The Freckled Diaries

Busy Day!

Ah....

That's the sigh of relief of having finished a very busy (but VERY fun) day in the life of....well, me. It's odd, because I've been nothing but busy for months now (or, well, really a year now...I started my job at the Senate Library on December 2 of last year and full time school plus mostly full time work=not so easy), but this kind of busy feels so different from what I've been doing these many months, but yet so familiar. Maybe it's the Christmas/Holiday season busyness that everyone goes through or...something.

Either way, I started my day at 10 am (don't laugh, I didn't get to sleep until 3 because I was up writing a paper that was due today), and prepared myself for karate class. I then exited my home to go to my bike (to take me to class) to discover that the snowpocalypse* I'd thought was predicted for Saturday night/all day Sunday was in fact for Friday night/all day Saturday. I must say, hats off to Dottie from Let's Go Ride A Bike and everyone else who rides in the snow (and enjoys it!), because my experience was abject misery. According to Google Maps, it is .7 miles between my house and the dojo (that sounds so long--I think of it as 10 blocks), and it was .7 miles of miserable awfulness. My feet were frozen solid, my karate uniform from mid-thigh to knee totally wet (and cold), my hair was wet and snowflakes and pieces of flying ice/"wintery mix" kept getting into my eyes. People in cars were even more humorless than usual (grammatically speaking, can you be "more" of "xxx-less"?). Put simply, it sucked. Now, I don't have the proper gear, or anything that could be defined as "gear" at all, and that's probably largely the culprit. But I was not a happy camper.

Anyway, I got to karate class, where I did get some serious "omg you're so tough" points for having ridden the bike there. Unfortunately, about a half hour into class, I very nearly passed out because I hadn't eaten enough and because that's what happens to me when I exercise vigorously before noon.

Straight from class (which ended at noon), I got back on the bike into the snowpocalypse to the Metro to go to actual class--the one for which a paper was due today. From 1:30 to 4, I was a slave to Information Systems for Libraries (the worst class I have ever taken at Catholic or any university), then back on the Metro. On the way home, I realized that being on the bike in the cold and wet could be much more comfortable if I had warm, dry feet and I should get some wellies and wool socks. I got off the train at Pentagon City (a major mall in the DC area) and went hunting. 2 hours later, I came out with some wellies (yellow plaid!), two hats, a flower headband, and two dresses. No wool socks to be found. But the dresses totally made up for it. Macy's is having a major sale and has awesome stuff. I got this dress (don't mind the huge pile of laundry on the ottoman) 

 

for $24. It was on the half off rack and the lady in line ahead of me gave me a coupon or an additional 25% off....all on top of Macy's big ol' sale.

I then got back on Metro, retrieved the bike, raced home (got there by 7) and got showered, blow-dried and dressed (in the new dress!) in 25 minutes. Back on the bike all spiffed up to go to Arlington. One of my friends from ballroom dance class is the conductor and director of the Alexandria Symphony Orchestra (his wife is also in the class and is one of "The Catherines". He offers free tickets to all their events. For some reason I don't fully understand (though I suspect has to do with Arlington trying to lure the Orchestra away from Alexandria), they were playing their holiday concert in Rosslyn. I was so pressed for time, I did my makeup on Metro. 

The concert was great, and I had fun catching up with folks from dance class. It started at 8, ended at 9:15 and at 9:30 I was in my cousin Rebecca's car on the way to Shirlington to see "An Education". We've both been DYING to see it for months now, and she texted me last minute to let me know there was a 10pm showing and this was her last free time until Christmas. The movie was great, I'm SO glad we made it and I had an absolute blast being out in my new dress. We decided we wanted to talk about the movie and "catch up" after not having seen each other for 6 whole days so we went to Murphy's in Old Town--got there at midnight on the dot.

