Two days in one entry

Got a late start yesterday due to a late friday night (trust me, you will be noticing a trend this trip). Also losing sense of the days. But on the Saturday that felt like sunday, I slept through frontrunners, and went to ‘s housecooling and games party. I played several games, some new. brought Puerto Rico! Yay! , , and I played a round. has never played before, but absorbed the rules and complexity with more ease than I’ve seen from anyone else. He also got the same number of victory points as me at the end game. (I won on tie breakers). We also played phase 10 (I didn’t do too badly), 10 days in africa (I bit on that one. hard. and not in the good way. =) and scrabble. I won the scrabble, but had we been playing strip scrabble, would have retained more clothing than I. I grabbed some howard zinn, the first in the matrix and lord of the rings series (the only ones worth grabbing from either series, imho. I almost felt bad about leaving the worst (#2) of both trilogies there, but not quite), and Life Outside by michelangelo signorile.

Afterwards, I headed off to Blowoff, where I saw for the first time this trip. Also saw I sampled pumpkin beer, honey beer, and a very tasty, no-alcohol-flavor raspberry something-or-other. It would be highly recommended if I could remember the name. I think it contained “framboise” in there somewhere. I wasn’t as think as I wanted them to drunk I was. I’ve made the occasional bitchy comment about hot shirtless guys making out on the dance floor in the past. Probably jealousy. It certainly didn’t stop me this time. =) I left so I could make it to the morning session of the trb meeting.

Then today I got a late start due to a late saturday night (also note the time stamp on this post. I encourage you to start a betting pool on when I actually drag my ass out of bed tomorrow, err, today. You know what I mean). I went to neither the obesity and transportation infrastructure, nor the international street design workshops that I’d intended to attend, but instead caught parts of the congestion pricing floor show). Talked briefly with Frank, the youngest research fellow in slpp. Nice guy. Had a decent, if overpriced, Eritrean lunch, with uninspiring samboosa’s, but injera as good as axum’s. Ran into Stephanie, a fellow first year and slpp RA when I got back to the hotel. She was headed off to a public participation workshop. We talked about my (and many of my classmates’) disappointment with the public participation course I took last semester. I should ask her how the workshop went.

Went to “so you want to be a transportation professional” workshop. More geared to engineers than polwonks, but still entertaining. The state employee and the (cute) contractor did not entertain nearly as much as the academic. He was a good lecturer, informative, and funny. He played a very entertaining martyr (we bleed for your enjoyment). Broke my schedule yet again to go back to the subsubcommittee meeting (not yet official) for brt and pricing (what I’m supposed to write a paper on at some point. *le sigh*). It’s good to know that the professionals fumble with the same sort of intellectually masturbatory silliness that volunteers do. It was eventually decided to rename it “the multimodal pricing implementation committee” and make it an official group in july.

This made me late for the “new and young attendees reception”. Hung out around there for awhile. Snagged some fruit. Chatted with an slpp ra (who I didn’t know was a fellow ra prior to the reception, told him about a couple ra events during the conference). Drifted around. Settled into a comfortable conversation with a friendly latino employee of the federal highway administration. I later found out that he was an ex-employee as of about 2 days ago, but shhh, his mom doesn’t know yet. He is a former dc resident. And a former minnesota resident. And the way the conversation was going, I think he’s a homo, but I’m not quite sure. We’ll be sharing the luch break tomorrow.

Metro out to prince george’s plaza, where Liz and Craig snag me away to gorge me on south indian (yay Dosai & idli & medu vada). I don’t think that Liz and I have found that special rapport nearly so well in years. Much talk of family. And politics (I have yet to have a conversation in dc that doesn’t involve politics. I mean even more than usual for me.) And my now deceased great aunt’s view of straight men having some basis for having their masculinity threatened by gay men because she’s seen gay porn, and she’s never seen men who look like that anywhere else. =)

Plans made with for tomorrow evening. Liz & craig drove us to Cosi (we parked in front of the Brookings Institution, which was cooler to me than the Washington monument (tourist trap)). Liz played with fire & marshmallows, I had green tea, and we stayed til the started putting the chairs up. Then back here to le chateau de and . Quick recap of the day for them. LJ entry for my subscribers. & Soon sleep. =)