Did I Say That?

There’s a new app making the rounds on Facebook that generates the pretty little graphic below with a selection of status updates. It’s kinda silly, I realize, but it was fun to look back through all the stuff I posted through the year. There were a few recurring themes, including coffee, meetings, the Caps, beer, colds, and  travel — not necessarily in that order. Facebook clearly remembers more about this year than I do. Maybe I should just use  this for my Christmas letter…

Click to enlarge. It's much more legible that way.

Almost Ready to Go

I always love having a snow day off from work — it’s the only thing that makes giant winter storms worthwhile, as I far as I am concerned. And today’s was even more welcome, since I had a lot of stuff to get done before I leave on my trip.

Because I was snowed in for the better part of the weekend, there was no excuse for not being productive. I did a ton of laundry, cleaned the apartment pretty thoroughly, worked on my Christmas letter, bought some presents online, and started packing for my trip to Egypt. I hit a few snags along the way — like discovering that the dress I had finally settled on for the wedding needed an emergency trip to the dry cleaner and realizing that two days without mail service means my stamps might not arrive in time to mail my letters — but otherwise, things went along swimmingly.

Of course, I now need to squeeze two days of office wrap-up into one, which is no small feat given the size of my to-do list. Fortunately, nearly all of my colleagues take a decent chunk of time off for the holidays, so many of them won’t be in the office long enough to get mad at me if I don’t get everything finished.

I’m officially on vacation starting Wednesday, having planned a day off for last-minute appointments and prep before I knew I’d be off today. Given the weather over the weekend, I’m feeling very lucky that I opted to schedule everything on a weekday  — I’d have never been able to get Saturday appointments re-scheduled before I left town. Of course, I now get to figure out how, exactly, one walks home from a pedicure when there is two feet of snow on the ground. Flip-flops are out, I’m thinking…

Snowmageddon: the View from My Porch

I’m not gonna lie. I didn’t venture very far from home during this weekend’s storm. I know some people love to frolic in the fresh-fallen snow, but I am, alas, not one of them. Save a trip to Safeway on Saturday morning, I didn’t venture out again until dinner tonight. And so, my updates come from no farther than my back porch.

Saturday, 5:30 am: I took this through my bedroom window, shortly after being awakened by by neigbor's pre-dawn snowblowing, and moments before I went back to sleep for several hours.

Saturday, 10 am: Morning, take two. No sign the snow will be letting up any time in the foreseeable future.

Saturday, c. 1:30 pm: The tragic vestiges of my porch garden had been turned almost entirely into a snowbank.

Satruday, 9:00 pm: And once it had been snowing for 24 hours straight, my plants had vanished almost entirely.

Sunday, 10:00 pm: Here's the thing about snow in DC... It goes, well, not as quickly as it comes, but almost. As of tonight my porch has already seen some fairly significant melting.

What’s the best part about the storm, you may ask? It’s that the federal government is closed tomorrow, which means that I don’t have to go to work. I’m not a govvie, of course, but many nonprofits in the area — including mine — follow the lead of the big guy in town when it comes to these things. So, yippee! A grown-up snow day!

Here’s a funny thing, though. Even though the government has already declared itself closed tomorrow, Congress is still plugging away. On the way home from dinner tonight, we noticed the tell-tale light in the cupola that indicates they’re still in session. It’s probably impossible to see in this picture, but believe me, it’s there.

Congress is still hard at work on this snowy night.