Author Archives: JJD
Memorial Day Weekend – Shenandoah National Park
What do you do on a long weekend in Washington, DC, when you’ve already gone jetskiing and hosted a picnic in your apartment? Well, one good option is to go hiking in the Shenandoah National Park. It’s about two hours west of here through rolling rural Virginia. The Skyline Trail traces the crest of the Appalachian Mountains, with […]
Memorial Day Weekend – Sunday Picnic
Memorial Day is the unofficial start of summer, and nothing says “summer” better than a picnic with friends. Since actual picnics outside are complicated by potentially unpredictable contributions from Nature (bugs, dirt, humidity), I invited a group of friends from church to join me for a picnic in my apartment (where Nature is neatly cultivated […]
Memorial Day Weekend – Annapolis
By the time we were finished jetskiing, Tim and I were STARVING — jetskiing on rough waters is surprisingly physically demanding (and of course I was still recovering from my 50-miler earlier in the morning). Rather than drive all the way back to DC, we went up the road to nearby Annapolis. The first order of business […]
Memorial Day Weekend – Jetskiing
What’s better than going fast on a bike in pouring rain? Going really fast on a jetski on a broad Maryland river. My friend Tim and I decided to seize the first 90ish day of the season by going jetskiing on the South River (near Annapolis), just above the point where it flows into the Chesapeake […]
Memorial Day Weekend – Lunch with the Germans
Heidelberg Bakery celebrated the weekend by firing up the grills. Bauernwurst and sauerkraut . . . Yum.
Memorial Day Weekend — Out and Back
Remember those capricious gods of work and weather? Well, I must have done something right, because this weekend is going to be awesome: Three full days of hot, sunny, summery weather and nary a trace of work that can’t wait until normal life starts again on Tuesday. I kicked things off this morning with a […]
Container Gardens, Year 2: Pink and Green, with Fish
You may recall that the upshot of last year’s apartment flood was my moving into a new apartment with a balcony, which I promptly filled with an array of potted plants. Having thus broken my many-year hiatus from gardening, I intended to expand my gardens this year in some ambitious ways; namely, I wanted more color, flowering vines, and . . . drum […]
Today’s Ride
I learned my lesson about good-weather weekend bike rides a couple of weeks ago: If I wanted to be able to ride without having to weave through half the population of Washington DC in various stages of physical exertion, I need to hit the road early. So this morning, at what felt like the crack of dawn, […]
Moo, tip, bang
Last night after work I saw the Shakespeare Theatre Company’s staging of Constance Congdon’s adaptation of Carlo Goldoni’s The Servant of Two Masters. This was part of my season’s subscription, but my friend Amy decided at the last minute to get a ticket as well, so we met for dinner at Le Pain Quotidien before walking […]
Downpour
What’s more fun than going fast on a bike? Going fast on a bike in the pouring rain. The week so far has been wet and dreary, and there’s no break in the forecast until the weekend. So when the skies cleared this evening, I ducked out of work and to get in a quick ride before the clouds […]
A More Gentlemanlike Manner 