Tag: dc

Date night

Last night, we did the second of our new monthly date nights. We went to a restaurant that I run past fairly regularly, and for some reason it’s always seemed intriguing.

We went to Napoleon Bistro on Columbia Road (Warning: Their website is a horrific flash piece of crap). We were thinking about eating outside, but it was a little muggy. And, it turns out we made the right choice, as a group who went outside to eat just after we arrived came back in shortly after, complaining of bugs.

Anyway, inside the restaurant is nice. They have a rather large bar area, which suggests they get a bar crowd that wasn’t there on a Sunday evening.

The food was good. I had flank steak with a shallot demi glace, whatever that means, and french fries. The wife had a crepe filled with something green and a salad. Crepes, apparently, are their specialty. We split a nice cabernet that I’d never heard of.

Dessert was great, too.  We had the “Femme Fatale”, which was a crepe filled with caramelized bananas and topped with ice cream.  It tasted a little pumpkiny and delicious.

We would definitely go back. In fact, we might even go back later this week when we have a friend in town who would love the food there.

Back to the website, though. I find that, more often than not, a restaurant website is awful. They usually use a lot of Flash, which is rarely a good idea. When I go to a restaurant website, I’d just like to see a menu, maybe a phone number. I don’t need to experience the ambiance of the place through some crappy Flash interface. I’m also surprised at how often I Google a restaurant and they don’t seem to have a website at all. I know I spend more time online than most people do, but it seems that the benefits of even just an HTML version of the menu and phone number being online would outweigh all the maintenance and hosting costs.

Anyway, I would recommend Napoleon Bistro. Just not their website.

Bum bum bum bum BUM BUM DC U-ni-ted!

Short-handed United Holds Off Chivas’s Rush – washingtonpost.com

Despite playing a man down for the second half, United held off an unrelenting Chivas attack to emerge with a 2-1 advantage in front of a split crowd of 21,022.

Yeah, that last two in the crowd was the wife and me. One of her new coworkers has season tickets, and couldn’t make the game last night, and we were the lucky beneficiaries. Fantastic seats in the VIP section, just at midfield.

There’s a good atmosphere to DC United games. The fans are into it, they’re loud, and mostly pretty friendly. I did overhear a DC United fan make a rude comment to a Chivas fan while we were in line buying popcorn. The rude comment and the response were in Spanish, so I might have misunderstood, but one of the words that the Chivas supporter used in his response was definitely not friendly. It’s one of those words that doesn’t really have a direct translation into English, but I’ve always thought of it as the Spanish equivalent to a popular compound English curse word.

Anyway, the game was good – DC scored first, lost a man to a red card, then both sides scored second half goals. We should go to more games. It’s not expensive, compared to baseball or football.

Wanna use your blog for good?

Blog Action Day

On October 15th, bloggers around the web will unite to put a single important issue on everyone’s mind – the environment. Every blogger will post about the environment in their own way and relating to their own topic. Our aim is to get everyone talking towards a better future.

I know, many people use their blog to further good causes every day while I complain about the awful horrors of living and parking in Washington, DC. But I think many people who do fight for these causes forget that most people not only aren’t fighting, they’re not even aware.

The wife has complained about Metro riders who don’t recycle the Express newspaper. This morning, there were two down escalators at Columbia Heights. I went down the one that the girl with the large suitcase didn’t choose. At the bottom of her escalator, I saw a copy of Express that someone had dropped. As I was heading to the bottom, planning to pick it up, a woman on that escalator picked it up. “Wow,” I thought. “I never see people pick up trash in the Metro station”.

And then she turned left to throw the paper in the trash, rather than right to recycle it. It got me thinking. I know that my first thought if I have paper trash is to recycle it. In fact, I’ve been reading Express this week because I haven’t been to the library. They’re doing elevator work at Pentagon City, and the recycle bins are blocked. So I’ve been putting the Express in my bag and recycling it at home, or at Columbia Heights in the evening.

But lots of people don’t even think to recycle. I’m sure this woman didn’t consciously choose not to recycle – the thought probably never crossed her mind.

That’s why it’s important to tell people about the little things you can do to help the environment. It’s no harder to recycle Express than it is to throw it away, so you can’t say it’s hard to recycle (At least in this instance). Compact fluorescent bulbs are cheaper in the long run. Cutting down on energy use at home will save you money. There are plenty of things that you can do that are easy, that don’t require huge lifestyle changes or lots of money, and that really do make a difference. But people have to know about these things.

Once you get people started thinking about how their actions can help the environment, the effect can snowball. If that woman thought about recycling Express, she might wonder why she doesn’t recycle more at home.

Anyway, join me and tons of others on October 15th for Blog Action Day.

Be a part of local history might be a bit much

Columbia Heights News – Washington, DC – Columbia Heights Day – October 6

The First Annual Columbia Heights Day Festival is scheduled for Saturday, October 6th from 11 AM to 6 PM.

But hey, at least we’re having a Columbia Heights Day.  Not much detail at CH News, or at the CH Day website.  But there’s supposed to be a meeting of local business owners tonight, so maybe after that they’ll have a better idea of what’s happening.  They’re not giving themselves a whole lot of time.

