The Mustache of Justice

Ah, the news that gets reported in D.C....where every element of political life is thoroughly analyzed, right down to facial hair. The Washington Post reports on the rise of the mustache in government, due to Obama's staff. My personal favorite is Rep. Henry Waxman (the far right picture). The post says,

"The 'stache went totally A-list last week when Rep. Henry Waxman was elected the new chair of the powerful House Energy and Commerce Committee. Waxman's short, military brush has terrified Capitol Hill for years and earned its own nickname -- "Mustache of Justice" -- with a line of magnets, mugs and buttons.

How powerful? Stephen Colbert teased D.C. Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton that she ranked below the 'House speaker, majority leader, congressional pages, tourists and Henry Waxman's mustache.'"

(Photo courtesy of The Washington Post)

And yes, I know I'm already slacking on the word of the day for yesterday (I'm allowed to take the weekends off though), so to make up for it there will be two words today. And yes, one of them is mustache.

Word of the Day

So I am going to continue the theme of commonly used words as the word of today. I was typing an email and I completely blanked on how to spell color. Seriously, I tried coler, coller, colur, and eventually figured out how to spell it. I have no idea where that came from. So today's word of the day is color, or as our friends to the north (and any other English-speaking country) like to spell it, colour.

Funny story about the u. One of my favorite authors is Jasper Fforde, who writes the amazing Thursday Next series. Without getting into a long, drawn-out explanation, let it suffice to say it's a somewhat science-fictiony thing, where the main character is able to jump into books and is a police officer of sorts in the book world. So in this series, there is a text sea, where all the letters that form all the words in books come from. There happened to be a shortage of Us at one point in the series, so they decided to drop the U in certain words, such as colour, flavour, etc, and call it a regional anomaly.

Retouching Photos - or as I like to call it, Magic

So I am a strong supporter of Picasa for all of my photo editing needs, which I generally don't do a ton of, but I like to play every now and then. So the newest version of Picasa has this awesome retouch tool, which is a really user-friendly airbrushing technique. The first time I used it though, I was trying to remove a blemish from my face and ended up just putting it somewhere else on my face, because I had the sequence backwards. But once you get the hang of it, it's quite nice.

Yesterday I thought I would experiment with my apartment by removing items without actually having to remove them, and it proved quite effective. Granted, there are some fuzzy areas, and it doesn't work quite as well as removing blemishes, but I'm impressed with myself. I removed 9 items, whoever can find them all first wins my enduring affection.

I'm a Transportation Geek, I know...

But I do have an excuse. It is what I do for a living, after all. But anyways, I stumbled across an old Op Ed piece from the New York Times that just made my day today, which was all about the author's two sons' love affair with the subway. They are 3 and 5 and know way more than anyone I've ever talked to about the New York subway system. I'm usually lucky enough to have a native New Yorker as a guide when I go on the subway, otherwise I don't think I would ever come out.



The original thing that sent me to the NYT was, surprise, surprise, an Apartment Therapy post, about an amazing bathroom tile job which was pretty much the entire subway map. Somehow I don't think my landlord would be thrilled if I put the metro map in my bathroom, but it's tempting...

Word of the Day

So I was reading this morning on the metro, and I came across the word vacuum, and it made me very happy. So I've decided to start a new feature of my blog, word of the day. Obviously vacuum is not an uncommon word and I'm not going to make up a sentence to use it in, but I am just going to spend 2 minutes enjoying the double u sound - uuuum.

To make this a bit more literary, I will include another word that is a bit more unused, that we discovered last night in community group - boanthropy. This is the disease in which humans think they are cows. For example, Nebachanezer suffered from boanthropy. On a related note, apparently there is also a disease in which people honestly believe they are werewolves - lycanthropy. The things you learn in a Bible study....

Take a Bite Out of Crime

Yes, I know, this has nothing to do with teeth or crime, but the spiky things kinda remind me of teeth, so give me a little poetic license.

Death Berries

This post has two purposes:

1) To showcase some of the beautiful ginkgo trees that are all over DC.

They really are quite lovely. Last weekend, boyfriend and I were walking down his street and the sunlight and beautiful blue sky made a gorgeous composition, but my hands were full of bags and I couldn't get out my camera. Unfortunately, when we left his house, the sun had gone away, so this is the best I could do. So that takes care of purpose number one.

2) To profess my hatred for them.

Hatred may be a tad too strong, but let me just tell you, I don't visit boyfriend nearly as often in the fall. Because you see, apparently whoever decided that ginkgo trees would make a lovely choice to line the streets of DC however many years ago didn't know a whole lot about plant biology. I don't either, so I can't be too picky, but you think you would research your tree choices before mass plantings. Male ginkgos are wonderful and have no problems at all. Unfortunately, about half of the trees in DC are female ginkgos. They produce these wonderful little seed/berry things, which, bluntly speaking, smell like vomit. Especially when they are all over the sidewalk and get smushed into the sidewalk, and it's impossible to avoid stepping on them. Let's just say, my shoes need a good scrubbing after walking down boyfriend's street.

Absolut New York

So I am an obsessive compulsive furniture rearranger, as boyfriend will tell you, and I always have a floor plan of my apartment laying around somewhere so I can experiment. Because of this, I was excited to see this post on Apartment Therapy today about apartments photographed from above (warning: there is some nudity in the post, so don't be shocked, Mom). In the comments someone mentioned the billboard below:


I totally have a picture of this billboard in my photo album from the first time I went to New York in 2001! I loved it then, and I love it still.

