Things I Learned This (Olympic) Weekend

The Olympics never fail to make me happy. 
Even with a less-than-stellar Opening Ceremony and inane announcer commentary, they still make me very happy. All day I looked forward to it and all week the roommate and I planned to snack on international fare and watch it in its entirety. Which we did. (Along with Brandie, who was allowed to come even though she didn't realize they started that night.) This was our spread, with something to represent each of the rings: 

• Africa: Moroccan hummus and African hot sauce 
• The Americas: Southern Caviar 
• Asia: Dry-roasted Edamame and a spicy snack mix 
• Europe: Sangria 
• Oceania: Chocolate cookies from Australia 
• Host city: Cookies and napkins with the Queen on them 

Sitting by the pool in the rain is lovely.
I hung out with my friend Shana on Saturday, starting with a couple hours at her rooftop pool. It started to rain but instead of racing for cover we waited it out, appreciating the cool water on such a hot day. 

Handball might be my new favorite sport.
After the pool we went to a bar for a drink and apps and to watch some more of the Olympics. They were showing a handball game and somehow this is a sport that I've never seen. 

The boats used in rowing are called "sculls," not toothpicks.
After the bar and before dinner, we watched more Olympics, including what we like to call the toothpick boat races. 

There's no such thing as watching too much Olympics.
After a restaurant week dinner, we went back to her place to watch, you guessed it, more Olympics. We caught USA in beach volleyball, but missed the Lochte/Phelps match but that's ok because I love Phelps too much to watch him lose. 

"Gone with the Wind" is an amazing and intense book.
After two weeks of reading the 1,000 page tome, I finally finished on Sunday morning. And all I can say is, "Wow."

I read so much faster when reading by the pool. 
On Sunday I spent a few hours lying out and reading at my pool. I don't know if it's the fresh air or just being away from technological distractions, but I get so much more read when I'm outside.

The Olympics make Sunday nights more tolerable.
I know, shocking, but I watched more Olympics on Sunday. Water polo, synchronized diving, swimming, and gymnastics.

Things I Learned This Weekend

(Just a few things I learned as I'll write more about weekend happenings later in the week. As well as all the other things I keep saying I'll write about.)

It's possible to love my blanket in public.
It only took me a lifetime of owning the thing, and 7 years of consistent travelling, to figure out how to discretely hide my blanket so I can put my favorite corner to my mouth in public. This could change everything.

Adding text to photos in Photobucket is fun.
They took away my ability to collage photos, but at least I can add fun text. Or, well, if not fun text, at least just text. And just in case the above photo wasn't obvious enough.

Work from home days are great, but work from home home days are even better.
I left for NC on Thursday evening and worked from home home the next day. There's something about doing my job in the room I spent my high school years studying myself crazy, that's kind of nice/weird.

There's no such thing as eating too many Krispy Kreme doughnuts.
I may have eaten 6 Krispy Kreme doughnuts in 10 hours. This may not be remotely close to my record. (What we call the "Krispy Kreme Incident of '07," when I ate approximately 9 doughnuts in a few hours after returning from London. I only remember the first 3; the rest are just a blur.)


A quick meal and shopping with mom during my lunch break is way better than sitting at my desk and eating while working.
We went to my favorite Mexican place, Torero's, and then mom bought me pretty things at Target. I would have been happy just to ride around town with her, but don't tell her that, I also like the Target stuff.

My sister and I really should wear tiaras all the time.
While waiting to try on bridesmaid dresses at David's Bridal, we had a little photo shoot with some tiaras. We think our brother's fiancee should let us incorporate them into our wedding day attire.

  

Cleaning out papers and junk from the room you lived in from 5 to 22 is fun and weird and sad and happy.
Even though I cleaned out the majority of my room when I moved to DC, I kept a lot of books out and a lot of stuff in my closet. While looking for some clothes, I decided to clean out the rest of my closet. More on this later. But first, a glimpse of a report from my 9th grade computer class. On e-mail. That was done with a friend. That we only got a 98 on. I'm not happy about this.

My Dad is awesome.
He got a knot out of my necklace, took a bunch of my papers to the dump, lasted longer than 5 minutes in Ulta, got us Bojangles on Sunday morning, bought a great computer that I now want, and he makes me laugh.

My Mom is awesome.
She brought me Krispy Kreme and a Pepsi to the train station at midnight. She just wants to go shopping with me and have me fix her Pinterest. She lets me go around her house and pick out stuff I want. She got more excited than me when I told her I was going to make a t-shirt quilt. (More on her day later.)


