DC Day 1 - Nationals Baseball - Feel the Excitement

Here's a quick recap of day 1 in DC:

- 4:20 AM is WAY too early for anything, especially getting up to get on a plane.
- Random made up word of the day: bobulate. Meghan told me that I was all out of sorts while we were waiting for our 9 am flight (I call it sleep deprived). She said I was all discombobulated, and that I should take a walk around the terminal, until I was "bobulated".
- The walk worked, oddly enough.
- Commuter flights are my new favourite way to travel. Nothing like an empty airplane for a 1 hour flight that lands 10 minutes early.
- I hear Vegas was taking bets on whether Meghan would grab the diet coke cans that they gave us on the plane and recycle them when we got home. Degenerates everywhere were disappointed to hear that she didn't.
- Navy Yard, Washington, District of Columbia. From the looks of it, it used to be, well, a rough neighborhood. To say the least. And its going to be a fairly nice area in a couple years right now. But while we're here? Its a bit of a mix... brand new Courtyard where we're staying, with the ballpark (more later) virtually right next door. Yet its still a bit sketchy. Yeah, I'm still triple deadbolting the door...
- In all of our geekdomly genius, we broke out the phones to look for a place to eat near the White House. We decided we'd take a quick walk around the WH to start out our trip, but we needed lunch... and before I could come up with anything, Meghan found Old Ebbitt Grill. Come to find out, it wasn't exactly a tourist-showing-up-in-jeans-and-shorts type of place... but the food was very good, and they didn't rush us out the door to make room for Capitol Hill's movers and shakers (ok, i just wanted to say that.) Overall I give it an A- for food/presentation/snootiness of the maître d'.
- Walked around the White House. Its still white. I found it amusing that there are hardly any tourists at the fence at the back of the building, which provides a great view at a reasonable distance, and yet there are hoards of tourists out front, where you have to wedge yourself in for a much more distant photo op. Strange.
- World War II Memorial, very well done. Expansive, tranquill, water fountainy.
- Korean War Memorial. More peaceful, more tranquill, kind of creepy with the 125% of real life size soldier statues. But still, very nice.
- Vietnam War Memorial. Wall. Really, we've got to stop getting ourselves into so many wars. Also, do people still rub the names of the fallen onto paper? Didn't see anyone doing it today, but I did when I was a kid (back then that was about the only war memorial the city had...). Can I get a verdict on this?
- I understand not putting Metro stations underneath all of the important buildings... but what is the point of having a subway if you can't get to it when you are sick of walking?
- One other note on the subways... Boston should look into the creepy dark carvernous approach to train stations. Very cool. I forget how much the T sucks until I go anywhere else.
- Nationals Ballpark. Wow. I mean, Fenway is great, but WOW. Tix are cheap (beer, dogs and the like are still pricey enough to necessitate a second mortgage though), and the stadium is just beautiful. I hear that they'll get a big league team in there one day. Wait, what? Oh, right, that was a National League team out there... riiiight.
- Gotta love any oportunity to boo Manny.
- Sad moment of the night, after moving seats a couple of times, and each time Meghan dutifly grabed and moved them for me, I forgot the Nationals commerative beer cups that we got with our hot dogs. I probably could have gone back for them, but we were already half way down from the top level (oh yeah, that's WAY up there in these new fangled stadiums). I guess I won't be able to show off my Nats pride at home.

Next up: Congressional follies, Nat Geo, and attempting to find lunch at a place that doesn't employ a wait staff of 200.

Blame Canada

so I suppose you wonder why you haven't heard from me in a while. I won't make excuses. This summer, I just suck at posting. And I do apologize. But there are just so many things going on.
Ok, well maybe not that many things, but the olympics are on, and we all know that I was a little disturbed that I almost missed the 2002 Olympiad, so you best be sure that I'm not going to miss this one.
So what is coming soon? Well I'm sure i'm are I'll have something to say about the iPhone, on which I'm writing this post, as well as the upcoming pats season. Stay tuned.

