Day 318/365 - Hammering

It was raining again at Nationals Park tonight. The Nats aren't going to set a record for losses this year (thank heavens), but it's starting to look like they may set a record for rain delays. If it weren't a bobblehead night, I probably would've just stayed home.

It was though, so I ventured over to the ballpark, picked up my Frank Howard bobblehead, bought a Jesus Flores t-shirt from the team store, had a beer and an order of chili cheese fries to counteract the salad and diet Snapple I had for lunch, and then gave up and came home.

It was raining when I left the ballpark and still raining when I got home. Hang on, let me check and see if they've gotten around to starting the game yet...

Yikes! It's the second inning and Milwaukee is ahead 7-0. So much for turning on the tv to watch the game. I originally intended for the title of this post to be a bit of a play on both the rain coming down and the blistering Frank Howard's statue at Nats Park is giving the ball in the photo above. Now I guess it's also a reference to what's happening to the Nats on the field. Bummer.

I'm not really sold on this statue or its two brethren (Walter Johnson and Josh Gibson), btw. They're all done with the same "motion tracking" style. Big Frank's statue is supposed to capture his swing and give a sense of energy to what is typically a very static art form. It's a good concept and all, but it really just makes him look like the six-armed bastard child of a Hindu deity with seaweed clinging to his bat.

(Taken with my Nikon Coolpix S200)

Day 317/365 - H O T

After a mild start, summer in DC has taken a turn toward the miserable. It's hot and the air is as thick and sticky as syrup. Being outside is like walking around with a wet woolen blanket draped over you.

I had thought about going to a county fair tonight, but then I decided I'd rather just stay in the air-conditioned indoors and watch some old movies off my DVR. Given that it rained pretty hard earlier, I think I made the right call. Plus I got to watch one Stewart Granger-Grace Kelly movie ("Green Fire") and another with Clark Gable and Susan Heyward ("Soldier of Fortune").

BTW, this shot is part of a sign in the Potbelly's sandwich shop at work. I swung by there this afternoon for an Oreo milkshake. I'm not all that crazy about their sammiches, but they do make some mean milkshakes.

(Taken with my Nikon Coolpix S200)

Day 316/365 - Brew at the Zoo

Hot, tired, and still half-drunk. I'll write a description at some point tomorrow.

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Okay, I’m sober, awake, and air-conditioned now. I’d heard about Brew at the Zoo but never been before. It’s a fundraising event the National Zoo hosts every summer where they bring in around thirty breweries to set up booths at the Zoo and give out samples of their beers. For the price of your ticket you get a nice glass mug with the Brew at the Zoo logo etched on it and all the free samples of beer you can drink in three hours.

There is a sample line etched on the mug and many of the brewers were strict/stingy about only filling your glass up to that mark. I did notice that the women in attendance generally were given more in their glasses than guys, probably because most of the people working the booths and pouring the beer were guys. The booths are arranged in a loop at the back end of the zoo and you just get a sample and then move to the line for the next and drink your beer while you wait to move up to the head of the line. Which means that it’s pretty much just continuous beer drinking for hours. Because your mug is only getting filled to sample size, it doesn’t seem like you’re drinking that much but it adds up quickly.

I was supposed to go with a couple friends, but something came up and they were unable to go so I had to fly solo. It’s an event that would be more fun with friends, but it was still pretty good on my own. They should’ve handed out a map though showing the different brewers’ booths and listing their beers because if you find one you enjoy and would like to buy at the store, it’s hard to remember what it was after trying so many different ones (not to mention the memory fog brought on by simply drinking so much beer). Of the ones I liked, there are only two that I can remember by brewery – a porter by Flying Dog and a hefeweizen from Starr Hill. They were both delish.

My only gripe about the event is that it’s held at the worst possible time of year. August in DC is like a summer vacation in Hell. It’s so hot and muggy that the entire city feels like one big outdoor sauna. They should push Brew at the Zoo back until September when the weather is less brutal. Especially given that you have to hump it back up the hill to the zoo entrance after the event ends. I can’t lie, I had to stop twice and take a break on a bench for a few minutes (whether from the beer I’d drunk or the oppressive heat I don’t know. Possibly both).

