Tag: Harvard Street

Ever gone in the back entrance of the zoo? The one off Adams Mill and Harvard, not Connecticut. If you haven’t, you probably have no idea that every single path in the zoo going from east to west is uphill. Every one.

I found that out the hard way, it turns out. Went out for a run, decided to go through the zoo and see if I liked that route.

I don’t.

Actually, it wasn’t too bad. It was about a 45 minute round-trip from Columbia Heights through Mount Pleasant through the zoo, past Woodley Park Metro, back through Adam’s Morgan, and home.

Now it’s starting to rain, and of course I have to move my car. It’s a few blocks away, furthest away I’ve had to park since we moved here.

I’ll wait until 6:30 when both sides of the street are open for parking. Meanwhile, I’m going to get out a pen and paper and try and figure out how I managed to run for 40 minutes, return to my original destination, and never go downhill. By my calculations, I should be about thirty feet above the roof of the house.

This was the first weekend where I really feel like I took advantage of living in the city. Friday night, we went to Georgetown to see Hexagon. Saturday, we went to Luna Grill in Dupont Circle for lunch, back to Georgetown, then to Woodley Park. We ended up at The Raven in Mount Pleasant, which many consider to be the best dive bar in DC. I’m not inclined to argue. Sunday, we took my brother-in-law and his girlfriend on a monument tour, which gives me an excuse to be a bit of a tourist.

Hexagon was pretty interesting. I didn’t know what to expect. The brother-in-law had said that he was going with some friends, and we should get tickets. Except then they didn’t get tickets. So the wife and I went alone. It was a great opportunity to learn a bit about the buses. We found that the 42 bus takes us right down to Dupont Circle, which is convenient. It was very cold waiting for the bus to Georgetown, and the sleet in our faces didn’t really help matters. But at least we were inside during all of the snow.

So, we got to the school where they were performing. We walked in, and it took me a minute to find someone less than twice as old as me in the crowd waiting to take their seats. There were young people, but I imagine the bulk of the crowd was 50+. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Just that I felt very young, and under dressed. So, the show started. They dance and sing songs about politics. Some of it was pretty funny. One of the funniest things for me, that probably doesn’t amuse anyone else, was that the woman they had playing Nancy Pelosi a few times could have been Laura Bush’s sister. Or maybe it was actually Laura Bush. Apparently some politicians have had cameos on stage with Hexagon, including Janet Reno. I wonder if her appearance was as funny as her SNL skit. Did you see the one where Will Ferrell was doing “Janet Reno’s Basement Dance Party” or something like that, and she smashed through the “brick” wall wearing the same outfit? I almost wet myself.

Anyway, Hexagon was good. Some of their stuff missed. They did a little Borat skit that I think most of the audience didn’t get. But they did a song called “Turning the Elephant Pink” about how the entire Republican party is closeted gays. A little juvenile, perhaps, but the dancing pink elephants and the guys dressed like the Village People were pretty funny. All in all, I’d say go see it, but don’t cancel cooler plans to do it.

I had been to Luna before, so it wasn’t terribly exciting, but the food was good, as usual.

We wandered around Georgetown, then met a friend of the brother-in-law, then went to Dean and Delucca for coffee. I wasn’t impressed. The BIL got bad service, and my coffee was mediocre. But the company was good, so I can’t complain.

That evening, we went to the Afghan Grill for dinner. Service was a little slow, and they were out of coffee, but the food was great, and they brought us free dessert to make up for the coffee.

The Raven is exactly what a neighborhood bar should be. It’s smallish, but it never got too crowded, even though it was St. Patrick’s Day. I guess everyone nearby was down the street in Adam’s Morgan getting belligerent and puking in alleys. We overheard one of the bartenders mention that she didn’t know anyone in the bar, implying that she usually does. The wife and I will definitely go back. If you’re going to go, remember that they don’t do tabs, and it’s cash only. They have Magic Hat #9 and PBR in bottles, so there’s not really anything else you need. It’s cheap, too.

Sunday morning, we went to the Mall. I had actually never taken a photo of the White House, which seems kind of strange. It’s nice to have people visiting from out of town because then I don’t feel so bad about taking pictures of the Washington Monument and stuff like that. We saw the Lincoln Memorial, the reflecting pool, the Korean War memorial, WW2, Vietnam, and most of the stuff in between. The Vietnam Memorial is funny – it’s much more solemn than the WW2 Memorial, even though a lot fewer people died. I think because it’s so personal – you can actually read the names of real people who died. It’s pretty powerful. People are even quieter there than a lot of other places.

We closed out the weekend with lunch at Potbelly, which was delicious, as expected.

So, it was a full weekend. Got to see a lot of the city, and learned a few helpful bus routes. And now I’m back at work.

