i'm still here! in atlanta! and doing stuff! details below.

So, the weekend. It happened, there's no denying that. On Friday I watched basketball and drank beer with Matt, Kriston and Charles, and it was good. On Sunday I saw The Da Vinci Code with Mark and Rebecca, and it was not (although it was good to see M & R). In between I somehow managed to pick up a cold and an accompanying case of nocturnal laryngitis: for the past two days I've lost my voice right around 8pm. Yesterday it occurred somewhere during the course of the movie, so it's not from overuse.

But, my fascinating symptoms aside, the big excitement of the weekend was making the trek to the Argonaut on Saturday. This has been on my to-do list for a while. I like U Street just fine, but there's no denying that its cachet diminishes a little bit more with every new trainload of prelaw girls crammed into tubetops. Not that, you know, *I* am an authentic participant in U's cultural offerings. It's just that I, too, own a Gap card. I've been on a GSA schedule. I drink light beer, and shop at Ikea, and have strongly-held opinions about olive oil. I'm sorry. I can't help it. But I find these things just as noxious in others as you do, and consequently try to avoid doing my socializing in the presence of too many similarly callow twentysomethings.

In order to achieve that goal I'll eventually have to identify the next bar scene ahead of time, so that I can enjoy it in its unspoiled state/get a head start on ruining it. The early indications have been that H Street is going to be that scene. It's got all the signifiers: climbing real estate prices; a new music venue and several bars that are threatening to open; race-baiting WaPo gentrification articles; and, of course, the neighborhood is terrible, aka "edgy". Surely this is where one ought to go to find the city's artists, poets, intravenous drug users and other creative types. In my mind I had pictured Paris cafe culture, only with more stupid t-shirts and public urination.

So on Saturday Kriston, Matt, Ian, Valerie, Sommer, Genevieve, Jon and I — fortified with sausages and beer — ventured out from the shadow of the Ellington, hailed a couple of cabs, and headed east. "That's right by my house!" said the cabbie. He didn't seem like the indie rock type, though.

Well, we went to the Argonaut, and it was pretty good. The Sierra Nevada-ish house beer was okay, and the prices were okay, and the jukebox was okay. But there was barely anyone there on a Saturday night. The only folks out on the street seemed to be in the process of a) waiting for the bus or b) getting arrested. We had a fine time, but I don't feel particularly compelled to go back.

The X2 makes it more convenient and awesome-sounding to get there than I would have guessed. But until some more stuff opens up and some more people start going, I don't see a particularly great reason to head to Trinidad.http://www.zunta.org/tomsblog/archives/005333.php

Sunday: it's an up-and-comer. Between the injustice that is daylight savings time and the freshly-painted hallway flooding the apartment with solvent fumes, things were not shaping up well. But then a little Drupal installation, a little Chipotle and some cherryblossom-viewing with Michael, Emily and Tim served to brighten things up. Despite this flurry of activity, I somehow still found time to not clean the bathroom.

But, perhaps most exciting of all: the Radioshack cellphone cable recommended to me by this gentleman actually works with my Nokia 3100. I've been through two phones, a pair of Linux installations, and four $25 phone cables, but I can finally taste victory: I successfully sent and received SMSes from my miraculously un-lost Italian SIM. Score! Take note, Gammu googlers: the FutureDial cable (#22) is the one you should be investing in.

Now I'm over at Kriston and Matt's (whose names it now feels weird to hyperlink for some reason) for some grilled Italian links and Sopranos watching. It's the good kind of sausage party.

back and not really refreshed from a wonderful weekend in d.c. my flight left the district at 6:30 this morning, and as soon as i landed i headed to the newsroom for some fun and fabulous journalism work. as i'm sitting here brainstorming and tapping away, i had to take a blogging break to talk about what went on:

thursday night: unbuckled. dc9. olivia mancini and the housemates; the hard tomorrows. you saw the pictures here.

friday night: tommy and i decided kind of last minute to head to coppi's, a pizza and italian joint on U street. though dcist reviewed it back in november, we had never been there and in fact hadn't heard much about it otherwise. walking in at 7:30 on a friday night without a reservation, we weren't surprised at being sat at the bar, which turned out to be nice and cozy, with an excellent view of the wood-burning oven, and an attentive bartendress. we started off with some excellent calamari, a bottle of red and then two small pizzas - i forget what was on tommy's, but mine was prosciutto and funghi. though the crust was a little iffy, we both thought their pizza could easily place a very close 3rd in district pies, after two amy's and pizzeria paradiso. i can't believe we'd never dined there before. fairly reasonable, as well. (though that's always easy for me to say when tommy foots the bill, as he almost always insists on doing.) 1414 U street.

saturday: i hit up the glorious, glorious tyson's mall with my family. we ate at brio, which, for a chain restaurant in a mall, was actually pretty decent. then my mom bought me a pair of editors pants at express. discuss: editors pants from express, best pants ever? i own like six pairs.

for dinner that night, tommy and i went to queen of sheba, a recently-opened ethiopian restaurant. pluses: a block from the apartment; nice space; pretty great ethiopian food. minuses: no liquor license (though hardly their fault); about, oh, a FIVE HOUR WAIT for food. well, more like 40 minutes, which struck us as pretty ridiculous seeing that the restaurant wasn't even half full. maybe they're still just working out service kinks, but until they start getting their food out in a timely manner, i'd go to sodere or dukem.