If I go again next year I think I’ll spring for the VIP ticket. Then they throw in a free t-shirt, appetizers, and you have your own private beer booths so you don’t have to wait in line. Plus you’re under an awning in case it rains. After all, you don’t want the rain watering down your beer.

(Taken with my Nikon Coolpix S200)

Day 315/365 - Lunch with "Tony Plush"

My buddy Chris and I went to the ESPNZone for lunch today to catch a question and answer session with Washington Nationals centerfielder and lead-off man Nyjer Morgan, whose on-field alter ego is "Tony Plush."

It was a fun session. He's a very lively, entertaining, honest guy. He talked about how he left home in San Francisco when he was 16 to play hockey in a Canadian development league before hanging up his skates and going to college in Walla Walla where he started playing baseball.

He's become one of my favorite players since the Nats acquired him a month ago in a trade with the Pittsburgh Pirates. He's an excellent centerfielder who can chase down nearly any ball, a deft basestealer, can hit for average, and seems like an all-around good guy.

Go Nyjer, go Nats!

(Taken with my Nikon Coolpix S200)

Day 314/365 - It's All Good!

Who cares if the Nats comeback against the Rockies fell a little short tonight and they lost 4-3, at least the game wasn't delayed by rain as I feared it would be. And, best of all, last night at one minute to midnight the Nats signed top draft pick Stephen Strasburg, the best amateur pitching prospect in the past 10 years!

So what if no pitcher taken number one overall in the draft has ever lived up to the hype and that even if Strasburg does he'll likely bolt to another city as soon as he's eligible for free agency, for the next six years he's going to be a Washington National.

Over the next several seasons I'll be looking forward to a lot of strikeouts, a fair number of wins, a couple playoff appearances, and a Cy Young award. The grass is always greener at the ballpark, even when it's home to a last-place team.

(Taken with my Nikon Coolpix S200)

Day 313/365 - Not a Work of Art

For this week's self-portrait, I took a shot of myself with my D90 and then ran it through the watercolor effect on an old version of Microsoft Photo Editor to give it the look of a painting rather than a photograph. This is me tired after a busy day at work.

(Taken with my Nikon D90)

Twice on Sunday Bonus Photo - Uniformity

This week's extra photo from my archives is a shot I took of the Navy Honor Guard at the Navy Memorial in Washington, DC last Veterans Day.

(Taken with my Nikon D80)

Day 312/365 - Post-It Note Impression No. 9

Time for me to make a fool of myself again with another Post-It Note impression. Quick, who am I this time?

(Taken with my Nikon Coolpix S200)

Day 311/365 - Everyday Art

I had an art-filled Saturday today. Although I didn't plan it that way, all three stops on my impromptu art tour focused on everyday rather than 'high' art and, fittingly enough, all three were free. I started things off at the Corcoran Museum, which has free admission every Saturday this month. They are currently featuring a very cool photography exhibit by William Eggleston entitled Democractic Camera. His shots aren't of celebrities or of beautiful, exotic landscapes. Instead, he shoots regular people, ordinary places, and average objects, but the way he composes his shots is what makes them artistic.

It's easy to make an eyecatching shot of an intrinsically interesting subject. It's much harder to do that with a nondescript subject. Eggleston excels at it, however. My favorite photo in this exhibit is a shot he took of the back of a woman's ornate 1960s up-do at the next booth over in a restaurant or diner, but all of his stuff is pretty striking. Next stop on my everday art tour was the National Geographic Society's Explorer's Hall, where they have an exhibit entitled Kodachrome Culture that features photographs taken by American tourists traveling in Europe in the 1950s and 1960s. These are not your average tourist summer vacation photos. They were very well done and the place in time they depicted was equally as interesting as the place in the world they highlighted.

Last stop was the all-day Mural Jam that was going on at the Rhode Island Avenue Shopping Center. There is a long concrete retaining wall that runs in back of that strip mall and an organization called Albus Cavus was sponsoring a public art project wherein several local artists were collaborating on painting a massive mural that stretched the length of the wall. A few of the artists were using brushes, but most were wielding spray cans. As you can see from the shot above, however, they weren't just the typical conception of graffiti artists. The things they were able to do with spray paint were absolutely amazing.

