Words are inadequate

Last night I emptied one more Office/Misc box. I'm down to three of those, plus some random stuff on top of the dresser that needs to be sorted and sent to storage. I think I can get the Office/Misc down to two boxen but beyond that I'll need a hanging file or something.

Among the things I excavated was the blue folder of memories. I no longer remember where the folder came from, but when I moved out of my dorm room I took down my photos of people I knew off the wall and stuck them in there, along with a couple of letters and such things. Over the years it's become the repository for Things From Important People.

A brief and incomplete list of what I dug up:

• A card from my parents on the occasion of the death of Tommy (the family cat), including a few photos of him.
  
• A list of things my Calculus teacher said during class, including "The AP exam will be the easiest test you take all year" (accurate), "The numbers are getting bigger and bigger in a negative sense," "We're going to start out with the concept of ... of needing more chalk," and "Never use a physics equation in my classroom again!" Educationally speaking the back half of high school was an almost unmitigated disaster, but I really, really liked Dr Stallings.
  
• Rare photographs of me: Lion In Winter (I was Richard), pre-Homecoming-dance in fairegarb with Shaye and Scott and Kirsten, me and Mo looking content.
  
• A certificate from college confirming that I made the Dean's List one semester in 2004. (As opposed to the Dean's Other List, which I made repeatedly between 1996 and 2000, and which eventually resulted in me taking the Dean's Vacation.)
  
• A photograph of the apartment building in Fürth that I lived in from 1979 to 1982. I remember it as being this towering edifice but no, it's a three-storey walkup.
  
• A couple of the photos I took in photography class senior year, including one of Jynx looking impish through the spokes of a bicycle wheel she's holding.
  
• A postcard from tam_nonlinear.
  
• Stuff from Andy McCoy's Eagle Scout Court of Honor, over which I was privileged to preside.
  
• And of course letters and cards from high school and college girlfriends and friends, including one from someone I hadn't thought I'd had any written relics of at all.

This was easier than the journals were. It's the view from outside, and that's always been easier on me. Even the pictures of me, something I usually hate with a passion, are ... jeez, that guy. He had no idea.

Notably absent are any relics of Kelly, with whom I had a rocky relationship and very bad breakup in the 2000s. Those are all in a bag in a different box, specifically to keep them away from the good memories. And while it's getting on time to revisit those so I can finally discard most of them and filter the rest to the folder... not yet, not yet.

Elseweb a friend asked about personal hinge points, of the "if you could go back and do one thing differently, what would it be?" variety.

Most of the poor decisions I've made were the best decision I could have made at the time. As noted elsewhere, I lacked the tools to make better ones. To have chosen differently or better I would have had to be a different person. This rules out such obvious choices as "don't nearly fail out of college" or "don't give up on writing for the better part of a decade."

Having said that, there are one or two places things could have gone differently. ( For example... )

My calendar tells me that Friday was National Boss Day. Mine celebrated by getting sick and going home midway through the day. I don't remember where Friday evening went; we must have stayed home.

Satyrday I slept lateish, and made pancakes because I was wanting pancakes instead of an omelette. Eventually I got on the road to head out to D&D, a little later than I might have liked, and stopped at Safeway to pick up crack chips. Was running not nearly so late as I'd thought, so I figured I'd swing by Trader Joe's to pick up a couple things of Vintage Cola (which, incidentally, tastes like the Platonic ideal of Coke).

( Cut for traffic bitchery. )Thankfully, after all that I got to hit a bunch of things with a hammer, so it was all okay. (In retrospect a Big Freaking Axe might have been a better choice than the Big Red Hammer. The difference between d10+2 ("d12 brutal 2") and 2d5+2 ("2d6 brutal 1") damage is mostly a matter of taste and whether one prefers a bell curve; the slight deficiency in average damage in the former is compensated for by its "high crit" quality, which means that if roll a 20 on my to-hit roll I get to add an extra die of damage. And most of the time I'm rolling two d20s to hit and picking the highest one, so my chance of a crit is effectively doubled.) (Here endeth the D&D neepery for the day.)

Satyrday evening daghain was in a play, and it would have been good to have seen that, but I was sufficiently beat that I just wanted to stay home. So I did.