UPDATE: man, MT fucked up the rest of this entry. i talked about the rest of saturday night and EVEN sunday, too, but it somehow ate it. quick recap: ellington party, fries at the saloon, sunday lunch at saint-ex, and attempting to convert tommy and charles to grey's anatom. which i don't think worked.

last weekend's.

this weekend was more low-key, but i can still recommend the following:

the freaks and geeks dvd. tommy got me this for christmas, and i've been too busy to watch it until now but have spent a large chunk of saturday and sunday racing through. it's certainly charming, although i'm not sure why it inspired such cultlike devotion - it hasn't totally grabbed me in that way. but still very enjoyable, and i am now also in love with linda cardellini.

el tapatio on ashland. you know the night's going right when a) your supposed 45-minute wait to eat at a restaurant turns into 15 minutes b) the restaurant lets you sneak in your beers from the bar across the street that you were waiting at c) along with your pitcher of margaritas the waiter scores you each an extra glass full and d) even though your "burrito grandioso" weighs approximately four pounds, it's so good that you eat the entire thing.

guthries. we were supposed to hit up this bar on saturday night, but it turned out to be too crowded to stay there. but it looked adorable - small, cozy, with a fireplace and stacks of boardgames that people were playing at every table. perfect for a rainy night. if our group had been smaller, i would have been content to snag a table and hit up some monopoly. as it was, we headed to the first bar we came across on southport - cullen's, which was basically your typical faux-irish pub but was still fun. they actually had a decent cover band that played everything from radiohead to gin blossoms.

fudgy chocolate-raspberry bars. though fresh raspberries obviously aren't in season, the bars were still delicious and elicited raves from a dinner i went to sunday night. i was glad, because only god in heaven knows what a trial it is to bake in my postage-sized kitchen. my kitchenaid mixer? has to go ON THE FLOOR IN MY BEDROOM BECAUSE THERE IS NO WHERE ELSE TO PUT IT/PLUG IT IN.

not recommended: lazing out on your weekend run of 8 miles such that you have to do it monday morning before your 2 p.m. class, and now it's flurrying. sigh.

Whew. That was quite a weekend. Thanks to everyone who came out on Friday, and apologies to those who stayed around until 3 or so. I thought I was doing pretty well considering the variety and quantity of booze I'd been consuming, but sometime in the early morning my liver decided it was going to bed, and didn't care whether I joined it. Hopefully I didn't scare any of you.

But look, if there was one undeniable truth about that party, it was that it could have been slightly bloggier. One or two attendees may have somehow snuck in without having a valid URL. So on Saturday night I headed over to Kriston and Yglesias' place for a stupefyingly internety fete. Kevin Drum was there! I wanted to pose for a photo with him, as if he were a cardboard cutout, but chickened out.

Instead, I mostly just drank beer, gossipped with Yglesias and took increasing pleasure in introducing myself as "a blogger of no consequence" (business cards?). I once made a fool of myself in front of Dave Winer without knowing who he was, so the evening was really just an exploration of an already established theme.

But I did genuinely enjoy meeting Roxanne, her husband, and John and Belle. And there was the usual collection of Prospect/Reason/Cato people, who are always good to talk to. And the fellas bought caviar! And Sommer makes an awesome spinach dip thing! So all in all, pretty fun. Although when a couple of the Important Bloggers started telling me how much I should cherish my (relative) youth, I figured it was time to head home. Because duh: I think it's pretty obvious that I am. Did you not just hear me discussing federal wiretap laws with that guy over there?

Sunday was Charles' folks' annual holiday open house, and, as always, it was great. There was no chicken liver pate this year, but the addition of several dozen pounds of unpronounceable cheeses more than made up for it. Also: Charles always gets the leftovers, and I conveniently share a fridge with him. That, combined with his stellar cleaning efforts, puts him solidly at the top of the Roommate of the Week ballotting. Good luck in the elimination round!

