Wednesday, August 29, 2012

A Shower, Spies and Sweat

This weekend was a live one!  I can't remember the last time I had each day was fully packed like this was, boom boom boom.  So packed I didn't even have the energy to write about it while it was still going on!  Let's go back in time, shall we?


Sunday was the bridal party for Rosie, one of my oldest friends, and it was held at what turned out to be a pretty classy and beautiful place, so I'm glad I didn't wear my overalls and dirty Nikes or something (I own neither of those.)  It was so nice!  Rosie was genuinely surprised and it was so nice to see.  She got a lot of great loot, too!  I was the wrapping paper throw-er away-er in the line of bridesmaids chipping in so I had a front row seat, and I'm stoked for her to have all the condo fixin's she could ever want.  Rosie loves fish so there was a fish/sea theme, including live fish centerpieces...


So pretty, right?  They were given away as prizes for the shower games, which was pretty cool.  All in all it was a nice brunch and I was so happy to see my friend happy.

Later in the day I headed over to Ryan's house for a barbecue and helped prepare some of the food, and by "helped" I mean turned over the ears of corn or chicken on the grill whenever he had to go to the bathroom.  It was fun to hang out with his roommates and a bunch of my friends came too, the only bummer is that I felt like we were kind of in different camps for no other reason than geography because they were playing beer pong on the driveway and we were mainly in the backyard.  



Worlds colliding stresses me out sometimes but our peoples blend really well so it's usually a good time.  Whatever, I'm lucky enough to know people who even live in a place with a driveway and a backyard rather than a parking lot so I shouldn't complain!  I hope the next hangout has more overlap though.

The next morning Ryan and I got up and headed right to DC for a quick trip!  As I think I mentioned in the "About" section of the blog, Ryan is a chef with a rotating schedule so we don't always have days off at the same time and when we do, especially a few in a row like this week, we like to do it up sometimes.  Washington DC is only about 3 1/2 hours from where we live so it seemed like a good destination for a quick overnight trip that we could get a lot out of.  And get stuff out of it we did!  After we checked into our hotel we walked around and explored a bit, stopped to grab a snack and while we were eating I did a little internet wheeling-and-dealing to get us super discounted tickets to the International Spy Museum.  Score!  Photography wasn't allowed but I absolutely loved it.  Did you know that the gown Queen Elizabeth Tudor wore in her favorite royal portrait was embroidered with eyes and ears to imply that she saw and heard all?  I know that, now, because I went to the museum.


After the museum Ryan and I went back to our room to snazz up (which on my end was thwarted a little by a toothpaste explosion on my dress, very cool) before heading out to dinner at a tapas place Ryan had made a reservation at called Jaleo.  It was good!  Tiny, tasty food, you know the drill.  The decor was pretty weird for a high end place but I was into it.  Take, for example, this table:


Pretty sweet, right?  Fancy places incorporating not-so-fancy stuff can either sort of annoy me or I can get into it, and I was into this.  Afterward we went to a speakeasy-style bar called The Gibson, which had really delicious cocktails.  Ryan and I had googled speakeasies in the area because we really liked a couple we had gone to earlier this summer in Chicago, and from the outside this one was so nondescript that for a second we thought it was the door to an apartment and we'd messed up.  But nope!  It was a small, super dark bar with a blacked out front window that served 'em up tasty, just the way we like them.  On our way back to the hotel to call it a night with some Chinese takeout (tiny food was too tiny) we stopped for a last beer at a bar with shuffleboard tables and skeeball machines, both at which I showed my ineptitude.  Who am I over here, Wayne Gretsky? (That's like, the only sports guy I know.  Daryl Strawberry?)

The next morning we woke up early with plans to hit the typical tourist-y monuments, food trucks for lunch, and the Smithsonian and the Crime and Punishment museum...and got our asses handed to us by the sweaty hot weather.  We had to sacrifice checking out all the monuments because we were doing some serious walking just to the museums, and you could practically see those wavy bacon-looking heat lines coming from the pavement.  Oh well, it's an excuse to go back another time!  The museums were awesome, I was a little disappointed that The Puffy Shirt from Seinfeld was no longer at the Smithsonian, but totally geeked out over some original Muppets being there! 


The Crime and Punishment Museum had slightly fewer Muppets and slightly more John Walsh, but it was still awesome.  I very unexpectedly felt slightly weird at the museum- admittedly, probably the majority of the media I consume has to do with true crime (the entire broadcasting lineup of the Investigation Discovery channel, books), and maybe it had to do with the contrast of just having seen Dorothy's ruby slippers behind similar glass an hour before, but it felt a little icky to gawk at John Wayne Gacy's oil painting set alongside a family from New Hampshire.  I really did enjoy it but it was unsettling in a way I didn't expect.  I did get to see and say "no thanks" to a confiscated prison tattoo machine though!


Oof, looks pokey.  All in all it was a great trip, and if you're curious to see even more pictures you can check out my TripColor page!  Do you guys know about this?  It's an app you can use to upload pictures and tag your locations so they show up on a little map.  I like it because there are plenty of you-had-to-be-there things on trips that I want to document, but I don't want to necessarily clog up everyone's Facebook and Instagram feeds with.  It's free and I've used it twice now, I highly recommend!  Here's mine, where you can also see my Chicago trip if you're curious: 

Thanks for reading down this far, what an endurance test of a post!  So have you guys shoehorned in any last minute summer trips?  Were you also caught on camera by America's Most Wanted (not pictured)?



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