Free Lunch and Other Anomalies

Notable events from today:

-The whole office went out to lunch at Vidalia to celebrate certain recent accomplishments. It was fancy, as you can see from my rather blurry vegetarian entree. Also it took about 2 1/2 hours.

-I got a parking ticket. I'd been so absorbed in looking at the sign that said people with my permit number were allowed to park there that I failed to notice the sign underneath it prohibiting parking during rush hour. There was a stupid $100 mistake. I'm hoping, though, that being that I'm about to ditch my out-of-state license plates (and the car, for that matter), I can stick it to the man by just not paying it. It's worked for me before (knock on wood): I still owe the city of New York $65.

-Which serves as yet another reminder of the advantages of not driving. I listed the Beetle for sale this evening. The idea leading a simpler, car-free existence held a lot of appeal for me, even before the ticket--I just wish I didn't have to give up Grommit to achieve it.

-It's the last day of July! And what a month it's been.

Exploring

Jeanne D'Arc

I am a lazy person. I've been in DC for over two weeks now, and have I been downtown to admire the monuments? No. Have I finished organizing my apartment? Found a new tae kwon do school? No and no. Do I have a rollicking social life that consumes all my time and thus prevents me from doing anything remotely productive? Also no.

However, I am happy to report that yesterday on my way home from work I finally went to see the park across the street from my building. And I have pictures to prove it.

This one, for example. Not being an expert on these things, I'm nevertheless pretty sure this statue of Joan of Arc has no artistic merit, but it seems like a cutely quaint thing to find in a park, particularly since the plaque is in French.

For lunch today I got ambitious enough to venture out to Meze. I've been reading Middlesex, which takes place partly in Anatolia and probably gave me the idea that I wanted Mediterranean cuisine.

I can't claim this was really exploring because I'd been there with K and been pretty excited to find a real Turkish restaurant. Today I got to see their brunch menu, though, which includes Turkish breakfast. Some months ago I got a sudden craving for Turkish breakfast, which includes olives and salty cheese and cucumbers and a hard-boiled egg, among other things, but at the time the only place I knew of to get it was... Turkey. Now I know where to go my Turkish breakfast fix.

Bookish

Today on my walk home there was a woman in front of me reading a book as she shuffled along in her flip-flops. As I passed her I noticed she was also holding a highlighter, and some of the lines on the page she was on were highlighted. I was impressed with her dedication: I haven't even tried watching videos on my iPod while I walk.

To Drive Or Not To Drive

Today I got an auto insurance quote for D.C., and it wasn't pretty. Then I got some more quotes, and they weren't much better. So the question I'm thinking of just selling my car rather than spending oodles of money to keep it parked on the street all the time except for the 1-2 times a week when it seems more convenient to drive through D.C.'s notorious traffic and find parking than to just walk or take public transit. I can always rent a car for weekend excursions, right? To be honest, convenience comes in third in my reasons not to sell my car, the first two being:

1.) I really like Grommit, he's a very distinctive accessory, and I literally just paid him off (should be getting the title in the mail any day)
2.) It will be a pain in the ass to sell my car

Neither of which should really tip the balance toward the spending of oodles of money (not to mention time at the DMV!) to let a car languish by the curb.

Still, I'd feel better if I knew someone who'd give Grommit a good home. Anyone want to adopt a car? He won't be free to good home, but I might knock some off the blue book value for the right person...

Or maybe better insurance news will come in the morning.



Speaking of adoptions, Rocky is doing better. She's still hiding when I come home and not eating as much as she probably should, but she's acting much more like a sweet, affectionate, non-terrified cat. [TOWWAS: I remember telling you a long time ago that if I started a blog it would have to be about my cat. Case in point. Although to be fair, I would have included a picture of my car too if it weren't nine floors and a long, long hallway away. I didn't even have to get up to take a picture of Rocky.]

New Shoes

Yesterday after work I went shopping. I wanted some summery office clothes, but I ended up with three pairs of shoes, a book, one very expensive undergarment, and one lonely skirt. In my defense, I found the shoes at a pricey shop in Georgetown where everything is made in Europe and both cute AND comfortable, and they were on sale. Being that walking is my main mode of transportation now, I feel good shoes are important.



By the way, the second pair are the first pair of flip flops I've owned since I was a little girl and wore the plastic kind. Yes, I'm a little behind the times.

I was thinking as I was taking the metro from work to Georgetown and then home how strange it is to actually be living in a city. I'm always a visitor in cities, unless you count Colorado Springs (really just a spiral of suburbs around a pitiful downtown) or London (where I spent three weeks once).

On the way home I bought a bag of cat treats and a can of tuna cat food for poor Rocky, who as far as I could tell had not eaten in the two days since I'd brought her home. It worked, sort of: Rocky the scaredy-cat has eaten a few treats, but more excitingly she's venturing out now periodically to demand attention. She still spends a lot of time under the bed and in the closet, but when in the closet she's not huddled in the corner or in her covered litterbox. She's just hanging out in the closet.