In other news: we have a heat pump, but still have no heat. And a pipe has burst under the sink, we're told. Which doesn't really bother us, but is apparently a pretty big inconvenience for our downstairs neighbor. We're now racking up negative karma every time we run the faucet.

so, after the blogiday party on friday night, this is how i spent the rest of my weekend:

saturday, around 10 a.m. thought about getting out of bed. thought very seriously about it. but realized it would do nobody any good. one or two more hours of sleep would surely help ease the hangover, right? right. very wise decision, catherine. proceeded to wake up at 2 p.m., aka the latest i have ever slept in at least the past 5 years, because ever since i became a GrownUp, i cannot sleep past 10 in the morning, even on the weekends i really, really try.

spent three or four hours doing some serious couch sitting. it took a lot out of me. with some protest, i eventually hit up the sketchy giant with tommy to grab some dinner. apparently the major movement of getting up off of the couch and out of the apartment reinstated the dreaded delayed hangover. i was doing pretty good until i had to stand up. but the standing up set off the pounding headache from hell, which prevented me from attending a party at matt's and kriston's that was to be even bloggier than our own. instead i spent the evening in my sweatpants uniform, watching the sound of music, which luckily happened to be on tv. it was like ABC read my hungover mind. christopher plummer+do re mi+a slowly sipped beer=defeat of the hangover. i have always been wary of the hair of the dog thing, but it really seemed to work. is there a scientific explanation for that or what?

this is the worst post ever, but i somehow cannot seem to stop typing.

anyway, sunday was charles' parents' annual holiday party, which is always highly looked-forward to, because it is always lovely and filled with wine and great food and we usually end up taking home 5 billion pounds of ham, 72 bottles of wine and eleventy hundred cans of beer. this year was no exception. i mean, i had a piece of ham, a shrimp, and a petit four for breakfast today. post-grays christmas party is a life of shrimp luxury. if only i could get out of these sweatpants.

so, our party, it was teh awesome. and you know what? it was FILLED WITH BLOGGERS and it was still totally awesome. in fact, it was made even more awesome by that fact. we have crossed some sort of bizarro line, my friends, when bloggers are advertised instead of shunned at a social gathering.

i met many lovely people that i hadn't had the chance to before, and i don't want to list them here, because i will definitely leave somebody out and then feel terrible about it, but you know who you are all and you are all internet sugar and spice, like the governess writes (and no pirate eye, lady! you look lovely i promise especially your hair of which i was v. envious). i stopped being surprised a long time ago at how much i like people in person whose internet personalities i like. that sentence did not make sense but you know what i mean.

the hot chocolate and the egg nog were big old hits (a ratio of one cup whole milk to 1/3 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips, melted in a big old pan, and doctored with as much amaretto or creme de menthe as your guests like, is especially yummy, and jeff swears by the joy of cooking egg nog recipe and it was delicious). unfortunately i didn't take as many photos as i would have hoped (if you took some please leave the link in the comments!), but those i did take are here, including some awesome pictures of kriston and charles dueting it up on some terribly maudlin love song. i would like to take this chance to say that tommy's and my rendition of "i've had the time of my life" was probably some of the most painful 5-6 minutes in the entire history of karaoke. my apologies, friends.

today will be spent recovering, maybe making lemon bars, and then probably humiliating myself in front of kevin drum. onwards!

UPDATE: Changed the Flickr link so Tommy's photos show up, too.

well, well, a weekend report. i haven't done one of these in a long time, primarily because there has been crapall in my life lately to report, unless you want to hear about me constantly being stressed and bitchy - who doesn't want to hear about that?! - but i did a couple of things this weekend that were kind of fun. so onwards, blogging soldiers.

Monday mornings are, I think, when we're supposed to regale the internet with stories of -- or at least vague allusions to -- the exciting things we did all weekend. But I'm happy to say that this weekend I did nothing. There was a total, perfect absence of excitement. I did some work; I went to the gym; I watched some Star Wars cartoons; I read a little(!). Mostly, though, I slowly recuperated from the stress-induced lobotomization that work had recently inflicted. I was in bed every night by 11.

So thank you to those who invited me to go out. I'll be more interesting in the future, I promise. But I was pretty well determined to consign this weekend to sweet, sweet oblivion.

Well, okay. Catherine and I did do something. But it was entirely by accident! Taste of Arlington stood between me and my Sunday agenda of haircut- and grocery-acquisition, so Catherine and I met up there with Julie, Brian and Scott.

TOA was okay. The minimum buy-in of $25 was a little disheartening, as were the occasionally meager portion sizes that the $3-or-so tickets got you. I'll cop to gluttony, but Hard Times Cafe should still serve more than a quarter-cup of chili. More irritating, though, was the just-okay restaurant selection. Arlington's probably got more and better food per dollar per capita than DC; so why did Molly Malone's, Guiness-vendor to the pop-collar set, have a booth? Why did Chipotle? Hell, why did Kaplan Test Prep? Restaurants ought to jump at the chance to sell large quantities of one appetizer at $3/pop -- aside from the goodwill it generates, it should be easy and profitable. Although there were several good restaurants represented and quality food to be had, it felt like the festival was struggling to fill the booths. Many well-known area restaurants chose not to participate, and those who did seemed primarily interested in getting suckers like myself signed up for their spam email lists.