Confessions of a Coffee Addict

I sometimes find the conversations I have to have with Dunkin Donuts employees to be the most unbelievable experiences of my life. This may not seem like a big deal to you, but I quite frankly enjoy (read: freak out if I don't get) my daily coffee. I've probably written about all of this before, but in an effort to be a little more "healthy" (whatever that is) I've cut back to only one medium coffee a day. So I'm a little short on brain power. Stay with me though, it gets funny, I promise.
Meghan and I went up to Dunkin Donuts after hitting a couple buckets of golf balls on Sunday. As she details, it was about 200º outside, with 150% humidity (these numbers are slightly rounded). I needed my coffee.
As usual, something had to go pear shaped.

I drove up to the seemingly innocuous speakerbox device, and ordered in the least confusing way possible:
"I'll have a medium iced, extra skim, two splenda". DD - anything else? "Yeah, a medium iced coconut the same way". (I always managed to suppress the gagging noise that reflexively comes to me when I order Meghan a coconut coffee, but I mention it here for effect).
I'm beckoned by the disembodied voice to hither to bring myself to the magically slidey window.
Now, Meghan's dad has a term for our order - he says we order coffee with lots of "words" in it. This may be true in a sense (yes, I've used the term "iced mocha latte lite" before, but never have I used the word moccachino while ordering), but the kind orange shirted folks at DD never seem to be frazzled by too many words (just a certain lack of understanding of the english language as a whole, in some instances). And as I mentioned, it was hot - sunny, muggy, nasty hot. So I had my sunglasses on.
Yet as I pull up, I notice that one coffee, perched temptingly on the ledge like a warm apple pie cooling in the breeze, is regular extra-skim infused-colored, that is to say it is mostly dark with a hint of milk, and the other one is startlingly only-Michael-Jackson-is-whiter-than-the-cream-in-this-coffee white. I stare at the girl who's about to charge me for an erroneously made coffee and ask her what is in each - she looks down and reads the crayola chicken-scratch on the side and informs me "this one is the coconut (the one on her right) with skim and splenda, the other one is skim and splenda".
Meghan almost had to jump in at that point, either to speak with the girl, take the wheel, or both. As Lewis Black would put it, "the left side of my brain looked at the right side of my brain, and said 'its cold in here... and we may die".
I recovered within moments (I realized that Meghan was having the same brain issue, or was trying her hardest not to laugh in the poor dumb girl's face, I'm not sure which), and informed her that there was NO WAY the coffee on her left, which I'm fairly certain was white enough to reflect 99.7% of the visible light spectrum, was made with skim milk.
She looked down. It was as if I had given her a new pair of eyes, as she realized at once that I was correct. And I would forgive her her transgressions, save that she had had to look down and discern everything about the maker's handwriting, written on a transparent plastic cup, but didn't find a way for point A to connect to point B. Again, these are conversations I shouldn't be having. All I want is my freaking coffee... now.

Big Day

So its 9:28 ET and Meghan just pointed out that it was a big day.

And then I realized, wow, it kind of was:

7:30 - Up, but not to happy about it.
8:15 - On the bike for 7.2 miles of Cape Cod.
11:00 - Meghan and I took the boat out, just the two of us, up to Falmouth harbor and back. Nice, nice ride.
1:30 - Lunch, pool at Grandma Dot's
4:30 - Meghan & I hit up Falmouth Country Club and walked nine holes.
7:30 - Dinner in power-less East Falmouth - steak and shrimp on the grill.

Ok, so it doesn't look like much when I put it in a post, but that was a LONG day, and a very very good weekend day, and the power is back on, so I figured I owed you, my curiously loyal reader, an update.

So what's on the docket for tomorrow? I don't know if we can top that... but anything to take my mind off of work on Monday would be great!