Why am I not mad?

I just can’t seem to get worked up over the DC voting rights push.  Sure, it bugs me that I don’t have a representative.  But when I see the “Taxation without Representation” license plates (which aren’t the choice I thought they were – they’re standard issue DC tags) and I read about the “injustice” that this is, my immediate reaction is, “Stop whining”.

It may be that I moved from Virginia into the District knowing full well that we had no representatives, so I feel a little silly complaining about it now.

I really do want to have someone speaking for me at the national level.  I think it’s the right thing to do.  And I’m even okay with this little deal with Utah to placate Republicans who see giving DC a vote as a Democratic ploy to gain a seat.

Maybe there’s some argument that would strike a nerve and get me worked up over this that I just haven’t heard yet.  Anyone know what that argument might be?

Go high or go home

We were at Science Club on 19th Street Saturday night.  I’ll try not to pass judgment on the crowd, because I was kind of tired and not really up for a crowded bar.  I went because some good friends were going and we didn’t want to call it a night.  I had a good time, but it was definitely the company, not the bar.

Anyway, if you’re going to go with a themed bar, you have to GO with the theme.  This place threw a few things up on the wall and left it at that.  We were down in the basement, and they have a periodic table on the wall, a picture of Einstein, and a microscope on a shelf.

How hard would it have been to look up geeky science stuff on Wikipedia?  Or give some GW student a free happy hour in exchange for covering the walls with differential equations?  Shame on you, Science Club.   You  get bonus points for having organic beer on tap, though.

Pepco still sucks, but Im not quite so mad

Pepco came out and read the meter after all.  I just got off the phone with the first Pepco CSR who didn’t make me want to break things.  He said the meter was read yesterday, and we’ve used 4344 kilowatt hours since we moved in.  Our latest bill was for 7942 kilowatt hours, or 183% of our actual electricity usage.  Based on what they charged us on our latest bill, I think that’s about $450 that we’ve paid them that we don’t owe them.

Actually, I haven’t technically paid the latest bill.  I scheduled it, but it hasn’t gone through yet.  But apparently they can’t cancel the payment once I have a confirmation number, which is crap, but whatever.  We aren’t going to pay another bill for a few months.

I’m not sure why I had to be home yesterday.  They read the meter after I left for work, despite their claims that someone had to be at the house.

I wish I could fire Pepco

I just got off the phone with Pepco customer service.  They told me they don’t guarantee they’ll actually arrive in the four hour window.  They have lots of meters to read, and sometimes they don’t arrive on time.  I finally hung up on the CSR I was talking to because I was so furious.  I have no idea what I can do.  I can’t take my business elsewhere.

Anyone have any suggestions?

Waiting for Pepco

I’m working from home this morning, waiting for Pepco to come and read our meter.  I’m not sure why I have to be here, since the meter is outside, but I do.  They promise to be here between 8am and noon.

Why am I waiting for Pepco, you might ask?  Isn’t it their job to read my meter and charge me for electricity used?

Well, sort of.  You see, apparently Pepco can estimate my meter readings.  Based on what I don’t know, because this condo has only existed as a condo since some time last year, and has only been inhabited since February.  I suppose they’re basing the estimates on similar places in the area.

Or maybe they’re pulling numbers out of the air.  As of last week, when we got our latest bill, it looked to me like we’d used about 4200 kilowatt hours since moving in.  Our bill claims we’ve used 7900.  That means they’ve overcharged us by something in the neighborhood of $300.

I’m sure they’ll adjust the bill once they read the meter, and we won’t pay anything for a few months, but it’s absolutely infuriating that I have to make a special request and work from home for half a day (Okay, I’m not really complaining about that) just to get Pepco to charge us for the power we actually used.

Is it possible to have competition in power companies?  I know that, at least to some extent, it’s probably not possible to share the infrastructure necessary to deliver power to my house.  It might not be possible at all.  I guess we’re just going to have to put windmills and solar panels on the roof and go off the grid.

Coppis on U Street

The wife and I had a little date night last night, having dinner at Coppi’s on U Street and then drinks at Saint Ex on 14th.

Coppi’s was courtesy of my occasionally blogging brother-in-law (As opposed to the others who don’t blog at all) and his girlfriend, who stayed with us a little while back, and were overly generous in expressing their gratitude.

In any event, Coppi’s was great. I beat the wife there by a bit, which meant I sat at the bar, chatted with a woman who was probably the manager, and drank an organic beer.

Then the wife arrived. We each had a salad and an entree, all delicious, and then shared a dessert. My salad was the Bietole al Forno, which was very good. For dinner I had a really nice lasagne. It was a bit more cream sauce than red sauce, which would not have been my first choice, but was very good anyway.

And then we shared the dessert. It’s not on their online menu, but it was recommended by the waiter. It was peaches with a wine and brown sugar sauce topped with ice cream, and it was quite good.

As for the restaurant itself, it was a great experience. The service was excellent, the place crowded but not uncomfortably so, and the music was eclectic and interesting.  I would highly recommend them for dinner.  Reservations are probably a good idea.

I’ve been to Saint Ex before.  It’s one of the wife’s favorite bars.  And it was, again, a nice place to hang out.