Cafe Ole

It's New Year's Day, and after a lazy start, M and I went out to hang in the city. Old City. Walking down 3rd street, we stopped in a snazzy vintage clothing store that was having a half-off everything sale - YAY! I found a snappy 3/4 sleeves camel hair (yes, real) pea coat for 15 bucks, and a wonderfully mod-ish white enamel metal cuff bracelet. Ummmm. M tried a pair of 501's that gave him sausage ass. How unfortunate. Exhausted from our vintage rummagings, we ambled down the street to Cafe Ole. A small, genteel cafe that seems more home grown, and less murderously trendy than some others. M had a cafe latte, and I had a hot cider and chocolate chip cookie. As I sat nibbling on my sweet little cookie morsels, I realized that nearly everyone around me was excessively, heart-achingly hip. Less trendy and beautiful, than stylish and well put-together. And wayyy tooo young. She-of-the-small-thighs-and-narrow-hips to my right was donning leggings and a brown YSL bag. Authentic. With salon perfect, dramtically black and bluntly cut high-sheen hair. Her escort was equally well-coiffed, with the apparently de-riguer shades propped just so above his forehead. Then a young woman of ambiguous ethnicity, with a mop of wild, curly, dark hair sauntered in, wearing a sweater, scarf and black opera length leather gloves. She chattered in an overly familar way with the waitress. Obviously this one was a regular. When did I get so old? And why hadn't I bothered to properly accessorize? Ugh...

The Last Time I Saw Smithson

On Tuesday, M and I went to DC to roll him out to the family as the new fiancee. Realizing that we'd not get the chance to do so after the meet & greet, we decided to hit the Washington Mall for a museum fix. I remebered what I loved and hated about DC in those few hours. The city, with its grandiose architecture, is impressively architectural, well, at least the parts that are governmental, in the center of the city. This almost, thought not entirely, makes up for the acute myocardial infarction you are at risk for while trying to park within 20 minutes of any worthwhile museum. After circling the Hirshhorn for neaerly 15 minutes, we gave up, and attempted to find a garage. Not as easily done as we thought, as the first one we found was 'temporarily full.' Lucklily, we found another garage, and after waiting in traffic for 10 minutes at the intersection just beforehand, we swung into the entrance. The very nice police woman then requested that we show ID, pop the hood and trunk before we proceeded, as we were neither governement or military personel (which only sounds like an enourmous waste of time once you realize that nearly everyone working in DC is in one of those two camps. We thought, gee, that's a lot of security for a lowly Holiday Inn, until we came up from the garage and realized that these were actually the offices for FEMA. It was a very DC moment.
Anyway, having found an appropriate place to leave the rental, we went to the Hirshhorn, one of my favorite Smithsonian museums, if only for the gorgeous cylyndrical building housing so much gorgeous sculpture.
Next came the African Art museum - so fabulous! After so much art I was almost ready to see the family.

Destination: Terminus.

On April 2nd, 2007, I got off a plane in New York, and for the first time in a very long time, arrived back home - in the States. I had been living for the better part of a decade overseas. Specifically, I had been living in Zurich Switzerland, and was glad to be finally free of that frosty, alpine nation and its frosty, alpine people.

After visiting some lifelong friends in New York, I would be on my way to my new home. The City of Brotherly Love - Philadelphia. I would, in a sense, be at an end of one phase of my life, and at the start of another. Philadelphia would be the journey's terminus. Philadelphia would be Terminal City.