The mostly tasty eats weren't enough to assuage the feeling that the event was an exercise in marketing first and food second. It's been a while, but Taste of Clarendon was cheaper, more pleasant, and considerably tastier.

Oh well. At least the haircut was pretty good.

Check out this photo of Catherine and Scott.

Aww. Doesn't she look pretty and demure?

Yes. Well. Actually, though, she's imitating X-Pac of the WWE, performing his signature crotch chop and accompanying scream: "SUCK IT!"

She's a competitive girl, is all. Despite this, at Julie, Becca and Na's party over the weekend, teammate Brian and I were victorious. The exact details of that victory remain murky, including what it was we were competing at. But rest assured it must have been a devastating loss for Catherine. And even with the heated rivalries, we all had a good time -- thanks, hosts!

Yesterday Jon and Eric invited me to go rock climbing at Great Falls. It was not only non-fatal, but actually pretty damn fun. Pics and predictably self-deprecating commentary after the cut.

a somewhat unremarkable three-day weekend overall, though nice and relaxing. as tommy noted, movies were watched - "million dollar baby" and "mean girls," which i had never seen. if you know me at all, you can guess which film i thought was the vastly superior one. i mean, i liked "million dollar baby" alright, and i thought hilary swank was pretty superb, but the cliches, grizzled voiceovers, emotional maniuplation and the stupid-sport-as-metaphor-for-life genre just didn't do it for me (which is weird, because i'm usually a sucker for that kind of stuff, minus the sports metaphors). plus, i had heard so much about the "twist" partway through the movie that i halfway expected an alien lifespawn to bust through swank's stomach during the climatic boxing match and swallow her opponent whole. but the scene where a partially blind morgan freeman punches out a young whippersnapper with only one glove and no effort was pretty kickass.

a good part of the rest of my weekend was spent shopping for a formal evening gown. you see, a good friend of ours is getting married in a month to a very lovely young woman that i like a lot. i think they'll be very happy, etc etc. thing is: they decided to make their wedding black tie, and (HORROR) i'm also fairly sure that the reception will be dry. at first, i thought dressing up would be fun and glamourous and exciting; now i realize i just have to spend $100+ on a dress that'll hide a thigh-flask.

anyway, after hours at the racks at such glamorous institutions of couture as hecht's department store, i think i found a proper dress (though it's a little too clingy to really wear a thigh-flask; don't worry, i'll bring along a proper-sized clutch instead), but i need my readers' fashion-forward advice. what i've got in hand is a flesh-colored gown with spaghetti straps, some beading, and some gauzey-ish material. it's not totally unlike this dress naomi watts wore to the oscars last year, except, well, a LOT less beading and more of the gauze. maybe this evening i can upload a picture of the actual thing (or beg tommy to take a picture of it today and upload it? eh?).

my questions: does this scream 2004? is it too fancy? is this color-appropriate for a wedding? will i look like one big washed-out blob of flesh? and, for the love of god, WHAT SHOES SHOULD I WEAR?

this is a dire matter. i hope you will pay it the attention it deserves.

UPDATE: here is a picture of the dress hanging from our bedroom door, with animal gaping at it in the background. it's returnable, so make fun of it all you like.

I hope everyone had an enjoyable President's Day. I had to work, bike through the rain and lose at trivia, but still had a good day. My secret? Drinking heavily at the end of it. Oh, and Kriston and Susan gave me this awesome shirt which they picked up on their Gotham/Gates getaway. Thanks guys! I'm getting even more spoiled than usual.

Not a lot to report from over the weekend: Julie and Jon came over on both Friday and Saturday night. It was cold. Doing things is hard. So we stayed in and watched movies. Million Dollar Baby was heart-wrenching and all, but having thought about it a bit more, I agree with Catherine's initial assessment: it's a little cliched. C'est la boxing movie. Of the films watched, Mean Girls clearly stands as the more lasting cinematic achievement.

so. it's been cold outside, huh? the kind of cold that freezes the interior contents of your nose into a crystallized fountain pouring down your upper lip; the kind of cold that makes you tear up, except you don't know you've teared up, because the liquid your eyes are emanating in response to the extreme polar weather has actually glued your eyelids together; the kind of cold that causes somebody who has never in fact lived above the mason-dixon line to whine unendingly on her blog.

and it was during the first real cold weekend of the year that i had an altogether wonderful time, despite the fact that i had to wear, like, sneakers and sweaters and scarves instead of flipflops and the slutty tank tops that i like to characterize my days off work. ah well. we all make sacrifices.