Pics from the Europe trip

Miraculously avoiding serious travel snafus surrounding the volcanic ash, we’ve made it back home safe and sound. Lots of good visits with friends and family in Belgium, the Netherlands, and Germany.

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laughing fit

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one busy weekend

A visit from the cousin (and parents) was followed by a visit to the White House for the Easter Egg Roll. It was a madhouse and the first brutally hot sunshine of the year, but still kind of nice to check out Chateau Obama.

And OMG Justin Bieber was so cool.

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new adventures

The latest crop of photos…

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wedding crasher?

Buried in the first column of our wedding ketubah, we just noticed the signature of this character a few weeks ago. And he didn’t even stop to say hello…

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D.C. date

Her cell phone was off.  His laptop was tucked away.  Silver was folded and hitched to a nearby meter.  Off we scurried to Central (pronounced it like zee French would), a fancy schmantzy resaurant at 11th and Pennsylvania Ave, to savor a few hours of delicious togetherness!  [I'm curious what kind of oil Central uses for their fries, though, because they were unusually good, as was the fried fish (guess who got the fish and chips?).]  Not that we spent that much time wondering about the oil, though, because this was, in all likelihood, the last time until post-election that we get to see each other.  A nice breezy walk through the National Sculpture Garden brought us back to the car where she got in her car and on her conference call (two minutes late!) and he got on Silver and pedaled off into across city, into Georgetown, across the Key Bridge, down the beautiful paved Custis bike path in Arlington to hang out with Nate, Jenny and Rowan for an evening.

Tuesday morning it was off to the Tufte workshop on the other side of Arlington (about 5 miles) but wouldn’t'cha know it but there was another bike path (the Washington and Old Dominion trail — we’re talking scenic, along-a-river-in-the-woods most of the way)  that went basically door to door.  Tufte was good in the morning when he was dwelling on specific examples of good historical graphics and keeping his PowerPoint heckling down to a minimum.  But the afternoon got fluffy: he started talking about his new art exhibit and showing weird artsy conceptual movies about things like “escaping flatland” and “wave fields.”  As Justin says, “he’s at his best when he’s not talking about his own work.”  Ate lunch with Nat, a speechwriter who works for a small (<10 employees) firm that was started by some of W.J.C.’s old writers.  He has good stories about writing for famous people but can’t tell any of them b/c they sign big confidentiality agreements (no one wants a ghost writer!).  He asked good questions about biostats, and was curious about the difference in our respective lenses through which we were seeing the Tufte work.

Again, it was off on a bike path (the Mount Vernon trail) back up to the Memorial bridge that brough me to the feet of Abe Lincoln.  A long ride along the mall brough me back to Union Station where I met up with Buckets and Kathy for a quick Wienerschnitzel and Weiswurst (and Oktoberfest Ale!) at a nearby German beergarden.

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in other news,

it’s been a mostly quiet weekend. Paul and I did the PoNY track workout yesterday. A fairly light pre-season set of plyos and a few hard laps around the track, but nothing too bad. This is the first time in years that I’m psyched enough about an ultimate season to be training this early. There’s buzz that a great coed team is going to come together in the DC/Baltimore area. And so far, the men’s team from NYC is still telling me that I can try out for them.

Last weekend, Becca and I hit up the Bodies exhibit. Even though she griped that the textual explanations of things weren’t good enough (they probably weren’t — I didn’t pay that much attention to them), the bodies themselves were pretty captivating. There were some where the nerves were preserved and looked like little pieces of floss hung between the muscles. Others where they’d slice away a knee-cap or a big butt muscle so you could look underneath it. The muscles themselves looked a little like big things of beef jerky. Becca thought that if you saw someone you knew that you’d be able to recognize them. I said that I disagreed except for on the ones where they leave the facial skin intact. Also, the room of fetuses and a pregnant mother were pretty amazing. They had little vials with babies that ranged from a few weeks to a few months old. Even on one of the little babies you could see these little fingers, about the width of a few hairs. Really tiny!

I’ve been starting to tense up about writing this big paper. It’s coming along all right so far (32 pages and counting…) but there’s still a lot of work to do. The first draft is due to Ron in a week.  I’ve started to procrastinate by playing Scrabulous Blitz games (4 minutes long, place as many words as you can on your own board).  It’s hard, but addictive.

The peas finally poked out this weekend.  Looks like the newer seeds from Fedco had a better germination rate than the older ones from last year.

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yumyum

I keep on meaning to put up a little note about all the places we’ve been for date night over the last few months. (Weekly date night, spent at a restaurant and out of the house, was a condition of the recent engagement.)

Last week we went to Helen’s Garden down in Canton.  The first time we had hit up that little O’Donnell Street town square thing.  We got lamb with a good sauce and “organic” salmon.  And a nice bottle of red wine.  Seeing as we have a one-drink limit policy for the driver (Johanna in this case), the wine ended up being maybe a little too much. I thought the food was okay (but probably not worth $25/entree) but Johanna was more upbeat about it.  I was a little disappointed in the veggies, as we both had a simple corn and pea mixture topped with some parm.  Seeing as Helen’s advertises itself as having good local produce stuff, my expectations were high.  But maybe canned corn and peas count as eating “seasonal”.  Hmm.  Anyways, the sauces on both meats were flavorful and good.

