Local Tourist, Day One… er, Three

On November 7, 2020November 22, 2020 By StevenIn Life At Home, The D-M-V9 Comments

Let’s time travel, dear friends, back to the day I arrived on the Amtrak. The train arrived early on Friday, August 7th, and I was on the platform by twenty to nine in the morning. It didn’t take them long to unload my car, and I was on my way to my new apartment pretty quickly. Once I arrived, I unloaded the car, taking multiple trips to do so. I snuck in a brief but fitful nap to try to offset the mediocre sleep from the train, before my first visit to Harris Teeter I described in yesterday’s post.

On Saturday, August 8th, I waited for Verizon to come and install my Internet – a process that took all of 90 seconds once they were here. Afterward, I drove to a nearby Best Buy and acquired a new television- my previous TV committed Seppuku about two weeks before the move, so I needed a screen. I also drove by a local friend’s house to pick up a small table and chair that she was willing to part with so that I didn’t have to use my toilet as a desk until the movers arrived. I also made my first visit to a new favorite place, a local Irish pub with delicious food. The corned beef and cabbage was delightful.

Which brings us to Sunday, August 9th. The first day in my new city that I had no specific goals or plans in mind. I decided, after a little waffling, to take a Capital Bikeshare over the Potomac and check out the National Mall. I’d seen it all before, of course, but not as a local! Here’s my local tourist afternoon in eight photos.

Photo the first: After blundering my way through the Arlington roadways on my rented bikeshare with the help of my phone’s little mapping robot, I made my way to the Arlington Memorial Bridge. I stopped about halfway across to look at the boats on the Potomac, and the pretty stellar view of the Lincoln Memorial and Washington Monument.

Photo the second: There was a rack for the the bikeshare pretty close to the Lincoln Memorial, so I made the decision to re-rack my bike and walk the rest of the way. This gave me time to poke around the Lincoln for a little bit.

Photo the third: Walking east from the Lincoln Memorial, I moved along the Reflecting Pool, enjoying the fact that although it was still a hot day, the breeze was actually cooling me off. That never happened in Florida.

Photo the fourth: Just past the Reflecting Pool is the World War II Memorial. To be perfectly honest, I didn’t know much about this one- I know there’s at least a dozen different Memorials that I haven’t seen before, but this is a big one. I probably saw it on a previous visit, but it didn’t make an impression until I stumbled across it on this day. This is a big place. I bet it gets really crowded on especially hot days.

Picture the fifth: Continuing east, I reached the Washington Monument. Somehow in all the times I’ve been by here over the years, I never noticed before that there are two different colors to the marble, starting at about 150 feet up. This is because construction halted for about twenty-three years for a variety of reasons including the American Civil War. When they resumed construction in 1877, the marble came from a different source so it has different shading.

Picture the sixth: Still the Washington Monument, but the sun and clouds were doing neat things and I thought it would be an interesting photograph.

Picture the seventh: I continued east along the National Mall, past several of the Smithsonian museums, and toward the Capitol.

Picture the eighth: This is where I concluded my tourism for the day. I stopped at the Smithsonian metro station beneath the National Mall, and took the metro back to the station closest to my apartment. I’m very happy that I can walk a few minutes from my apartment to the Metro, and then take a fifteen minute train ride directly to the National Mall.

When post-pandemic life resumes and there’s more cool stuff going on in the city, I think I’m gonna be doing that a lot.

Have you been to the National Mall? What’s your favorite thing to see there?

28/52 (and 7 of 30!)

The most boring decision I’ve made all year.

On November 6, 2020November 22, 2020 By StevenIn Life At Home25 Comments

Since I arrived in Arlington, I’ve been trying to find the One True Grocery, and my search has been unfulfilled so far. I mentioned back on the first of November that I’ve been to a crazy number of different grocery stores since my arrival, and I still haven’t settled into a grocery routine here.

When I moved to Germany, I did some of my grocery shopping at the Globus near the office, but the vast majority was at the Kaufland a few minutes away from my apartment. Since I was walking to and from the grocery store there, I fell into the habit of only getting what I could carry. When I repatriated, I started grocery shopping with a car again and the amount of food that I bought was significantly larger. I have a tendency to overbuy, and it’s something I’ve mentioned before in this blog.