This all brings me back to what I WOULD have been doing today had it not been for grad school. Today was Alexandria's Scottish Walk--our Christmas parade. Alexandria was founded by Scottish merchants in the 1600s etc etc....it's just a thing we do. As most people know, I belong to a group which plans, organizes and fundraises for the Irish cultural events in Alexandria (mainly the St. Patrick's Day parade and the Irish Festival). This organization's members march in the Scottish walk singing Christmas carols and pimping our own parade (and not drinking Irish whiskey from flasks. Nope.). If I hadn't had to be in class, I would have been marching in said parade and participating in the day-long liver-busting bar hop fest that was last year (long story short--a friend of a friend would up crashing at my house, but before I was even home, because she was too drunk and had like a 4am flight home and at some point got up and made herself soup in a skillet--we're lucky she didn't burn the place down). Those were the days. 

Instead, this year, I got to hop in at the very end. All the bars (Irish ones in particular) were ALL hopping and lit up for Christmas. Men in kilts and women dressed up all pretty were in abundance. Everyone was in good cheer. It's actually better to come in late, because then you get much of the fun, but without the hangover. Note to self for next year.

One of the many things I love about living in Old Town (I'll get more into all of them another day) is the walk home between 1 and 2am. The bars are closing, everyone's out and about, you see some crazy ass shit (excuse the language but seriously, there's no better way to talk about it--office wheely chair, drunk people, cobblestone, snowbank---you do the math), have random and funny interactions and everyone's, generally, in a swell mood. It's just great.

So then I came home, checked my email and started updating my blog. The end!

*The Washington, DC area and all of its inhabitants absolutely flip out beyond all reason every time something "not rain" falls out of the sky.  This snow wasn't even sticking to the ground and only UP TO 4 inches (in the far western suburbs--the Appalachian freaking Mountains!) was predicted and people behave as if Christ himself was floating out of the sky with four horsemen and a flying pig in tow. It's so extreme you'd think people were doing it to be "ironic". But they're not.

More Books

Hey, look. I updated my Shelfari. I'm actually not reading any of them at the moment, as at least one of them is not yet published (the one I'm looking the most forward to but which Shelfari for some reason won't let me place at the top---"Faithful Place" by Tana French). But this is The Plan for winter break/Christmas.

So #1 is Faithful Place because I LOVED the first two books Tana French wrote. Please check them out. They don't have to be read in order because they're not technically a series but they do have the same characters....yeah. Anyway. First "In the Woods", then "The Likeness". You (probably) won't regret it, even if you don't normally like mysteries.

#2 I'm most looking forward to is "The Song is You" mainly because my favorite work of contemporary fiction is "Prague: a Novel" and this is by the same author (Arthur Phillips) and has gotten rave reviews. I think that for me it will be very hard to top "Prague" but we shall see.

#3 is The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo because I started reading it this summer but had to return it to the library when I was only 50 pages in (there was a queue behind me and I couldn't renew). Lesson learned: don't check out 5 books at a time, you'll never finish them all! I liked what I'd read, but I have to say I don't see what all the fuss is about. Then again, I only got 50 pages in.

#4 is Sorting Things Out because I like that kind of non-fiction (popular non-fiction about odd topics--like "Cod: the Biography of the Fish That Changed the World"), but this is about classification! Go librarians!

#5 is the Quiet American because I've been meaning to read that since before we went to Vietnam (oops....). My cousin managed to accomplish this (or read it while we were there?) and loved it and insists that I will, too. And I stayed at that hotel (the one in which it is largely set, I understand). That and it's kind of a modern classic, and while Greene's not quite one of the Lost Generation modernists (or is he? is Evelyn Waugh?... surely not, right? maybe straight-up modernists? ack, it doesn't matter and I wasn't an English major anyway), I kind of get the impression that many of the things I appreciate about Hemingway and Fitzgerald and company I would like about Greene. I'll let you know how that theory turns out.

So that's it. I've updated the Shelfari. After....a year? I've been busy.

Edited to add....alright so The Quiet American didn't show up, but Barbara Kingsolver's new one did. I just like her and have lots of her books on the "To Read" list. This one may or may not make it. Greene gets a bump. But I can't make Shelfai cooperate. Stupid Shelfari.