *against* the Yankees yet again, which based on their ALCS match up with Boston, meant i would need to root *for* the Red Sox.

    i watched all seven games of the series that year, and got (what turned out to be) my only true flavor of the misery that being a Red Sox fan is associated with: series tied at 3 a piece, game tied 5-5, Yankees at bat to begin the bottom half of the 11th inning … first pitch is knocked out of the park by Aaron Boone. Yankees win the game. Boston loses the series.

    (ironically enough, Aaron Boon is now with the Washington Nationals, and is the one player i can’t bring myself to cheer for.)

    i barely knew what a baseball was during the last major Sox tragedy (Bill Buckner and the ball between the legs in ’86) but if it sucked anything like this did, I’m glad i was too young.

    and, from that point on, i was hooked. i even converted the lady sparkler into enough of a fan that she believes “@$%#$” is J.D. Drew’s middle name, knows that Big Papi needs to get his act together and start bringing in some runs, and thinks Jacoby Ellsbury and Dustin Pedroia are cute (I’ll take my in’s how ever i can get them).

    so, there you go. red sox nation member since October 2003. five years and two championships later, life on the bandwagon is great. i just want you new punks to know that i was hear first, even if it wasn’t by much.

  • first attempt at anniversary fails, couple reshedules for friday

    it’s our anniversary, and the lady sparkler and I packed up Saturday for some light camping along the Delaware shore (cape helopen, near rehobeth).

    the first problem is that she’s been fighting a cold, and it seemed to take up residence as the weekend went on. second problem was that the beach town was packed with old white people and their funny accents (the origin of which we never did figure out).

    but besides side-stepping octagenarians, we had a good lunch (authentic, takeout fish and chips) at the beach before heading bailing for the quiet serenity of the nearby state park.

    turns out that the economy really is in the toilet, because while every motel had bountiful vacancies, the campsite was quite literally packed with miserable looking middle-class white people. we checked in, and found our allotted 8 foot square patch of sand surrounded on all sides by kids, dogs and cars.

    our site seemed to have the special designation of being the dog run for the neighbooring sites, which would have been about 2 feet from our tent once pitched. i am pretty certain that I have never seen such a small “campsite” before, and (we decided) hope to never again.

    so, given the illness, the kids, the dogs, and the funny accents, we decided to take a long walk around the cape, eat some cheesy-so-bad-it’s-good Mexican food (Chevy’s) along the highway home and call it a day.

    in full disclosure, the day was by no means a wash … we had gorgeous weather, a beautiful hike, and a wonderful day trip. we’re going to celebrate our anniversary on Friday instead, with a meal at our favorite-est fancy restaurant in the world — Acadiana — like good affluent, married white-people should.

    hopefully we’ll have less sickness, and we’ll definitely have less funny accents.

  • hiking in rock creek park (why we love dc #9)

    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

  • kids on campus

    It’s that time of year again … when drunken freshman boys roam the streets, parkour-ing off downtown curbs to impress non-existent girls.

    When young women move in packs of eight or more, with anorexic blonds leading the way (pressing the less-than-skinny into service as “rear guard”).

    When you see athletically mismatched couples running together, the result of conversations that must have gone something like this:

      Buff Girl: I love running. Do you run? (Please say yes, please say yes…)

      Flabby Boy: Um. Yeah. Of course! I, uh, run all the time. (Shoes. Did I bring anything other than flip-flops?)

      Buff Girl: Great! How about Saturday night? (That’ll get me off the hall, and if it’s dark people won’t be able to tell he’s a dork …)

      Flabby Boy: Sure, that’d be great. (I hope she puts out quick. I haven’t run since that presidential skills test in 7th grade, when I puked on the second-to-last lap.)

      Buff Girl: 9 o’clock? (Oh, I’ve got the perfect outfit. I hope his cute roommate sees me.)

      Flabby Boy: Great! (Dude, I *love* college! It’s exactly like I saw in that movie…)

    When on Thursday night, girls in impossibly impractical shoes — and with nary enough clothes between them for one good outfit — block up metro escalators by standing to the left.

    When on weekends, shell shocked parents lead miserable looking children around Target buying those last minute essentials, like toilet paper and granola bars.

    *sniff*

    Boy, I miss college.

  • choose your superpowers

    I’m reading a fun (read: trashy) little book called Who Can Save Us Now?: Brand-New Superheroes and Their Amazing (Short) Stories, and while I don’t normally do fiction, this one is pretty good.

    so, each hero in each story has a strange new power to meet a modern threat (to become a meerkat, to mind-control televangelists, to never forget a name) which got the lady sparkler and i to thinking about what powers we would take if given the choice …

    mine was easy. ever since i was a child, i wanted (a) to have bionic eyes which would zoom, see infrared, take pictures, etc. and (b) the power to be invisible. i’d totally be the little monkey boy who’d come back with the intel and then let the main characters go off and do the dirty work.

    she floundered a bit, but soon settled on the ability to fly (“that’s be so cool! zooming in and out of the clouds…”) and to time travel, which — i’ll have you know — includes *both* going backwards and forwards in time, *and* stopping it all together. she also wants a costume that kicks major heiney, too (first draft is above, right).

    I thought my desired superpowers say a lot about my personality, but her’s seem an even better match. i’m curious, tho … are we the only ones who have thought this through?

  • the “silly” season

    so, i don’t know about your team, but mine spent $121 million this offseason to grab nine players off the open market.

    sound too “spendy” to be true? not in brave new world that is the english premier league.

    as a long time footy player (mostly in goal) and footy fan (college, national teams, d.c. united), i always wanted to follow the epl … but it wasn’t until recently that state-siders had the means (via two dedicated cable channels and al gore’s birth of the interweb) to actually follow an english club.

    so, for the last three seasons, i’ve been following Tottenham Hotspur, a side from North London that is probably best compared to the pre-2004 Boston Red Sox … a storied club, with a good bit of success early in their history, but lately there’s been a lot of, um, “potential.”

    quick detour …

    so why pick the Spurs, as oppose to one of the more successful english clubs?

    well, there’s manchester united … who are the new york yankees of the league and they annoyingly win pretty much everything (well, “the yankees” back when they actually won things). there *is* a good club in liverpool, but they are, well, in liverpool.

    there’s chelsea, which is funded by a vaguely scary russian oligarch who spends money as if his team were the yankees (but they aren’t, which makes the spending that much more offensive). then there is arsenal, a team staffed almost entirely by the french.

    as you can see, the decision wasn’t terribly hard at all.

    back to the $121 million …

    as you might guess there isn’t a salary cap in the epl, but that’s okay because the money we are talking about isn’t actually the player’s salary — it’s the money that the team spends to get permission to sign another team’s player. (yes, you read that right.)

    for example: some bureaucrat at Tottenham watched the European footy championships this summer, and noticed that one of the Russian players (Roman Pavlyuchenko) scored a lot of goals. well, “we like scoring goals,” mr. bureaucrat thought, so he rang up Pavlyuchenko’s team (Spartak Moscow) in Russia and gave them a lot of money ($25 million) for the right to sign Roman to a contract worth even more money (5 years, at $100,000+ a week).

    now, if you made it past the made it past the “veritable orgy of money” part and noticed that we had to bring in *nine* players this off season … you may have thought that so much turnover could be good (boston celtics!) but probably isn’t (florida marlins).

    right now, only eight Spurs (out of 40+ on the expanded roster) have been on the team for longer than two years. and, (oh, by the way) we are on our 6th manager in ten years.

    fortunately for spurs-fans’ sanity, there are only four months out of the year when players are allowed to transfer between teams (three in the summer, one in January). the summer transfer window just closed, which should bring much needed (if temporary and obligatory) stability to the team. so, for now, no more “silly season” and we’ll have to shut up an play, for better or worse.

    while we gained a bunch of good players during this window (a keeper from Brazil, midfielders from Croatia, Mexico and England, that Russian striker I mentioned) we lost two players who scored more than half of our goals last season. (ouch.)

    if i was a cubs fan, i’d say “well, there’s always next year” …

    … except that’s actually not always the case in the epl. as a special brand of torture for english footy fans, if your team finishes as one of the three worst teams in the league, you are “relegated” down to a lower league and have to win your way back up some later season.

    imagine the washington nationals getting booted to the minor leagues, the memphis grizzlies getting demoted to the nba’s “developmental” league, or the miami dolphins playing a year of college ball next season (… yes, they’d all still lose).

    so, *hopefully* there’s always next year …

    (oy, vey.)

  • fenway park, south

    MVI_1583 — Originally uploaded by [ecpark]

    the red sox had a home game today in baltimore, maryland … with more red sox fans in attendance than they can even fit in fenway park north (i.e. the one in boston).

    you think i am exaggerating for effect, but:

    • there we no orioles fans in three rows below, six rows above, and one section to either the right or left. zip, zero, none.
    • two or three times an inning, the “lets-go-red-sox” chant would take over the stadium (see audio/video above). during the first two innings, a handful of orioles fans booed, but by the third inning they had all but given up.
    • red sox garb outweighed orioles garb (conservatively) by four to one. even in the season ticket seats down each baseline.
    • a sox bus tour in left field started “the wave” immediately after Jason Bay’s second homerun, and there were enough Sox fans in the crowd to sustain it for four or five circuits around the yard.
    • the only time i saw flash bulbs the whole night was when papelbon took the field in the 8th, and when they came there were enough for an olympics opening ceremony.

    i actually feel bad. it’s incrediably tough to be an orioles fan at these sorts of games — i followed the O’s myself for neigh on two decades, until i finally had my fill of peter angelos being nasty to d.c. — and the true fans must just stay home.

    as proof, some of the people behind us were kidding with one of the beer guys about how the only people who wanted beer in our section were the ones on the top row, but the beerman snapped back, saying: “i can’t wait until friday when the real fans come back.”

    the sad thing is he’s right … the fan’s just didn’t show, obviously biding their time until the sox (or yankees, who actually manage to have even more offensive fans) leave town. even the ushers looked beleagured.

    funny aside: we played “count the manny ramirez jerseys” today at the park and got up to just four. four! and he was only traded from the sox to the dodgers (for jason bay) three weeks ago.

    now, for reference … there were 200+ papis, 100+ papelbons, 20+ becketts/dice-ks/youks. there were even a dozen brand-spanking-new jason bay tops. but the manny jerseys have been euthanized from red sox nation.

    i’d wonder what that says about red sox nation’s feeling for manny, but i think it’s pretty apparent that it translates to “don’t let the door hit you in the !@#$@# on the way out.”

  • wanted: stupid, drunk people

    [Photo]
    ECPA20080816_1578, originally uploaded by [ecpark].
    i don’t like picking on the d.c. government (mainly, because it’s not as bad as everyone makes it out to be) but tonight has temporarily pushed me over the edge.

    so, there was a sobriety checkpoint tonight, southbound on 16th street. southbound, as in going *into* the city. obviously, lots of people get drunk in residential areas on Saturday night and *then* drive into the city after midnight … as opposed to vice versa.

    interesting hypothesis, but not my main complaint: they setup the roadblock just past the exit for park road.

    for those of you playing at home, park road — which was left wide open — leads to (a) a residential neighborhood, (b) a great cut-through street for people going to the bars of georgetown, dupont and woodly/cleveland park, and (c) one block away from a road that will let you drive around the checkpoint entirely.

    to make matters worse, they put the “sobriety checkpoint” sign at the top of the block, to ensure that anyone who could read knew they should take this right.

    how drunk do you have to be to get caught by this checkpoint? were they hoping to catch drunk people who were leaving their homes, but weren’t going towards the clubs, who weren’t able to read, and were too upstanding to drive drunk through a residential neighborhood?

    who’d fall for that? was paris hilton in town? mark foley? Vito Fossella? the bush twins?

  • nbc’s gymnastics commentators: a disaster of epic proportions

    just finished up the olympic women’s gymnastics team all-a-round competition … and we are *done* with the manic-depressive rantings that spew from nbc’s gymnastics commentators.

    update: for 2012’s NBC gymnastics coverage — live commentary is here, or follow on twitter.

    some snapshots:

    • when Alicia Sacramone fell on a floor routine, it was a “a catastrophe of epic proportions.”
    • when an men’s gymnast fell off the apparatus: “High bar 101, grab the bar.”
    • apparently, japan and romania’s women “don’t show the proper respect for the olympics” by enjoying themselves on the gym floor, and they would be ultimately unsuccessful because they were “unfocused” (romania went on to medal).
    • they won’t shut up about the age of the chinese gymnasts, saying at least three times that “nothing more need be said” about the controversy (if they would only *heed* this themselves).
    • when the chinese started their final routine: “Pick your measure of pressure and multiply it by one point three billion.”

    really, people. they weren’t negotiating a peace treaty. they weren’t transporting nuclear waste. this is a sport. frankly, Sacramone going to have all sorts of undeserved shrink bills even without your drama queen commentary. (we still love you, alicia…)

    turns out that we aren’t the only haters. their are tons of nasty commentary about NBC’s lousy commentary.

    anyway, we’re using the mute button from here on out.

