I swear that I will have get back to regularly scheduled content soon. But I dozed off on the couch earlier and now I just want to get to bed. Working is hard!

Today was my first day at the new job. It went fine and everyone is very nice, but god I needed a nap when I got home. Unfortunately, I dozed longer than I should have and missed the movie showing I’d hoped to attend, as well as the coffeehouse’s patio hours. But I did not miss the sunset, so we shall look on the glowing side of things.

A long weekend is definitely time to look at life through rose(ate spoonbill)-colored glasses. Feel free to (Goeldi’s) monkey around — you deserve to goof off during a three-day weekend!

how you rebuild a bridge?

First, you need to drain the waterway so you can get to the footings.

In the case of the 31st Street bridge over the C & O Canal in Georgetown, built in 1867, they run the water from the canal through a series of tubes, holding containers, and pipes to give them a relatively dry section on which to work on the bridge. The wooden structure you see the water pouring back over is what the canalboat sits on when it’s not in the water.

They’ve mostly got the canal blocked further upstream because they’ve been doing repairs to the locks and the canal itself, so the water is already running pretty lightly and slowly through this section, but it was still impressive to see.

The bridge closed to vehicular traffic at the start of the summer and will remain closed until this time next year. However, they’ve built accommodations for pedestrians and cyclists to continue to get around the area, which has to be a huge relief to the couple dozen businesses and restaurants on the affected stretch of road. (It has the added benefits that the restaurants are super-excited to see foot traffic and that the two neighboring Italian restaurants often have samples of pizza at the maître d’ stands outside for passersby who might, for instance, be walking home from the movie theater.)

On Wednesday, we had a sun shower:

It was followed by a short regular shower, which was bookended by the evening of two rainbows.

But the weather gods did not stop there. They had dumped out their box of 64 Crayola crayons and were excited about using them all.

I had gone to the garden to water and then to the grocery store (hunting fruitlessly for puff pastry) and emerged onto Pennsylvania Avenue in Foggy Bottom to this sight to the east:

And this to the west:

It felt like I was living in a Maxfield Parrish painting. (It took me a little while to come up with the correct painter, since all I had was a memory of a poster Grey Kitten had when we were teenagers of a woman with a scarf standing on a cliff. Once I stopped trying to make it a book cover (I thought maybe John Irving’s Hotel New Hampshire or Wally Lamb’s She’s Come Undone) and made it the painting it was, Google was way more helpful. Also, memory is weird.)

I mean, it really just kept getting better:

Even after the sun went down, the gods kept up with the coloring:

It was a beautiful night.

A large, violent rain storm was tapering down as Rudi and I left the movie theater this evening. I needed to get across town and biking seemed the best option to do that, since Georgetown is not on a metro line, but does abut the river trail. I’d get a little wet (Honestly, it was more than a little, since I was dripping from the humidity as well by the time I arrived to meet my friends for dinner on Barracks Row.), but it was efficient.

Soon after setting forth, I watched the sun break through the clouds to the west and the dark clouds moving to the northeast, thinking that this was a prime period to catch a rainbow emerging. And, sure enough, one did.

It was never especially bright and it was very low in the sky, but it was quite wide, as you can see here looking up at the back of the Lincoln Memorial.

By the time the bike trail left the Mall by the Jefferson Memorial, the rainbow was receding. But it had been there, and I got a chance to see it because I was looking for it.

Life lessons. A rainbow is a rainbow is a rainbow, after all.