Yesterday morning, the three of us who split a full share at Great Country Farms in Bluemont hopped in the car and headed for the farm to do some picking, and to retrieve our CSA boxes. Last week’s trip had been in the middle of the pre-summer heat wave that had the mercury pegged in most folks’ thermometers, and had us sweating a ton as we picked strawberries. This week’s trip turned out to be a more pleasant pastoral affair.

We hit the fields at about 10:30 in the morning, when it was only just in the mid-70s and the breeze made it mighty pleasant. We ended up with about 8 pints of strawberries between us, plus our farm boxes which had asparagus, lettuce, more strawberries, spring onions and a small cilantro plant. Farmer Ray showed us where the peach orchard was, as well, and showed us the fruit that was setting in the branches already. He says about three weeks ’til the peaches are ready. Judging by the heavy-laden blackberry vines, we’ll be in blackberries next week or the week after. After that, it was off on an adventure.

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Last Friday, me and the missus decided to dine in Old Town. We were craving Irish food; after our jaunt up in Maine a few weeks back and hitting several New England pubs we were feeling nostalgic for our Ireland walkabout back in 2005 and wanted to try getting back to that setting. Yes, yes, this is Virginia after all, but no harm in trying, right?

I’d read some reviews on O’Connell’s a while back and since it boasted itself as “a modern Irish restaurant in an ancient Irish setting” (from their website), we decided to give it a whirl.

We arrived right at 5 p.m., before the dinner crush on a typical spring weekend evening on King Street. After doing a quick check of the menu out front, we followed the pleasant and cheery hostess upstairs to the third floor. (As an aside, I love it when restaurants post their menus out front - saves me a heap of time of going in, scanning the menu and then bailing because I can’t find anything on it that waters my mouth.)

Seated in a corner along the long banister “corridor” connecting two of the older bars upstairs, the busboy was prompt in getting us water. So we dove into the menu and after some discussion, decided what to eat.

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I’ve realized that one powerful symbol of urban life is the little convenience stores that are on about every tenth corner throughout the District. They’re tiny and the cashiers are often boxed in by bulletproof plexiglass, but the shoppers are regulars and the stores are packed to the gills with necessities and odds and ends. They are a neighborhood institution that only exists in a walking—ie, urban—culture.

I recently had a brilliant idea of doing an irregular series of posts that would investigate neighborhood stores from time to time, looking at who shops there, what they buy, and what the general neighborhood vibe is.

I started at my own neighborhood shop, the Euclid Market, but now I’m not sure how great my idea is. The Korean guy working there, Joe, was happy to talk to me, but the shoppers were not; one of them asked if I was “the police.” Also, while the market sells a very wide variety of goods (sardines, Yellow Tail wine, Van Holten’s Pickles in a Pouch, Luna bars, the obligatory pasta/oil/beans/etc, wristwatches, male enhancement herbal supplements), the best sellers weren’t surprising: singles of IceHouse or Budweiser 211, and Newport cigarettes. I have a feeling those goods might be ubiquitously popular throughout much of the city.

So I’m not sure how well this series is going to proceed, or whether the Logan Circle market I had in mind next will really be much different. Perhaps I need to look under the surface a bit more. Suggestions are welcome!

These are the rare perfect nights here in Washington, when the weather is pleasant and civil. When you can sit outside on your patio, the hum of an AM radio droning in the background, the chirping of the robins dying down. The sky is robin’s egg blue, slowly heading for midnight blue. The breeze wafts in the smell of mown grass and freshly turned soil.

It’s the nights that make me love this town. In Summer, they swelter, and your clothes cling and stick, as if pressed down with a wet army blanket. In Fall, you can smell the fireplaces, the leaves, and the dew. In Winter, the smells of snow and of brisk cold and the fires down the street.

Tonight I can smell the charcoal grill two blocks over, sweet and gentle on the air.

All our windows are flung wide, the smell of springtime suffusing the house. I can almost smell my roses from here.

Though it’s a bit too chilly today, by midweek, we’ll be into perfect sidewalk cafe weather. I remember many a night spent on the patio either at Boulevard Woodgrill in Clarendon, or at Four Courts in Courthouse, or down on I St at the Bottom Line after work.

There are a ton of great places in DC for drinks on the patio when the weather’s nice and the sun is shining, and everyone’s got a favorite. I know Wayan is addicted to Fox & Hounds, and that I’ve certainly enjoyed a long happy hour after work at Elephant & Castle, and of course there’s the roof deck of pretty much every place in Adams Morgan, or the places in Georgetown that have the pull-back walls to let the air flow in when it’s nice.

Do your friends a solid, though, and tell us where to be this week when it’s nice here below in the comments.

Street in San Juan, Puerto Rico (LOC) — Originally uploaded by The Library of Congress

Luckily for everyone who inhabits the world, and particularly for people who might have occassion to knock on his door, Keith Washington has been convicted and will be spending some time behind bars. It’s not perfect - the jury couldn’t bring themselves to convict him of second degree murder - but they did agree on two counts of first degree assault and two of using a handgun in a crime of violence. With no mandatory time on the assault charges we can only be sure of 5 years for each of the handgun counts. WaPo didn’t make it clear if the minimums could run concurrently.