My brother-in-law is in town for a job interview, so last night we went out get some dinner. He was craving a burger, so we went to The Diner in Adam’s Morgan. I’d never been. I’d recommend it – the service was good, my burger was good, and they have Sierra Nevada on tap. Ten minute wait at 8pm on a rainy Thursday wasn’t great, but it could have been worse.

What was great, though, was watching the end of the Duke-VCU game. I had been glancing at the score now and then throughout the second half. Like any normal person from the DC Metro area, I hate Duke. And so the highlight of the evening was definitely when VCU’s Eric Maynor pulled up and hit a quick jumper from the foul line to put VCU up, 79-77, with 1.8 seconds left. Most of the restaurant yelled. The two girls sitting at the table in front of me, who probably didn’t even know there was a TV in the place, let alone a tight game going down to the wire, jumped.

It was anti-climactic when Duke missed their desperation three to end the game. But it was still nice to watch.

Have I mentioned that I love living in the city? Now, when we have guests, we can walk 5-10 minutes and find all kinds of cool stuff. A walk like that from our old place left you in a little strip mall with an old Safeway and a Radio Shack. We can give them directions to Sticky Fingers rather than Dunkin’ Donuts. They can hop on the Metro when they need to go somewhere instead of borrowing a car.

Actually, we don’t need guests to do all that. But we have guests now (Well, technically we have A guest until his girlfriend arrives, and I think she’s on the Flyer from Dulles to West Falls Church right now).

A Pet Cause Celebre link via my mom

“They have never eaten meat in their whole lives,” [Ward 1 Councilman Jim] Graham said. “They are about as green as you can be for white Westies.”

Well, that’s nice to know. Our Councilman buys additive-free food for his dogs from a local store. I still don’t know much about him, which is probably something that should change. I imagine he’ll be up for re-election at some point, and since I don’t (yet) have a senator, I’ll be desperate to get my voting fix.

And I think I might have to drag the wife down there to get some additive-free food for my crazy cat, too. Actually, dragging the wife probably isn’t going to happen. It’s pretty clear that it’s MY cat, not OUR cat.

Anyway, maybe they have something to keep the cat from being so weird. She is more active at 5:15AM for about half and hour than she is the entire rest of the day. Luckily she didn’t adjust for Daylight Saving, and now she doesn’t bother me as much because I’m usually awake. But this morning she was scratching at something for a while, and I couldn’t quite bring myself to get out of bed and see what it was. I didn’t see anything destroyed, so I guess it was something harder than her claws, but it’s never good to hear your pets (Or children, I suppose, but I don’t yet have children) making destructive noises.

Every weekday, the right side of Harvard Street is closed for parking during rush hour, both morning and evening. That gives traffic two lanes on this one-way street, and parking one lane. It’s a big cut-through between 16th and 14th, so traffic is pretty heavy at times.

On Tuesdays, they clean the left side of the street. So there’s no parking there all day, and the parking restriction on the right side of the street is lifted. In the winter, there is no street cleaning, so these rules don’t apply.

However, the result of this is not that Tuesday is the same as Monday and Wednesday through Friday. What happens on Tuesday is that everyone ignores the “no parking on the left side” signs, and obeys the “You can park on the right side today” signs. So they park on both sides of the street all day, meaning that the afternoon rush outside my window is particularly heavy. I’m glad I’m already home and parked right out front.

It looks like it might have been sort of my fault that our wireless disappeared. I may have inadvertently changed the name of my neighbor’s network instead of ours. Which wouldn’t be possible if Comcast actually set different passwords on the routers. It also shouldn’t have happened because I told my computer not to connect to the neighbor’s network any more after we got our own, but it apparently didn’t get that memo.

It seems to be resolved now. I still have my old modem from Cox cable, so I plugged that in, Comcast activated it, and I’m using my Linksys router like I wanted to originally, and everything seems to be fine.

The quality of our cable tv is still poor, though. I still stand by my statements about Comcast sucking.

Let me count the ways in which Comcast sucks. First, it took them over a month to recognize that my house had been converted to condos. The guy upstairs spent that whole time fighting with them. Even after they finally acknowledged multiple units and installed his cable, their customer service was unable to schedule an install at my house for a few days because it wasn’t in the computer.

Finally, they came out and installed the cable. They did this while my wife was home, not me, so I was unable to check what the installer did. First, he used a combination modem/wireless router. This probably saves Comcast money, but is really annoying for those of us who have a Linksys wireless router with integrated Vonage phone jacks, and don’t want to use Comcast’s crappy router. Never mind that Comcast assumes that I’m incapable of changing settings on the router, and doesn’t leave me login details. I found the IP in my history, and he had saved the password, but that hardly seems sufficient. Then he set the name of the network to my last name, which is exactly what I want to be broadcast to anyone in range.

