Three beautiful things from the week before a long weekend:
1. The windows in John’s condo are huge and look out over 16th Street.
2. A tiny girl, who clearly was still mastering the freestyle walking thing, staggers up and down the street as her mother follows. When her father emerges from a restaurant with the stroller, she lurches over to him to help push. She and Rudi engage in a series of “hi!’s” and waves.
3. With his new haircut and strolling around the Burrow in his boxers, Rudi reminds me of an underwear model. (But don’t tell him, okay? This will just be our secret…)
Two acquaintances from the Dean Days have been roaming the country, correcting the irksome misspellings and typos found on public signs.
In a case that should chill the heart of teenagers everywhere who fail to perceive the danger of posting every action on the internet, Ben and Jeff were recently arrested because of a blog entry.
Apparently while they were in Arizona back in the spring they stopped at Grand Canyon National Park, where they fixed some punctuation problems on a sign, which, it turns out, was not appreciated by the Powers That Be. Someone alerted the officials to the blog post, in which Jeff and Ben discussed what they’d done, and the former roommates were arrested.
This week in Phoenix, they were sentenced to probation, banned from national parks for a year, and ordered to pay $3,035 to repair the sign. My question is: How will the National Park Service fix the sign — will they go with the correct grammar or add in the corrected edits, but in an appropriate yellow color to match the original text?
The singers are Jack Johnson and Ben Harper (who wrote the song).
This is a PBS ad that aired last night during the convention and that, I feel, helps demonstrate the tone of the first night. I’ll be buying the song from iTunes.
Even though I keep thinking today ought to be Friday, I’m having a tough time understanding how it got to be this late in the week already. Nonetheless, here it is — time again for three beautiful things from the past week:
1. As I hurry to the metro, I pass a man in paint-spattered pants out on his front walk. He is painting bright splotches on a large (4’x6′, maybe) canvas.
2. I ride downtown Saturday afternoon, cutting through Lafayette Park on my way. Because they’ve closed Pennsylvania Avenue nearby to cars, it’s a great, safe place for pedestrians and tends to attract a lot of foot traffic. A guide leads a tour group, explaining tidbits of information about the area. A little girl in a white lacy dress and flowers in her hair runs down the path to my left. Women in matching gowns are clustered to my right and I glance around, searching for the bride. She’s walking behind the flower girl, looking lovely. Meanwhile, a ferocious game of street hockey is going on in the closed street.
3. Jordi and Charles (a D.C. for Dean friend) got married on Saturday night and were kind enough to invite us to help celebrate with them. The ceremony was simple and quick, held in an outdoor courtyard under an unseasonably pleasant August sunset. There was little fuss and you could tell from looking at the two of them that this was really a perfect match.
We adjourned inside for the reception, where photos of the couple and their friends and family covered the shelves around the room. A note indicated that we were welcome to take shots we loved home with us as their gift to us. A group of us grabbed a table together and we spent the evening talking and refilling our plates from the buffet lines and generally making merry. The music started early and continued late and covered every decade from the 1940s on. Our crowd, being perhaps a bit older than most of Charles and Jordi’s friends, particularly enjoyed the ’80s hits. Both Charles and Jordi spent lots of time out on the dance floor and you could see that the two of them were actually having fun at their own wedding!
By the time you’ve lived a third of a century (stop gasping, Mum, it’s true), you so often come away from weddings with a list of things you would have done differently if it had been you. Not so this time. It really was the perfect day.
