Fabulous Visit to Washington DC

Just a couple of tourists

Yes, I live here. But I took some days off from phenomenally busy work and a friend came in from out of town, and we played tourist together. I was clear to my friend: I'm not showing you the town, we're going to go do things together, and with a heavy emphasis on things I haven't done before. The weather cooperated and it was terrific in nearly every way.

We hiked in a park along Chesapeake Bay (after swinging by my boat) and had tasty crabcakes at a little place that sells both seafood and cooked food to-go, sitting at a picnic table outside along the highway. We went to the gym to work out together with my trainer, marvelling at how we've changed since college days when such a thought would have been absurd.

World class scenery

We weren't the only ones here

The cherry blossoms were still going, so very early one morning we got down there so S. (an avid photographer, as am I sometimes) could take advantage of interesting morning light. It was past peak, but still darn nice. Every bit as breathtaking as they say.

We walked to the brand-new shiny waterfront development, The Wharf. While some places opened in November of last year, some are still under development and many places just opened in the last few weeks. We sat outside and ate seafood salads with cocktails for lunch.

Fireproof Woman

Made partly from muffin tins

We visited the Renwick Gallery, a bite-sized little piece of the Smithsonian across the street from the Whitehouse. They were showing The Art of Burning Man, fun and wierd. We had cocktails at a rooftop bar looking down into the Rose Garden.  We walked the length of H Street, stopping at my brother-in-law's pharmacy, and rode the street car back. We went to Union Market, the hip food-stall place that replaced the old actual farmers' market. (There we had brunch pizzas with quail eggs.)  We visited the Portrait Gallery and saw the Obamas' new official pictures. (Hers really doesn't look like here, though it is still a magnificent rendering.) We had an afternoon brunch at a downtown place where we skewed the demographic significantly upward just by walking in.

Me and the Supremes

We saw the new and amazing African American History, Art and Culture museum. We were there about four hours, which sort of exceeded my ability to focus, but we barely scratched the surface and I'll be back. 

All told, it was a [insert new superlative here] experience.  In five days, I set new step count records for this year three times. We visited three museums. We ate and/or drank out ten times, and seven of the restaurants were new to me. I took a bunch of pictures (mostly of cherry blossoms) and S. took eleventy-bazillion. We had the family over for one meal, cooking mostly from new-to-us recipes.

Sadly, my body was not as strong or resiliant as I was hoping. My knee was the worst part, and a limiting factor on our activities, but I also got a blister on my foot and my back was aching by the end of the day. The day S. left I was having a migraine, which I'm learning can be triggered by activity.

View from inside the African American Museum

I refuse to accept that reducing my activity is inevitable.  NOT YET.  Instead, I'm trying to double up on the activity, walk more, do more things, and keep up with those back exercises, many of which were also prescribed when I did PT for an injured knee. I don't know if it's time to get a second opinion on my knee, if it could get better (and if I could run) with a replacement. I do know, for any elective knee surgury, this is absolutely the wrong time of year for it, so no hurry on this. Just something to keep in mind.

I've been back to long long hours at work, so keeping the step count up is hard, but extended daylight hours is helping. I like this time of year, when optimism is in the air!

Detours

The past few weeks feel like a detour from the course I thought I was on. First, a tree fell on my house (March 2; I wrote about in on my garden blog, link at right).  It could have been worse, but it felt catastrophic and it was hard to focus on anything other than it for a while. Except work, of course (which continues to be a big eater of my life and time but brings its own rewards, yes).  But partially as a result of the neighborhood interest in my tree disaster, I've kicked off some home improvement projects that I have been mulling roughly forever.

Then my back went sproing, subject of the last post. It's not all better yet, and it took at least ten days before I started to feel close to normal. Somewhere in there (it all blurs together) my lovely dog had to go to the emergency vet to have a linen table napkin extracted from his inside. Also somewhere in there was a snowstorm; closed work, and close enough in time to my back thing that I had to hire a young person to do my shovelling, first time ever. I have developed a brand new exercise at-home every morning (well, almost every morning) habit to try to keep the back healthy. I do not want to do physical therapy - too inconvenient. It's hard enough to carve out 20 minutes in the morning at home.

Work continues to absorb my life, but also somewhere in there I decided I needed to get away on vacation. I needed to prove I'm the kind of person that gets out there and does things (to paraphrase a friend). I took some time off, and it will be the subject of it's own post.

All of the above is to explain why its been a month since I posted about trying a different strategy for the late afternoon and it was just this week I tried it. I knew if I was going to the gym it would be right from work, so I brought some meaty chili from my freezer, and ate it around 4:30 pm.  Sadly, no, I still dipped into the candy jar. I was ravenous and real food didn't fix that.  I was also ravenous last night - perhaps the somewhat higher level of work and stress this week is the reason for that.

Still, I'm going to try again to actually eat food instead of snack on some afternoons this coming week. We'll see how it goes.

Meantime, halfway through my first of two weekend days, and I need to get cracking on chores.

Excelsior!