Tuesday, September 6, 2011

Weekend Report: Labor Day Stay-cation

I bookended my summer with yet another stay-cation. The three days went by quickly, and though I didn’t do a ton, there was certainly a significant amount of reading, pooling, and lounging…


On Friday night I met some friends for the summer’s penultimate Jazz in the Garden. I strongly believe that instead of sweating through jazz on Fridays in the summer, they should start these evenings now and carry them through the fall. It’s sooo much more pleasant when the weather’s nice!


Saturday SpeedyKate and I met for a truly epic pool workout (2 hours!), then I metro’d down to the Corcoran for their final Free Summer Saturday. The special exhibit is Chris Martin: Painting Big, aka ridiculously large abstract paintings. 


One of my (many) favorite things about art museums is the writings on the wall. For example, “Martin’s paintings are often quite literally big, in the sense that many of his canvases are towering fields of color and pattern, yet they are also big in concept and in spirit, incorporating the gamut of experience, from personal memories to James Brown to the sublime. Although his paintings are lush and playful on the surface, they are embedded with traces of private stories and layers of history.”


I love it. It’s completely over-the-top pretentious and ridiculously awesome. If I knew more about art I would totally write these things. (And yes, that's a chicken walking on the above "painting in progress.")

Sunday marked another pool running day, but pre-pool get this…dun dun dunnnnn…I WENT FOR A RUN! It was only 2 miles and felt absolutely terrible (in a I-haven’t-run-in-a-month sort of way), but nothing really really hurt, so I’ll count that as a win!

Between running and heading to the pool, I stopped at Yola to get a cup of coffee to go. Let me set this up properly – I was hungry, and really sweaty (it was disgustingly humid), and all I wanted was to be on my couch drinking coffee and watching Track Worlds. So I got my coffee and bee-lined it home. 

As I walked through Dupont Circle, a pigeon ran into me!!! It was taking off, and umm didn’t see me? It smashed into my hand, aaaccckkkgaahhh!?!?! (that sound applies to me, not the pigeon). I watched in slow motion as my coffee hit the sidewalk. Nooooooo! I pitiful/angry whined. I noticed a girl sitting on a bench watching me with a look of concern and surprise. 

“A pigeon just ran into me! I can’t believe that just happened! And now my coffee’s gone and there’s pigeon on my hand!” I tried to justify myself. Ugh. This would have been funnier had I not already been so cranky…

After sufficiently recovering from my avian mishap, I headed to Rumsey to pool with SpeedyKate and 6x6. (What are friends for but to cheer you up with a challenging workout?)

After the workout we went to Peregrine Espresso to enjoy some delicious coffee (theirs iced, mine hot, no pigeons included).

Sunday night was an extra night of weekend…so what to do? Nothing crazy - 6x6 and I hung out chez SpeedyKate and ordered in Indian food. Yumm!

Monday morning I took advantage of the day off by hitting up a morning movie in Georgetown ($6). Crazy Stupid Love slightly exceeded my expectations (they were low). Some friends told me it was depressing, but I thought it was really happy! There were a few moments of cringe-worthy clichés, but other than that let’s just agree that Ryan Gossling is my ideal man and move along…

Then it was time for my 3rd pool workout of the weekend (total minutes in the pool in 3 days: 270, aka 4.5 hours) . 6x6 “coached” me through an hour of fast repeats (1 minute, 2, 3, 3, 2, 1, 10x1) to the consternation of everyone else lounging around the Francis Pool. And then I went for another run (23 minutes!). Because I am a bad-a**. :) 

Hope you all had a fantastic weekend too, whether it involved an actual vacation or a Mollie-style stay-cation!