Then, on Saturday, Matt took us out to dinner at Marekesh, a sweet Moroccan restaurant in DC where we enjoyed a seven course meal which was punctuated with a tall belly dancer who danced on a table in the middle of the restaurant.  She was pretty amazing — I didn’t even know some of those parts could shake.

Also on the topic of food… Johanna’s started making salsa (thanks to Nick’s housemate’s idea) by just blending a large can of stewed tomatoes with a hot pepper or two, some onion, garlic, and vinegar.  Then, she adds some slightly cooked corn kernels and it’s pretty amazing stuff.  Not quite as good as the fresh fresh stuff made from tomatoes just off the vine, but better than much store-bought stuff too.

And, finally, we planted our first set of peas outdoors yesterday.  It was time, according to Clyde.  I saved some space in the planter, so we can plant another round next weekend too.  This week is supposed to be in the 50s (or 60s!) every day, so hopefully some will germinate.

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overdue

I arrived back from Hawaii on Tuesday and promptly came down with a cold.  Ah, to be in the climate where you can sleep out under the stars there every night and walk around shirtless.  I wouldn’t want it all the time, but to slurp it down for a week is just right.

Anyways, the Big Island served up the usual smorgasbord of  adventure: hiking on volcanic craters and hardened lava flows, snorkeling with the turtles, getting thrashed about by waves, jumping off 40 foot cliffs into shark-infested waters, etc…  If you think I’m joking about that last part, just check out the pictures.  Off the edge of the cliff, we saw a large school of fish that was getting harassed by a large slender fish with black tips at the edges of its fins — Katie, the marine biologist who was with us, said it was probably a black-tip reef shark.  Not dangerous to humans, so they say.  Matty and others had a few whale sightings too, but I didn’t see any.  Joanne and Francis put us up like kings again — they have an amazingly simple and beautiful place on the dry (south-west) side of the Big Island.  Also, we got to hang out with Masulis’ Carleton friend Anna Laube (whom I didn’t know at school) who is making music as a singer-songwriter in SF right now.  Her music is pretty sweet.  Check out her website.

After the Big Island, it was off to Waimanalo on Oahu for Kaimana.  I hadn’t played men’s ultimate in since I played at this tournament 3 years ago, I don’t think.  And boy was it ever fun.  Even got me thinking about training a bit and trying to play some men’s ultimate this summer/fall.  Voltron was one of the three best teams there, but we managed to lose a close game in Semis.  The only time the other team had the lead was when they won the game at hard cap, 12-11.  That part sucked.  I played solid (only 3 turnovers all weekend) and stepped it up in Semis a bit — getting a nice D in the sky on Hollywood and putting a sweet toss to “The Kid” in the back corner of our endzone after not throwing much upfield all weekend.  Anyways, it felt real good to be a contributor on such a solid team.  Some photos, taken by Matteo, are up online too. Best food of the weekend (why didn’t I take a picture?) was poke (pronounced poh-KAY), raw tuna with fresh onions and scallions marinated in soy sauce. Mmm hmm.

Back at home, things at school are heating up, as my school-wide oral exams are probably going to be scheduled in early April sometime. Writing the paper for that is going to eat up a lot of time. Also, it’s time to start planting seeds indoors. And Johanna did some sweet painting of the kitchen window while I was gone, so it’s almost time to install the bar. We’re supposed to be picking up bar stools (craigslist) this weekend. Vespa’s set-up is nearly complete. A new 500GB hard drive is on the way as a back-up disk to use in conjuntion with Time Machine, the new backup software that comes with Macs these days. More on the install process later.

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exhausted

Thanksgiving was fantastic, as usual. Non-stop laughingcookingplayingeatingdrinking made for an amazing weekend. The food was better than usual. This was the second year in a row that we brined the turkeys (both the fryer and the roaster) and we’re definitely not going back. Both birds were scrumptious — and the fried one had a nice kick from the whiskey/pomegranate/citrus/cajun flavor injection.

We invented a new floppy disc game this year called Orbit. Imagine a circular patch of asphalt with small circle of earth and a tree in the middle. Add in a floppy disc, some playful and competition-starved ultimate players and stir. We were still ironing out the fine points of the rules when we stopped playing after a few hours. And by ironing out, I of course mean arguing vociferously about.

Oodles of photos are up on the 6thandcollege gallery.

This little story (as told by Johanna in a recent email) paints the end-of-weekend picture very accurately:

…as i steered the nissan sentra towards the on-ramp of i-876 near kip and aaron’s house i leaned over and asked nick what his highlight from thanksgiving had been. i got no response. nick was sound asleep… but when he woke up 5 minutes later, the first words he said were “it’s exhausting having so much fun”.

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