Papermoon Diner, Baltimore’s finest eye spy establishment.

The food is good, too! Best bread pudding in the Mid-Atlantic.

Our first day of vacation:

• Basement flooded for the second time in as many weeks.
• Washing machine unusable until further notice.
• Needless to say, we’ll be traveling light!

The downside of living in a city others come to visit is that it never feels like a good time to be a tourist. Yes, D.C. is lovely just walking around — flaneuring, if you will — but all those buildings around the National Mall are still worth visiting.

Which is to say, our tickets for a tour of the Capitol are booked. It was now or never, since this year will probably be our last in Washington proper.

Let this unsolicited 2014 cartoon of me sipping coffee in Havana sit here for posterity as I replace it with an actual photo for my micro.blog avatar. [Note: Slash account photo slash profile pic. I can’t keep up with the nomenclature. ] Other than the hunched back, the often unkempt sideburns, and the cup of coffee that is always close by, it never truly was a good likeness, even for 2014.

The new photo is a cutout of this particular moment in time, as I browsed through used books in front of an Athens, OH bookstore during one of our first post-pandemic trips. Yes, that feral child doing God knows what on the sidewalk is ours, and obscured by the sign just enough to be included without a privacy blur.

Athens itself ⊕ [Note: And yes, having a photo from an institution unironically named the Athens Lunatic Asylum serve as my Twitter profile backdrop was a joke that up until now only I uderstood, but we are both in on it now, aren’t we, dear reader? ] was a delightful surprise, from the walkable downtown to its partially-abandoded Lunatic Asylum. The latter was the source of my Twitter cover photo, also saved here for posterity pending the site’s likely demise.

Eeast coast beach vacations in December are underrated (Virginia Beach, VA)

The next time you crack your backdoor to let your cat outside for its daily adventure, you may want to think again. For a cat, the outdoors is filled with undesirable potential. Like the risks of catching and transmitting diseases, and the uncontrollable drive to hunt and kill wildlife, which has been shown to reduce native animal populations and degrade biodiversity.

So starts a University of Maryland press release about this paper, which analyzes interactions between domestic cats and “eight native mammal species common in urban areas” in Washington D.C.

Now, if you ever stepped foot in D.C. you will notice that the most abundant mammals are neither cats, dogs, nor humans, but rats. But these District mascots do not make an appearance among the species analyzed, which were eastern chipmunk, eastern cottontail, eastern gray squirrel, groundhog, white-footed mouse, raccoon, red fox, and Virginia opossum.

Ah yes, the red fox. So very common in Washington D.C.

Look, I don’t doubt that domestic cats roaming around the suburbs are the scourge of bunny rabbits and chipmunks. But downtown D.C. has a bit of a rat problem and this study could have been a way to learn more about them.

An homage to M.C. Escher’s Three Worlds, shot at he US National Arboretum, which is another one of the spots in DC you shouldn’t miss.

• Avoid, if at all possible, eating in a random downtown restaurant. This is especially true for the National Mall, but also near large hotels — Woodley Park with nearby Omni Shoreham and the Marriott comes to mind. There is a line of restaurants there which sound suspiciously like some other, more well known DC establishments: Mayahuel for Oyamel, District Kitchen for District Commons, that kind of thing.
• There is good food to be had, for sure, but it is still overpriced.
• The best food at any price is outside of the beltway, usually in strip malls.
• Yes, sometimes you need to pay for the “good” attractions, but not in DC! The best stuff is free and unless you want to go to a specific gallery or museum (The Phillips collection is worth visiting) you can easily spend a week just going through the Smithsonian museums and free parks.
• Speaking of parks: Kennilworth Aquatic Gardens and Brookside Gardens are two (free) family favorites, and underrated.
• Two favorites that you do have to pay for: the Hillwood estate, which was Marjorie Merriweather-Post’s home and now an exhibit of (mostly pre-revolutionary Russian, including Faberge eggs) art with a small-ish but beautiful garden; and the Dumbarton Oaks museum and garden, which is so large that is bordering on unseemly considering its Georgetown location.
• But the best — and free — experience would be just to walk around areas that aren’t the Mall, around Dupont and Logan Circles on a spring afternoon when trees are in blossom, or down U Street/Shaw on a Friday evening, both unforgettable experiences in their own ways.