Sunday started off with the sink flooding the kitchen during laundry again, which was about as much fun as it sounds. Eventually I got that cleaned up and finished and headed out for a ramble through Riverbend Park (on the Potomac, just north of Great Falls). Too warm, too many small children, and it turns out that what I was wanting was a ramble in company, but a decent walk anyway. Came home, had a fight with nixve, had dinner, tried to clear the sink with Drano, vacuumed, wrote email.

Was unfortunately still online at just after one in the morning, which led to an unexpected continuation of said fight, which led unrelatedly yet inexorably to getting sort of half-assedly dumped around two. There followed an hourish phone call during which, after some prompting, the dumping was performed with a whole ass, and then the ritual Changing of the Facebook Relationship Status, and then uilos being a Heroine of the Revolution. I remember hearing the clock chime four, and later hearing it chime 6:15, so I guess I slept for two hours in there. Emailed work to say "not today, sorry" and probably got another 2-3 hours of sleep. uilos also called in sick, so I had someone to fall apart on at random times throughout the day.

The apartment maintenance guys came by to fix the sink pretty quickly, which was nice. Later, I confirmed with nixve that it was neither a bad dream nor one of those things one says when exhausted but regrets the next morning, and talked with ancientsong, which helped an awful lot as well. Then home, and crashing.

Today I've listened to Inches and Miles and Trees Still Bend (which made me sniffly the first time I heard it, a little more than a year ago, and now just feels right and true). And now I'm at work, where I have an annoying blurry ache in my eyes and no keyboard tray.

Tonight is sushi with someone cool, and Wednesday is probably pumpkin acquisition, and Thursday is likely to be hanging out with elf, and Friday is Belly Horror, and Satyrday is Ren Faire and then ABG if we feel up to it, and Sunday is rislyn's followed by Tribal Cafe. I'm keeping busy, and sociable, and both of these are probably good things.

So a week or two ago I spent an extended weekend in Seattle.

( It was fun. )

Maybe at some point I'll even get around to talking about my very cool weekend, featuring belly-dancing, aerial antics, lots of books, and new Girlyman songs. (Plus "Superior," which I don't think I'd ever heard live. Good stuff.)

( meanwhile, have some more northwest )

Pillsbury makes a brand of biscuits called "Grands." They're pretty good, but really flaky.

When I moved here I didn't bother buying any maps. I figured Googlemaps can get me a good overview of where I'm trying to go (not the directions, just the maps). Besides, I'd need a map of northern Virginia, one of DC, and one or two of Maryland to cover all the places I'm likely to be. My parents decided this was an intolerable state of affairs and got me the ADC Northern Virginia map for Christmas. It's a handy thing to have. But I still don't have a map of Maryland or the district. Isn't that grand?

Honestly, it's okay for the most part. Anywhere I go in Maryland is likely to be in the company of uilos, so that's not a big deal. And I avoid driving in the district on general principle. The one-way streets and the narrowness and the flood of cars generate more stress than I want to deal with. I can navigate reasonably well via metro provided I have time to plan out where I'm going: one-way streets are irrelevant to a pedestrian. But driving? Not so much.

The first time I went driving in the district I got lost in southeast for an hour or so. This was pretty impressive considering I'd been trying to get home (to Burke) from a restaurant in Fairfax.

I know I drove the minivan to the Kennedy Center at least once, and I know I drove the pickup to get a load of railroad ties from somewhere. KenCen is easy; the railroad ties thing was back in the maze of twisty little streets all alike. I /think/ that was the last time I'd driven in actual DC. A dozen years ago.

Until today, when my metro-to-DC-for-lunch-and-afternoon-wandering date turned into hurried-lunch-and-by-the-way-you're-driving-us-into-DC while I was on the way to pick her up. That was just grand.

Getting there was awkward: either I missed a sign or it doesn't exist, so there was some amount of backtracking, "What-the-hell"ing, and general irritation. But I had a navigator for that part. That helped more than I'd expected it to. No, it was the way back that caused trouble. "Go straight down Connecticut, I think I saw signs for 495." Argh.

Thus, when Connecticut became 18th (I think) and the Washington monument rose up before me in all its majesty, I panicked, and called for help. I imagine this made me the subject of some amount of derision. As it happened, all I needed to do was keep going straight and I would have been fine: the signs only said "50 East" but from that I could deduce that "50 West" was the other direction and turn appropriately.

It was, all things considered, not as hellacious as it could have been. With a map in hand it might even be worth doing again.

Until I get a map, though, I'm sticking to metro.