  • We Love D.C.

    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.

  • david, i love you!

    [Photo]
    ECPA20080629_1532, originally uploaded by [ecpark].
    oh, my … where to begin.

    you’d think in washington, d.c. the hotest ticket in town would be some kind of political event, or maybe that tiger woods golf tourney happening out in bethesda next weekend.

    but with approval ratings in the toilet (congress is at 19%, the president at 29%) and tiger on his back with a bum knee … the hottest ticket in the district this summer (hands down) is the visit of super-fantastic-megariffic-star david “bend it like” beckham to our small corner of the footballing world.

    his trip to d.c. last year was a circus … and one which the lady sparkler and i opted to watch on the telly instead of braving the soccer-mom driven mania. this year was sure to be no different and — through a couple of tickets t.l.s. scored from work — we got to see it up close and personal.

    i’m not exactly a stranger to the beguiling charm of the english flavour of football (or “footy” as the lady sparkler has taken to calling it…) but the national obsession with the chiseled greatness that is mr. beckham has me more than a little puzzled.

    sure, i can understand 12 year-old girls screaming … and MAYBE we can extend that to their 40 year-old moms. but, the place was packed with 25-35 year old men with mint-edition beckham branded l.a. galaxy unis … shouting out adulation, and snapping pics. and remember, this is d.c. — it’s not exactly a home game for a team from los angeles.

    i’m a 25-35 year old male and, while i am not so ego-tastic to speak for a whole decade of humans, i must say that i remember far more lows in “the david’s” career (thrown out of 1998 World Cup, lackluster showing in 2002 and 2006 Cups, flipping off fans at Euro 2000, benchings by two of the greatest coaches of this age) than i remember his highs.

    so while i respect david for his 100+ appearances for the national team, and for his collection of early club championships — that’s enough for me to hope he does well in the States, but not enough to drop $70 on an spanking new beckham jersey and scream at him like a little girl.

    speaking of which, the funniest moment of the day was shortly after we arrived with some of the lady sparkler’s co-workers … we were poking fun of the whole scene, when someone from two rows back, right behind out heads, shouted “DAVID, I LOVE YOU!”

    unfortunately, we just *lost* it.

    oh, right. the game. d.c. crushed them. beckham looked miserable (as a proper brit should, playing footy .. during the summer .. in 98-degree weather .. in an american swamp).

  • homeless world cup

    [Photo]
    0628081034c.jpg, originally uploaded by [ecpark].
    lately, i’ve been looking for something (really, pretty much *anything*) to redeem my faith in the larger human race. but, this morning, i’m glad i got out of bed …

    now, the great thing about sports is the (near) universal appreciation of the stories behind the competition … so long as you know where to look.

    for every $15-million slugger that dopes his way to the home run record, there is a $600,000 baller for the Celtics who overcomes homelessness on the way to win a NBA championship. for every perfectly-formed sprinter turned out by the u.s. track and field machine, there is a 41 year-old South African dissident who overcomes two shattered knees to break a world record at the World Pacific Games.

    never has this been more apparent, that this morning when we went to the u.s.a. trials for the homeless world cup (which is exactly what it sounds like: a (soccer) world cup where all the competitors are homeless).

    the tournament was started in 2001 by some activists for the homeless as a way to inspire the homeless to make positive life changes, and some 70% of past participants have gotten off the streets for good.

    the u.s. team is being selected this weekend, with a tournament down by the old convention center. city teams from across the u.s. are participating (atlanta, charlotte, minneapolis, new york, the district, austin, etc) with the the best players from each squad being selected for the trip to Melbourne.

    there weren’t many people in the crowd for the games we watched, but it was still an incredible experience. the talent and skill were way beyond what we were expecting, and it was pretty easy to see that the competitors were having the time of their life.

    if any of this is sounding interesting, the story of 6 participants in the 2006 Homeless World Cup has been turned into a documentary called kicking it (in theatres now). we’ll be there later this week …

  • the apocalypse

    [Photo]
    IMG_3515.CR2, originally uploaded by [ecpark].
    i’ve been ruminating about this blog post for about two weeks now, which accounts for my recent lull in blog activity. and while it seems rude to start a global panic, i think we need to come to terms with the fact that the world is ending. like, tomorrow.

    just listening to npr this morning — my adoring wife’s daily ritual — makes a case for the pending apocalypse that’s at least as good as the case for increasing domestic oil production.

    let’s run through the major topics addressed as i refused to get out of bed this morning, hoping the world wouldn’t notice my absence … we’ve got:

    • flooding in the midwest
    • drought in the south, panhandle (drier than the Dust Bowl of 1930s)
    • fires engulfing california (two months earlier than usual)
    • earthquakes in china (69,000 dead)
    • cyclones in myanmar (138,000 dead or missing)
    • plants on European mountain ranges are moving up the mountain, searching for “higher ground”

    … and, lest we forget, people are killing each other in iraq, afghanistan, israel/palestine, and (it seems) most of sub-saharan africa and south asia — not to mention drug wars in central and south america.

    add this to what you and i already know:

    • gas prices are through the roof
    • home values are in the toilet
    • food staple costs are up 30% in the last year
    • the stock market has slid back to where it was in July of 1999
    • consumer confidence index is the third lowest since it began in 1952
    • presidential approval rating is at 28% (worst sans truman and nixon)
    • a whopping 14% believe our country is moving in the right direction (lowest ever)

    …and what al gore (the guy who invented the interweb) has told us:

    • the 11 warmest years on record have all been in the last 13 years
    • the number of Category 4 and 5 hurricanes has almost doubled in the last 30 years
    • the flow of ice from glaciers in Greenland has more than doubled over the past decade

    … and we’ve pretty well slept with the four horsemen of the apocalypse, and possibly tried to steal their girlfriends. we’ve got conquest, war and famine all sorts of angry. turns out there is even a good, old fashioned plague (locusts in massachusetts) which, in other news, can’t be a good omen for the democratic party.

    i was talking to a friend of mine about this “crazy like a fox” idea at lunch today, and it turns out that i am not the only one stockpiling water, duck tape and plastic sheeting. both abcnews and the associated press have come to similar conclusions … and both in the last month.

    now, looking at my own reaction — and running through what i remember of the five stages of grief — i have either skipped three stages (straight to depression) or am still in denial. actually, considering i have blacklisted all sources of news from my daily existence (npr, bbc, washington post, even those metro tabloids) i think i’m clearly in “kathleen harris running for public office”-level denial.

    that leaves anger (which’ll be easy!), bargaining, depression (that’s easy too!) and then acceptance. of course, all four together might be hard to get through by the time we turn into nothingness, like, tomorrow.

    p.s. if you are planning on being raptured, now would be a good time.

  • banner no. 17

    [Photo]
    Wow, it’s been 22 years since the last Championship, originally uploaded by Pink Knitter.
    well, it’s a good time to be a sports fan in boston.

    the red sox have won twice in four years. the patriots blew their chance to be a perfect 19-0. (oh, btw, i like all teams in new england *except* for the patriots.) the revolution lost their fourth major league soccer title game in six years. (oh, the revs … *hate* the revs, too.) and, the boston celtics just won their first championship in 22 years.

    now, i don’t want to say that the culture of new england has changed … but it has, so i guess that phrase was an empty blogging device.

    my father and i talked after the celtics won game four, in los angeles, to take a commanding 3-1 lead in the best of 7 series.

    if this was 2001 — with the red sox in an 80+ year drought and the celtics in a 15 year skid — new englanders would be talking in hushed tones about how the lakers were a great team who were the odds on favorites to come back and win, especially knowing *our* (ie. new england’s) luck.

    but, you throw three super bowl rings and two world series trophies into the mix, and these crazy yanks get down right cocky.

    talking to my father that night, he guaranteed — OUTLOUD! — that the celtics were going to win the championship, and odds-on it was going to happen in five games. needless to say, given my comparative old age and experience, i was looking for any piece of wood available to knock on.

    sure enough … my boy was right. he wiffed on the number of games — it was six not five — but a championship none-the-less.

    and all was well in beantown. again.

  • our long national nightmare is over

    [Photo]
    Day 55 – Barack Obama Mural in Houston Texas (Houston Graffiti Art), originally uploaded by Marco From Houston.
    well, i don’t even know where to begin on this one…

    now, we weren’t exacty backing hillary in this horse race (tho admittedly we’d have voted for her as the nominee) but, as late april turned to mid may turned to early june, our patience with hillary’s mathematical chances to secure the nomination started to wear a bit thin.

    once it became clear that the her only chance for nomination rested on convincing superdelagates to vote against their constituencies, i (for one) started to flip out … ’cause overruling the populace isn’t something *we* do, that’s something the opposition does.

    now, i’ll give hillary mad props for toning down her rhetoric as this dragged on … but the notion that her supporters would threaten to boycott the general election (bad form) or vote for McCain (worse) because of how “poorly” they/hillary were treated?!?

    ick.

    the view from here was that hillary was giving just as much as she was getting … and not necessarily in that order. actually, our “insider” circles were *rife* with tales of hillary supporters linguistically kneecapping fellow party members with threats of reprisals if they took the “wrong” side and she pulled off the win in extr innings.

    it is the very peak of sad that, at the time we should all be celebrating *whichever* pioneering nominee came out on top, we are instead debating recriminations and writing bitter blog posts.

    sigh.

  • too much free time. more playoffs, please.

    [Photo]
    Kevin Garnett, Boston Celtics, originally uploaded by Paul Keleher.
    so, my father is a lockdown celtics fan.

    now, i often say that i don’t remember anything before 7th grade (which is sad, yet still true) but, due to my father’s Boston brand of religion, some of my best childhood memories involve the celtics, including:

    1. my father sneaking us into the old Garden, and then sweet-talking the staff after we got caught. the parquet playing floor wasn’t down because of a Boston Bruins game, but those Championship banners were sure up in those rafters.
    2. watching the Celtics win Game 7 of the ’84 finals against Los Angeles, giving them Championship #15. To this day, I still hate that whole squad of Lakers, especially Kurt Rambis. (sorry, Nadav…)
    3. “havlicek stole the ball!” actually, that wasn’t a childhoold memory (because I was born almost 20 years, to the day, later) but CBS used to play it over and over anytime the Celtics made the playoffs … to the theme from “Terms of Endearment,” no less.

    of course, with said favorite memories, came some of my least-favorite childhood memories, too:

    1. waking up after the ’88 division series loss to the Pistons, realizing that the Celtics just weren’t the “Celtics” anymore. (which would have been revealed a year earlier if not for a last second gaff by the Pistons.)
    2. len bias.

    i was seventeen when Larry Bird retired, and the Celtics launched a 15-year “forgettable” streak. over that span, they had only three winning seasons, three playoff series, and just two players named to an All-Star team. last year, they lost 58 games and won just 24.

    but, everything change this summer, when Celtic GM danny ainge — who was in contention for “worst GM ever” until that point, which is saying something considering recent Celtic history — pulled of the steal of a lifetime by snagging Kevin Garnett from Minnesota.

    now, i watched the Celtic’s new “big three” during the regular season, but i knew they were going to choke … so didn’t get too attached. in fact, i was more optimistic about the Red Sox’ chances in 2004 … and they were facing down 86 years of history, not a pedestrian 20.

    however, once the Celtics made the playoffs, we started watching. and watching. and watching.

    and yes, that was “we” — as in the lady sparkler’s been watching, too. and she’s been screaming at the television when Ray Allen bricks another three. and she’s been twitching non-stop during every road game waiting for the choke to come. and she’s been wondering how Paul Pierce became the team hero when Kevin Garnett has him beat in every major stat category except assists.

    at this point, the lady sparkler and I are guessing that we have seen 15 of the 20 playoff games so far, for 50+ hours of basketball. there has been a game just about every other day since the end of April. which brings us to why I am blogging about this today … there hasn’t been a game for four days. and won’t be one until the finals start this Thursday.

    basically, we are in withdrawal.

