For those of you synchronizing your internal calendars to my monthly posts, I apologize. It is far past the first week of the month, when I usually post these things. Today is July 17th - So to compensate, let's all start July this week.
July shall now end August 17th. August now goes until mid-September, and so on. This will put Halloween just about where Thanksgiving is, at which point we can re-compress the lost days and celebrate both holidays together to make up for it.
This means, of course, that you can finally put a pumpkin on your Thanksgiving table and recreate that well-known image of the Pilgrims celebrating their "first Thanksgiving," without all that cognitive dissonance you usually have each year regarding the matter. Because, really, if there's a pumpkin at Thanksgiving, it's in the pie, not on the table.
There, two problems solved.
Oh, and of course now you can put on a costume for your family's Thanksgiving gathering, which is something we all want to do anyway.
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So I'm mixing it up slightly this month. Here's Dave-June 2010 in pictures:
Thursday, June 3rd, 9:30 PM
Tom Tom bar on 18th Street, DC
Due to receiving multiple free Heinekens from "The Heineken Girls," we ended happy hour with far too many drinks, and thrust them on [unnamed, for obvious reasons] with the demand that they all be drunk immediately. Overwhelmed, [unnamed bottle fellator] did the only thing a man can do when faced with 3+ drinks and only ~2 hands.
Sunday, June 6th, 5 PM
Black Ankle Vineyards, northwest of Baltimore, MD
Accessed via a bus full of 20- & 30-somethings, this was the front yard of the last stop of our Maryland wine tour. Bottle of 2007 Crumbling Rock on the table, farmhouse in the distance. metal table and chairs on which the four of us tried to be those people who sit and stare at a farmhouse in the countryside while sipping wine at a winery. We succeeded, for the most part.
Wednesday, June 9th, 6:45 AM
Rock Creek Park, DC
Laura and I woke at 6:28 AM and went on our first morning jog (we'd been night-jogging previously), which happened to coincide with the first few minutes of me being 28 years old. It seemed like a good old-person's way to start a day. And it turns out there are a surprising number of people riding bikes, jogging, doing push-ups in Rock Creek Park (!), and being generally awake at this time in the morning in the summer in DC. It's spooky.
Friday, June 11th, 9:00 PM
Men's Bathroom of Komi restaurant, 17th & P St, DC
For my birthday present this year, Laura arranged reservations and bought us both dinner at a restaurant I'd wanted to visit for many, many months: Komi, with their 15 course menu and no-taking-pictures-of-the-food rule. Thus the picture of the men's restroom. Taking a picture of the front of the restaurant doesn't do anything for anybody, and I couldn't bust out the camera during dinner, so...
Anyways, the place was incredible - by far the best food-related experience I've ever had. Presentation was perfect, and the servers' descriptions of the food and how exactly to eat it added some serious class (and raised the interest level, of course). Some of the food highlights: Octopus with onion yogurt, oven roasted dates with sea salt and mascarpone cheese, sea bass belly with ice cream, half of a suckling pig, and some unforgettably delicious sashimi that I ...forgot the names of. Not a vegetarian paradise, for sure - but everything was ultra delicious. The restaurant was dimly lit, and relatively small - about 14 tables, with as many servers. We had a wine pairing as well, including 7 glasses poured and described by the server with excellent timing, and ended the night with the most physically satisfied feeling I believe I've ever had. All in all, a substantially awesome birthday present.
Saturday, June 12th, 4:00 PM.
Dupont Circle, DC
Watched the World Cup U.S. vs. England game on a big screen TV set up in Dupont Circle, 100 feet north of the fountain. My friend standing next to me, The Welshman, rooting for England and booing the U.S, made the experience all the more... How to describe this... Might-Get-Beaten-Up-By-The-Mob-ish. That's it. Quite the thing.
Saturday, June 12th, 8:30 PM
Tequila at Sunset Birthday Party on the Roof
'Twas a wonderful birthday celebration, with wonderful friends. You know who you are. And the tequila was as good as the view, though the former lasted a bit longer than the latter...
Friday, June 18th, 8:30 PM
Kennedy Center, DC
Went to the symphony at the Kennedy Center. And before you ask, the answer to your first question is yes, they did perform Mahler. Here's the program:
HAYDN - Symphony No. 85 "La Reine"
SZYMANOWSKI - Violin Concerto No. 1
MAHLER - Symphony No. 1
The Szymanowski (who?) Violin Concerto was literally mind blowing. As in, I had to get a new one from the aisle attendant (who was, of course, fully prepared for that, and smiled as she mopped up the old mind bits from the orchestra section floor). I recommend downloading this Violin Concerto No. 1 and listening to it alone in the dark, thinking about the fact that your world is completely incomprehensible and chaotic, but that every so often you have moments of beautiful joy in which you truly believe the illusions of order you impose on the chaos, and boy do those moments feel good. You'll know why when you hear the music. And, funny enough, enjoying this symphony is just another of those moments...
Monday, June 28th, 9:00 PM
Front of Hard Times Cafe, King Street, Alexandria, VA
For the 39th time (Really, precisely 39 times) in the 2.5 years that I've lived in the DC area, some friends and I got dinner and drinks at Hard Times Cafe on King Street in Alexandria, VA. This is a picture of a horse on a truck with an American flag behind it, on the street in front of the restaurant. There is a sign on the horse with horse information which reads:
It turns out that information from a horse - at least, horse-related information - is very straightforward and to the point. In the future, I'll try to get more info off of horses. Thank you, horse, for the horse information.
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Haircuts: 1
Total # Haircuts in 2010: 3
Bars visited: 4
Restaurants: 6
Jogged: 45.50 Miles Average Speed: 4.01 mph
Improvement over May: 1.52%
We did some serious(er) jogging this month.
Movies Watched at Home: 1
Seven Pounds, with Will Smith. It was surprisingly touching...
Loads of Laundry: 3
Again, 3. There's a pattern here...
Episodes of The Wire: 27 (Seasons 1 & 2, part of 3)
Holy crap, we watched a lot of damn episodes of The Wire. First season started out slow, but got good by episode 10. Season 2 was fairly good throughout.
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That ought to do it.
I'll leave you with my favorite picture of the month: My friend AlsoDave dressed as a true American Cowboy shopping for high class cheese in Safeway:
2 comments:
When I visited the nearby buffalo ranch recently they talked about how the generally perceived notion of Plains Indians riding horses and shooting buffalo was a farce because buffalo can run at sustained speeds of 35 mph and horses can basically only run short sprints at that speed. Not that the Indians didn't use horses; they just didn't use them in the way all the movies and paintings and whatnot show.
Also, the famous song indicates that Rudolph was to "guide my sleigh tonight"; however, one could argue that just because he guides the sleigh doesn't necessarily mean that he's the navigator. Guide is a much more broad term and the song conjures up visions of Rudolph leading the sleigh, while the navigator is often a separate role taken over by the "second in command" or "first passenger" - thus indicating that perhaps some other reindeer was actually the navigator. One could argue, though, that captains guide ships without having a separate navigator, so it is indeed possible that Rudolph both headed the sleigh and navigated routes between locations in order to deliver packages on Christmas Eve.
I guess my point is that next time you see the horse you should see if they could provide some clarification on the aforementioned (and perhaps other) historical details. I mean, you can only fit so much text on a horse, so it's only fair that the horse should try and summarize the information for display, but it seems that the horse ought to be able to provide the rest of the story.
Damnit! Stupid misinforming egocentric greedy fucking horse!
I retract my praises of equinformation.
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