Magic word

This is an excerpt from the instructions on my Trader Joe's organic whole wheat pasta. It seems so Trader Joe's to include the word "please" in cooking instructions, as in, "We at Trader Joe's care deeply about our pasta and about your experience thereof, so although we don't like to be bossy, we respectfully request that you not overcook this spaghetti."

Joey (no relation) had a different interpretation:

Is it like in gremlins when you weren't supposed to feed the fuzzy guys after a certain time? Does your pasta turn into a monster? Please don't overcook!

Free stuff week

Two free things I got recently, but didn't mention in my last post because they weren't art:

1.) a glass of wine at Artomatic, courtesy of Zipcar
2.) a Ben & Jerry's ice cream cone yesterday, which happened to be Free Cone Day

The kicker, though, is the Zipcar mouse pad and a Not for Tourists Guide to Washington, which it turns out I won in the raffle I entered Saturday at Artomatic. Awesome.

Free art weekend

A painting by the nostalgic Turkish guy

Well, once again it's my bedtime and I haven't yet blogged, so I'll make this quick. I soaked in a ton of culture for free this past Saturday without even going to the Smithsonian. MM and I started off with the Japanese Street Festival, which concluded this year's Cherry Blossom Festival. While the bastardized pan-Asian cuisine and landscape architects from Portland did not get me feeling very Japanese, we did see some interesting displays of dancing, drumming, and swordsmanship.

Next stop was a temporary exhibit of Turkish paintings just down the street from The Ninth Floor. Unfortunately the name of the artist escapes me--it's something fairly long and, well, Turkish-looking. The paintings were surprisingly nostalgic. I liked the colors.

All this was very family-friendly; for the hipster free art experience we had to travel far--almost to the airport, in fact, to a place called Artomatic. It's an annual showcase for local artists that takes up two floors of a large office building in Crystal City, one of the Virginia suburbs. The artists each get their own little space to take over, which lends itself to an almost dreamlike experience. In a few steps I went from something involving a large circle of live grass, to wax sculptures resembling sea anemones, to symmetrical black and white photos of naked breasts. There was a ton of art, so much that I eventually gave up on seeing it all. I did make a point, though, of seeing all the Peeps dioramas.

Blooming

I like DC much better now that the trees are in bloom. Here's a picture I took a few days ago on my way to work. Even the pathetic triangle of dirt on 17th and New Hampshire that passes for a dog park was bedecked with beautiful white blossoms.

Yesterday half of our office went down to the Tidal Basin (where the famous Japanese cherry trees are) for a picnic lunch. The famously ephemeral blossoms were near their peak, and breezes sent blizzards of little white petals swirling around their throngs of admirers.

Last night brought an impressive hour-long thunderstorm and hard rain, and on the way in this morning most of the cherry blossoms had been washed from the trees, revealing new green leaves.