Mike was a senior at the art school when I went there for a semester. He’s very enthusiastic and personable, a really friendly guy. Though I don’t think we ever had the kind of establishing conversation that’s usually the foundation for a rapport, he always greets me warmly when I run into him [...]
I recently fretted about some local store closings. Now I need to make a partial retraction.
I ate at Julia’s the day after it opened, and though I made some half-hearted jokes implying otherwise, I didn’t really miss Eileen’s much. The food was fine. My fellow diners’ scorn for the Liza Minelli posters [...]
Wednesday, April 24, 2002
This little closet-sized shop on Olive Way, one of Capitol Hill’s bigger arterials, was packed with odd wine glasses, porceline figures, and troll dolls. The little woman who staffed the store consistently kept the hours as they were posted on the door, Saturday from noon to 5pm. (I saw her filling in at [...]
“I was trying to get to sleep, up front in the driver’s seat, but there was this really hyper guy moving around in the back of the van, keeping everyone awake. A. said that some ice water would calm him down, so he told me to go out and get some. It was [...]
VeriSign sent me a “Domain Name Renewal Form”, odd considering that my domain wasn’t registered through VeriSign. I considered that my host might be in a reseller-relationship with them, but that doesn’t turn out to be the case. An uncritical scan of the form would lead one to believe that their domain’s registrar was [...]
After the little going-away party for someone I didn’t know, in which I expected to be teased for suddenly appearing with Ingrid (after wandering in the same circles for four years) as a couple (but wasn’t [teased] much because the main group of common acquaintances were a pretty sedate bunch), I drove a stick shift [...]
Ten Five Anecdotes That, Through Repeated Tellings, Are Truer Now Then They Were When They Happened
When I was very young, I saw a monkey climb between the bars of its cage at the zoo into a neighboring cage. Nobody else noticed and I didn’t tell anyone at the time.
I once went down to the [...]
The distressing cycle of closings and openings continues.
The Green Cat Cafe is closed. They started operating under new management about a year ago, and my impression was that the new owners didn’t quite get it. They replaced the selection of hoity-toity natural sodas with Coke products, hung a “Vegetarian” neon sign in the [...]
Wednesday, April 10, 2002
You know that move where your nose is either a little too dry or a little too wet and you run your finger under one nostril to make sure your nose is still there? Yeah, I happened to be pulling one of those when the groom, my new brother-in-law, came up and introduced himself.
It [...]
Wednesday, April 10, 2002
On the trip from the airport to my sister’s house, I looked down at the dashboard and noticed that the odometer had just turned over to 10,000. Why was I chosen to witness this milestone for this anonymous little rental car? Poor Daewoo, no one who cares was there to appreciate this birthday. [...]