    All day Sunday, i felt like i was missing something … and it didn’t go away until I realized that I would have been watching Game 7 had they not clinched two days earlier. today, i felt like i needed to do something when i got home. but no. it was just an even number of days since the last game.

    and so we wait.

    and it sucks. and i can’t imagine what it’s like for someone (like my father) who’s been around for all the rest of the 16 championships, 20 conference titles and 26 divisional titles, and has had to wait 20 years for the next glimmer of hope … because the anticipation is just *killing* me.

  • Sports Night at the “Juice Box”

    [Photo]
    ECPA20080524_1332, originally uploaded by [ecpark].
    We’re in Houston for Memorial Day/the lady sparkler’s Birthday, and spent last night with Nadine and Nadav at Minute Maid Park. (the lady sparkler’s parents had a prior engagement to see Pink Martini.) Great park, great game … which Houston won 4-3 by gunning down the tying run at home plate, with the bases loaded, for the final out.

    Speaking of sports, i just read a story out of Washington State where a senior softball player in her final game blew her ACL after hitting a home run, and was carried around the bases by the opposing team. Incredible. I cried like a baby.

    Speaking of crying like a baby, the only other time i’ve gotten misty during SportsCenter was a segment about an autistic teen who scored 20 points off the bench in the first and only basketball game of his high school career. (turns out that segment was nominated for an Emmy, so i wasn’t the only one bawling, fwiw.)

    (p.s. insert your “evan/girl” or “the lady sparkler/pants” jokes in the comments.)

    Explore the Photo Set:
    Astros v Phillies, Minute Maid Park, Houston, Texas

  • i seem to have misplaced the hot water heater

    [Photo]
    ECPA20080522_1319, originally uploaded by [ecpark].
    your not going to believe this, but we can’t find our hot water heater. you would think this would be something that would be hard to miss, especially in a 700 sq. ft. apartment, but it appears that we are “special” people.

    last summer when we moved in, our building inspector came in and showed us around the place. he talked us through the a/c, the furnace, the annoying glass-top stove, etc. about half way through, he said “oh, it looks like you guys have communal hot water, so there must be a building-wide water heater down in the basement.”

    we didn’t think anything else about it.

    … until yesterday. for reason’s too boring to explain, I was emailing with some people from the condo board (more on that later) and asked how the communal hot water worked.

    they said there was no communal hot water.

    so, i just came home and started looking around for where a hot water heater might be stashed. looked in the closets. looked in the laundry. looked through a this weird, tiny little 9″ x 9″ access hatch located behind our refrigerator (actually, it was too small to look, so i stuck a camera through and took the picture above.)

    nothing. not just that, but i honestly don’t know what to do next.

    in other news, the reason i was emailing with the condo board members was because they saw fit to elected / appoint me to the board three days ago. a board member was itching to get off — he had moved out of the building and is now renting his place out — and i was a warm body who didn’t know better to say no.

    the funny punchline to this is that they asked me to be the treasurer. now, for those of you who don’t know a thing about me … i’ve never been paid to manage a budget, haven’t taken a math class since 1991, and had a legitimate shot of being a triple Theater / Russian / Geology major. (notice the one thing in common? no math.)

    anyway, i agreed to serve on the board, but politely turned down the treasurer position, saying that we would be open to a “gross negligence” lawsuit if i said yes. volunteered to be secretary, or internal communications specialist, or streak through the hallways naked … basically anything that didn’t involve math.

    *sigh*

  • earth day 2008: done, done aaaaand done

    happy arbor day!

    well, i made my goal to plant 200 trees thanks in large part to a late flurry of my former hippie co-workers. (former => co-workers, they are all still hippies.)

    a big thank you to everyone who donated … you helped a great cause that i truly believe in, and have helped me do something (personal fund raising) i have never, ever done before.

    with that in mind, i gotta say … these last 3 weeks have really changed my world view on how to raise money.

    first, i have a new found respect for the people I know who raise lots of money for hikes, walks and such. it isn’t easy to sell your friends and family on a cause, even one you love … and I was only looking for $200. i can’t imagine fund raising for a $3,000 walk.

    second, as someone who does online fundraising for a living, i’ve been to tons of conferences where people sell this type of “friends-asking-friends” as the future of modern american online fundraising. all i can say is “hooey.” or “pthbthbthbthbt.” or some other onomatopoeia of your choice.

    to begin with, it’s *hard.* a lot of people (me!) don’t like to ask for money. writing just four blog entries pitching the cause was excruciating. also, there is a very vocal group who *really* don’t like to be asked for money, either. (granted i run with a snarky lot, but still …)

    imho, the benefit of doing this sort of campaign is the way it can energize an organization’s base, and as a great way to spread it’s message to new people. it’s hard to believe that some day organizations will get the bulk of their funding from a process that is so draining for half the personality-types on the planet.

    but all this is water under the bridge … 15 *great* people steped up and give their hard earned moolah to plant trees in Brazil’s Atlantic Forest. hopefully, we’ve helped jump start the Plant a Billion campaign, which has — in just three weeks — raised enough to funds to plant 276,080 trees.

    p.s. the “chevy” widget above isn’t actually green-washing (entirely?) … the nature conservancy get $1 to plant a tree each time someone grabs the widget for their web site or social network page. you’d think that would be better highlighted somewhere …

    p.p.s. now, i return you to your regularly scheduled blog without substance.

  • last photo in australia

    [Photo]
    ECPA20080314_4965 by [ecpark]
    Austalia (Day Twenty) — Well, this trip didn’t quite end how I expected. Everything I read, and everything I knew, pointed to Melbourne being my type of city … certainly when compared to the yet-another-big-city in Sydney.

    I can count on exactly one finger the number of “first” cities I like (New York) and wasn’t planning on this being any different. So, I was a bit surprised when I found myself picking out curtains in Sydney after being decidedly ho-hum about Melbourne.

    Granted, I crammed a LOT into my 30-hour Sydney experience, including the Bridge, a tour of the Opera House, the Royal Botanic Gardens, Observatory Hill, a beach (Manley), two ferry rides and one of the best opera performances I have seen in the last five years (La Boheme at said Opera House).

    In the end, the Sydney / Melbourne question went a lot like the rest of the trip: all the greatest stuff came when we weren’t expecting it, and for entirely different reasons than we expected.

    The best city was the afterthought (Sydney). The most time was needed at the place we had the least (Tasmania). The best part of the Great Ocean Road wasn’t actually part of the Great Ocean Road (Adelaide to Port Fairy). The best part of my Australian vacation was the work. Even with all the spectacular vistas, the best part wasn’t the parks but the people.

    In the next couple of weeks, I will pull my thoughts together on the trip as a whole … and try and distill all the best bits. But until then, I think it is a fair say that this was far and away the best three weeks of travel in *my* short lifetime, and while Belize was paradise on earth, Australia is where I will be packing my bags for if I ever get the means.

    Explore the Photo Set:
    Sydney, Australia

  • travel: cricket in 3,482 simple steps

    [Photo]
    IMG_0739, originally uploaded by [ecpark].
    Australia (Special Edition) — I never thought I would say that the U.S. needed yet another professional sport, but we are missing out on one: Cricket. Sure, the rules are obtuse, the matches long, the fields required enormous, but the lady sparkler and I must have watched parts of half a dozen matches or more, and loved every minute of it.

    The sport is nothing like American baseball, but the easiest way to explain it is through that terminology. (A new Aussie friend of ours explained that you can tell when an American understands Cricket because they start getting offended when the baseball analogy is made.)

    Basically, there are two batters (batsmen) who don’t bat as much as they protect the wicket (three croquet mallet handles stuck in the ground behind each of two home plates) from pitchers (bowlers) who hurl wooden balls trying to knock the wickets over.

    There are “outs,” which comes if the bowler knocks down the aforementioned wicket, or the batsman makes a batting error (hits the ball to one of the outfielders, or uses something other than his bat to strike the ball). Two batsmen are on the field at once, and each stays until he is out once, scoring as many runs are possible. All members of one team bat before the other has their go.

    Runs are scored when the ball is hit well enough that the two batsmen can exchange places. There are even two types of home runs (6 runs if the struck ball clears the park without touching the ground, and 4 runs if it just dribbles over the boundary). Good batsmen can score one hundred — or more — runs in a match.

    There really isn’t the downtime here that you have in baseball, with nearly constant action through the whole match (except for when they break for tea, of course). Because each player does their batting all at once, there is a better opportunity for a “dual” to develop between batsman and bowler. Also, when the batsman or bowler is having a good go of it, there is a sort of “king-of-the-mountain” tension that develops as well.

    The greatest thing about the game is that it is watched here by all kinds, though women do seem to roll their eyes when it is discussed at the dinner table.

    Explore the Photo Set:
    Melbourne, Australia

  • melbourne olympic stadium

    [Melbourne Olympic Stadium]
    with an apparent genetic predisposition to sneaking into sports venues, the lady sparkler and I talked our way into the Melbourne Olympic Stadium today.

    being an Olympiphile (sounds dirty, huh?) I wasn’t going to pass up an opportunity to checkout a venue, and so I led us on a walk around the city that “conveniently” went past the stadium.

    unfortunately, it’s now a private training venue.

    not to be denied, I marched right up to the security gate and proceeded to barrage the (60+, toothless) lady with how honored i was to be at the Stadium, how incredible the 1956 games were, how I reveared Australian national icon (and three time Melbourne gold medalist) Betty Cuthbert, and how important the games became when they were the first to allow all the atheletes enter the closing ceremonies together (as opposed to marching in by country).

    needless-to-say, she was confused by my knowledge and excitement which it became obvious that, as she stammered to keep up, she didn’t share.

    (what I neglected to tell her was that I had watched a two hour documentary on the Melbourne Olympics on the flight over … details, details.)

    finally, I assume out of boredom or desparation, she waved us through and asked us not to wander too far.

    and while the stadium itself doesn’t look too different from the track at my college, seeing the same venue from the documentary (only less scratchy, and less black-and-white) was incredible.

    not that i need an excuse to Become more obsessed with the Olympics, but it’s nice to have one regardless.

    See All the Photos on Flickr:
    melbourne olympic stadium

  • Travel: Cape Otway Centre for Conservation Ecology (a.k.a. Cape Otway School for Orphaned ‘Roos)

    [Photo]
    IMG_0209, originally uploaded by [ecpark].
    Austalia (Day Eight) — Perhaps the place that the lady sparkler and I were the most psyched to stay during our trip was the Great Ocean Ecolodge, which is a small bed & breakfast type accommodation (5 rooms) attached to the Cape Otway Center for Conservation Ecology. The lodging came ridiculously highly recommended — especalially by TNCers — and the experience was even better.

    Shortly after arrival they took us on a “dusk” walk around the properties, and within the first 20 minutes we had seen three koalas, were explained the entire regional ecosystem and were firmly behind their site management plan. On our way back it was all down hill, only tripping on three parrots, two dozen kangaroos, two wallabies and a magpie that enjoyed attacking human’s shoes.

    The owners are a zoologist and a natural resources manager in their mid-twenties, who have overcome some pretty long odds to launch this, their dream project. Besides using the property to test a range of ecological hypotheses — including the best ways to revegetate portions of Australia that have been over-cleared — they take in injured / abandoned animals such as a baby kangeroo who flopped around the house while we ate dinner that night. If you have the chance, we highly recommend making the trip.

    We had quite a great crew of fellow quests, including a retired couple from Sheffield, England and a couple of small business owners from somewhere along the Gold Coast of Australia. Much of the convesation that night was predictable (“how in &^%$ sake did *he* get elected?!?) but everyone was most generous to keep it amicable and gave us the widest possible recognizing that the lady sparkler and I weren’t unilaterally responsible for the current geo-political situation.

    Ah, imagine that … two cultures who don’t assume the worst about their contemporaries.

    Explore the Photo Set:
    Cape Otway Center for Conservation Ecology, Australia

  • Travel: Discovery Bay National Park, Victoria

    [Photo]
    IMG_9584, originally uploaded by [ecpark].
    Austalia (Day Seven) — Today we had two of the best hikes of the trip so far, both through Discovery Bay National Park, which runs along the Southern Ocean on the western edge of Victoria.