Here in Arlington, I’m somewhere between the two extremes. I’m not buying a lot of food, and that is in part because the grocery stores haven’t thrilled me yet. It’s really tough to top Publix. I’ve been to many different stores here so far, and these are my impressions so far:

Harris Teeter – I Teetered my Harris on my first day in Arlington, and I haven’t been back. The one I went to was a two-story affair with a very confusing layout. It looked to me like what might happen if MC Escher was really into neon and wanted very much to make a knockoff of Whole Foods. I have not yet been to a second Harris Teeter to see if a different location might suit me better.
Giant Food – I’ve been to two different Giants now. The first one was like a dirty, poorly stocked Winn Dixie where nineteen out of every twenty people completely ignored the directional arrows on the floor. The second one was a bit better, but I still had trouble finding everything I was looking for.
Safeway – I’ve been to three different local Safeways so far, and the closest location off Lee Highway is the one I’ve actually gone back to more than once. They have a decent selection, and their Zebra Cakes are always really fresh. (Snack standards are important.) I was thinking that they reminded me a lot of Albertsons, but then I found out while fact checking this post that they’re actually a subsidiary of Albertsons now, so that tracks.

I haven’t bothered to shop in Target, Trader Joes, or Whole Foods, even though they’re reasonably close. I haven’t even seen a Wal-Mart, even though there’s gotta be one nearby. And last but not least, everyone keeps telling me Wegman’s is great, but I haven’t felt like driving half an hour each way for groceries.

If even a single one of these stores carried absolutely everything I wanted, I would keep going back to that one over and over again, but some things are just incredibly difficult to find.

For example, my favorite pickles are Claussen, but they’re not carried anywhere locally except for Wal-Mart. I did try Vlasic again, and I immediately regretted that decision. They taste like turmeric and existential dread.

As an aside, when I couldn’t find Claussen in six different stores, I turned to the Internet for reassurance that they were still being sold, and I was treated to the most delightfully unlikely sentence I’ve ever seen online:

“The Federal Trade Commission blocked the proposed merger on the grounds that it would have severe anticompetitive effects, leading to a monopoly in the refrigerated-pickle market.”

So that’s where things stand with the Great Grocery Selection of 2020. They opened a Wegman’s in Tyson’s Corner this week, so maybe I’ll finally give that a try this weekend. Or maybe I’ll finally give in and just go the Instacart route. If you’ve read this post all the way to the end, then bless your heart! It’s definitely not my most interesting work. If you’ve read this far, you deserve a treat, like a cookie or a White Claw or something. Treat. Yo. Self!

Treat. Yo. Self.

Do you have a favorite grocery store?

27/52 (and 6 of 30!)

The United States Air Force Memorial

On November 5, 2020November 22, 2020 By StevenIn The D-M-V19 Comments

One night pretty soon after my arrival in Arlington, I saw this giant pointy thing from the passenger seat of a rideshare.

I had no idea what it was, and the driver of my Lyft didn’t know either, so when I got home I set about looking for it on Google Maps. I knew approximately where I was when I saw the thing, and it was obviously huge so it didn’t take long to figure out that it was the United States Air Force Memorial.

When Lorrie came up for a weekend visit a few weeks later, we noticed signs indicating it was nearby while we were on the way back from a diner. I had been meaning to go check it out, so we decided to stop. I’m glad we did, because the place was pretty neat.

The United States Air Force Memorial is at the east end of Columbia Pike, on the grounds of Fort Myer just south of Arlington National Cemetery. It is a fairly new memorial, relatively speaking- groundbreaking was in 2004 and it was dedicated in October of 2006.

The three metal spires are all different heights between 201 to 270 feet tall. They’re meant to look like the contrails of three jets doing a “bomb burst” maneuver, with the fourth spire missing to suggest a missing man formation.

Near the spires are four 8-foot-tall bronze statues sculpted by Zenos Frudakis, representing the United States Air Force Honor Guard. Across from the spires on the other side is a free-standing glass panel with the image of four F-16s in a missing man formation.

On either side of the spires are large reflective granite walls with various details carved in them. One section lists all the recipients of the Airmen Medal of Honor award, while another section contains comments and quotations from various important Air Force generals and other notables. Near the drive in are large carved inscriptions from Presidents Reagan and Bush.

I learned during the writing of this post that when there’s not a pandemic on, the United States Air Force Band holds concerts here every Friday night in the summertime.

The view of the spires as you approach from the parking lot.

The Washington Monument is visible in the background, just across the Potomac River. — The view of the spires as you approach from the parking lot.

Have you ever been to the US Air Force Memorial?

26/52 (and 5 of 30!)

What really scares me.

On November 4, 2020November 22, 2020 By StevenIn Life At Home16 Comments

There was a thing in the news last week about a man who was waiting for a bus in the Bronx when a sinkhole opened beneath his feet and he fell fifteen feet into a hole filled with rats.

Around the same time that I learned about this, my sister posted her “Question of the Day” on Facebook, and in honor of the Halloween season, she asked what people were afraid of. I had already been thinking about this, and I answered the two things that truly scare me: Triffids and Sinkholes.

I will elaborate.

