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!