    On our way back from the second, we ran into three billy goats (“gruff” presumably) in the middle of the path. Don’t know where they came from — they weren’t anywhere to be seen on the way out — but they were sure enough there on the way back. Initially, things didn’t look particularly good … the biggest one of the bunch approached slowly, dipped its head, and started pawing the ground.

    Perhaps, now is a good time to pause for some back-story:

    Last year when the lady sparkler and I were in Tucson, we mis-timed one of our hikes and found ourselves out in the desert after dark. As we were scurrying back, we had not one but two rattlesnakes try and kill us. The second of the two actually rattled across the path between the lady sparkler (who stopped) and myself (who sped up).

    Yesterday, we were hiking around Mount Richmond in the middle of the day, when I noticed a large tree branch that was down across the path began to move. We’d find out later that it was actually a copperhead, one of the 14 breeds of snakes in Australia that can kill you. Now, when you think copperhead, you think of a normal-sized snake that just happens to be poisonous. This, however, was the size of the basilisk from that Harry Potter movie. It looked like it had recently eaten a moose. Or an auto.

    Anyway, back to the goats. The only thing that kept me from running around like a blithering idiot around the snakes — other than the whole “being paralyzed with fear” thing — was that I keep being told that they are just as scared of us as we are of them. The goats? Not afraid of us, though, this turned out to be a good thing.

    Momma goat DID dip her head, and pawed the ground, but was just looking to soften up the dirt before she laid down to completely block the path. Her two chil’en quickly followed suit. We gingerly chose about a 6 inch path between the goats and the 200-foot cliff, and resisted the urge to pet the (now) cute little goats. Didn’t want to open ourselves up to *that* conversation with Customs.

    Turns out that not everything in Australia is trying to kill you.

    Explore the Photo Set:
    Travel: Discovery Bay National Park, Victoria, Australia

  • Travel: More reasons to hate Californians, and everything is NOT bigger in Texas

    [Photo]
    IMG_8562, originally uploaded by [ecpark].
    AUSTRALIA (DAY THREE) — Well, my luggage mysteriously appeared in our hotel room last night, and the sudden appearance (which occurred without any apparent human intervention) gave the lady sparkler quite a start when she got up to use the ‘loo.’

    Still no word on her bag though, other than the knowledge that it never made it through LAX. Interestingly, when we were talking to one of the Qantas baggage service people about what happened, she rolled her eyes and said, ‘LAX happened.’ Not that we needed another reason to dislike Californians, but apparently their baggage handling skills are world renowned for all the wrong reasons.

    We spend the day driving 200 kilometers south through what is widely considered as the most beautiful portions of Tasmania. We knew we were in trouble when I had taken over a hundred pictures *before* we even entered the first of three national parks for the day. (The final tally included two full memory cards for over 350 images.)

    Today was less about rainforests, and more about landscapes. We passed though mountain ranges, savannah grasslands, scrubland/hill country, reeded marshlands, both rocky and sandy beaches, before finishing up in rolling prairie-land. All this in little more than one hundred miles driven.

    Which brings us to our first conclusion of the trip: everything is decidedly *not* bigger in Texas.

    The roads here never end. We could spend four weeks on an island the size of West Virginia, and never see the same thing twice. The trees here would take half a dozen adults to surround holding hands. The animals are bigger (they even have longhorns). The land is more diverse. The mountains are higher. The beer is larger. So are the hats. Even the hubris is bigger (they have routed an entire river through pipes for use in hydro-electric plants.)

    And we haven’t even reached the mainland.

    Near the end of today, we were wincing as we drove around corners because the impossibly beautiful just kept getting more beautiful … it was actually more than a bit overwhelming. Words honestly can’t describe this place. The photos we posted do a pretty good job of showing the beauty, but really can’t give a hint to the scale … so, while you are looking think ‘vast’ and then triple it.

    UPDATE: the lady sparkler’s luggage was waiting for us at the hotel in Hobart, which is great as we fly back to the mainland tomorrow morning. t.l.s. has never been so excited about the possibility of shaving her legs.

    Explore the Photo Set:
    Travel: Lake St. Claire National Park, Tasmania

  • wren cross

    the college of william and mary — my alma mater — has become the latest bauble in the rhetorical culture wars that have been consuming our society.

    in october 2006, the school’s president removed a cross from permanent display on the altar of the college’s Wren Chapel saying it was important for people of all faiths to feel welcomed in the college’s buildings.

    that cross is still available (and actively used) for christian services, but would not be displayed by default.

    a frenzy of opposition arose, largely from outside the college community. one petition collected 10,000 signatures demanding the “return” of the cross, but less than 30% of the signers had ever been affiliated with the school.

    what few people know is that the cross isn’t actually property of the school — it has been loaned by bruton parish church (and caterbury, the parish’s college community) in 1931.

    and, for the two hundred and fifty odd years before that loan in 1931, the chapel was without a cross of any kind — as no Anglican Virginia church displayed a cross during the colonial period.

    but, just as in the pledge of allegiance — in which the divisive “under god” phrase wasn’t added until the mccarthy fueled 1950s but is seen by some elements as being core to the pledge itself — historical fact has little to bear on modern controversy.

    during the late 1990s, i was the liturgist for caterbury (the “owners” of the wren cross) and was the person responsible for both the only regular service in which the was used and (in as much as anyone) for the cross itself.

    while i didn’t threaten to revoke a $12 million donation to the school over the issue, you could argue i’d be one of the people most emotionally outraged by the wren cross controversy.

    but i’m not.

    why? because i’m comfortable in my Christianity, and as such I don’t need to cling to iconography to support my religious beliefs. i also feel like we all paid tuition to this great college without regard of our religion — and as such, we should all feel equally welcome in the college’s buildings.

    unfortunately, the school’s president Gene Nichol resigned this morning — under pressure from alumni withdrawing donations from the school — for having these very same constitutionally guided views.

    and while i know that the College won’t even notice, after much deliberation i have decided that I can no longer financially support a school that succumbs to such petty partisanship and radically exclusive views — even though i’ve been supporting the school financially every year since 1995.

    i can only hope that someone comes along to right this ship, but that won’t happen so long as the campus remains obsessed with the views of fringe elements from outside it’s walls.

  • musings: obama

    the lady sparkler and i have a house rule, that you can’t discuss an election until it’s the year *of* said election. while the media may want us to obsess, there is no reason to even pay attention until it’s time for your local primary.

    either way, it’s open season now.

    as of january 1, i thought i had this whole election this worked out. obama & edwards: guardians of the working class populous; clinton: guardian of the north-east elite. and then new hampshire happened … for reasons i am still struggling to comprehend, clinton carried the $50k and under, high school educated crowd, and obama carried those who make over $100k and have post graduate degrees.

    clinton … blue collar? obama … white elite?

    some order was brought to my internal chaos with super tuesday. obama carried the heartland (montana, kansas, north dakota) and clinton carried the coasts (california, new york, massachuesettes). but even with that, there were enough outliers (obama in connecticut, clinton in oklahoma) that i came to a startling realization: even with four years on the hill and another four years at a political consulting firm, i have no clue about politics.

    my biggest complaint about politics (and politicians) is the seeming endless partisanship that has settled on d.c. since the republican “revolution” of 1994. and it has (inarguably) gotten worse since Bush II took office. my point is that, while truly believe that clinton would make a solid leader of the free world, i just can’t face the idea that we will have another 8 years where 49.5% of the electorate utterly despises the sitting president.

    so, over the last two weeks i basically ruled out everyone else, and was left with obama for (admittedly) all the wrong reasons. and then i heard him speak for the first time. and then i was hooked.

    now, i am a *sucker* for obama’s message. i hate fear mongering. the best president of my lifetime was played by martin sheen. i need oration, and hope. i want my politician to tell me why to love him, and not why to hate everyone else. i want someone to dream big, and challenge those around him to keep up. i want to vote for *someone*, and not just for who-ever is running against the neo-con of the cycle.

    obama gives the best stump speech i have heard … easily since the “other” clinton in ’92, but probably since the kennedy brothers in ’60 and ’68 (of which i heard recordings, obviously). i find it fascinating how well he is doing in places that have heard him speak.

    now, if you are already on-board, God bless you. but if you aren’t, watch the video clip above of him speaking in New Hampshire — if you are short on time, skip ahead and watch the last half — and tell me that’s not what you really want in a candidate.

    unless, of course, you are christy rome … in which case don’t tell me, because i prefer living in denial.

  • musings: a tale of twenty-two parties

    [Photo]

    Ah, ’tis the season of love, joy, and parties. This year, we have two work parties each, two more parties at our house, a couple trips to the theater, and about half a dozen happy hours between us.

    Not that I am complaining, but I actually had to stop commuting to work via bicycle in mid-December, because we have something just about every day after work for the last two weeks before Christmas. Thank God we finished up our Christmas shopping in late November, or a lot of people would be getting a whole-lotta nothing.

    The highlight so far — for us, at least — was the Christmas Cartoon Extravaganza. Each year we collect as many television Christmas specials as we can, and throw a party where they are playing in the background. Our place is a bit small, but we managed to cram in twelve people to watch three and a half hours of pure animated Christmas goodness, including A Charlie Brown Christmas, Frosty Returns, Robbie the Reindeer, Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends christmas special, and How the Grinch Stole Christmas.

    I think this is only the second or third time the lady sparkler and I have thrown the Extravaganza, but I have done something similar on and off for the last decade. I wish I could take credit for the notion, but the idea originally came from a Theatre Department tradition at the College of William and Mary where people gathered each year and managed to turn How the Grinch Stole Christmas into a drinking game.

    The basic premise of the College version was to drink each time you hear the word “Who” — as in “All the Who’s down in Whoville” and “Cindy Lou Who who was no more than two.” As you can imagine, the “winner” was essentially declared by the first commercial break by looking around at whomever was still standing.

    Fortunately, the thirty-something version entailed just sitting on the couch and thinking warm thoughts of friends and family, though we did “go crazy” by slipping some peppermint schnapps into the cocoa.

  • musings: christmas extravaganza

    IMG_4999.jpg

    it’s the weekend after thanksgiving, which means it’s the official start of the “get-evan-prepped-for-christmas” season. you laugh, but i have found that after 30+ years of christmases (christmi? christmasuses?) i have developed a pre-christmas routine that boarders on obsessive.

    first, we have the music. i’m currently sitting on 600+ christmas songs (from 30+ christmas albums) which means i can listen non-stop for about a day and a half without repeating the same version of a song. my itunes currently features 18 versions of silent night (my favorite is a classical russian folk recording) and if you ever want to have a conversation about the definitive recording of “o holy night” then i am your man (my vote is for the new orleans benefit version featured on studio 60 last year).

    but mostly, we have the movies. and television. and cartoons. it all started about a decade ago when i noticed that the more christmas “stuff” i watched, the more likely i was to have a good christmas. this has now officially spiraled out of control, and has resulted in me watching about 20 dvds worth of goodies each holiday during November and December. actually, i have taken to throwing a “christmas cartoon extravaganza” each year to help spread the love (or share the burden, as it were).

    my checklist for this year has 50+ items on it. while i certainly won’t get through more than about half of what you see here, i’ve documented the whole list so i don’t have to keep recreating it every year. if by some strange miracle i have forgotten something worth seeing, please mock my omission in the comments.

    Best Christmas Cartoons & Best Christmas Specials

    this selction include christmas cartoons (rankin-bass!) and several live action specials including various muppets. also included are television show episodes worth re-watching during the holidays, especially aaron sorkin productions (who has a knack for christmas that i wish he could spin into the other 364 days of his work each year).

    A Charlie Brown Christmas
    A Chipmunk Christmas
    A Special Sesame Street Christmas
    Emmett Otter’s Jug Band Christmas
    Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends (“Christmas Special”)
    Frosty Returns
    Frosty the Snowman
    Frosty’s Winter Wonderland
    Grandma Got Runover By a Reindeer
    Holidaze: The Christmas That Almost Didn’t Happen
    How the Grinch Stole Christmas
    It’s Christmas Time Again, Charlie Brown
    John Denver and the Muppets: A Christmas Together
    Little Drummer Boy
    M*A*S*H (“Death Takes a Holiday”)
    Nestor, the Long-Eared Christmas Donkey
    Olive, the Other Reindeer
    Pee-wee’s Playhouse (“Christmas Special”)
    Robbie the Reindeer
    Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer
    Rudolph’s Shiny New Year
    Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town
    Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip (“The Christmas Show”)
    ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas
    The Life And Adventures Of Santa Claus
    The West Wing (“In Excelsis Deo”)
    The West Wing (“Noël”)
    The West Wing (“Holy Night”)
    The Year Without a Santa Claus

    Best Christmas Movies

    some are good (miracle on 34th), some are bad (santa conquers the martians) but anything is fair game (die hard) if it happens at christmas.