It is possible for me to sleep on a train. And "The West Wing" really is just the greatest show ever.
I managed to sleep for a few minutes on both train trips. This never happens. Even though, on the way back, I was watching "The West Wing" and missed half an episode. But that's what DVDs are for.

The absolute worst way to end a long weekend at home is with an all-day meeting on Monday.
I got in at 8 last night and had a meeting downtown today for work. This can be good because my commute is only 15 minutes and costs me less than $2. But it can also be bad when it's raining, I'm running late, my metro train is off-loaded due to the fact that it's smoking, I have to run to the meeting in the rain, alternating sidewalks on opposite sides of the street due to construction, making it with just 5 minutes to spare and only enough time to switch into my grown up shoes but not brush my hair.


And that last graph should explain why I'm not going to spend forever fixing the wonky spacing in this post or care that there are, yet again, too many commas. I'm tired and just want to curl up in my queen-sized bed with my visible baby blanket and watch C.J., Sam, Josh, etc. do their thing.

Things I Learned This Weekend

It's perfectly acceptable to forgo plans so you can stay home and watch it rain.
I love rain just about more than anything and it has been ages since I was home during a good storm. So late Saturday afternoon, as the sky began to darken and thunder sounded in the distance, I grabbed some tea, a book, a blanket, and curled up on the couch to listen to and watch the rain hit the window.

The Hope Diamond really is worth the hype.
Brandie and I went to the Natural History Museum on Sunday morning. Our first stop: something shiny.

The rescue vessel for the Chilean miners is really small.
The main reason for our trip to the museum was to see the new exhibit on the Chilean miners. It was pretty small but did feature items on loan from the miners, including a signed flag, letters, and a helmet. There was also one of the test rescue vessels and I'm not sure I could have fit one leg in there. (Slight exaggeration but it was small.) 

According to a blood pressure cuff in a museum, I have high blood pressure.
There was also an exhibit on race at the museum and one of the displays allowed you to test your blood pressure. This is because apparently one of the stereotypes over the years has been that African-Americans have high blood pressure. Now, any other time I've had my blood pressure checked, including most recently last month at work, I've been normal to too low. Well, today I was in full on hypertension mode. I'm going to blame it on the fact that this was a blood pressure cuff in a museum and that as I sat there reading the warnings of "might faint or feel pain," my heart was racing a bit more than usual. 

Not all brisket is created equal.

A new restaurant opened in Penn Quarter called Hill Country Barbecue. Between numerous trips to Texas over the years and my Daddy's supreme grill master skills, I've had my fair share of brisket. (And probably the share of a few others as well.) This brisket was just good, but not great. Same for the beans and the cornbread. Very good, however, was the water out of a mason jar.

Ulta is amazing.
In the past few months I've kind of become addicted to beauty blogs and how tos on You Tube. As a result, I spend a bit more time in Sephora than is prudent. And while I thought I'd been in an Ulta before, today I discovered this was not true and that it is a wonderful, wonderful place.


Ryan Gosling is crazy stupid hot.
B and I ended the day in a cool movie theatre to watch "Crazy Stupid Love," which was crazy stupid good. (Is that getting old yet?) Funny, well-acted, and well-written; it was just a solid film.

Home sweet home (ish)

I left all of this...

...to come home to three days of drear. Some sun, some blue sky, but mostly just gray. Here is my artistic interpretation of the past few days:
All the same, all gray.

Today, however, in protest of the lack of color in my life, I went to see the Obama-dictated green water in the fountains at the White House. I know, it doesn't take much to get me excited. But I do love fountains, and I love color, so to the other end of Penn Ave I went. My camera phone, however, was not capable of recognizing the green water. But I did see it in person, and it was green. Go here to see that I'm not lying.
Happy St. Patrick's Day! More on the cruise later when I've had more than four hours of sleep. Oh insomnia, it has been 10 years, can you please leave me alone, please?

Day 320: $%&@ Terps!!!! Go Heels!!!!

Oh, I love my Heels. Really and truly, even when they lose. Especially the football team as I have gotten quite used to them losing over the years. So this whole winning, national ranking, actually tackling thing they are doing this year is quite exciting. So exciting that I bought tickets and travelled to Maryland, venturing on to enemy Terp territory, to stand in the rain for close to four hours, to watch my Heels play, for the first time not in CH.

Our awesome seats:
I had lovely company, and I loved seeing my first UNC football game in three years. But the combination of being sick and the cold and rain and horrible Terp fans and a newly broken camera and, oh yeah, losing, made it less than ideal. But would I do it again? Absolutely.

And, I can say with absolute certainty, that Terps are some of the nastiest lifeforms on the planet. I know Heels fans aren't perfect, but I'm not sure I've ever been around such a lack of sportsmanship and grace. And of course the snobby Tar Heel that I am can only say, well, it's because they go to Maryland.

