DC, briefly

After a whirlwind weekend in Washington, DC, I am back at home, behind at work, and slightly heavier, I’m sure, due to all of the super yummy food I devoured over the weekend. In lieu of a coherent narrative, I present: Highlights of a DC Weekend — Blurb Style.

Holy Hotness, Batman
At the risk of being ballyhooed by DC natives, I have to point out how ridiculously hot and humid the weekend was. What in the world? I can’t remember going through so many sweat-dry-off cycles in one day and that’s saying a lot, what with my summer camp job in college. In addition to the normal crankiness that comes with being hot and sticky comes, well, the stickiness. I don’t glow in a ladylike fashion; I perspire way more than is reasonable for a tiny girl and it is not pretty. Thank goodness for air-conditioned apartments and malls, I say. Amen.

Quack Attack!
Because I know that there are people who, at the sight of a giant, amphibious vehicle driven by a loudmouth tour guide and packed with kazoo-toting tourists, dismiss it as something hopelessly corny, I hereby shake my fist and proclaim that these naysayers should not knock things before they try them. See, duck tours, though tacky and obnoxious, are loads of fun and highly educational. Riding around on a vessel originally designed for invasion by land and/or sea while being bombarded by useless historical facts cannot be topped in the realm of cheesy tourist activities. I don’t deny that it’s cheesy; I simply challenge anyone who says it’s not entertaining. Of course, if your duck boat leaves at noon on The Hottest Day Ever (ahem), your fun quotient may decrease just slightly. Fortunately, the combination of a witty and knowledgeable tour guide, possession of a yellow plastic quacker, and the breeze off of the Potomac River will make it all much more agreeable.

Meet and Eat and Tell
I had the pleasure of meeting up with Zandria for lunch while I was away. I didn’t prelude this meeting very much because I was trying to quell my inherent nervousness. If I tried to craft a post about how I knew Zandria but didn’t really know her, I had a feeling that I’d be this close to writing up an index card of Topics to Discuss and stressing about whether shaking hands was too stiff. So I just avoided thinking about the meet-up and chose to wing it as much as is possible with me. Well, any worries I may have had dissipated upon meeting Zandria. Taller than I expected and with a slight southern accent (at least to me), she made conversation easy. We talked comfortably about our backgrounds and blogging as we chowed down on enchiladas and tacos. I can breathe deeply now that my first in-person blogger meet-up has gone down without a hitch and hopefully, Zandria wasn’t put off by how tiny I am and that I laugh really loudly. Because I would have warned her of that if I had written about how nervous I was. Good thing I didn’t do that.

After I got back from lunch, I ended up telling my sister about the blog, unprovoked. I wanted to get her permission to post pictures of her on the internet, but really, I wanted to get her reaction, which was more “How you say, blog?” than “Why didn’t you tell me?!” She made me bring it up right then and commenced to coo over the most recent pictures of Ted. It is just fine with me if that is the extent of the impact of this divulgence.

Delayed Wedding Present
When JG and I got married, we received two $100 gift cards from my grandmother’s sisters as a wedding present. How generous, right? Except that they were not redeemable online and we did not have a store location within a feasible drive. And the gift cards were to Saks Fifth Avenue, where one can buy two small throw pillows for that sum. Oh, I was annoyed. I knew that I should not look at a gift horse in the mouth (I wrote two rather awkward thank you notes), but when we were in need of things like glassware and comforters, this gift felt impractical and not very thoughtful. If only we had received a check, I moaned.

Those two cards languished in a shoe box for two years until I finally used (most of) the money this past weekend at a trip to the Saks by my sister. I had hoped to get a home good of some sort that someone may have bought as a wedding gift, but everything in that section of the store was miles beyond my price range. What’s a girl to do? Buy a dress, of course! I don’t know what my grandmother’s sisters expected me to buy, but I doubt that the cute, BCBG faux-wrap dress popped into their minds. What the heck — the price of the dress fit neatly within the gift card allowance, and best of all, it made me feel great. I handed over those gift cards with no regrets. Later, when I modeled the dress for JG, he made soft sounds of approval. It seems as though we’ll both enjoy this gift in the end.

In retrospect, I realize that this post is not so much brief. Oh, well.