So iTunes Music Store retrieved 50 versions of “Anarchy in the U.K.,” but none of them were the one I heard in the Thai restaurant last night—sort of a warbly singer-songwriter chick with piano, Judy Tenuta having an argument with Tori Amos. But there was a karaoke version, and here’s where I had my epiphany. I would totally karaoke “Anarchy in the U.K.”
Category: Like Life
On deck: 4
Yes, this is what I’m doing instead of a more constructive use of my leisure time, like preparing for next week’s auditions: snapping pix of my bookshelves. I’m saving the Jonathan Kern as a memento until my onsite gig wraps up. The Thoreau is perhaps ambitious. I’ve been through Walden and I’m curious about the other books in the LOA edition. John Adams and the Therberge and Therberge via the free book shelves at work; Morton via Mattie; Sir Gawain via the Strand. The John Brunner is one of the few sf titles from high school that I’ve held onto; since it’s set in 2010, I thought it would be good to find out how well he predicted. The Chinua Achebe is there because it just feels good to say “Chinua Achebe.”
How would Elizabeth take this?
A well-packed path leads past the partly iced-over lake to the shops. The Safeway and CVS are open, the Subway and Dinner Zen are not. No New York Times to be found at any location. South Lakes Drive is showing one lane each way of wet pavement, and one lane’s worth of slush and pack.
Lots of downed limbs from small trees; the shrubs in the little frisbee field where Leta took my headshot are pretty much clobbered. The most spectacular is this two-tree pileup involving a pine and a Norway Maple. Between the snowstorms and Isabel, there’ll hardly be any Norways left in the cluster.
Ya hadda be there
Overnight drifting blew the stack of snow along my fence rail into this curving drapery (distracting mulberry twigs in the foreground for scale). Alas, it didn’t persist long in the morning sun. I hope the holly does better. You can just see about six inches of it behind the fence; it’s literally doubled over with a load of frozen stuff.
Around the corner
On a usual workday (that it, when there isn’t two feet of snow on the ground) I have a ten-minute walk from my Orange Line station to my client’s facility on Massachusetts Avenue, N.W. It’s a wedge-shaped merger of two buildings bounded by Mount Vernon Square and K Street. If the weather is bad, I can transfer to the Red Line to get to Gallery Place, and save myself some exposure to the wet, but most days are pleasant enough that the transfer isn’t worth the wait.
Google Maps draws the usual path I take, but since I need to make a diagonal across the grid, I actually have a variety of paths to choose from. And my usual strategy is to start walking north, past the sinister looking buildings that house the Voice of America, and past the doorman at the Marriott who is out in all weathers. When I get to an intersection, if the light is in my favor, I cross the street, and if it’s not, I turn (or cross in the other direction). This means that I don’t spend much time at all waiting for lights, and that I end up taking a few different paths over the course of the week. So sometimes I follow H Street all the way down to 7th; sometimes I cut across the frozen steppes of the parking lot on the old convention center site (don’t be fooled by the building outline on the Google Map). Returning in the evening, I follow the same strategy, so some days I’m just retracing my steps, and others I’m all the way down on G Street past the collection of colorful characters hanging out in front of the public library. Evenings I often see the wait staff at Bibiana seated in the dining room for a brief confab before the dinner rush—this is often the only spot where I have to wait for a light change.
There are just a couple of path segments I avoid. I find that morning crossings of 9th Street on the south side of the intersection (the downstream side, if you will) are extra dangerous: I’ve nearly been hit a couple of times by drivers zipping through a left turn into 9th. (Frankly, walking anywhere near Mount Vernon Square can be risky: I see drivers snapping off illegal rush hour left turns at 7th and Massachusetts nearly every day.) And there’s too much evening foot traffic on the blocks of 7th north of the Metro station, so I almost always slide around that.
If I feel like stopping at Starbucks on the way in, I have options: there are at least four within the 12th/New York/K/7th/G pentangle, including one in the brutish superblock of Techworld Plaza.
But the best part of my commute is the countdown walk signals at every corner. A signal that’s showing 20 seconds of green in the crossing direction, for instance, tells me I shouldn’t wait for the change, but should continue down the block. But if it’s only 3 or 4 seconds, I’ll wait. Something I’ve become more scrupulous about is not starting to cross once the red hand comes up. I have found that the D.C. signals are well-calibrated to intersection sizes, and if the hand is up, I need to move fast to get across before the change. The thing is, the street is full of drivers trying to squeeze their crossings in before the light changes, too. And if I’m running across and not watching out for them, I’m going to get pancaked one day.
Still smiling
Here is Leta standing somewhere toward the end of a huge entrance queue at the California Academy of Sciences, perky as always. The San Francisco museums were aswarm with patrons on this Tuesday of the inter-holiday period.
Phone home
Last one out the office on Christmas Eve. They’re moving my workspace early next month, so this snapshot will serve as memento.
My year in cities, 2009
I got out a bit more than last year, albeit more for chores than pleasure. Overnight stays this year:
- Sacramento, Calif., and suburbs (3 trips)
- Brooklyn, N.Y.
- Berkeley County, W. Va.
Slow melt
The sun did indeed come out again. In fact, I’m waiting on it to work on a stubborn icy patch on the sidewalk between the townhouse rows; this is the place where the northwest wind whips through from Saskatchewan. At the middle school behind the cluster, a maintenance guy was hard at it with a Bobcat clearing the fall.
Avoid the brown stuff
Live from Snowpocalypse ’09: I shoveled out about a foot of accumulation in front of my house, and the snow is still falling. The hour-to-hour forecast says we’re going to get another jolt this evening.
Late-arriving post card from New York
Leta and I visited her cousin and various family in New York for the Thanksgiving holiday. It was a trip of initialisms: Sam explained all about TBIs; we rode the new R-160s, which are running on the Broadway line under a pilot program, which line Leta has taken to calling the NRBQ line. We found a nifty organic eatery in Brooklyn Heights called Siggy’s (Aliens eat free!); brunch with Dennis at Junior’s.
Museum stops for the Lower East Side Tenement Museum and the new Rubin Museum of Art in Chelsea: works of art performed for the removal of physical or mental obstacles.
Various gawping at the streetscape.
On deck: 3
George Plimpton’s hockey book is back in print; an old Dickens from the basement shelves that I never got around to reading; an Angela Carter that I didn’t know about; and this seems to be the year of Edna Ferber around here.
Out of the garage
Maybe a little too close to home: Jon Mooallem checks out self-storage culture in suburban California:
“My parents were Depression babies,” [Tom] Litton told me, “and what they taught me was, it’s the accumulation of things that defines you as an American, and to throw anything away was being wasteful.” The self-storage industry reconciles these opposing values: paying for storage is, paradoxically, thrifty.
On top of the dust
Leta, where’re your shoes?
Takeaways: 4
Some snaps from my recent trip to Sacramento and suburbs to move my mother into her new place. Mom wasn’t fazed by using my mobile to leave a message for her friend Priscilla.
Doing what she loves doing (and is dang good at), my aunt Takeko (my mother’s brother’s widow), cutting melon for breakfast. At the end of the week, I used Taki’s guest room as an operations base. She’s camera-shy, like me.
This was the end state to which Rita and I worked for six days: an empty apartment, carpets vacuumed but hardly blot-free.
In the neighborhood, the old Tower Records store on Watt will reopen as a thrift store next month. The Gottschalks down the block is also empty. But the staff at the Starbucks just north of here are the friendliest I’ve ever found.