(Thanks to the roommate, Brandie, for the picture, as my camera is still refusing to turn on.)

Day 170: "Anyone who says sunshine brings happiness has never danced in the rain." (Anonymous)

Today was one of those days where I felt like I had been spinning around in a circle, and then came to a sudden, dizzying halt, while everything else kept whirling around me and I tried frantically to regain my balance and breath.

I am a big believer in rain as a purifier, as a rejuvenator. So when it started to lightly rain on my walk from work to the metro, I let it hit me. I left my umbrella in the bag and soaked it up. I enjoyed a walk in the rain.

By the time I got to just across from the metro, it was coming down so hard it appeared to be raining up from the road. I had fears that maybe my two white shirts would be the same as one white shirt and I'd be arrested for indecent exposure. (I wasn't, the two white shirts were equal to one dark shirt.)

Caught up in my act of spontaneity, I didn't consider having to wear wet clothes on the ACed metro, or what I would look like when my very non-waterproof mascara started to melt.

And I didn't care. I saw this just beyond the airport, over the river, and it's all I needed:
(Not my picture, taken from Flickr. I saw them from a different angle, thicker, closer up. Stunning.)

It reminds me of the last double rainbow I saw, almost exactly three years ago, in England:

And the really cool part is, that Mom saw the Washington rainbow on the national news, around the same time I saw it in real life.

"The true harvest of my life is intangible - a little star dust caught, a portion of the rainbow I have clutched."
-Henry David Thoreau

"It's not strange, unusual maybe, eccentric in a quaint way, like dessert spoons." -Ned, Pushing Daisies

I'm sure I've written about it before in here, but I love rain. I like the way it sounds hitting the window. (Even better when it hits a skylight.) I like the way it smells. I like how everything looks after a good shower. I like how it cleanses everything it touches. I like to put on a hoodie and PJ pants and curl up with a cup of tea and a movie or book.

Or, you know, I like to get up at 6:30 in the morning, trudge to work, freeze half-to-death for 8 hours, have my commute time doubled because the metro is stuck for 30 minutes on the track one station before I get off due to another train having mechanical problems. Then walk a mile home with increasingly wet jeans, missing taking a shower in street water by inches, and still get whistled at by idiots in a pickup truck.

But really, I have had way worse experiences. Last summer's fall in mud/soapy shoe/missed bus/refusing to cry on side of street debacle comes to mind. And even more incidents, sadly. (All of which would be obsolete were either of my 2005 rainy day inventions to come to fruition: shower curtain/umbrella hybrid, and giant "hamster" ball. And these aren't some harebrained schemes, I have drawings.)

However, I am now at home in front of a heater, sprawled on the living room floor with tea and my blanket, watching "Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants" and listening to the traffic outside my window rush through the rain. A satisfying sound.

Now a brief rundown of the past week:

Old friends: Saturday, at two separate meetings, I got to spend time with my best friends from high school, Brett and Genie. They are my oldest friends (known since 5ish and 14ish, respectively.) and I love that as much as some things change, this never really does. I had lunch with Brett and his wife and her parents downtown. It was really great to just chill and catch up, and get to know each other.

I then met up with Genie and two of her friends. We went to Union Station, and then to King Street in Alexandria for some shopping. I had never been here before but I will definitely be going back. It had cute and unique boutiquey type shops, but also some chain stores. We had dinner at a casual Italian restaurant, and ended the night gossiping and laughing.

All in all it was just really great to catch up with two of my most favorite people.

Sunday: *Warning Shannon: Mention of sports. Skip ahead to next section.*
Yes, I planned my Sunday around the Patriots/Cowboys game, as they were indeed showing it here. I have no idea how I became that person who schedules things around sports. I really really don't. But it was a good game and a great end to the weekend.

Work: I am still at the same temp job and it is getting better. I'm getting to write more. Granted it's just writing letters, but every letter has to be different, so there's room for creativity. And I'm certainly learning a lot. I never thought I'd know so much about patent reform that is for sure. And no, I don't really want to know about patent reform, but oh well. Though, with all this newly acquired patent knowledge, I should begin to explore patenting my rainy day inventions before someone steals my idea. Of course, this would be pointless if a certain bill is passed which would weaken my patent's validity and stifle innovation. (And that's a preview of what the 42 letters I wrote on the subject were about.)

Ok, this is far too long. No pictures because I forgot my camera last weekend. And all attempts to take pictures of the rain outside my window tonite failed. Potentially picture-worthy weekend coming up, so we shall see. Lovely weekend wishes to all.