Author Archives: JJD
The capricious gods of work and weather
Sometimes I think the ancient Greeks had it pretty good: If something wasn’t going the way you wanted, all you had to do was identify the offended god, sacrifice something (100 bulls, say, or your fourteen-year-old daughter who thought she was about to be married to Achilles) to appease that god, and then things would go right again. […]
Building Dancers
I hadn’t expected to walk out of work today and see people dancing on the facade of the clock tower across the street. And yet there they were. Totally bizarre and cool. I love public performance art. (You’ll see the dancers better if you maximize the video.)
Baltimore: Kinetic Sculpture Race
Baltimore is an odd city with a lovely inner harbor. Nautical tranquility is nice, but that’s not why I went to Baltimore on Saturday. The goal of the visit was to see the craziness that is the annual Kinetic Sculpture Race. Think of this race as what you might get if the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade had a […]
Booked!
And the destination for this year’s grand adventure will be . . . [drumroll] . . . Spain and Morocco! It’s quite a shift from the original plan of doing Russia (the goal had been to start in Berlin and end up in St. Petersburg), but since Amanda is going to be in Spain anyway this summer, this switch […]
Mintwood Place
After the bike ride and the bookstore yesterday, I went into DC to have dinner with a friend of mine at a new restaurant called Mintwood Place. We had read the food critic’s review in the Washington Post and decided it sounded delicious. And it was! I started with burrata and asparagus with balsamic onions […]
Tired Legs (despite and because of the weather)
It’s a perfect spring night. After a gloriously warm and sunny day, the evening has cooled to a comfortable chill, without a trace of wind. I’m sitting on my balcony surrounded by flowers, listening to Prokofiev’s ballet score to Cendrillon, and enjoying the enforced immobility that comes with very tired legs. I spent some time this weekend out on the […]
Maiden Voyage
Between days-long rainstorms and dinners with friends visiting from out of town, I haven’t been able to do more than gaze longingly at the bike I got on Saturday. After almost a week, I was anxious to take it out on a ride. Would it be as good as I’d hoped? Would my knees hold up? Would I notice the […]
New Toy
You know how, when you were five, you’d get a new toy and it would be the awesomest thing ever and you’d want to bring it with you everywhere and take it to bed at night? I kind of feel like that right now. Thank heavens I have a queen-sized bed. I fancied myself a cyclist once. After […]
Roller Girls, a Drag Queen and Eugene O’Neill
Boy, this week has gone fast! We’ve almost reached the weekend and I’m still processing last weekend, which was action packed, of course, but perhaps more ecclectic than usual. On Saturday afternoon I went with a friend of mine to see a roller derby tournament out at the DC Armory. This was part of the DC Rollergirls league, […]
Discovery Fly-over
The retired space shuttle Discovery is being transported today from the NASA space center in Florida to the Smithsonian’s Udvar-Hazy Air and Space Museum out near the Washington Dulles Airport, where it will replace the Enterprise, which is currently on display but never actually went into space. (You may remember it from last fall, when I wrote about my visit […]
A More Gentlemanlike Manner 