Luckily, it wasn’t hard to fix the settings, although if IE ever forgets the password, I’m going to have to figure out how to reset it. I turned off the wireless of the Linksys router, and the phone works, so that’s only a minor annoyance.

Then, after about 24 hours, my computer stopped seeing the Comcast router’s wireless signal. I tried cycling the power, and still nothing. I plugged in with an ethernet cable, which worked, but I was unable to get to the router login to check and make sure it still thought it was broadcasting the signal. So, currently I have what is effectively a wired modem/router, and I’m using the wireless from my Linksys. This would be fine if Comcast had just set me up with a modem and let me provide my own wireless. But since they provided a wireless router (Which, actually, provides a slightly faster connection than the Linksys. Although that may be only because the Linksys has to go through the Comcast router. Anyway.), I would like to be able to use it.

The cable, however, was even worse. I paid for HD, and wanted to switch over once my wife started watching ABC in SD. I found the second ABC channel, which seems to be something in between SD and HD. I’m not sure what it is, but it kind of sucks. It sucked even more because the Comcast installer was running coax to the tv. Can you even send an HD signal over coax? It comes in from outside over coax, but I didn’t think it was an option from the cable box to the tv.

I didn’t think it was possible to nostalgic about my mediocre experience with Cox, but Comcast has not done a single thing right since I started dealing with them. I’m tempted to try to bribe Verizon to bring Fios to our neighborhood.

In any event, I hope to have this resolved this week. Currently everything is working, just not very well. I’m sure you can guess how excited I am at the prospect of sitting on hold with Comcast tech support (Their automated phone service refused to accept my home phone number, and wouldn’t give me a person, so I had to wait ten minutes on hold with customer service to be transferred to wait on hold for tech support).

Area has high number of subprime mortgages

Never mind that this article is using data from 2004 to talk about the effect a large percentage of subprime loans has on the current market. The larger problem is that they’re ignoring the other details.

First, the DC housing market has a bit of a crutch that other areas don’t have, and that’s the federal government. There will always be federal jobs here, and so there will always be demand for housing. I think if you look at the numbers, you’ll see that the DC area is less susceptible to recessions and things like that because the government never goes away. Second, the housing market generally picks up with the warm weather. January was probably as bad as it’s going to get for a while (NB: I am not in the mortgage industry. I worked at Fannie Mae for a year in 2002-3, but that hardly qualifies me as an expert.).

That doesn’t mean that people with bad credit who have taken on loans that they can’t really afford aren’t going to get hurt. But the real issue there is not the housing market at all. A strong market does help people get out from under their homes if they can no longer afford them. But it doesn’t address the root of the issue, which is that these loans never should have been made. I know there has been a push for more regulation on subprime lending, and I know it’s a fight to balance between allowing people with little credit or bad credit to buy homes and protecting the uninformed from bad decisions.

I hesitate to push for more regulation, to force lenders to teach potential homebuyers about what they’re getting into. But I wouldn’t mind seeing a push for more transparency. I just bought a home, and with a degree in math and a year in the secondary mortgage industry, I still had trouble deciphering all the paperwork they threw at me. Even my wife, a lawyer, had trouble wading through all the paperwork. It doesn’t need to be that complicated. It SHOULDN’T be that complicated. I think that’s where we have to make some changes. If everything is out in the open, in plain and simple English, we will reduce the problem because people will better understand what they’re getting themselves into.

We’ll still have people who take on mortgages they can’t afford. But we can’t protect everyone from their own stupidity all the time.

A bunch of MD and VA schools are already closed. There’s a dusting of snow on the ground. I’m at work in VA, and I’m pretty sure the snow emergency is going to trap me here for at least six days.

Where’s your global warming now, Al Gore? Snow in March! It must be a new Ice Age.

Seriously, the snow is just annoying at this point. I’m ready for spring. This winter had a nice run, but now it’s time for flowers and birds and walking around in flip flops.

Well, we have my neighbor’s internet. The couple who live in Unit 4 have had their cable installed, and have graciously given out the password for their wireless network until we can get cable. It’s not perfect, but it’s better than nothing.

Comcast, meanwhile, has been less than helpful. One would think that they would be eager to get four new subscribers all set up. We’re all but begging them to let us use their service. Yesterday, two days after the Comcast install guy cut through my condo (With permission) to get to the back of the house, the Comcast CSR I spoke to was almost rude when I told her that Unit 4 had cable already, despite the fact that we still show up in the system as one unit. “Well, I don’t see how THAT’S possible.” She said.

Still, rudeness from Comcast aside, we are that much closer to having our very own internet connection. I’m, obviously, thrilled.