In case you haven’t found yourself outside in the early night hours recently, you’ve been missing this:

The moon, of course, you probably recognize without introduction. (Although you might not know that it’s called Earthshine when you can see the whole disk of the moon showing behind the crescent. It’s caused by sunlight reflecting off earth, and conditions are only right for it to happen once a month.)

The bright light “next to” the moon is Venus. And below them both is Jupiter. They were in conjunction tonight, which means that, from our perspective, they seem to line up.

And their function, I’d say, is just to look cool.

Objective achieved.

Last week, due to unusual circumstances, I was up and outdoors at both sunset and sunrise within the same 24 hours. Really. I have proof:

Sunset over I Street on Thursday:

(I couldn’t decide which shot I liked best, so you got all three.)

Sunrise over R Street on Friday:

Crazy, but beautiful!

I thought I’d share some of the photos I took earlier this month when I walked over to the Georgetown waterfront and then back home via the West End.

It is bitterly disappointing to this Dupont Circle resident to learn that my local record shop, Melody, is closing its doors. I know we’ve largely moved into a digital world musically, but I felt there was still a place for a quality brick-and-mortar music shop. However, dollars talk and when people don’t buy cds or records or videos — or they buy them at a loss on Amazon — we lose local institutions.

Yes, I understand there is an argument to be made for switching away from a resource-intensive physical product. And, yes, I know that everyone’s budget is tight and that in order to make dollars stretch you have to look for deals. However, Melody employed local music lovers, alerted you to upcoming concerts, offered a default location for those who wanted to “talk shop,” and allowed you to browse an extensive and well-rounded collection of current releases. There are still several used music shops around, and I can recommend a few of them quite highly. But Melody was the only local shop in town to get new releases (other than the couple dozen discs stocked at Politics and Prose), and their week-of-release prices were reasonably competitive with online mega-complexes.

This is a blow to music lovers and to the Dupont community and to me. Watch for their space soon to be filled by some national conglomerate. I’m sure what Dupont really needs is a Quiznos or another mobile phone store or a fifth Starbucks.

Dear Washington, D.C., commuters,

I would like to take this opportunity to apologize for a wee bit of congestion you might have encountered this morning in front of my house.

We got home yesterday evening while the restaurants were still doing brisk business, leaving no Tuesday-side spots available. I told Rudi to park on Florida and that I’d move the car later.

What did I not do last night? Move the car off of Florida.

I am the first to be annoyed by people who thoughtlessly inconvenience others, so please know that I feel terrible about having bottlenecked your commute this morning. That it happened on a Monday, when you’re already hating life, makes it even more guilt-inducing.

While I’m sure you were all disappointed that the traffic cops did not tow my car out of your way, please rest assured that the ticket I found on my windshield after I woke up and exclaimed, “Oh! Fuck!” will serve as no small deterrent to my remembering to park legally for rush hour in the future.

I hope the city does something nice with my money like fix a pot hole along your commute.

And I hope Monday improves seriously for both of us after this.

Contritely,

sprite of the Colgate-green Geo

This past weekend was busy, but not as busy as the previous weekend, where I failed to figure out how to clone myself in order to be at every author reading I wanted to catch during the 2011 National Book Festival.

We didn’t get shots from every day this last week, but those we did get were worth sharing.

First up, a slideshow of Rudi’s shots from the Georgetown Waterfront Park taken last Sunday:

For those unfamiliar with the area, we are on the D.C. side of the Potomac, and the buildings across the way to the west are in Rosslyn, Virginia. I believe the shots are pretty much all looking north upriver.

Next, we jump to Wednesday night, when we returned to Nationals Park for a loss to the Diamondbacks:

Luckily, we had a really lovely sunset and quite a nice evening for baseball. We have two more games this season — against the Mets next Saturday and then a day game in mid-September. I can’t wait!

Finally, as I mentioned in yesterday’s post, my coworker and I stayed late at the office last night, which had us leaving just before sunset. Of course, it had rained earlier in the day, so the sky was still grey above us, but looking south offered a view of some pretty amazing cloud structures rolling in:

Downtown

Looking toward Dupont Circle

Over the Indonesian Embassy

Pretty awesome, right?

You didn’t think I would be able to let this go without comment, did you?

ETA: How did I forget this one?

We just had an earthquake!

ETA (2:32 p.m.): After a short evacuation, we’re back in the building. 5.9 on the Richter scale with the epicenter 90 miles south of D.C. Nothing fell off the walls here on the sixth floor, but you could see things moving, and I definitely was glad to be standing in a doorway as the building waved back and forth.

Rudi is likely heading home for the day, although that’s not yet certain.

I heard from a friend that she could feel it in southeastern Connecticut.