I'm Inspired...

So I normally don't just link to other blogs, but I just love, love, love this skirt, from the Sartorialist. We'll see what boyfriend has to say about it. :)

Fall Fabulousness

Two weekends ago, 3CC had our retreat out by Great Falls. I don't get much of a chance to get out of the city, so it was wonderful, and of course being outside in the fall is one my favorite things. It was also amazing to see the Potomac in a pure and unadulturated state. It looked like a completely different river than that which someday may hold my houseboat.

I accidentally had my camera set to digital macro, but I really liked the way it turned out.

The more boring view of the river.

Is it the republicans turn in the zoo?

So it's a week after the election, so I will finally get around to posting about it. The district popular vote ended up being 93% for Obama, glad to see that my vote really counted. (I've been waiting for a chance to bring out the teal - if anyone besides Andrew gets it, you get a cookie.) Anyways, everyday I pass by the Washington Post building, and there is a donkey and an elephant out front. The elephant is painted with various governmental buildings and the donkey is painted with pandas. I've never understood this. My personal theory is that it is because the president was a republican and therefore had control of the government, and the democrats are therefore either left in the wild or penned up in the zoo. I'm curious to see if they will repaint them in January...I'll keep you informed of any happenings.

In other political news (as political as it gets for me, at least), they are already preparing for the inaugaration. I walked past the White House this weekend and there are like 8 trailers out front and they are building the stage. It seriously takes 3 months? Come on, people, I know you're government workers, but I expect better than that.

Happy Veteran's Day

I have a bone to pick with Metro though, in regards to Veteran's Day. I understand that anyone vaguely governmentally related will have the day off, which is a large portion of DC, but the rest of America still has to go to work. So why in the world are they running on a Saturday schedule??? I'm annoyed.

Hasn't it been too long since I've posted pictures of flowers?

I was going through my photos, yet once again avoiding trying to get my Botswana pictures in some semblance of order, and I came across these pictures. Way back when boyfriend was just boy number 5, last summer, an orchid arrived for me at the office. It had no card, and I had no idea who it was from, seeing as boy number 5 was number 5 for a reason. And I couldn't find out because he had just left for Africa for 3 weeks. I eventually found out it was indeed him who had sent the plant, and our love bloomed just like the orchid. Oh my, I think corny doesn't suit me. I take it all back. Anyways, I did find it to be a good subject for my digital macro.

Addendum: Boyfriend thinks it's necessary for me to mention that I have since killed the orchid.

And my favorite of all....it reminds me of a tongue.

Zoom, Zoom

Today on my way to the metro, I saw my dream car. It was a Porsche 911 Turbo, somewhere around the 1997 body style. I swooned a bit. And then I came to my senses and realized that I will never be able to own one myself, and I have to be content with my model sitting on my shelf at work. Ah, the dangers of having all guy friends who are mechanical engineers...I had to learn about cars as a defense mechanism, just so I could be part of the conversation. Apparently it's still haunting me.

House Tour

I was browsing Apartment Therapy today, and I came across this post, which is a tour of a girl's first apartment in Adams Morgan. I was curious as to how my own first apartment in Adams Morgan would hold up.

The Kitchen

The Kitchen View 2 - Not quite as attractive, but functional

The Kitchen - I loved my little table - The chairs are actually really cool diner chairs, but they have reddish-orange vinyl seats and backs, so I had to make slipcovers for them so they would match the table.
The Bed - This wasn't taken at the same time as the rest of the photos, but I don't have a picture of the bed. This is the platform bed that I had custom built - once again, thanks to boyfriend - because my antique massive bed didn't quite work with all the windows and doors in the apartment. Unfortunately, I don't have a massive walk-in closet in my new apartment to store the other bed, so I had to sell the platform bed when I moved.

The Entrance - not very auspicious, but it works. The green chair is another slip-covering job of mine, as it was formerly fuzzy and orange. The green boxes under the bed were awesome for storage in a tiny apartment.

The Living Room - Despite the fact my bed was in the middle of it, it worked well.

Living Room - The white pumpkins on the coffee table are imported from Michigan - courtesy of Mom. My loveseat was my favorite part of the apartment, as it was my pseudo-chesterfield, my dream couch.

Living Room - The console table was my Great-grandmother's and represents a project which is still underway. It's mostly stripped, but I haven't gotten around to finishing cleaning it up and re-staining it. The keyboard is also an over-ambitious project. I thought it would motivate me to put my 10 years of lessons to good use, but rather it's just a not so good use of the console table.

The Bathroom - Small, but light and airy. Oh how I miss you, gloriously light and not pink bathroom. My new bathroom is like 3 times the size, but completely covered in pink tile and pink fixtures, not so cool.

My Balcony - A tiny retreat, which would have been so much better if it weren't cut in half by a chimney. Oh, and also if it weren't the way stupid robbers were able to break into my apartment (reason I moved out of the apartment).

The View - The back alleys of Adams Morgan aren't particularly inspiring, but it wasn't bad.

So there you have it - my first real apartment after college. I think I did a pretty good job, although I do have to admit, these pictures were taken after I had lived there for a while. I left out the first set on purpose. The apartment itself helped, as it had character in tall ceilings, beautiful wood floors and lots of light. Whenever I get nostalgic for the character though, boyfriend has to remind me of the cockroaches and robbers, but I will always love my first apartment.