    About a Boy
    A Christmas Carol
    A Christmas Story
    Bad Santa
    Christmas in Connecticut
    Christmas Vacation (National Lampoon’s)
    Christmas with the Kranks
    Die Hard
    Die Hard 2: Die Harder
    Elf
    Ernest Saves Christmas
    Holiday Inn
    Home Alone
    It’s a Wonderful Life
    Love Actually
    Miracle on 34th Street (1947)
    Miracle on 34th Street (1994)
    Prancer
    Santa Claus Conquers the Martians
    Santa vs. Snowman
    Saturday Night Live Christmas
    Scrooge
    Scrooged
    The Muppet Christmas Carol
    The Nightmare Before Christmas
    The Polar Express
    The Ref
    The Santa Clause
    The Santa Clause 2
    Trapped in Paradise
    White Christmas

    again, if i have forgotten something worth seeing, please share.

  • taylor twellman is a twit

    [Photo]
    1118071406, originally uploaded by [ecpark].
    the championship match of major league soccer returned to D.C.’s RFK Stadium again this year. unfortunately, after having the best record during the regular season, D.C. United flamed out in the first round of the playoffs and blew the chance to play for the cup on their home turf.

    instead, we watched the lady sparkler’s hometown team (the houston dynamo) hand the new england revolution (employer of the twit mentioned above) their fourth cup defeat in the last six years. you can guess our allegiances (have i mentioned he’s a twit?) and i can safely say that we were in a small, small minority of people cheering for houston as they sent the revolution to the bad side of the record books.

    now, not everybody cares about fútbol/soccer, but focus for a moment on the futility factor here: 4 championship appearances, no wins. only two professional teams share this dubious honor (the buffalo bills and the minnesota vikings, both of the NFL, both 0-4 in the superbowl). hockey has only one team that comes close (st. louis blues, 0-3) and basketball/baseball can only muster a few 0-2 teams (utah jazz, phoenix suns, new jersey nets, san diego padres).

    the amazing thing is that major league soccer is just a decade old. imagine what their futility mark could be like with another 30 years of championships to lose. how would you like to be part of a franchise like that? i meant to ask some of the 30,000+ Revolution fans as they were leaving the stadium grounds, but …

    back to the twit. i’m normally not one to shower the hate on people, but it’s even worse that i can’t figure out why i loathe him so. part of it could his gawd awful kick medic commercials i have to watch every weekend on fox soccer channel. part of it could be that no matter how good he is for his club (83 goals in 145 appearances, or 57%) he is equally bad for his country (6 goals in 28 appearances, or 21%). or it could just be because he wears his shirts two sizes too small.

    regardless, houston won their second straight (the only team other than D.C. to do that) and twinkle-toed twellman and the revs lost … all is right with the world.

    Explore the Photo Set:
    MLS Cup 2007, Washington, D.C.

  • wedding: “green” weddings for the washingtonian

    so, the Washingtonian magazine is doing a “green” edition of their magazine this January, and have been looking to talk to a bride and groom about their “green” wedding.

    a friend of mine is the director of media relations here at the conservancy, and he suggested that the reporter talk to me. to make a long story short, the call is scheduled for tomorrow morning at 10am.

    needless to say this, quite rightly, got me to thinking about whether our wedding was actually “green” or not. and by “thinking”, i mean “obsessing”. i’m pleased to report that, after about 24 hours of concerted panicking, i am pretty certain we actually didn’t do a half bad job putting together something that closely resembles a green wedding (which is a bold statement considering how caveat-laden i usually am).

    my first concern was the defining the term “green wedding”. we didn’t really start off trying to be “green” so much as we were trying to be thoughtful about reducing our wedding’s drain on ourselves and those around us. obviously, this meant we were looking for simple things we could do that would reduce our wedding’s strain on the planet as well. my second concern was that, in my head, the term “green wedding” was essentially synonymous with “hemp wedding dress” which i knew wasn’t going to fly (i didn’t even ask).

    in an odd stroke of coincidence, the month after the lady sparkler and i got engaged, the conservancy posted something about the simple things you can do to have a green wedding. reading this yeilded my first thoughts that a "green" wedding might be possible (or, more important, practical).

    looking back at the list now, we actually did quite a bit to reduce our wedding’s footprint:

    • central: we threw the wedding in downtown d.c. which — besides being home for us and most of our friends — was also decidedly central for most of our families (who hailed from Oregon, Texas, Virginia, and New England).
    • walkable: the whole weekend happened within four blocks of the church, including the hotel, the bachelor party, the rehearsal dinner, the reception and the after-party. once people arrived, they could opt out of transportation for the rest of the weekend.
    • organic favors: for wedding favors, instead of the usual rock with our name painted on it, we gave out organic “endangered species” chocolate and planted 35 trees in a national forest on behalf of our guests. (also, it goes without saying, but we used animal-friendly blowing-bubbles instead of having guests throw rice or birdseed.)
    • locally-grown: we tried to use local businesses as much as possible (more on that below), and the reception site we used (15RIA) billed themselves as “using a bounty of local fresh products.”
    • virtual: besides trying to reduce the amount of paper we used in our invitations (limited inserts, no inner envelope), we saved a few trees by doing an email save-the-date and by using a wedding blog to keep people updated about the weekend details.
    • eco-honeymoon: while the first half of our trip was at a resort with locally-grown/organic-friendly food, the second half of our trip was more legitimately eco-friendly at one of Belize’s oldest eco-lodges. we wanted to be sensitive, but we weren’t willing to honeymoon in a tent in our backyard.
    • green registry: we (ahem) "strongly encouraged" our guests to make a gift to MercyCorps instead of the more traditional registry gifts, and about 1/3 of them actually did it. obviously MercyCorps isn’t an environmental organization, but poverty is one of the largest barriers to effective conservation. (we also were given an acre of rainforest through the Conservancy and a pig through Heifer!)
    • offset everything else: we absolutely weren’t willing to uninvite people who had to use carbon-based fuels to get here (or make them watch on a web cam), so we offset everyone’s flights to and from our wedding — including our own flights to and from Belize. (the sum of everything, for the record, turned out to be around 18,000 lbs of CO2.)

    so, with all that, why am i hesitating about whether it was a green wedding or not? well, we have a couple of open items …

    • the hemp dress: while our tuxes were rented (it’s best to share tux resources with hundreds of other grooms and groomsmen) and the bridesmaids picked out their own dresses (this increases the chance they might be worn again, however slightly) we didn’t even consider going down the path of the organic wedding dress. there was just too much wrapped up in our (er, her) vision of the perfect dress to add this layer of complexity.
    • the rings: the lady sparkler got a diamond (and loves it however guiltily), and i got a gold ring (silver is less toxic for the environment). neither of them were used or recycled. we had a devil of a time trying to offset the rings (we tried, but couldn’t find anyone who would even approximate what would be required) so this one is destined to remain an open issue.
    • the cake: we tried so hard to use local merchants, but every cake place we tried within the district didn’t pass our admittedly lofty standards (yes, including Cake Love which was dry and over-hyped). so we ended up using a place in (God-forbid) Herndon. not two months after we “sold out to the ‘burbs”, we found an equally fantastic bakery in DC’s Mount Pleasant neighborhood, and we will be definitely using them for all our baking needs in the future.

    … but all of this, to some extent, misses the point. we were looking for simple ways to reduce our footprint, and (to be honest) we as a society just might be a couple years away from “eco-wedding dresses” and “environmentally sensitive engagement rings” being an option for mainstream-ers like us. that, and we just had bad timing with the bakery.

    not that i am EVER going to have another wedding (ever, EVER!) but i’m happy to leave those three items open for future, er, motivation.

  • Hike: The Remains of the Foliage

    [Photo]
    IMG_7860, originally uploaded by [ecpark].
    We completely missed peak foliage this year, because of the whole wedding/honeymoon thing … so on our first real weekend back, we headed out in search of what was left of the leafs to peep.

    First thing we learned was to not trust state tourism department’s web sites. It makes sense with hindsight, but both Virginia and Maryland seem to have incentive to be less then honest about the status of the foliage in their respective purviews. In their “foliage reports,” they used words like “spectacular” and “peak” that roughly translated to “intermittent” and “you should have visited two weeks ago.”

    The only people who seemed to have a clue about what was going on was The Weather Channel, which has a forecast map showing the state of the foliage on the ground. This turned out to be the most correct, largely because it said that vast majority of the country is, in fact, “past peak”.

    In search of what was left, we drove out to Elk Neck State Park in Maryland, which is situated right on the northern tip of the Chesapeake Bay. The drive in had some widespread (but muted) foliage, but there wasn’t anything — and I mean anything — once we go into the park itself. From there, we headed 20 miles west of Baltimore to Morgan Run Natural Environment Area. While the drive in wasn’t as pretty as in the far northeast of the state, the hiking was great.

    From all reports, this just isn’t going to be a good year for foliage. I found a great write-up on what makes for good foliage, and we just didn’t have the wet growing season and dry, sunny fall needed for anything other than muted, muddy leaf peeping.

    Explore the Photo Set:
    Morgan Run Natural Environment Area, Maryland

  • Wedding: Our Favorite Things to Do in D.C.

    [Arial View of Washington, D.C.]This is (hopefully) the first in a series of posts about things to do, places to eat, the best ways to get around the city, etc. In case you are coming to D.C. to see something other than us get married, let’s start off with a list of some of our favorite things to do while in the District. Let us know if you have questions, or if you need additional inspiration.

    The Korean War Memorial

    Why? It is the most interesting of all the National Mall memorials, composed of a group of soldiers making their way through Korean rice paddies. See it on a cloudy day or at night for the best effect. Easily the “local” favorite of all the monuments.

    How? It’s on the very west end of the Mall, next to the Lincoln and Vietnam Memorials. A long, but nice walk from the Smithsonian metro, and tour bus accessiable. Open 24 hours.

    ONLINE: The Korean War Memorial

    PHOTOS: ‘koreanwarmemorial’ on Flickr

    MAP: The Korean War Veterens Memorial on Google Maps

    Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial

    Why? It’s one of the newest monuments, and is easily the greatest departure from the rest because it is a little more interactive than the more somber downtown monuments. in its layout. It occupies over seven acres, with dozens of statues and waterfalls.

    How? It’s a little remote, being on the west side of the Tidal Basin (ie. the far side if you are standing on the Mall) in between the Lincoln and the Jefferson memorials. There is plenty of parking, a longer (but nicer) walk if you are up for it, and tour bus accessiable. Open 24 hours.

    ONLINE: Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial

    PHOTOS: ‘fdrmemorial’ on Flickr

    MAP: FDR Memorial on Google Maps

    View from the Washington Monument

    Why? Easily the best view of the city, and a nice short cut to see a lot (as in ALL) of the city in a short period of time. There is an elevator to the top — since the renovation, you aren’t allowed to take the 896 stairs — and they give you a great overview of the monument on the way up.

    How? It’s hard to miss, so I will spare you the directions. Timed-entry tickets are required, but they are free and can be obtained for same day visits from the kiosk at the bottom of the monument’s hill. Tickets run out early in the summer, but you should be fine on off-peak weekends. Open 9 am to 4:45 pm.

    ONLINE: Washington Monument

    PHOTOS: ‘washingtonmonument’ on Flickr

    MAP: Washington Monument on Google Maps

    Smithsonian Museums

    Why? Normally, the National Air and Space Museum wouldn’t make our personal top 10 — been there 10,439 times — but the National Museum of American History is closed and the Smithsonian has relocated their “Treasures” collection here (think “Ruby Slippers”). Across the Mall is the National Museum of Natural History, which was magnificantly redone in the last 5 years, with the addition of a brand new IMAX theater (which makes a great break in a day of touring). You also have the Castle (houses special exhibitions) and the National Gallery of Art (best gallery outside of the Met in New York City).

    How? The whole DC transportation system is geared to get you to these places. Take the metro (Smithsonian), drive or take any of the tour bus operators’ offerings. Most are open 10 am to 5pm, everyday.

