once there was an elephant who tried to use the telephant

It’s been a long time, blog.

I had a lovely few days in Washington, D.C. attending a library conference. I stayed in a sweet B&B: there was no breakfast, just a bed. In a bedroom. A really nice bedroom that would’ve completely sufficed as the best studio ever if it were 1998 and I was in San Francisco. The place was huge and had a big bay window and ginormous bed. The rest of the house was very nice, too. I didn’t see much of it as I was gallivanting much of the time.

Here’s my condensed idea of Washington, D.C., in bullet point format + 1 photo:

D.C. has its share of the weird

• people were very nice, smiled when you passed them on the street, and were altogether charming
• some of the monuments (okay, 1, it rhymes with “stinkin’”) make me cry
• it isn’t a great place to be a vegetarian, but if you are and you love Thai and Indian food you will be O.K.
• D.C. Metro is the fastest, most on-time, cleanest, most thorough and CHEAPEST subway system ever and I loved every minute riding it – I’d jump on and off trains just to see what was above ground, it was so easy to get back on and not get stranded
• it’s super fun to ride a bus across state lines – I was in three different states/districts throughout any given day – fun!
• Georgetown was expensive and everyone was rude – it was like a little mean island in an otherwise sparkly ocean; I visited a lot of neighborhoods and that one was just the worst. I had a total Pretty Woman moment when some snotty lady in an not-even-that-nice boutique asked me if I “really wanted” to be looking through the $18 Italian soaps. Bitchyface. And yes, I did.
• you pretty much never forget you’re in the nation’s capital because of the constant presence of a) tourists and school groups, b) people in assorted uniforms, and c) ads in subways with big military guns and planes on them

The conference was OK – I learned a lot of interesting new data and formed some new ideas, but overall I found it kind of a lackluster experience. It was super clique-y and it wasn’t even really a clique I wanted to be a member of: librarians who kept talking about the technology but rarely naming a use for the technology. 3892009393 conference retweets made my head spin: repeating something someone else said that someone else said that someone else said? Not interesting to me. Theorizing about what you could maybe do if you had X, Y, & Z? Not interesting to me. Real life examples of what you’ve done and how you did it? Awesome, but those were few and far between. I walked away feeling lucky to be surrounded by fresh, outward-thinking, service-obsessed, and impassioned librarians on all sides at my job – I don’t necessarily need to go to a conference to be inspired or feel a sense of community.

I got from my B&B to Sky’s office by way of subway->bus->plane->plane->lightrail. About 15 minutes after I arrived in Seattle proper, we were picked up by our awesome real estate agent Ms. K. She whisked us away to a handful of selected houses. We fell in like with one of them and discussed it at length. Then we went home, ate, and I crashed headfirst on the couch. I woke up the next morning and drove 7 hours to a ladies’ getaway in Oregon. It was a lovely little weekend with my momma, my sister, my two aunts and my gram. It was fantastic and funny and comforting and all of the things that hanging with your family ladies should be.

I drove home on Sunday afternoon, just in time to meet Sky, our other awesome realtor Ms. R, Sky’s mom, and our friend Lotus, the former contractor. We were looking at the “like” house again and kind of fell in love. The neighbors were great, the view was better than we remembered, and we saw some wood underneath the ugly carpet. Lotus knocked on walls and kicked at some wood and declared it probably okay, so we went ahead with an offer. We offered what we could afford (minus some $ to fix this lady house up) and damned if they didn’t accept our offer! Crazypants. Now we’re waiting on the inspection and hoping for a May closing. This thing happened so quickly we’re still pinching ourselves, but in a very blissed out and satisfied way.

We’ve started a little tumbleblog to keep the email traffic down (no need now to send a photo every time I spot a cute toilet). You can join us in our house-musing at A House Named Meg. Yeah, we named the not-even-ours-yet house after Meg White (wait until you see it – you’ll understand why). And yeah, we then started a blog based off of a Johnny Cash song. What can I say?