Road Closed

There are times I really, really, really hate Canton. It doesn't happen often, as a) I don't spend much time there, b) its a relatively nice place and c) it isn't Stoughton (ok, Stoughton isn't that bad, but you have to agree it rolls off the tongue kind of funny). Last night I was furious with Canton though, because of its sheer stupidity.
As we were driving down Washington St, Meghan and I came up to some road work that has been going on since about 1998. Most nights, I'm coming home from work, so this road work is on the other side of the street and only inconveniences me so far as to force me way to the right of the rather narrow lane, in order to avoid hitting a construction worker or police officer.
Well last night was a little different. I had to go TO work at 9:30 at night, to write a couple last minute emails. We're down the Cape for five days, and I had a final exam at Brandeis last night, so I rather hastily ran out of work. Heading to work, we ran into the construction, and a rather helpful sign:

ROAD CLOSED

Not, DETOUR, with some helpful hints as to where to go. Not that I don't know Canton that well, but I don't just travel in random 1930's neighborhoods for no reason either. So I made my first attempt to go through the neighborhood and loop back to Washington St, only to hit Washington St. right where another police officer was standing, only all to glad to tell me that I couldn't turn in the direction that I wanted to go, waving his little orange stick and telling me to turn left.
Ugh. I hate Canton. So I went back to the original road I had turned onto, traveled a good mile to a mile and a half out of my way, and then finally made it to the highway.
Is it that hard for one of the 5 police officers that manage to scam detail off of this job to maybe put up a couple detour signs? How can you just close a road? I'm pretty sure in most civilized towns, cities and nations, they give you a hint as to the best way around.


(Red is the road closure, blue is my original attempt to get around it, green is my eventual route. Its a complete coincidence that its labeled with green dots, because going all the way around because they don't know how to close a road properly isn't very "green" at all)

Who Needs a TV to watch TV?

I vowed, solemnly, to myself, that I would take some time this weekend to actually sit down and post a few thoughts.

That was before I found out that they added all six seasons of Highlander to hulu.com. Wow. All I can say is, well, wow. I guess you get the short end of the stick on this one... because you know, there can be only one... and by that I mean only one thing I do online at a time.

But on that note, at what point do we just get rid of the TVs? You can watch all of the seasons of Lost @ ABC, Family Guy and Colbert @ Hulu, and I'm pretty sure that crazy Japanese game show is online as well (and yes, I'm downright giddy about that one, and I'd be sad I didn't see the premier, but, well, you know, its online).

I don't have anything else to say, 'cause I have to go watch Highlander. But I'll do my best to revisit this non-video web site once or twice again this weekend.

The Internet. Short for Idiots with Keyboards

Steve Jobs had me at hello. I'm not kidding. I've been infatuated with the iphone since it was announced, and now that its price point is dropping, its service is getting better, and our Verizon contract is just about up, I'm very seriously considering getting one (er, a couple).
Here's the thing; they're coming out in less than a month, and its almost impossible to get info directly from Apple or AT&T... you know, important stuff like how much will a plan cost, can you get a family plan, ect. I don't particularly like AT&T but I'm willing to sacrifice my dislike for a snazzy iphone. I still can't abide their website though, with 3ish weeks to go until release they should provide plenty more info.
So what do I do? I go to the tech sites (my fav Engadget, or gizmodo) to see if they have any insight to my not so pressing questions.
What annoys most about having to do this though is the comments that are involved... half of the posters HATE Apple, and the other half have filed papers to be adopted by Jobs. They're fighting is annoying and petty; its beyond reproach and I'm disgusted that I bother to read it.
But then again, why do I bother to read it? As always, the lesson is that the internet is full of good information, bad information, but mostly a bunch of idiots. Ugh. And I just want to know how much text messaging will cost.

17

Wow - what a night.

A lot more entertaining and interesting things will be said in the various corners of the internets, so I'll simply add my favorite sentimental moment of the night.

It got a little dusty in the O'Girard household right after midnight. After 2 minutes of being harassed by the ESPN reporter shortly after winning, Kevin Garnett spun around and found himself hugging Bill Russell. Garnett's words:

"I got my own now. I hope we did you proud"

Again - wow.