Company Dinner

First dinner - homemade macaroni with the last 1/2 bag from my stash, fresh spinach, Asian salad and fresh Sour Dough Bread!

Linda is here for the weekend and now Neil is calling the steaks are ready. Time for chow on night two.

Go see RED, the movie with Bruce Willis and Morgan Freeman. Hillarious and great continuity. All the famous actors did well.

Few Things More Gratifying...

than planting grass seed in the Fall.

We had a depression in the lowest part of the back yard which stayed wet longer and longer and became more impossible to mow through, eventually turning to standing water like a bog.

We hired someone to lift the sod, add new dirt and put down sod, but they came the day before we left for Fourth of July vacation during the hottest part of the year. Portions of the sodded grass died.

I finally got the grass seed two weeks ago, scratched the dirt/dead sod, stirred the seeds around and went on to the next bare spot. I quickly tired of that approach and just put the seed on top of most of the remaining patches.

Here we are two weeks later and the first part I worked up has bloomed famously (frothy lighter green in foreground), the other bare parts still have the seed sitting on top, not even the birds have found it.

11:03 pm

Linda arrived at National a little earlier than I expected and was a good enough sport to catch the Metro to my station. We met up on the lower level and came home. Dinner at Laredo Grill, then watched the Pelican Brief.

She had given me men's short samples - one leg, multiple colors and a load of them during a previous visit to San Francisco. I brought them home and cut them into the 9" squares for the church charity quilts.

We started to arrange the colors. Just 63 possibilities. We'll keep working on the layout and then will sew and donate to the Quilters.

Time stamp is because I almost ran out of time to get this date. I have blogged almost a year and I still have to make an entry each day, or I lose the date as a heading.

Union Noise

The unions are getting ready for Halloween. This large inflated mouse is on the back of a truck, illegally parked in a loading zone, and unfortunately you can't see the driver has raised the hood and appears to be looking at a vehicle that can't move, therefore doesn't deserve a ticket.

It did catch my eye, but the noise did much earlier. A block away I could hear the drums, whistles and reggae sounds to people answering chants. They are more like music than words, but the idea is to protest nonunion carpenters working at any given site in DC. Northern Virginia is a right to work state and sometimes those companies win work in DC.

The unions hire the street people to march during lunch hour so the show and noise are over at 1pm.

Fall Color

These are the yellows I thought would come out in the full fountain picture from yesterday, but it was 10am and too gray, or the water was too opague.

We have had the yellows for about a week and we had our first frost this week, so now the fiery orange and red colors are coming out.

About a third of the leaves are still green, so we will need another frost to catch their attention and remind them, this is the time for fall color and falling off the trees. Summer is over!

Taken from the fourth deck of the metro parking garage, my typical parking space with my new life balance schedule.

Freedom Plaza Fountain

I had a meeting at Commerce this morning so walked over.

It was supposed to be partly sunny and if that had been the case, you would have seen all the tree leaves behind the fountain would have been bright yellow. Additionally, in the lower right, through the water, you can see Treasury - flag on top.

This is looking up Pennsylvania Avenue toward the White House and that is the gate at Treasury we entered for the White House tour.

This fountain, in the DaVinci Lost Symbol book mentioning Freedom Plaza, was fully working today, a rare occurence. Sorry the sun was not shining as promised. The real rain comes tomorrow.

Not So Fast

Well, fiddle-dee-dee. I came in from weeding in the backyard thinking I would clean up and get into house clothes for the day, and look what I found. Our newly installed shower curtain had slid to the top of the tub.

You can see this temporary rod only has rubber endings. I will have to look on the Do-It-Yourself Network on the computer to see how to secure the holders.

I think it will involve a molly bolt, a rubber housing and a strategic screw into/through the rubber end points reminding them not to shear off and fall to the floor. Sigh....