It’s a great relief, I think, that the jury convicted. I’d become worried that this clown was going to skate because each not-yet-punished bits of whacko behavior wasn’t going to be tried in a vacuum, despite them clearly providing plausibility when taken together. WaPo had earlier reported that this jury wouldn’t hear about Washington being indicted for waving a gun at someone who said they’d simply knocked on his door by mistake, something that certainly makes the shooting victims in this case a lot more believable when they said Washington simply flipped his shit and started shooting.

Sentencing is in late April; here’s hoping they land near the maximums of 25 and 10 years per count.

This weekend, as part of the Super Flush, I got an excellent tour of the new stadium under construction. Nationals Park (which I hope it remains) is truly a wonder to behold. The concrete and glass exterior was the part I was most concerned about when the initial HOK designs were released. I was worried that it wouldn’t look as good as Oriole Park in its red-brick, or any of the other new stadiums that have been built over the past couple years, as when I think cast concrete, I think of any of the various ugly ass buildings downtown that have all the personality of a washed-up tax accountant. Nationals Park has found a way, though, to make concrete sexy in a way that I didn’t think was possible.

We were led around the insides of the stadium, and the aura is of a still unfinished construction site, with building materials crowding the halls and various craftsmen hard at work on all the details. The seats are in place, the main structures complete and the scoreboard up and lit for all to see. The dugouts and locker rooms are very near completion, and the stadium’s plumbing is, as of this weekend greenlit. The beer lines are in and all lead down to the two condo-sized beer coolers that will pipe icy-cold deliciousness to taps throughout the stadium. And, as of this afternoon, you can enjoy a nice half-smoke from the Ben’s Chili Bowl stand that’s going into the stadium. No word on which labels will be on the tap handles just yet, though.
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Good morning DC, I hope you’re all blissful this morning. Going to be downright pleasant for February out there, high in the low 50s before a weekend that may require an extra blanket.

Metro Considers Large Plasmas for Stations

Metro’s giving a good hard look at plasma screens for all the platforms, and if you’ve seen the plasmas at the Gallery Place station, you might have a good idea what the prototype may look like. In addition, the displays would show content from a new “Metro Channel”, designed to provide a platform for live announcements and display of system conditions.

Virginia Dumps Smoking Ban

Despite strong support from the left, the Virginia House of Delegates has killed the smoking ban for the fourth straight year. Since Virginia’s legislature holds most of the power in the State, cities and counties can’t independently ban smoking, and thus it continues unabated in many of the bars and restaurants in the state. Who was responsible? Why, look, it’s Virginia’s favorite son, David B Albo, of the egregiously stupid $1000 moving violation fines! Hooray.

Final Amount in Revenue Scam is $43M

Forty-Three Million Dollars is what several DC Department of Revenue employees stole from the city coffers as part of their years-long scam. My general hope is that they spend some serious time in a federal pen belong to the guy with the most cigarettes.

When in Doubt, Don’t Trust the Flower Guy

Some suspects were caught red handed on Thursday, but a Sheriff’s deputy dressed up like a flower delivery guy. They used a sheriff’s van made up to look like a flower delivery truck, and a deputy in a delivery guy’s uniform to put the cuffs on 12 suspects who had been dodging the police for some time.

Do you think they make fun of you extra if you got caught because you were monumentally stupid?

Just what I wanted

Originally uploaded by tiffany bridge.

I just ate this. And it was so good.

While I pondered all the ways Ben’s chili half-smoke could promote world peace, the little granny at the table behind me was having an animated discussion of her First Amendment rights… And how they relate to patio furniture.

God I love DC.

Well, I showed you the visitor to our birdfeeder. However along the way we had a bit of an adventure with some other critters that like birdseed. Or, really, damned near anything.

When my mother sent us the birdfeeder she included $10 with the explanation that it wasn’t practical to ship birdseed. Fair enough. So my darling girlfriend went out, looked at the options, and opted for pure sunflower seeds. As it turns out that’s about what the goddess of homemaking suggests as well. Once we got it home, however, we realized our initial intended place wasn’t going to be able to support the feeder and I’d have to come up with some other way to mount it. So we put the seed on the porch out of the way and I put another item on my shopping list for when I next went to Mecca Home Depot.

A few weeks later someone else found the bag of seed and decided they’d like to do some preliminary testing to make sure it’s okay for the birds. Now, normally I’m okay with feeding the little tree rats - I think they’re cute. But its not what we bought this seed for and they were having their version of a kegger on our patio, crapping and peeing all over our bench there behind the feed. I don’t even like having to clean my own bathroom, I’m sure not going to do it for the Alpha Kappa Sciuridaes

So I went out and got a storage box for the feed when I picked up the crook, which I’d wanted to get anyway. I knew it wouldn’t keep them out long-term but I wanted to see how long it took them to wriggle it open. As it turns out it didn’t even slow them down long enough for me to get out of bed - I took this when I came downstairs the following morning. So I piled some firewood on top of the box and went about my day. By afternoon they’d somehow shoved the wood off and gotten right back in.

So I moved the box to the other side of the patio, pushed it into the corner, put a big spool of coax I had out there on top of it and braced the roll on the other side.

This bought me a day, apparently until the squirrel army could muster up their little ropes, block and tackle. I came downstairs to discover this fellow nibbling away and the spool off to the side. Note the lack of one of the lid flaps - they managed somehow to get it completely off the container. I considered a padlock but I feel confident they’ve all read and mastered the MIT lockpicking guide.

The container is in the house now. I give it a week before they muster up the troops to stage a full invasion. Here’s hoping they don’t have body armor.