I don’t get great cell phone reception in my office. I can sometimes get text messages and occasionally a phone call will even sneak through, but generally the service bars just disappear. So, it was fortuitous that yesterday I opted to take a late afternoon lunch break. It was the first day I’ve had time for one since we returned from Utah and I desperately wanted a few minutes outside in the warm air.<\/p>\n
Getting outdoors allowed my phone to reconnect with the world and to alert me to a surprise message from my college roommate. She and another college friend had made a last minute trip to town and were wondering if we were here, too, and, if so, did we want to meet up for dinner?<\/p>\n
But of course!<\/p>\n
The day progressed in such a way that I was able to escape for the day at a mostly reasonable 6:30, and Eri and Eric, who’d rented bikes, pedaled up from the Mall to meet me outside my building. (It’s sad to say, but I was so tired that I originally told them my office was at a totally different intersection. Yikes!) Rudi, who’d had Good Friday off, biked down to join us, and the four of us set off for dinner.<\/p>\n
We had a leisurely ride to Dupont Circle, where we landed at Luna Grill’s outdoor patio and a nice long time to catch up. We traded news of family members and of friends and snippets of work-related tales. We talked politics and cycling and D.C. and New York. Later, a bit chilled and ready for dessert, we pedaled over to ACKC, a local chocolate shop, for macarons and cocoa. Minutes and hours passed until we found we’d shut the joint down. Reluctant to end a perfectly lovely evening, we even stood on the sidewalk, bikes in hand, in front of the darkened shop until nearly midnight when we all agreed that really<\/em> if we ever planned to get up today we’d have to go home. So we parted ways, but with a promise to meet up again soon.<\/p>\n It was a very good night, the best I’ve had in ages.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I don’t get great cell phone reception in my office. I can sometimes get text messages and occasionally a phone call will even sneak through, but generally the service bars just disappear. So, it was fortuitous that yesterday I opted to take a late afternoon lunch break. It was the first day I’ve had time […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2397","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n