Never mind the bread and circuses, give the people art!

(Taken with my Nikon D90)

Day 310/365 - Twenty Interesting Experiences

Didn't know what to shoot today, so I decided I'd go with a photo of an adventurous still life and blather on about some experiences I've had that I thought were interesting. Some of these are repeats of things I mentioned on my list of random facts about myself from Day 76, but whatever.

Twenty Interesting Experiences I've Had:

1. I've been through the Panama Canal
2. I climbed an active volcano (Mt. Pelee) in Martinique
3. I've attended Mardi Gras in New Orleans
4. I've bungee jumped
5. I've been inside a pharaoh's burial chamber in an Egyptian pyramid
6. I've been hoisted up into a helicopter that was hovering over the deck of a ship at sea
7. I've attended Carnevale in Venice
8. I went to the first ever Nationals game in Washington, DC
9. I've eaten dinner at Citronelle
10. I've skydived
11. I've been to a Broadway play
12. I've ridden a train through the Chunnel
13. I've been swimming with dolphins
14. I saw a Space Shuttle launch
15. I was a ballboy at a Kansas City Kings basketball game
16. I've been to the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade
17. I've been in a car that was upside down
18. I've ridden bareback on a horse that was swimming in the ocean
19. I saw Nirvana in concert
20. I've loved and lost

(Taken with my Nikon D90)

Day 309/365 - (Ex) Sailor

It's not Halloween, I'm not going to a costume party, I haven't reenlisted, and I haven't completely lost my mind. This is just my self-portrait for the week. I thought I'd see if I could still squeeze into my old Navy dress white uniform.

Squeeze was definitely the operative word here. Fourteen years after being discharged from the Navy, I could barely fit into the jumper. The pants didn't come close to fitting. Even the hat felt small. Oh well, I think I'm happier being fat and free.

(Taken with my Nikon D90)

Day 308/365 - Rough Day at the Office

Thanks to the wonders of modern technology (and a cool boss) I worked from home today. Reviewing grant applications for legal sufficiency isn't the most exciting gig in the world, although occasionally some of the project proposals are fairly interesting. When you're doing it while sitting poolside, however, it's a pretty damn good job.

Now if only there were cocktail waitresses and a swim-up blackjack table.

(Taken with my iPhone)

Day 307/365 - At the Dentist, Again

It was time for my six-month check-up, so I stopped by the dentist's ofice on my way to work this morning. I didn't realize that much time had already gone by since my last visit. I was a bit worried she'd tell me today that the repair job she'd done on my crumbling tooth wasn't holding and that I'd need a root canal.

Thankfully, that wasn't the case. However, she did find some new decay on the sides of two of my bottom teeth. That's them in the photo on the monitor above. My dentist's office is cool. This flat screen is attached to the patient chair and it can display a map of your mouth and it can also show photos that she takes inside your mouth with this wand camera thing. Then she points out the problem areas in the photo and you can see exactly what needs fixing.

Because the decay was on the outside of the teeth, she didn't need to do any drilling. Just a quick bit of grinding and then she spackled them over with this tooth-colored filling goop. Then I got to walk around for a while with one cheek and half my tongue numb. Made answering phone calls at work sort of interesting.

(Taken with my iPhone)

Day 306/365 - G.I. Joe (Doesn't Blow)

Suprisingly the GI Joe movie doesn't suck. My friend Chris and I went to see it as part of our occasional "Monday guy night at the movies." I was expecting it to be rather craptastic, but with some cool action sequences and effects. However, apart from the Paris sequence -- which was overlong, largely unnecessary, and absolutely ridiculous, it was a fairly good movie. Definitely enjoyable.

The characters, while two-dimensional (it was based on a cartoon after all), were entertaining and the story almost made sense. The action sequences, which are really the star of a movie like this, were pretty damn cool. It wasn't a particularly original piece of cinema. There was pretty heavy borrowing from Star Wars and also the Bond movies, but I didn't feel cheated after it was over.

