101, 206 steps

How do you measure, measure a week?

I survived five packed days in Washington, D.C., with 87 middle schoolers, where’s my t-shirt? D.C. is the place of very long museum names. Here’s a list of all the places we visited:

• National Museum of the US Army

• Monuments & Memorials on the Mall

• Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History

• US Capitol Building (for a photo op in matching t-shirts)

• Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture

• Inner Harbor Dinner Cruise

• George Washington’s Mount Vernon

• Arlington National Cemetery

• The White House

• National Harbor

• Thomas Jefferson Memorial (and cherry blossoms!)

• Arts + Industries Building

• United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

• Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial at sunset

• Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center (the air & space museum near the airport; apparently the one in DC is closed through Fall 2022)

I’ll write a proper recap at some point soon; in the meantime, you can check out all my photos on Instagram and my Fitbit summary below.

Saturday was my 17th wedding anniversary (while I was in D.C. with our son my husband was holding down the fort here in Oakland with our daughter). I bought him Heather Havrilesky’s latest, Foreverland: On the Divine Tedium of Marriage, because I too want to read it and it seemed like an appropriate prequel, if you will, to the book I bought him for Valentine’s Day (what can I say, I’m deeply committed to this relationship, for better or worse, ‘til death do us part and all that).

I wrote about our first wedding anniversary here and again about our 10th wedding anniversary here. Should I try to make a vegan version of our wedding cake to celebrate belatedly? On the other hand, I don’t know if I can top the Sixteen Candles/Oakland Sideshow inspired vegan strawberry cake I made for our 16th wedding anniversary last year.

If you’re in SF, let me know if you spot any of the alleged stop wearing vests flyers (never!).

I posed this question on Twitter and it got several interesting responses.

Rebecca Bird Grigsby @danceswithkids

If I was a journalist interested in the effects of the pandemic on working parents, I might be writing a tweet right now something along the lines of: Looking to speak with people who've felt more, not less, stressed about life and stuff since kids went back to in-person school.

Because…

Rebecca Bird Grigsby @danceswithkids

Had an experience today where it was pointed out that kids returning to school this time last year or in the fall opened up some bandwidth to become aware of things not being right that we were just too busy to notice during distance learning while working, etc. Fascinating.

More to follow on that.

I am now caught up on all the shows I didn’t watch while in D.C. Like so many folks right now, I’m a little obsessed with Severance (work-life balance is, after all, something I write and podcast about) including the food (ranked here) and the role art, painting in particular, plays in the show. I’ve yet to read much about it (other than this Reddit thread), most recently intrigued by the discovery that not only is Irving a painter, but he uses oil paint on a seemingly unprimed wood panel?!? I’ll keep digging. Maybe I’ll have some findings for you by next week.