There are bars on our windows, which seems like a bad thing to some people, but it’s pretty typical for a ground-level apartment in DC. They’re tasteful bars, slender and black, twisted into heart-like swirl shapes where they meet in the middle. I’m sitting here on the couch watching a blizzard pour down, framed by those window bars. Feeling all warm, safe, and fuzzy in the grand scheme of things — my kitchen is full of non-perishable food, so I don’t have to go anywhere I don’t want to.

no comments :: read more...

My car came back from the body shop yesterday. She’s still a little scuffed up (most notably some scratches on the one door’s inside plastic bits) but the real damage is repaired and she’s a LOT cleaner than she was before. If my parents haven’t forwarded these pictures to you yet, I got attacked by a Giant Metal Thing:

no comments :: read more...

Astorians are few and far between in DC (at least the Oregon variety), which makes it that much nicer to see a familiar face. Luke, one of my dear friends from high school, has been enjoying a great deal of musical success lately, and I shared a taste of his good luck last night when his band performed at the Black Cat, just down the street from my apartment. Brendan, Frannie and I went down for the show (which lived up to glowing reviews) and even got a chance to chat Luke up (which warmed my heart), so it was an all-around good night. It was a brief reunion, they’re off to Philadelphia and beyond, but it was enough to recharge my nostalgia banks for a little while.

1 comment :: read more...

It’s strange to think how American my life is right now, at least compared with the leisurely day-to-day pace in Norway last year. I wake up early to run on a treadmill before wolfing down some Kix or, if I was slow at the gym, grabbing an apple on my way out the door. I work from sometime before 9am to sometime around 6:30pm on an average day, though it gets later when projects are due. There’s a lunch break in there, usually microwaved leftovers and a free diet Pepsi from the office fridge, but I usually eat it at my desk. The commute is an hour each way, so I only eat dinner before 9pm by the grace of a supportive boyfriend, who does most of the cooking after his own long day at school (or summer vacation, as the current case may be). I wrap it up with a movie or a readthrough of the news, and then I do my best to sleep.

1 comment :: read more...

We planned this weekend’s trip to the Air and Space Museum Annex a few days beforehand, we couldn’t have anticipated the coincidence. We’d been wanting to go and we had errands to run in Northern Virginia so we set Saturday afternoon aside. Even just after the accident the irony didn’t sink in, not until I was there, surrounded by every possible variation of airplane, from that nuke-dropping superfortress and the SR-71 Blackbird to human-sized stunt planes and dissected engines and gliders and flimsy prototype helicopters and the practice space shuttle Enterprise. The point was hammered home with no pretense of subtlety when my phone rang, just in front of the showcase on Japanese stewardesses. For the next ten minutes, as I wandered under a three-dimensional puzzle of suspended airplanes, Mom described the scene on the docks as they pulled Bill’s plane out of the Columbia River.

1 comment :: read more...