    ONLINE: The Smithsonian Institute

    PHOTOS: ‘smithsonian’ on Flickr

    MAP: Smithsonian Museums on the Mall

    U.S Botanic Garden

    Why? This is a great place to visit, rain or shine. It is a giant greenhouse, with some of the most exotic plants you will ever see. There is a brand new external garden next door as well, and a rotation of new and permanent exhibits inside the conservatory.

    How? It’s on the east end of the Mall, between the Capitol and the Smithsonian museums. Smithsonian Metro, although Union Station will work in a pinch. Open daily 10 a.m.-5 p.m.

    ONLINE: U.S. Botanic Garden

    PHOTOS: ‘usbotanicgarden’ on Flickr

    MAP: U.S. Botanic Garden on Google Maps

    National Geographic Museum

    Why? Always with a global flavor, you can view changing and permanent exhibitions on a variety of scientific, geographic, and cultural themes. Check to see if they have something for you on their website.

    How? Located on 17th between L and M, this is about three blocks from the wedding hotel. Open Monday thru Saturday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Sundays from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

    ONLINE: National Geographic Museum

    MAP: Museum Hours and Directions

    Eastern Market

    Why? Absolutely beloved by locals, Eastern Market is the last traditional city market in DC. The main building recently burned down, but it relocated just across the street while being restored. There are several “sub-markets” including a flea market, farmers market and arts-and-crafts market every weekend.

    How? Located on the opposite side of the Capitol, the market has its very own metro station (cryptically named “Eastern Market”). The flea market is open Sunday 10 a.m.-5 p.m.; farmers market Saturday and Sunday 10 a.m.-6 p.m.; arts-and-crafts market Saturday 10 a.m.-5 p.m.

    ONLINE: Eastern Market

    PHOTOS: ‘easternmarket’ on Flickr

    MAP: Historic Eastern Market on Google Maps

    The Library of Congress

    Why? The reading room is one of the most spectacular inside spaces in DC, and their collection is easily holds its own with the Smithsonian. The Library of Congress also offers book talks, gallery talks, poetry readings, lectures, and vintage movies that are open to the public.

    How? To get the most out, you should do a tour, which is available Monday thru Friday at 10:30, 11:30, 1:30, 2:30, and 3:30 and Saturday at 10:30, 11:30, 1:30 and 2:30. Visitors should arrive 15 minutes early for a security check. Capitol South is closest, though Union Station will again work in a pinch.

    ONLINE: Library of Congress

    PHOTOS: ‘libraryofcongress’ on Flickr

    MAP: Library of Congress on Google Maps

    Arlington National Cemetary

    Why? On the other side of the Potomac from DC, there is something for everyone from the changing of the guard at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier to JFK’s eternal flame. The cemetary is huge, so plan on walking… quite a bit.

    How? There is a metro station at the base of the grounds. The guard changes every hour on the hour from October 1 through March 14, and every half-hour from March 15 through September 30. The cemetery is open 8 a.m.-5 p.m. from October 1 to March 31, and 8 a.m.-7 p.m. from April 1 to September 30.

    ONLINE: Arlington National Cemetary

    PHOTOS: ‘arlingtonnationalcemetary’ on Flickr

    MAP: Arlington National Cemetary on Google Maps

    Cultural Tourism DC

    Why? There is a DC beyond the Mall, and these guys will help you find it. Oddly enough, not all of DC is made out of marble and granite.

    How? Check out their web site, as there are dozens of walking tours that you can take to get a much better flavor of the city.

    ONLINE: Cultural Tourism DC

    PHOTOS: ‘culturaltourismdc’ on Flickr

    MORE: Check out their Trip Manager

  • Wedding: Basics, v2

    52 days left before the big day, so we figured it was a good time for an update.

    The wedding ceremony is now scheduled for 10:30 am on Saturday, October 6th at Foundry United Methodist Church in Washington, DC. We have had two of our three meetings with the minister, and have mapped out most of the service — with the exception of the music, which is still to come.

    The reception to follow will be held at 15 RIA, which is about two blocks south of the church — check out or interactive Google map to see where everything is in relation to each other. The reception will feature a mostly traditional brunch spread, which is heavy on our favorite food groups: eggs and breakfast pork. They kick us out at 4pm.

    That night, we are throwing a little after-party at Stetson’s on U Street. For those who aren’t familiar, Stetson’s has quite the political heritage, including a stint as the central watering hole for Clinton Administration staffers, later gaining further notoriety as the place where the Bush twins got busted for underage drinking (wonder if there is a connection between the two?). We have the top floor reserved from 7:30 to 11pm.

    As you may have heard, our block of hotel rooms at the Doubletree Hotel is full, but we have a new block for anybody who needs one next door at the Holiday Inn (details here).

    If you have any questions post us a comment or email us at [email address].

  • Home: 7 days, and counting … (July Edition)

    Made you look. No, the wedding is still 86 days away (not that anyone is counting). We speak, instead, of the move.

    In fact, in seven days I expect to be painting our very own master bedroom a lovely shade of Chianti after earlier in the day giving our sellers the largest check I have ever seen in my life.

    To bring you up to speed … Since we last mentioned Mt. Pleasant nary sixteen days ago, we have:

    • Gotten the results of our home inspection back — Everything looks pretty great. The combination furnace/AC unit needed to be serviced and there were a couple of power outlets that needed work. The home inspector also mentioned something about our electrical circuit box potentially bursting into flames without warning, but not sure exactly what he meant. All in all, we were pretty happy.
    • Negotiated some extra dough from the sellers for the (potentially) flaming electrical box — Turns out that having a Federal Pacific “Stab-Lock” electrical box that could burst into flames at a moment’s notice is considered a “bug” as opposed to a “feature.” After a little negotiating, we managed to get some money from the sellers to get it replaced.
    • Tested Evan’s bicycle commute — I have been biking to and from work for about 6 weeks now, and hope to keep it up after the move. It should be easy. Our new place is right off the Rock Creek Trail (which meets my current commute) and forms a nice little seven mile commute each way. This past weekend, I tried the full trip from to Mt. Pleasant and back, and it was a LOVELY ride with some truly beautiful sections through Georgetown, Rock Creek and the National Zoo.
    • Determined Evan probably should not use a two decade old bike for commuting long distances — The following day, while commuting to work, I nearly wrapped myself around a tree because my 18 year old brakes and gears no-workey-so-goody, especially when wet. If I make it another 6 weeks of commuting via bicycle — ie. haven’t killed myself and haven’t given up trying — I am going to seriously ponder getting a bike made sometime *after* the first Bush administration.
    • Reviewed the condo’s bylaws and budget documents — Apparently, The Lady Sparkler and I share 5.2% of the voting power in our condo association. I am already wondering how best to abuse our new-found power. Perhaps we will start by repealing the bylaw that states that 80% of our *gorgeous* hardwood floors are supposed to be covered by area rugs.
    • Started shopping for rugs — Well, yes, but not because of the condo rule. We did some research and discovered that the current owners have never had more than 30% of their floor covered since the late 90s, and that most people aren’t meeting either the letter or the spirit of that rule. Not to mention: our unit is directly above the lobby, so there aren’t a whole lot of people to complain.
    • Gotten our appraisal back — Perhaps the most bizarre realization of the last two weeks was finding out that the bank felt comfortable verifying the value of our purchase without ever stepping foot inside the building. Not to mention, they *miraculously* appraised it at $1,000 more than we are buying it for (so we have already made a profit!)
    • Gone to Home Depot for paint colors — The only thing we are painting before we move in is the master bedroom, as it is currently a lovely shade of mango. To be fair, the color really is quite lovely, but our drapes are burgundy and our spread is olive and maroon, so keeping the mango isn’t really an option. The rest of the colors — seafoam living room, mango second bedroom, cobalt-ish halway, beige bathroom — match enough to buy us some time.
    • Found movers, electricians specializing in flaming electrical boxes, locksmiths, water/sewage authorities, a gas service and an electrical utility — Not much to add on this one.
    • Petted Emily-the-Cat — For two whole weeks, we said “wow, Emily is really taking all all this commotion well.” Then two days ago, she finally figured out something was up … and that 200 packing boxes might be something other than construction materials for the fort of her dreams.
    • Packed 60% of our belongings — Basically, everything is done except the kitchen. It took 16 copier boxes (and then some) to pack our bookcases alone, and that is after giving away four boxes of books. It is going to take years for us to get everything out again once we make it to the other side of the Potomac.

    So, there you go.

    Neither of us can wait ’til the end of October, when we can look back at this and start thinking that “shooting the moon” by moving and getting married on top of each other wasn’t the silliest idea we have ever had 😉

  • Wedding: Church Declares Bride and Groom Incompatible, Couple Unrepentant

    So, maaaaaybe that statement is a bit of an exaggeration, but it is safe to say we are now formally banking on the axiom: “opposites attract.”

    We just got back from the second of our three church counseling sessions with the man who would marry us, Rev. Dean J. Snyder. At the end of the first session, he administered the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator test to us. Now, at the second session, he promised to review the results with us.

    And, oh, what results they were.

    Turns out that of the four bands (Extraversion vs Introversion, Sensing vs Intuition, Thinking vs Feeling, Judging vs Perceiving) we were at the opposite ends of all but one. The Lady Sparkler is a ESTJ, and I am an ENFP.

    Below are some highlights of our personalities:

    Favorite world: Do you prefer to focus on the outer world or on your own inner world?

    People with a preference for Extraversion (both she and I) draw energy from action: they tend to act, then reflect, then act further. If they are inactive, their level of energy and motivation tends to decline.

    Information: Do you prefer to focus on the basic information you take in or do you prefer to interpret and add meaning?

    Individuals with a preference for Sensing (The Lady Sparkler) prefer to trust information that is in the present, tangible and concrete: information can be comprehended by the five senses. They prefer to look for detail and facts.

    Those with a preference for Intuition (Evan) will trust information that is more abstract or theoretical, that can be associated with other information. They are more interested in future possibilities.

    Decisions: When making decisions, do you prefer to first look at logic and consistency or first look at the people and special circumstances?

    Those with a preference for Feeling (Evan) will prefer to come to decisions by associating or empathising with the situation, looking at it ‘from the inside’ to achieve the greatest harmony, consensus and fit with their personal set of values.

    Those with a preference for Thinking (The Lady Sparkler) will prefer to decide things from a more detached standpoint, measuring the decision by what is reasonable, logical, causal, consistent and matching a given set of rules.

    Structure: In dealing with the outside world, do you prefer to get things decided or do you prefer to stay open to new information and options?

    People with a preference for Judging (The Lady Sparkler) prefer matters to be decided, to start tasks well ahead of a deadline, and they can sometimes seem inflexible in this regard.

    Those whose preference is Perceiving (Evan) are happier to leave finishing a task until close to the deadline, are energised late rushes of information and ideas, and are readier to change plans if new information comes along.

    In retrospect, it’s funny/encouraging/touching that our number one response to the question “why do you like each other” over the last three years has been that the other “balances me.”

    Maybe there is hope for us yet.

  • House, 2.1

    Yay! We got it 🙂

    We got the call today shortly before lunch, that the nice people who live in the place we want to buy accepted our offer. Actually, they countered with another offer that was 9k more than what WE offerered, but which was still 16k less than the list price and 1k less then we *thought* they were going to counter with.

    Needless to say, we are besides our self with happiness. The settlement is July 19th, and we don’t have to vacate our current appartment until the end of August. This give us almost 6 weeks to move. Oh, joy! Oh, rapture! I have no idea what to do with the extra time … except for plan a wedding of course.

    The home inspection is on Monday, July 2nd @ 4:00 pm, so no real news (and no better pictures) until then. However, before the MLS listing disappears, I downloaded it for posterity’s sake, and it is below.

    101 days until the wedding …

    Property Details

    MLS#: DC6435304 · Bedrooms: 2 · Bathrooms: 1 full · City: WASHINGTON · Status: CNTG/NO KO · Type of Home: Garden 1-4 Floors · Style: Beaux Arts · Year Built: 1925 · Lot Acreage: 0 · Subdivision: MOUNT PLEASANT · County: WASHINGTON, DC · Address: 1661 PARK RD NW #206 · City, State, Zip: WASHINGTON, DC, 20010 ·

    Remarks

    Comments: Gorgeous & Sunny 2 BR/1 Bath Condo in a GREAT Pet Friendly BLDG w/Bike Room**This unit SPARKLES w/UPDATES GALORE to incl:Kitchen w/SS Appls, Cabinetry, Silestone Counters, Remodeled Bath, NEW AC & Fresh Paint**Lovely HWD Flrs & Doors, Crown Molding**Large Rm sizes**W/D in unit**METRO, Rock Creek Park, Shops, Restaurants & Nightlife are here!!City Living at it’s Best**Sellers have taken PRIDE!

