Yay birthday

I had a really great birthday.  Monday night Joe cooked manicotti and cupcakes, and we had prosecco and bummed around.  Yesterday I got up at the luxurious hour of 9:30 (instead of my usual weekday 7am), and Joe went off to his appointment while I had an additional hour to drink my coffee and lounge before I went to meet him at Friendship Heights.  He usually takes the Metro there, but that is such an error because THE BUS IS BEST.  Those of you who remember my packet-o-schedules from my Union Sq, Somerville days know that I am a big fan of buses, and yesterday I got to ride a whole new bus, the Montgomery County Ride On #1, which is similar in direction to the J1 Metrobus I ride to work, except that it makes many thrilling diversions into the adjacent neighborhoods instead of sticking to the boring main road.  It was the best ever, and then I met Joe for lunch at Mei Wah, which was super tasty.

After lunch we went down to Union Station and walked over to the new Capitol Visitors Center, where we had a tour of the Capitol (fun, but I need to get on a staff tour because only on those is there the possibility of riding the Capitol Subway), followed by a quick browse of the little museum.  Joe was pretty worn out after all that being out of the house, so we went home and vegged for the rest of the evening.  It was fun to have the day off work; sadly, I only won $2 in last night's Mega Millions drawing instead of the $212 million someone in Ocean County, NJ won, so I can't play hooky for the rest of my life and will have to continue working.

A great day for Metro

I was very bummed about having to trek out to use the bus, but I became less bummed as I realized that the little bit of deck and walk I had to shovel to get to the street was far less work than shoveling the whole driveway and cleaning off my car, as I'd have to do if I were driving.  It was also not that bad a walk, whereas it would have been a very stressful drive, since the streets were pretty slushy.  The bus I caught was on schedule (later than the bus I would normally catch, but just fine for today).

Sadly, we care a lot more as a society about clearing roads than sidewalks.  We leave it up to businesses and residences to clear sidewalks (where they exist... there aren't any sidewalks on my street), but we expect that our government will clear the roads.  I kinda want to boycott work whenever it snows as a protest.  Despite the University being open today, most of the sidewalks were not cleared when I arrived around 10, which is lame.

I wish I had been able to stay home today (I had to come in for something that we ended up cancelling and rescheduling anyway), but tomorrow I'm off for my birthday, which I will spend with my sweetie.

Found!

The copy card I was convinced had fallen behind the (immovable) desk was actually holding my place in a journal I didn't finish browsing a while ago.

Yesterday I was peppy, and it was warm out, and I made it to the bus stop early, and the bus was there, and I got to work door-to-door in 45 minutes.  Today, tiredness and scratchy throat, rain, no bus (either left early or never came), much later longer bus, 90 minutes.  Boo.

So the plan is just to mope in the office, keep warm, and read journals.

Buttons!

One of the buttons popped off my coat late last winter season, and I just ignored it (despite how dumb it looked) until another button popped off last week (with a third button looking pretty shady). Now, it would help immensely if I hadn't gotten so, well, immense since I purchased the coat. It's now a snug fit. This morning I saw that Amazon had coats on sale, and nearly decided just to buy a new coat.

But in these internetting times there's really no excuse for not making such an easy repair -- I figured out everything I needed to know online in about 10 minutes, I dug up some sewing floss (threads wound together for things like cross-stitch so you can actually see it) and got those three buttons back on there good. Success! So now my coat works again, even though it's still a little snug, but that's a different problem.

Last night we went to Baltimore for a number of social activities. We met up at Maggie's with Joe's soc friends, and then we went to dinner for my friend's birthday (which was actually Monday, but she had horrible grant writing to do all that day). Then Joe and I went back to Maggie's before going back home. Baltimore is great when you spend 2/3 of your time there at Maggie's. Today we went grocery shopping, thus getting maximum utility out of the ZipCar. I'm kinda missing having my own car, though, and I'm pondering whether to get it fix now that it's been a few months since the last repairs, instead of an insulting three weeks. I still wouldn't drive it to work, since that commute is very hard on a car and the bus is easy enough (when it comes predictably) and gives me exercise. But it'd be nice to have it for errands and such. I dunno, we'll see.

This week is the last actually at work, and then I'm going to NJ for 2 weeks! I have to "work at home" three days in there somewhere, which should be easy enough with Joe hacking away at his dissertation. It should be otherwise relaxing.

Today is annoying

My bus never came, as far as I can tell (I was late, but there were people waiting there when I arrived). The long bus came and promptly ate my $5 that I tried to add to my SmarTrip card that will have $30 whenever the transfer from my old broken card happens (after which I have to do some magic incantation at a Metro stop machine to get it into the card). Then the bus sat at the stop for ages.

Comcast raised the DVR price just a month or so after I ordered it. They also started charging all kinds of crazy fees that I think must be because I haven't returned the old box because I don't have an easy way to get all the way out to far out Rockville (public transit take like a half hour from work, I just discovered). They're charging me like $6/month for the box to sit in a corner collecting dust.

It's effing cold out and I'm tired.