If you aren’t familiar, The Day Of The Triffids is a 1951 science-fiction novel by author John Wyndham. It’s been adapted for radio, television, and movies several times over. The Day of the Triffids was even the inspiration for 28 Days Later. Triffids are tall, venomous, carnivorous plants that can actually get up and move around. They’re not particularly fast, but they have a whip-like stinger that can blind and even kill a person. They’re originally cultivated because they produce oil but they get loose because of course they do. Things are made worse by a meteor shower (in some versions it’s just lights in the sky) that renders everyone in the world who sees it entirely blind. The rest of the story is familiar to anyone who loves Zombie fiction because with most of the world blinded, society collapses almost immediately. After that, it’s a dystopian post-apocalyptic wonderland, but with man-eating plants instead of shambling undead.

I want to state clearly that I know that Triffids are fictional. Of course I know they don’t really exist. Nowhere on Earth is there currently a known plant capable of killing and eating humans. That being said, if we were ever going to get a Triffid infestation, 2020 would be the year for it. Regardless, a thing doesn’t have to be real to be scary.

Sinkholes, on the other hand, are very real. And they terrify me. The guy in that news story at the beginning of this post was swallowed by the ground in seconds. Then he was stuck down there, unable to move and covered in rats, for at least half an hour before fire rescue could pull him out. He was afraid to open his mouth because he was scared a rat would climb inside.

This is terrifying, and it happens a lot. Do a web search for “man swallowed by sinkhole” and check out the terrifying results. In 2013, a Florida man was asleep in his bed when a sinkhole opened beneath him and just swallowed his whole bedroom. That guy didn’t survive- his bedroom was just gone, in a matter of seconds. They had to evacuate nearby houses because it was continuing to widen.

There are lots of terrifying sinkhole stories. In 2010, a sinkhole 65 feet wide and 300 feet deep opened in Guatemala and it took out a three-story building.

In Florida, sinkholes are particularly active and unpredictable. In Gainesville, near the University of Florida, there’s a 120 foot deep sinkhole that has been there for so long they’ve named it Devil’s Milhopper and they’ve established a state park to contain it. It’s so deep that it has a slightly different microclimate at the bottom than at the top.

Then there’s Lake Eola. Lake Eola is in a central part of downtown Orlando, and there are events there year round. I’ve been there hundreds of times. If you don’t know the area, you’ve still probably seen Lake Eola because any time a television show “takes place” in Orlando they inevitably show pictures of Disney and then pictures of Lake Eola. The fountain and the band-shell are fairly well known and often photographed.

Here’s the thing about Lake Eola though- the lake is a giant freaking sinkhole. Or at least it’s on top of one- roughly a hundred feet east of the fountain, there’s a twenty-three foot sinkhole. Meanwhile, the city has sprung up around it, skyscrapers and thousands of people living and working nearby.

And everyone is perfectly calm.

And nobody (except for me) is freaking out that we’re all pretending that a giant gaping whole in the ground is perfectly and completely normal.

Sinkholes are terrifying, friends.

What is scary to you?

25/52 (and 4 of 30!)

Notorious.

On November 3, 2020November 22, 2020 By StevenIn Life At Home10 Comments

While today is our national day of stress and anguish and generalized terrifying anxiety about the results of our presidential election, there’s nothing I can do except wait it out. I voted as soon as early voting began. The election is like a runaway train now- all we can do is ride it to the end. There’s nothing more I can do today, and being a stressball about it will only hurt my own well-being. I’m trying to put the rest of it out of my mind as much as possible until everything settles down.

Instead, I’ll think about Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Specifically, I’ll think back to when she was lying in repose at the Supreme Court back in September. Since the Supreme Court is only a few miles away from where I live now, I was able to wander past to pay my respects.

First, I walked past the Capitol building, where the flag was flying at half-mast.

The line of people waiting to walk past RBG’s casket was several hours long. It snaked back and forth between the buildings, then down the street, then down another street, and then down still another street. While I was walking the length of it, I saw people displaying their support in various ways. This mourner’s jacket was awesome. I’d like to think that she wears that jacket all the time.

Ultimately, I chose not to go through the many-hour line, and instead I walked across the street from the front side of the Supreme Court. This is where the media was set up, and I had a clear view straight up the stairs at the front. This was a perfectly acceptable place to have a moment of silence and contemplation for all that RBG did in her lifetime.

I also realized while I was standing there that I missed out on nothing by skipping the two-plus hour line. Even those who waited through the line still didn’t get very close, and my view from across the street was just as clear.

Plus, there was an unexpected benefit to going along the front side of the Supreme Court- the walkway across the street had become absolutely filled with tributes and art and messages of love and hope and gratitude for everything that Justice Ginsburg did. If I had not walked this way, I would never have seen them all.