So it seems Rocky may decide to end her hunger strike and live with me after all. More updates to come.

Rocky

I really think a yellow Beetle has the power to incite goodwill in the hearts of man. Two cases in point, both drawn from this evening:

1.) I'd parked my car on the street on Sunday, and when I came to get it this evening I saw it was in an "emergency no parking area." Had been for two days. It was in front of a building that seemed to be in the process of being demolished, in fact, and there was a dumpster just behind my car. Yet Grommit had not been towed or ticketed.

2.) Upon reaching my destination I couldn't find legal parking, so decided to squat in front of a "diplomatic cars only: romanian embassy" sign. It didn't have hours posted, but I thought no one would need to park at the Romanian embassy at 8:30 p.m. However, as I got out of my car a guy came out and told me I couldn't park there.
"Not even for ten minutes?" I asked.
"For ten minutes, ok. But no longer," he answered in his (presumably) Romanian accent.

And you know what? I'm pretty sure I was there for 15. No ticket, no tow.

The occasion for which I broke out the car was to go meet a cat named Rocky. Until this evening Rocky lived with a guy who works on my floor and his family, but they got a new dog a while back that makes Rocky very nervous, and had decided the cat would be happier in another home, one with no dogs. I was forwarded an email to that effect yesterday afternoon, when I'd settled in just enough to start thinking seriously about acquiring a four-legged roommate.

Unfortunately Rocky, like most cats, does not like being transported. She (yes, Rocky is a she) meowed all the way home, and although I miraculously avoided getting lost on the trip, I seemed to hit every red light. She meowed as I walked a block to my building and down the long hallway to the elevator and into my apartment. When I put the cat carrier down in the walk-in closet and opened the door, she still stayed there meowing for half a minute or so. She was traumatized.

I closed the door of the closet, thinking it might be easier for her to get used to one room at first before exploring the apartment, and also not wanting her to escape when I opened the door. I went back down to the car to get the kitty litter donated by her former owner, and when I came back I found Rocky wedged into the corner of the closet as far as she could go. She meowed piteously, but I really didn't know what I could do for her; it was one of the saddest things I'd ever seen. So I took this picture. Then I decided to put a box in front of her to see if that helped her agoraphobia, and in fact she did stop meowing, though she's still got her nose in the corner. Poor thing.

Inside the Beltway

Until recently I lived in Ithaca, New York and blogged on MySpace. Now I live inside the Beltway and blog on Blogger. Here's a little rundown on what I've been doing lately:

Last Tuesday I went to my last tae kwon do class, then played Ticket To Ride with some friends. It's a board game that involves building train lines across a map of North America, and I came in dead last in the first game (I'd also done pretty poorly the last time we'd played). But for the second game I got paired with another serial loser and... we won! It was a historic moment. Also it was a very late one, which was unfortunate because on Wednesday I had to go pick up my sister at the airport very early.

I'd flown her in from Denver to help me move, and being that it's very expensive to fly from Denver to upstate New York I sent her to Rochester in an effort to save money. Rochester is an hour and a half from Ithaca, which can seem like a long time when it's raining hard the whole way there and the whole way back. We stopped on the way into town to admire Taughanock Falls, and it occured to me that I hadn't been there since I was in Ithaca for the very first time interviewing for my job there. It was a nice bookend to my time there.

Then we rested for a bit, picked up the moving truck, and started loading it. Thursday morning we got up early with the intention of leaving town at 8:00, but by the time we'd finished packing the truck and the car and cleaning the apartment it was 10:30. K had to drive the truck since she can't drive my car (it's a standard), so we caravaned down to the capital. It took forever, and of course we were just north of Baltimore when rush hour started, which didn't help. Finally got to my building at about 6:45, when the loading dock theoretically closed at 7:00, so all we could do was frantically unload some boxes and trash bags full of bedding in order to camp on the floor.

Later that evening we headed to 18th Street in Adams Morgan for dinner. I started to worry that I'd moved into too hip a neighborhood, but the food was good, and, ignoring our sweaty selves, so was the atmosphere.

Saturday and Sunday I hung out with TOWWAS and shopped and tried to unpack (a slow and still-incomplete process).

And yesterday... I started work! I commute on foot, which is nice except for the heat wave. How hot is it? Walking into an air conditioned building from the street feels shocking, like diving into cool water. But people assure me this is 1.) temporary; and, 2.) as bad as it gets, which is comforting.

The cool thing about the walk to work is how many errands I could potentially take care of on the way. It's only 20 minutes, but along the way there's Safeway, CVS, 7-11, four dry cleaners, two liquor stores, a hardware store, a day spa, a shoe repair place, two Subways, a Starbucks, and numerous promising-looking non-chain restaurants. Not to mention that I can catch up on my podcasts!