I’ve been feeling so settled in DC recently. I am finally at a job I really, truly enjoy, and I have become complacent. I was looking at pictures from Denver recently (though I may be surrounded by 50 computers a day, I don’t spend nearly enough time in front of any one of them to keep up with my internet stalking), and it actually brought tears to my eyes. Good friends have gotten married, surrounded by other good friends. People I have known for most of my life. I wasn’t there, but just to see the joy in so many faces brought tears to my eyes.

DC is home now, but I can’t help missing the people and places that shaped who I am. This past year marks the longest amount of time in my life that I have not been to Denver.

I gotta say, if I was a DC taxi driver trying to avoid paying the $1,000 fine I would not be waiting to pick up a fare at the Union Station taxi stand just before rush hour. According to WTOP nearly 95% of area taxis now have the time and distance meters, easily discernible from taxis without by a sticker in the passenger window. Walking past Union Station this morning however, a far fewer percentage of the taxis had the stickers than WTOP polled. By rough estimation I would say that around 60% of the taxis waiting in the queue were meter certified, the rest either were missing their sticker or had yet to make the switch.

For those of you keeping track… there’s actually no way I could have taken that picture… Though I wish I had.

I’ve spent a considerable portion of my free time over the past day or so trying to purge my hard drive of extra crap, and in doing so have taken an unexpected wander down memory lane though my pictures. It’s amazing to think that it’s been nearly two years since I lived in Denver, that it was more than two years ago that I came out to interview with Women for Women International.

I have recently played around some with the idea of moving back to Denver, for various reasons. It was only when I thought about leaving that I realized how very much I really enjoy living in DC. This year has, and will continue, to bring a lot of changes for me. I am nervous about many of them, I am even scared by one or two of them. December will likely see me in the MD suburbs (as much as I would rather be in Baltimore than Rockville, I expect the commute to work and school would weigh on me far too much).

I love being in the middle of the city, being able to walk out my door and basically get to anyplace interesting by foot, bus or metro, within forty five minutes. When I lived in Greensboro I had this overwhelming sense of being disconnected from everything because Guilford’s campus was so far removed from anyplace interesting in the city (and it seems like there are far more interesting places in Greensboro now than there were then… or maybe I just didn’t get out enough). I am nervous about moving to the suburbs and the return of that uneasy feeling.

I wanted to thank Mr. Matt Raymond, Director of Communications of the Library of Congress for his thoughful response to my critique of their new ad campaign (you can read it here).
I will be making a point of going to the Library of Congress at some point in the next week or so to check out the new Experience, and the baseball collection.

It’s a hard world for the libraries these days, and I appreciate the LOC’s efforts to remain (become?) dynamic. I’ve always had a love of the Library of Congress… but I’m a big dork, and I expect that the LOC, like many other libraries, has had to undergo a pretty major shift in order to stay competitive with the middle of the night accessibility of the internet. Undoubtedly that was also a factor in the “at your fingertips” phrasing.

I will be interested to see how the Library of Congress further develops this campaign. I personally would love to see an ad featuring Eleanor Roosevelt.

The father of one of the girls murdered by her mother in January is suing the city claiming that “16-year-old Brittany Jacks’ death has ‘denied (him) the financial benefits, gifts and other contributions.” Wait a second… is this the same man who failed to pay child support for the child even after admitting his paternity?

Let me get this straight. He’s going to sue the city for the lost money that he would have gotten as a result of being the child’s father (let me ask my dad… but I don’t think he’s made any money off of me yet) because the city failed to heed warnings that the children in Banita Jack’s home were in danger? Shall we take a moment and ruminate on the role that an active father could have played in preventing that tragedy? Perhaps if young Brittany had been close with her father she could have said “Gee Pops, you know mom’s been acting pretty weird… I was hoping maybe you could help out with that”.

But no…

I kind of want to vomit right now.

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