    Home Features

    Amenities: Crown Molding, Elevator, Shades/Blinds, Wood Floors · Appliances: Dishwasher, Disposal, Dryer, Exhaust Fan, Intercom, Microwave, Oven/Range-Electric, Refrigerator, Washer · Kitchen / Dining Info: Kit-Breakfast Bar, Liv-Din Combo · Heating System: Forced Air · Heating Fuel: Natural Gas · Cooling System: Central A/C · Cooling Fuel: Electric · Hot Water: Electric · Parking Info: Street · Water System: Public · Construction: Brick · Community Amenities: Common Grounds, Elevator

  • House, 2.0

    [Map]In completely unrelated news, The Lady Sparkler and I made an offer on a new place to live today. Yup, that’s right. We sat around last week, brainstorming about what we could do to make the last three months before our wedding a bit more chaotic, and this is the best we could do.

    Actually, truth be told, this has been in the back of our minds for quite some time. The housing market bottomed out (in DC, at least) in November of 2006, and is on the way back up. Interest rates are low, but climbing. Personally, our current lease expires in August, we are expecting another lease hike, and our building punishes you if you don’t renew for a full year ($300/month to go month-to-month).

    So, basically, the economic gods seem to be telling us something. Not wanting to anger said gods (Alan Greenspan?), ten days ago we found a real estate agent (Brandon Green) and a mortgage broker (Rob Riggins), both of whom came VERY strongly recommended and both very kindly gave us a crash course in home buying. After a weekend of getting oriented, and half a week of getting pre-approved, we hit about 20-25 different places this weekend.

    The primary goals were a 2 bedroom condo in DC (in the Circles area — Logan, Scott, Dupont, Thomas) or in Virginia (either near where we live now in Court House, or near were The Lady Sparkler used to live in Del Ray/Alexandria). Given our budget, Brandon chuckled warmly at his naive little charges, and politely showed us some places we could actually afford.

    The winning neighborhood by far was Mt. Pleasant, which is due north of downtown (16th street runs along the western edge of the neighborhood) and is nestled up against the back door to the National Zoo. The neighborhood has a fantastic diverse, family-friendly, funky vibe — those who know me know I don’t use the words “funky” or “vibe” lightly … darn hippie words! — and it seems to be one of the last true communities in the District.

    The place we are bidding on is 1661 Park Road, #206 and is located at the corners of 17th street and Mt. Pleasant Avenue. It’s about 2 blocks from the Columbia Heights metro (where a Target, Best Buy, Marshall’s, Starbucks/Caribu Coffee and Carvel are all opening), 3 blocks from Rock Creek Park, and 6 blocks from the zoo.

    (If you look on the Google Map above, the place we are looking at isn’t marked correctly … 1661 is actually well to the left of the green arrow, on the other side of the 5 townhouses you see on Park. It’s the building with 2 big trees between it and the street.)

    The apartment has a ton of windows, and gorgeous, dark hardwood floors. Two bedrooms, brand new kitchen. The pictures attached to the listing were so bad, that we almost didn’t look at the place.

    Anyway, we will obviously keep you posted as we keep moving towards the exciting conclusion of this very special episode of Extreme Makeover: Life Edition.

  • Wedding: “We went to Jared!”

    18k Gold 6mm Comfort-Fit Wedding Band*SIGH*

    I can’t even explain the horror of writing this post. They say confession is good for the soul … all I ask is you read through to the end before laughing hysterically. Basically, a funny thing happened on the way home from the cake place …

    After having our initial meeting at Lille a month ago, we forgot to actually place the order for the cake, and then they forgot what wanted when we called back 3 weeks after we were supposed to. So, today we had to shlep all the way back to Herndon, see “the guy”, redraw the cake and fork over a deposit.

    On the way back from “Cake, part 2: The Revenge of Fondant”, we realized that we had no idea what our ring-finger sizes were, and that the ignorance of such things was going to make wedding ring shopping online … well … suboptimal. Thusly, we decided to “swing by” one of the malls in Tyson’s Corner, pretend to be interested in buying our rings, get our fingers sized, and rush home to buy the rings online.

    Unfortunately for the mall theory, there was a bit of a traffic jam on Route 7 (the main road in to Tysons) and it just grinded to a halt after a while … directly in front of a Jared: the Galleria of Jewelry.

    With our souls already crushed by the traffic, we figured going into the store responsible for the most soul-sucking television commercials in nigh-on-a-decade (“He went to Jared!”) couldn’t kill what was already dead. Besides, if we want to bring down the evil empire, what better way to do so then by bring false hope to their sales associates and making them waste time sizing the fingers of future Blue Nile customers.

    Sadly, a very nice sales associate named Danielle helped us try on various rings. Even more sadly, they actually fit and looked rather nice. Even MORE sadly, they were reasonably priced, and The Lady Sparkler found the ring of her dreams.

    Wanting to save the last shred of my dignity, we took down the ring information and *promised* to come back to consummate the deal. I may not be able to stop the flood, but at least I can delay it a bit.

    UPDATE: When we went back the following weekend to actually place the order for the rings, our little helper Danielle was abjectly shocked to see us. I asked why she was so surprised, and she said that it was very rare for people to come back after being sized, and even more rare for a couple to ask for the person that helped them the first time. I handed her a credit card, completed the transaction and guiltily skulked away. I have become that which I had feared most…

    p.s. The first person who sees me walk by and says “He went to Jared!” will get slugged. Pow. Right in the kisser. (“To the moon, Alice. To the moon!”)

  • Wedding: Basics

    [Flowers]Well, there are certainly a lot of details left to finalized but — because we know you are waiting with baited breath — here are the broad brushstrokes of the wedding weekend.

    The wedding ceremony is scheduled for 11:00 am 10:30 am on Saturday, October 6th at Foundry United Methodist Church in Washington, DC. Foundry is located at 1500 16th Street NW, which is just north of Scott Circle at the corner of 16th and P Streets. We haven’t met with the Rev. Snyder to plan out the service yet — that starts in May — but we are very comfortable saying it will clock in well below an hour.

    The reception to follow will be held at 15 RIA, located in the Doubletree Hotel at 1515 Rhode Island Avenue NW. Take a look at our location, location, location (part 2) post, but the reception site is just two blocks south of the church. The reception will feature a mostly traditional brunch spread — eggs / bacon type breakfast — with a smattering of lunch items. They kick us out at 4pm.

    We have a block of hotel rooms at the Doubletree Hotel — see the hotel block details here — but there are also plenty of other hotels in the area if you prefer (see the original location, location, location post). For anyone who is thinking of driving to the wedding and / or the reception, there is plenty of parking available at the Doubletree Hotel for the whole day.

    Speaking of transportation, the closest metro stop is Dupont Circle, which is located at (essentially) 19th and P Streets … about three blocks west of the church. It’s a nice walk if it is sunny and you don’t have luggage. 16th Street is also a major thoroughfare for taxis, so it’s never hard finding one … coming or going.

    The final nugget of information for the day is about airports. Dulles Internation (IAD) and Baltimore-Washington Airport (BWI) are the farthest away — 30 miles — but will also be the cheapest. National Airport (DCA, or “Reagan” if you are Republican) is the closest — 5 miles — and is naturally a little more expensive. If you can find a good fare to National, absolutely take it. Otherwise, just make sure you factor ground transportation when you see that really great fare on sidestep.com (our favorite travel site).

    (Oh, the airports, metro stations and all other points of wedding interest are on our interactive google map of wedding weekend event locations if you haven’t made it there by now already…)

    We’ll give some more logistics suggestions as we get a little closer. Meanwhile, if you have any questions post us a comment or email us at [email address].

  • Travel: Vegas at Night, Las Vegas, Nevada

    Ah, Vegas.

    So, it’s a bit of a long story … but once upon a time, I worked for a progressive web consulting firm called the Carol | Trevelyan Strategy Group. We were a mission-driven organization, with nary a business degree among us. The type of company where people willing worked obscene hours for “the cause,” and where management was willing to go without a pay check in the lean months.

    Started in the early 1990s, CTSG created the first campaign web site (one of the California Senators) and by the end we had worked with just about every major progressive organization, cause and politician in U.S.

    Unfortunately, our luck started to run out when the non-profit technology industry started to consolidate in 2004. By the 17th of March 2005, we had been gobbled up by a soul-less, publically traded corporation called Kintera.

    Ironically, it turns out that our non-profit clients just weren’t willing to subsidize the cost of our doing business progressively … and we should all be honest that non-profits are just about the most ardent capitalists around when it comes to minimizing their budgetary spending.

    Anyway, we were in the planning stages of a company retreat when the St. Patricks Day massacre occured. For many, the purchse turned out to be little more than an excerize in pink-slip avoidance, so it was of little shock that something as expensive and touchy-feel as a staff retreat was cancelled.

    While the 2005 retreat was “lost,” a group of us are getting together in Vegas this weekend to make up for lost time and retreats. First step was meeting by the Bellagio fountains at midnight. How very “Ocean’s Eleven” of us.

    Explore the Photo Set:
    Vegas at Night, Las Vegas, Nevada

  • Wedding: Bridesmaids Dresses, oh my!

    Aloe

    Bordeaux

    Paprika

    Peacock

    Dark Red

    Aubergine

    So, dear reader, I am starting to get perilously out of my element, so please give me a wide berth as we discuss things … well, female.

    With most of the major decisions done (church, reception) or pending (rehearsal dinner) or at least started (wedding dress, band, photographer) The Lady Sparkler and her bridesmaids have turned attention to the bridesmaids’ dresses.

    My one request in this wedding journey was for bridesmaids’ dresses with large, taffeta “rear-end” bows. You know the ones that you see in the 80s wedding movies, where the bow sits right on the rump, and takes up the whole small of the back.

    Not surprisingly, the ideas was not warmly received. I believe that visionaries are never truly appreciated in their lifetimes.

    The Lady Sparkler and “the maids” have pretty much settled on Aria Bridesmaids as the place to get the dresses. Even my “groomsmaid” is on board … While I was pushing to put Chrissy the groomsmaid in a tuxedo, everybody else thought it would be more “traditional” for her to wear a dress.

    *Sigh.*

    The store they are looking at is online, let’s you pick a color, mails you a sample dress to try-on, and then makes all of the wedding’s dresses out of the same bolt of fabric so they match. All styles of dresses are in play (because they all use the same fabric) so everybody can buy the cut and style of dress that best suits them.

    Lots of the dresses have sashes, but no “rump” bows.

    The main focus (right now) is on color, because the color of the dresses is the next step to deciding the color of the flowers … which is the last, big, un-started project. The finalists are shown above. No word yet, but my money is on the Peacock or the Aubergine. Fabric swatches will be exchanged over Thanksgiving, so more info next month.

  • Wedding: Dueling Dinners


    Beacon Bar and Grill

    Local 16

    We have been scoping D.C. restaurants for the last month or two, working with a very patient, and gracious pair of friends (Sue and Jeremy) to find a couple rehearsal dinner spots that here located close to the church, that served good food, and had space for a private party.

    We are under this strange delusion that we might actually be able to walk from the rehearsal dinner, to the church, to the reception site (which doubles as the hotel) and back. Not sure it will happen, but that’s the goal.

    To make matters more interesting, my family has a strong background in dining (my father was a Chef for a number of years) and so mediocre food does not pass by an Parker unnoticed.

    Finally, D.C. isn’t exactly known for large spaces with plenty of private rooms for parties and events. Especially large spaces with private rooms that don’t look like the basement of the Hinkley Hilton.

    Anyway, what would be the point of the story if there was no happy ending? Probably to make you suffer as we have suffered, but fortunately that isn’t the case… Sue, Jeremy, The Lady Sparkler and I have two possibilities for rehearsal dinner spots that are looking promising.

    The first is the Beacon Bar & Grill, which is located at 1615 Rhode Island (the hotel/reception is one block west). BBG serves what it calls “Fresh Contemporary American Cuisine,” and (in some sort of incestuous irony) plucked its current executive Chef from 15 RIA (our receptions site) about a year ago.

