Sunday, September 02, 2018

you got a fast car

If San Francisco is the city of sin in my mind, what does that make Washington D.C.?

I don't have an answer for you yet. But today was pretty delightful. [censored] and I fulfilled our desires to sleep in, but we still managed to make it to the club lounge for breakfast before breakfast closed (this was not a particularly heroic feat, since breakfast ended at ten). Then we indulged our inner nerds and went to the Postal Museum - it's part of the general Smithsonian collection, but is perhaps the least-trafficked of the Smithsonians due to the fact that it's about fucking stamps and not about the Apollo Program.

But those of you who prefer the Apollo Program to stamps are #basic and really missing out. The Postal Museum was great - I learned a lot about all the complete idiots who formed the first air mail (one guy threw a rock at a bull who had charged him when he landed his plane to smoke a cigarette, but accidentally hit the farmer, so couldn't take breaks there anymore). In fact, the history of the postal service had a lot of daredevil idiots - people wandering through the woods making their own trails from NYC to Boston in the 1600s; the Pony Express; the air mail guys; the people still running a mule train down into the Grand Canyon every day to provide mail service to the Havasupai (okay, they probably aren't idiots, but if you've tried to haul a mail order washing machine into the Grand Canyon via mule, you may occasionally question your life decisions).

After that museum, which was excellent, we walked outside and were promptly greeted by the blast furnace that is DC in summer. So we didn't stray to far for a late lunch - we went across the street to The Dubliner, which had better food than I was expecting and the critical benefit of not requiring us to be in the sun for more than five minutes. After our meal, we spent two minutes paying respects at the Ukrainian famine/genocide memorial across the street, and then we took a lyft to the Air and Space Museum....

...which was about a hundred times more popular than the Postal Service museum, which was real annoying since I hate people and I especially hate children. However, the WWI and WWII exhibits were great - especially since I don't know much about the air war in WWI, so I enjoyed / was sobered my all of that. We also watched some videos of Medal of Honor winners from WWII who were telling their stories on video...you know you had to survive some really nasty shit to get a Medal of Honor in WWII, so that was pretty powerful.

There was more to the Air and Space Museum than that, but if you want to know the rest, you should just visit since the museum is free and my time is more valuable than that.

sssanyway. After the museum, we meandered back toward Chinatown and had dinner at Matchbox, which is a pizza place that I went to after Adit's wedding like eight years ago. The pizza (even the gluten free pizza) was super tasty, as was the rosé, and so I felt pretty satisfied with life. When we got back to the hotel, we adjourned to the club lounge, where we ran into some of [censored]'s coworkers - [censored] is in town for a conference, so the chances that we'll see coworkers will continue to go up in the next day or two. So we said hi to them, grabbed a drink, said bye to them, and ended up taking our drinks to a pair of chairs overlooking the atrium, where the lights slowly cycled through the colors of the rainbow and might have driven us mad if we'd been trying to read.

But we were just trying to drink Bud Light ([censored]) and sauvignon blanc (me) - we're such cliches - so the lights were fine. And now I must sleep so we can do fun stuff tomorrow - goodnight!

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