another year older

Mother Nature went bananas on my birthday! Four tornadoes touched down in the area and the tornado-free stretches were pummeled by violent storms. There are widespread power outages, damaged houses, downed tree limbs, and at least one person was killed.

My day was good, though, despite the weather. Initially I thought things were getting off to a lousy start, because I arrived at the Metro station and found that every single space had already been snagged by morning commuters. I crept through both parking garages and a big lot and didn’t see any free spaces. As soon as 10am hit, I pounced on a block of spaces that are off-limits until that time.

My first stop was the Natural History Museum. I groaned when I saw a long line of school buses parked out front, and a mind-bogglingly huge oil spill of students clogging the sidewalk. Thankfully not many of them were in the butterfly room at the same time as me. The exhibit was lovely, and its butterfly habitat was prettier than the one at Brookside Gardens, but I think I preferred Brookside because the butterflies were easier to photograph and there was more breathing room.

I had an unhealthy and rather tasteless lunch in the museum’s food court, and then trudged through the heat along the National Mall, checking out two tiny Smithsonian gardens along the way, as well as one of the Botanical Garden’s outside gardens. The Botanical Garden was as beautiful as I remembered it, but it was also smaller than I remembered. Maybe I just moved really quickly, I don’t know, but it didn’t take me long to get through it at all. While there, my memory card filled up, and I had to delete a bunch of pictures, which didn’t thrill me. Note to self: buy a big-ass memory card in the future!

I wandered through the Botanical Garden’s second outside garden, breezed through the Hirshhorn, and when I arrived at the Haupt Garden outside the Smithsonian castle, it began to rain. I ran into the castle just as the first ginormous storm hit. There was really nothing to do in there, so I just sat around, watching people and the clock. Then I stood outside under an eave, waiting for the last of the rain to disappear. I returned to the Haupt Garden, then killed some time doing this and that until it was time to head over to the Elephant & Castle pub to meet Debbie for dinner.

Dinner was great! I custom-ordered a meatless and gravyless Yorkshire pudding, and then Debbie and I split a gigantic brownie/ice cream combo that was so huge, we couldn’t even finish it. I had a pint of Strongbow cider and we each had a small pot of tea as we rode out the rest of the second huge storm.

The third storm hit when I was on the train, but by the time I got to my Metro station, it had passed. Thankfully I never lost the power in my condo. I feel so sorry for everyone who is still without power, because we’re in the middle of a damn heat wave.

Photos covering everything from Saturday’s dinner and burlesque show to my vegetarian Yorkshire pudding are here.

I went to work yesterday morning and saw a sign on a car that was parked at the entrance of our parking lot; it said that we had no power because of the storm and were thus closed, and employees should check back throughout the morning, and TPTB hoped to have power back by noon. If I knew the power would come back quickly, I would’ve stuck around, perhaps bumming around the local library until the power was restored. But Pepco can take forever to restore power, and time is so precious to me these days, because I have so much freelancing to do, that I just couldn’t take the chance of squandering a whole morning that could be spent chipping away at the freelancing, only to find out that the office was going to stay closed all day long because the power didn’t come back. So I turned around and went home. I got into comfortable clothes, started working on freelancing, and then checked my work email. Aaaaaand….I learned that the power had been restored by, like, 10:00. Great. The office only officially opened at noon, though, so I spent the morning working on freelancing and then switched to my regular work at noon. I just didn’t want to drive the 23 miles back to work for the second time in one morning.

Today my department threw me a birthday party with a yummy cake from Whole Foods and a card signed by everybody. Awes!

In even happier news, my oldest and one of my dearest friends Antoinette had her second baby yesterday. I was hoping all day long that the baby would be born on my birthday, but nope—he waited until 11:50pm on June 5th to make his arrival. And he’s a big one: 10 pounds and 11 ounces! Ouch! I thought for sure she’d be having a girl this time (I kept dreaming it was a girl, anyway), and was surprised to learn this morning that she actually had a second son: Matteo Mariano Rudolph. I can’t wait to meet him!


song heard most recently before posting:
Twenty Years—Augustana