Shoppy, Potentially Snowy Weekend

It is a cold, blustery weekend, which Amy and I have so far filled up with registry shopping. We sauntered over to the new BB&B at Gallery Place/Chinatown to go scanner-happy on kitchen gadgets, paused for a Five Guys lunch, then Metro’d to the C&B at Clarendon for tableware, flatware, glassware, more kitchenware, bedding, and big huge giant towels so incredibly expansive that they need their own representation in Congress.

Today is church, and tonight is free music by the Baltimore Consort at the National Gallery and snow! Weather folk are predicting just an inch accumulating tonight, but after the paltry few flakes we’ve had this winter, even an inch is a lot. I’ve posted more on tonight’s potential snow event at DC Metroblogging.

Caturday!

It’s been two weeks since we’ve had a Saturday with cat photos. I’m sorry. Here’s a whole bunch of Pandora pictures to make up for the gap:

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Oh, Snap

Animated GIF of 3D-generated Captain America parodying a GIF of an old chocolate commercial with the words 'Oh Snap' superimposed onto the chocolate bar packaging. Something weird happened to me last month, a couple of weeks before Christmas: I lost any and all desire to consume ginger snaps. I was about halfway down a week-old container of Trader Joe’s Triple Ginger Snaps, and midway through one of them I looked at it and realized I couldn’t eat it anymore. (This may be similar to the very last and final time I had a McDonald’s Sausage Egg and Cheese Muffin, when I realized on biting into it that every McDondald’s breakfast sandwich I’d ever eaten tasted just like sand. Even the Maple McGriddle. Sweet maple sand.)

I thought maybe I’d been eating a lot of ginger snaps lately, so if I gave them a break I’d like them again after a few weeks. Today, more than a month later, I still can’t bring myself to look at ginger snaps. Oh, I’m fine with chocolate chip cookies (though not with oatmeal raisin, mostly due to the “raisin” part), but ginger snaps? Pass.

Now, Peppermint Bark, on the other hand, I have fallen in love with. Seriously. Especially the Williams-Sonoma variety. Through the holidays I kept telling everyone I know who hadn’t tried it yet, “You have to try it. It’s like eating Christmas.”

Jan 2006 NJ/NYC Trip

It was foggy up in New Jersey and New York over the long weekend. Amy and I hung out with her family, and ventured twice up to NYC, one day to browse galleries at Chelsea, and another to have a half-price lunch at Sushi Park with newlyweds Raffy and Carla (who very kindly lent us their veil for the cord and veil part of our wedding).

We also polished off two (of six) more sessions of premarital counseling with P. Keith, tested a sound system, and paid a visit to our planned reception hall, Bridgewater Manor, to choose the cake, tablecloths, and reception dinner menu items. (Oh, you should totally see the menu. It’s scrumptious. And the food looks good, too.)

Yes, it was a very wedding-y trip, but I also got to see Rockefeller Center for the first time (it’s smaller in real life than it looks in the movies), and looked around Toy Tokyo, where I found a dubious-looking starship on a robot box. (Below, left) Oh, and we also found God on a pew at Amy’s church. (Below, right)

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DC Metroblogging and Washington Post Blogger Summit

Following a few communiqués with Tom, I am now writing for DC Metroblogging, with all the wild fame and fortune that entails.

I agonized for days over what my first debut entry would be, until finally, sitting at the WaPo Blogger Summit last Tuesday, I decided to forego all introductory niceties and just jump into the mix with a Liveblogging Stream of Consciousness. Since then I’ve posted secondhand neighborhood humor from City Desk and a Metro alert, and I have a few other ideas for content bubbling up.

I’m not sure what I’m doing, agreeing to write for DC Metblogs for free when I barely have time to write for my own site and attend to my current situation of professional and premarital chaos, but perhaps some good will come of this, if only from the general DC audience’s enjoyment of my razor sharp wit. All my entries gather here.

As for the blog summit, it was interesting, especially when they demoed their new upcoming local weblog directory. More on that from my entry, David’s entry, Marc Fisher, And I Am Not Lying, For Real.

Foggy DC

IMG_5009 This photo I took of a fog-shrouded Washington Monument, seen from Lincoln Memorial, has recently gotten a little more attention by being cited in DCist’s “Weekly Feed: Little Cat Feed Edition.” The photo is part of the Foggy DC photoset, the visual fruit of an unusually warm, moist Washington morning just over a year ago.

As you can see from the archives for that month, I wasn’t posting much at the time, engrossed as I was in getting Jopogo off the ground and seeing to a mile-long list of online and offline chores (many items of which list remain to this day, but here I am, posting more frequently than before, go figure), so I couldn’t really give the fog photos as much attention as I would have liked beyond a cursory pair of thumbs. The DCist mention has reminded me of it, however, so I would invite you to peruse Foggy DC, about a year late, but still worth checking out, if I do say so myself.

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Philippine Vacation 2006 Photo/Video Roundup

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Photosets

DCA-ORD-HKG-MNL

Manila Christmas 2006

Wedding: Raffy and Carla

Club Noah (plus diving photos from my dad and brother)

V-Mall (Virra Mall) 2006

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HKG Airport Prayer Room

Videos

Assorted Travel Clips: Plane Windows and Airport Subway (Includes: View from a United 747-400 window on a transpolar flight, Hong Kong Airport automated people mover subway, and view from Southeast Asian Airlines Let410 UVP-E window on takeoff from Palawan)

Club Noah Sunset Timelapse (Taken from cabaña balcony at 10 second intervals, 5:30PM to 7:00PM)

Virra Mall: After the Renovation

IMG_0193.JPG One thing I failed to do on my previous Christmas visit to the Philippines was follow up on old Virra Mall after its 2005 renovation. This visit, I was able to muster up some time to check out the new “V-Mall,” as it’s now called, (though it’s still “Virra” to me) and take some photos of the new interior — see the V-Mall photoset here. I forgot to print out references from my old Virra Mall photoset, so I still don’t have a perfect “Before/After” series to compare with the renovated V-Mall, but I’ll try and do that next time I’m in the area. For now, here are the closest approximations I could get to show the changes: (click thumbs for full size)

Before After
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