It ain't art, and it ain't particularly smart, but it is fun. Yo Joe!

(Taken with my Nikon Coolpix S200)

Twice on Sunday Bonus Photo - Kitchen Composition

For this week's extra photo from my archives, we have this shot I took a few weeks ago of a bowl of green apples in my kitchen. I really liked the various shapes, colors, and textures.

(Taken with my Nikon D90)

Day 305/365 - Lightning in a Jar

I went down to my neighborhood park tonight to catch myself a jar full of fireflies -- or as we call them in the midwest, lightning bugs. Every time we went down to my Grandpa's cabin at the Lake of the Ozarks when I was growing up, my brother and I would go out and catch as many lightning bugs as we could.

We'd put them in a mason jar with holes poked in the lid and set the jar on the dresser in the room we shared to make ourselves a nightlight. Then when we'd wake up in the morning we'd have a jar full of dead lightning bugs. We never could figure out how to keep them alive.

I didn't have any mason jars, so tonight I had to make do with an old jelly jar instead. I caught about six or seven lightning bugs, but once I put them in the jar they refused to glow. Seems like they only lit up when they were flying and the jelly jar was too small for them to fly around in, so after a few minutes I let them go. I don't really have much use for a jar full of dead lightning bugs at this point.

When I was a kid, summertime consisted of lightning bugs, watermelon seeds, squirt guns, bicycles, hide and go seek, reruns on tv, playing army, running through sprinklers, staying out 'til dark, road trips, freeze tag, camping, sidewalk chalk, hamburgers on the hibachi, and NO SCHOOL.

We didn't have play dates, or serial summer camps, or reading assignments. We just had fun.

(Taken with my Nikon D90)

Day 304/365 - Bobblehead Night at Nats Park

Tonight the Nats had their first bobblehead night of the season. They gave away Adam Dunn bobbleheads and if that wasn't reason enough to leave the ballpark happy, they also beat the Arizona Diamondbacks to secure their seventh straight victory. I believe that may be their longest winning streak since the inaugural 2005 season when they won ten in a row. Be still my beating heart -- the Nats are actually playing winning baseball.

(Taken with my Nikon Coolpix S200)

Day 303/365 - French Twofer (Deux Pour?)

There is a French restaurant in Georgetown called La Chaumiere that I've been wanting to try for a few years and tonight I finally went. I was going to see the movie "Julie & Julia" that is, in part, about Julia Child's formative years in France and I thought it would be cool to have dinner in a French resaurant beforehand. La Chaumiere is a small, intimate restaurant with a rustic and cozy feel to it. The food is very good. I had an emmenthaler cheese souffle to start and followed that with the venison medallions. Plus a couple glasses of champagne. Why not?

I took the unforgivable step of skipping dessert so that I would have time to stop by an ATM and get to the movie theater on time. When I got to the electronic kiosk at the theater to buy my ticket, I discovered that my debit card was not in my wallet. Cue moment of minor panic. I decided I must have neglected to take it out of the folder thing the bill was in at the restaurant. I started heading back to La Chaumiere when it hit me that I'd still had the card when I stopped by the ATM, at which point I realized that I'd gone off and left my card in the machine after taking the cash. Ugh.

I wasn't too, too worried given that there was no one else around the ATM when I went, it was inside the bank foyer rather than on the street in the open, and I believe ATMs are designed to suck your card back inside if you forget to take it. My card wasn't there when I got back to the ATM, and this is where buying an iPhone came in handy. I used it to get on my bank's website and find the number for reporting a lost or stolen card. There hadn't been any activity on my card since I'd withdrawn money, and they went ahead and cancelled it and sent me a new one. Phew.

By that time I'd missed the 7:15 show, but there was another one at 8:15 so I pulled up the map on my iPhone, found the nearest Starbucks, went and got myself a mocha frappucino, and did the Wall Street Journal crossword puzzle on my phone to pass the time. If it's possible to love a little hunk of metal and plastic, I'm coming to love my iPhone.