    We took my parents her for a test dinner just this week (my mom was in town for her birthday) and the quality of the food and the service was just great. I had the pasta, and The Lady Sparkler had the fish. The place was a little empty for a Saturday night, but how many restaurants shut down in their first year of business anyway?!? (For the record, 25% in the first year. 60% within three years.)

    The other restaurant in the running is Local 16, a local, slow food, organic restaurant which is about four blocks up 16th street. We will give that a try in January.

  • Wedding: Done, aaaaand done (almost).

    So, our “come to Jesus” conversation work. Well, it worked if Jesus was a Capitalist and signed contracts for wedding reception locations (after he was done turning water into wine, I presume). Anyway, we have inked a deal for our reception, though no word on free heavenly booze as of yet.

    And the winner is…
    http://www.15ria.com/

    The reception will take place at 11:30 am on Saturday, October 6th, 2007. Eggs, bacon, made-to-order omelets, champagne, wine, bloody Marys … We are still negotiating loaves and fishes, but (while signing a reception contract is indeed miraculous) we aren’t expecting the second coming quite yet.

    We also finalized the paperwork for the Church, though I am honestly not sure what we are waiting on … let me check. This just in, we were waiting on me to say yes. Which I just did. So the contract for the Church will be turned in first thing in the morning.

    There IS one proviso. The church has this event called a “pre-Cana” weekend … which entails a group of soon-to-be-newlyweds getting together for a weekend of bonding, sharing their religion views and helpful tips on being married. This sounds like a wonderful experience for the more “expressive” portion of the Protestant religious spectrum, but sounds like cruel and unusual punishment for an Episcopalian. We are checking to see if what the refer to as “traditional wedding counseling” is available for those marrying more “inwardly focused” (ie. lily-livered) men.

    It also looks like we are just about set on a group rate for a block of hotel rooms. The reception location (15 RIA) is in the Hilton Doubletree, and it looks like we can have as many rooms as we want for $129 a night (which is a pretty fantastic rate for D.C.).

    T-minus 389 days and counting. Next up is the Photographer, Florist and … hmm … something else that will have to wait for another day.

  • Wedding: And now for something completely different …

    Bet you thought we forgot about updating the blog. Sadly, not the case. Instead, we did exactly what all couples with 18 months to plan a wedding do: we procrastinated for two and a half months … and then changed our minds.

    About a week ago — when it was 411 days and counting — The Lady Sparkler and I had what we like to refer to as a “come to Jesus” conversation. In it, she admitted that she had some doubts about Clifton, and would really like to think about an option (a “Plan B” if you will) within the DC city limits.

    I said, “Aww shucks sweetie pie, half the reason we had decided on Clifton was that you liked it so much … If that’s not the case, why don’t we start looking around for options in DC!” (For the record, that was pretty close to what I said … 30 minutes of “inconsequential minutia” has been edited for length.)

    The first lego in the “Plan B” construction was already in place. The Lady Sparkler is a member of the historic Foundry Methodist Church at 16th and P, and was keen to try and pull off a wedding there. In fact, Foundry is the home church of the minister that she was going to cajole into doing our service in Clifton, so it actually simplified a step.

    The church is stunning inside (and recently renovated!) Seating 450 of our closest friends, it has a soaring dome and some of the best stained glass in DC. It is also arguably the most progressive church in DC, which means we can get in and out without complaining about the sermon (which is apparently something noteworthy if you are a Democrat in Texas, or so I have heard.)

    We did a little research over the weekend, and the church was available … if only we could find some place to do an brunch — it’s remarkably hard to find breakfast places in DC, but that is another tale — with eggs & bacon nearby! (Stick with me, there is a happy ending.)

    Over the course of two days, The Lady Sparkler did some research, found a place half a block from the church, organized (& executed) a small drinking expedition to scout the location and then setup a meeting with the Director of Catering (and yours truly) for this past Thursday. BTW, someone in this story was once an event planner … you make the call.

    The restaurant — 15 RIA — is located at 1515 Rhode Island Avenue (where DO they get those crazy names?!?) It is a posh, trendy little place best known for its modern decor, great “Continental Cuisine” and it’s head chef … who was just plucked from The Greenbrier resort in White Sulfer Springs (the fancy resort with the underground Congress bunker).

    The reception space was beautiful (and recently renovated! see courtyard, indoor pictures on the right) and the menu was even better … French Toast with Warm Maple Syrup, Applewood Smoked Bacon and Sausage, Penne with Rock Shrimp and Tomato Pesto, fresh cooked Omelets and Eggs any style, etc. It turns out the place is actually the entire ground floor of a Hilton Doubletree hotel, which means in this scenario the church, hotel and reception place are literally right on top of each other.

    So, there we stand. It’s a pretty safe to say that this plan, formerly known as “Plan B,” is now the top choice and Clifton (whose church STILL won’t let us know if we can get married there in 2007) has now been relegated to the second tier.

    404 days to go, and we’ll keep you posted.

  • Wedding: Clifton, Virginia

    We spent the morning in Clifton, Virginia (map, two sites) looking at potential wedding and receptions sites. A friend of mine from work got married in the town, and absolutely loved it. It’s a tiny town (population: 185) about 25 miles west of Washington D.C. (about 15 miles south of Dulles Airport) with a very strong small-town America feel.


    IMG_0315.CR2
    Originally uploaded by evancparker.

    The only reception place we visited here was The Hermitage Inn, which seems to rule the town as far as weddings are concerned. Spent an hour talking to Serge, the French-speaking owner of the establishment, and was really impressed by the stunning decor and the strong brunch menu (still planning on a morning wedding so far).

    The prices seemed affordable (for Washington D.C. at least, where everything is relative) and they were clear for the two months (September, October 2007) that we are leaning towards. It’s definitely at the top of (what is currently) a very short, short list.


    IMG_0305.CR2
    Originally uploaded by evancparker.

    Immediately behind the Hermitage is the Clifton Presbyterian Church… and by “immediately behind,” I mean “shares parking lot with.”

    While neither of us are Presbyterian (Methodist and Episcopalian, respectively, but both seem to be AWOL in Clifton) it doesn’t really matter, because they are B.Y.O.P. (bring your own priest) to non-members.

    The church is under-construction (well, renovation actually) and have told the lady sparkler that they aren’t accepting reservations until September of 2006. This makes us a little nervous, because it would sorta suck to pick a reception place in Clifton, and then get married at Foundry United Methodist in D.C. We weren’t able to get in (again, the construction) but will swing by later in the process, assuming we are as infatuated with Clifton as we currently are.


    IMG_0308.CR2
    Originally uploaded by evancparker.

    There is one other church option in Clifton, called Clifton Primitive Baptist Church. The church has a strong cultural history. Built in 1869, it was the first African American church in Fairfax County. The church hasn’t had regular services there since 1957, but was renovated in the last couple of years for use in weddings and special occasions.

    It’s small (even by Clifton standards) with 1 aisle, 10 or 11 pews per side, seating 4 or 5 to a pew. By my math, that’s 80 to 110 rear ends, and not a whole lot of room for breathing and such. On the other hand, the lady sparkler and I are trying very hard to break the land-speed record of my best friend from W&M (Chrissy, with a svelte 22 minute wedding ceremony) so if we have to stack you all in like lumber, at least it will only be for a few minutes.

    The good news is that the church is (primatively) gorgeous, available for the whole day, and we don’t have to compete with a congregation for attention.

    One thing that is good the WHOLE way round is that all three locations are within an easy walking distance of each other. This means no limo (yay!) and no problems with parking. Not to mention, all three places are within 30 minutes of home and 15 minutes of a major (and cheap) airport. Finally, there are 25 hotels within 9 miles (Manassas, Centreville) of the town.

    We’ll keep you posted, but T-minus 524 days and things are looking pretty okay.

  • Happy Young Christians

    I left my car at Greenbelt metro last night (long story) and had to go retrieve it this evening. Friends dropped me off a couple blocks FROM Gallery Place to make the trip. I noticed some event just broke at the MCI Center, which sits atop of the metro station, and I started hustling toward the metro entrance, to get in before the crowd.

    As I approached, I realized that this wasn”t just a normal MCI Center event. This was something special. Jamming the sidewalk, and spilling over onto the street, were thousands of overweight suburban soccer moms, with feathered hair and “Property of Jesus XXXL” t-shirts. I was entering the Metro system with 10,000 happy Christian females.

    I skittered along the edges of the crowd, to see if I could get ahead. At the top of the escalator, there was a GROUP organizing around its leader. Instead of holding up a placard with the group”s name, or a colorful umbrella, this leader was holding up a Christian fish symbol stapled to a paint stirrer.

    I decided to take the stairs, deciding in my head that this would be quicker. Turns out that wasn”t exactly the case. After taking 5 minutes to get down 2 flights of stairs, I discovered what was holding up the group. One of the conference attendees, on metal crutches and with leg braces, had decided to bypass the elevator and the escalator in ORDER to take the stairs. It was definitely shaping up to be a long evening.

    At the entrance leading INTO the Metro platform, there were lines about 40-50 people deep coming out each of the 20 turnstiles. There were another couple hundred people at the station”s fare kiosks as well. Once again demonstrating my lack of respect for tourists, I skittered along the edge of room, and worked my way in behind a happy Christian mother and her happy Christian family trying to get through the turnstile.

    The youngest daughter”s fare card was returning the “stop, take this card to the station manager” error, that means there isn”t enough money on the card or the magnetic strip is dead. Her not-so-happy Christian mother pulled her out of the way, and pushed her elder daughter through instead. While the turnstile was still open FROM daughter number one, she than tried to push the 12 year old through. The doors closed on the little girl, boxing her in the stomach.

    After trying the errant card again, the mother turned to the girl, obviously disgusted at the inconvenience, pointed at the station manager kiosk (which is 50 feet away, on the other side of 10,000 happy Christian females) and told her to work it out with the station manager.

    The 12 year old (and I for that matter) looked at her like she was crazy, after which the mother (again, obviously disgusted that the girl can”t to anything for herself) snatched the bad card out of her hand, shoved the little girl through on her own card, and started barreling through the crowd at the station manager. Fortunately, or unfortunately, I can”t tell you what happened next. I went through the turnstile, and started wadding down to the platform.

    As you might expect, the platform was packed, and the train I needed didn”t SHOW for 18 minutes. When it did show, it was packed. Nothing really bad happened over the next 45 minutes… besides the previously disclosed overweight happy Christian soccer moms with feathered hair. And considering they were happy Christians, they did not seem particularly happy.

    Once in the parking lot at Greenbelt, I sprinted to my car, not wanting to get caught up in the exit queue. And it worked, sorta. I was number three in line (behind a white mini-van, and a red hummer, both with Jesus Fishes attached to their backsides) at the left most exit lane, when things started (or more correctly, continued) to go horribly awry.

    Turns out the White Mini-van didn”t have a SmartTrip card to use, and she was in a SmartTrip only lane. So she sat there. For a while. Finally, the attendant to the other lane abandoned his post to see what was up. Now, no one is going through either of the lanes. At this point, each exit lane was backed up with 15-20 cars.

    The attendant talked to the driver of the mini-van, and it turned out that she not only didn”t have a SmartTrip card, but she didn”t have any money at all. So, she got out of her car, and started filling out a “I don”t have money” form on the hood of her car. This, apparently, was the last straw for the happy Christian female in the Hummer.

    At this point, each of the lines were 30-40 cars deep, and the Hummer has about two feet on either side of her bumper to begin executing a three point turn. Now, where she is going, I had no clue. And for those of you who don”t know, Hummer”s can”t DO three point turns in four feet of space.

    Somewhere around point 29 in her three point turn, the happy Christian Hummer paused, and assessed the situation. Turns out, she knew exactly where she was going: there was about a 3 foot green embankment that leads back to the parking lot, and in turn to other exits FROM the station. Right as she was reving her engine for the onslaught, the previously stuck Mini-van got her stuff in gear, and finally proceeded through the exit.

    As you might guess, at this point, the Hummer is 90 degrees removed FROM the exit, and was blocking up the works so that neither she nor I can get out. For the record, the now 50 cards behind me couldn”t get out either. Over the next several minutes, the happy Christian Hummer executed another 29 point turn to get herself oriented properly once again. After fumbling with her SmartTrip card, she finally exited and let the rest of us do the same.

    I am not sure there is a moral to the story, except perhaps that overweight happy Christian soccer moms with feathered hair who derive happiness FROM evangelical Christian conferences don”t appear to be very successful in deriving said happiness. Maybe, just maybe, the need to fix something a little deeper?