Back at the movie theater, the lady at the ticket counter recommended heading straight to the auditorium to get a good seat because it was looking like the show was going to sell out. Great recommendation, and something I wouldn't have gotten had I used the electronic kiosk rather than dealing with a person. The show did turn out to be packed and a lot of people who came in after me had trouble finding a decent place to sit.

The movie was very good. It has two storylines, both of which are based on real events. One is about Julia Child discovering French food in post-WWII Paris, learning to cook, and putting together her groundbreaking cookbook. The other is about a woman who decides to prepare all 500+ recipes in Julia's book in one year and blog about it daily. The plotlines echo each other in several regards, much in the way that the subplot informs on the main plot in Shakespeare. The first hint of this is in the introductory scene for each character when we see Julia drive by the Eiffel Tower in Paris and Julie drive by a rusty water tower in Queens.

Although their lives are very different on the surface, the two women's stories share many of the same elements. Each is trying to find something to do with her life, something more than just what she's done in the past and something more personally meaningful than just another way to pass the time. Each finds the answer in French cooking. BTW, don't go see this movie when you are hungry. I can only imagine it would be torment.

The Washington Post movie critic made a big noise over noting that the Julia Child scenes are more compelling than the Julie the blogger scenes. How insightful. Let's see, Julia Child and her husband are portrayed by Meryl Streep and Stanley Tucci. Who'd have guessed that their performances would outshine those of Amy Adams and the anonymous guy who plays her husband? There's some rocket science for you. I enjoyed both storylines. So go, see this movie and have a fun night out. Just make sure you eat beforehand.

(Taken with my Nikon Coolpix S200)

Day 302/365 - Phillips After Five

Although I've been a member of the Phillips Collection for two years and can get into the museum for free, I'd never been to one of their "Phillips After Five" events until tonight. Turns out they are pretty damn cool.

My evening started off with the Mortified performance piece in the museum's auditorium. If you're unfamiliar with Mortified, it essentially involves people getting onstage in front of a room full of strangers and recounting some of the most embarrassing and angst-ridden moments of their adolescence. Tonight's participants read from their high school journals/diaries, recited old love letters, and in one case sang childhood songs they'd written about their neighbors and friends. It was a hilarious, empathetic, touching, and occasionally cringeworthy experience. Evidently they stage events in cities across the country, so if one pops up in your neck of the woods you should go.

After the show ended, I ventured up to the third floor to check out the "Paint Made Flesh" exhibit, which highlights the way that the development of oil paints lead to greater skill and interest in depicting the human form among painters. The exhibit features a wide range of works from a variety of artists, styles, places, and eras. When I'd finished perusing it, I wandered around the permanent collection to visit a few old friends amongst the artworks, although I was bummed to discover that one of my Phillips faves -- Matisse's "Studio, Quai Saint-Michel" -- had been taken down from display. Don't know whether it's being restored or loaned out, but it was MIA.

From there I ambled on down to the music room to catch the tail end of a jazz quartet's performance. There was a cash bar there, but I had no greenbacks on me so I had to make like a teetotaller. Boooo. I then wrapped up the evening with a late supper and a bit of bookbrowsing at Kramerbooks & Afterwords Cafe. I guess I'd have to say it was a very yuppified night out. Fun, but definitely yuppified.

(Taken with my iPhone)

Day 301/365 - I Have Been Assimilated

"O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay! He chortled in his joy."

My iPhone came in the mail today! Serendipitously, I spent the afternoon on the internet researching various lists of the top iPhone apps and then when I got home, there was my new toy!

Recently I decided it was time I got myself a smartphone. I don't really talk on my phone that much. Mostly I use it for going on the internet, texting, and playing games, so smartphones would seem to be perfect for me. I've been a T-Mobile customer for the past 7 years and I would've gotten a model they offered, but they decided I wasn't eligible for an upgrade discount and were going to charge me $399 for their smartphone. Hmmm, let's see.... I could stick with T-Mobile and pay $399 for their smartphone, or I could switch to AT&T and get an iPhone for $99... okay then, AT&T it is! Brilliant business model, T-Mobile.

Now if I can just get the activation to kick in on my iPhone I'll be able to play around with it.

(Taken with my Nikon D90)