re: painted volkswagen buses

"It's not really a hippie bus, it's more of an afrocentric bus"
-r.c.



and it lives on our street!

"Washington is a city of Southern efficiency and Northern charm" - John F. Kennedy

i think that having lived in DC for 1 month, i'm officially entitled to complain about it...first, the bus and subway prices went up today (jerks. $1.35!). second, i needed to get my bus pas for the week, so rc tried to get one for me while she was at the giant yesterday. but they had a sign up that said NO BUS PASSES. why? i go to metro center to get one at lunch today, wait in line for 10 minutes, and find myself halfway to the ticket window...

the scene after 10 minutes.
there are 2 windows, but the person at one keeps leaving for long periods, with no explanation. the guy at the window is yelling about waiting in line half an hour and his card still doesn't work, and you need to get your manager to come down here and give me a refund now, because i didn't wait all this time for this, and everyone in line is getting pissed off. oh well. i get to the front of the line 5 minutes later, buy my card, and try to run back to work, but am foiled by the third annoying thing about DC: people who haven't learned to use the escalator! like this couple in front of me who had to have their arms around each other and take up the whole width of the escalator...i have one thing to say to these people:
Stand Right, Walk Left.

this is a girl named navajah who comes to my work on fridays and likes to deliver office supplies and have her picture taken. i'm not sure whose daughter she is though!

by special request

someone who never leaves comments on this (HINT HINT) said i should post a picture of me again, so, i took one with my phone. sorry about the low quality! the light was bad!

simcity 4

this is my favorite computer game ever. not that it has much competition, since it's the first computer game i've played since like...simcity 2000 or amazing animation or one of those other great ones we had on the old computer at home. yesterday i made two of my cities go from around 30,000 in population to around 70,000. now, i was really excited to have my cities finally be big, but then they started getting all these problems like real big cities! like crime, needing prisons, hospital workers going on strike, running deficits every year, running out of water, out of power, etc, etc. when they were at 30,000 they were so nice! always making money, never complaining about services, never catching on fire every five minutes... anyway, this is about the least interesting blog post of all time, but if anyone knows how to make your city make money instead of lose it, i would really appreciate the advice!

one thing i love about our house is that the bathroom has a skylight in it! in the morning, it's always lit up when the rest of the house is dark. and on weekends i end up taking showers at approximately the same time the sun is right overhead, and the light streams down into the shower, making it seem...tropical...or beachlike...or something. or like you're going to get burned.

yesterday i got a library card. they give you a normal library card, and a little one to go on your keychain, just like at a grocery store! this innovation amazed me, although since then people have told me it's not that new. the library near our house is probably smaller than the one at my middle school, and kind of depressing, but i can use the card at all the other libraries too.

on the way home from the library, there was a big traffic jam at around 4th St, with people honking and sirens going. i saw a man lying down on the ground, with a big crowd of people around him, and a cop car, fire truck, and three ambulances arriving as i walked by. i couldn't see what had happened to him, but this guy started talking to me about how people are getting shot every day in this city, just yesterday someone was shot at the anacostia station, etc etc. i asked him, did that guy get shot? and he said he didn't know, but they're shooting each other every day in this city, just yesterday, and now today, etc etc. i don't know what happened though, i searched for it in washingtonpost.com's crime report section, and found nothing. so it probably wasn't anything. just scary.

also yesterday jacques, sam, and peter came over and we played settlers. which is a great, great game. i almost won. by which i mean sam won when i had 9 points. RC watched and was (hopefully!!!) convinced of the game's greatness and wants to learn to play and we can play all the time at 19 fountain next year. ok, probably not. hey! if you read this blog and you like settlers and you want RC to learn to play, please start a lobbying campaign or something! send emails!

now i'm going to make an omelette. see you later, blogspot.

when college students make biscuits...

...and naturally don't have a rolling pin.




yes, that is a bottle of bawls.

the 80 bus

it never comes on time. or on any predictable schedule. in the morning there are 3 buses that come in a row, sometime between 8:20 and 8:30. i leave the house at the same time every day, at 8:25, and sometimes they come. sometimes they do not, or else they came early. then there are 2 buses that come in a row around 8:40. but sometimes more like 8:50. one time i got to the bus stop at 8:15, and there was no bus until 8:40. according to the schedule for this stop they should come at 8:17, 8:25, 8:34, 8:46...not 3 ALL AT ONCE and then 2 more much later! so tomorrow i'm going to try out the G8. the stops are farther away from home and work, but maybe it will come on time!

also, there's a very tasteful ad for life insurance on washingtonpost.com with a picture of a sad little girl saying, "My daddy told me that when I grow up, I can go to the best college around and someday have a beautiful wedding like a princess.
But...my daddy never told me that he was going to die."

things

1. i got a gmail account. that makes me cool. or something. if you want to write me at my cool exclusive (ok, maybe not cool/exclusive for much longer) email account, it's my first and last names, no hyphens or anything, @gmail.com. i bet i'll get some invites soon and then i can bestow them on people who ask...or do a gmail swap!

2. rowland is resigning. which is pretty awesome, and long overdue.

3. quotes from the weekend:
"so that's what they did before nalgenes!"
-ben, looking at a water vessel in the museum of african art
"maybe you ARE ns"
-ben or rc (i can't remember!), on my love for my computer vs. my wesmatch status

You are Bob Herbert! You're not the most sparkling
writer, but one of the most solid and selfless
on the Op-Ed staff. You focus on New York
politics, the poor, race issues, and civil
liberties. You like to quote others, and rarely
place yourself in your columns. You keep it
real. Seriously.


Which New York Times Op-Ed Columnist Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

if your name is ben somberg and you are reading this, I have a present for you. you have to come visit to get it. and remind me when you visit about the present so i don't forget to give it to you.

oh, i'm going to post some recipes i make so i will remember what was good!

on monday night we had pasta with garlic and zucchini. you make it like this:

1. cook some penne pasta (1/3 lb?)
2. cut a zucchini into julienne strips and fry it in olive oil and garlic and crumbled tofu (1/4 of a block). make sure the olive oil is plentiful so that it will coat the pasta later. use a low heat so the garlic mellows out.
3. toss the pasta with the zucchini mixture and grate parmesan cheese over it.

the end! i'm not even sure if this qualifies as a recipe, but we *did* get it out of a cookbook...

finally!!! here is a picture of my beautiful house.

don't you you lived in this house too?

furnished

i now have a bed. or really, a mattress, and it's kind of sitting on the floor in the living room with one corner bent up and leaning on the couch because it wouldn't fit flat on the floor without some effort. we got plastic drawers too, and real drawers, so now our house is completely furnished! and if we need more furniture we can just check on craigslist's free section more often! yay for craigslist. also, we have wireless internet here now. this is the most high-tech house i have ever lived in. when i think of last summer, living in the housing project with 9 housemates, checking my email at the yale library...this place just seems so big and amazing! i want to post a picture of my house but i need to figure out how...hold on a minute, eager readers.

DC (not the brian brotman article though!)

well, i've found a free alternative to the starbucks internet (yay!) and will use this opportunity to write in my blogspot!! i have just finished my first day of work at the national low income housing coalition. it was lots of fun, kind of, but i was so tired the whole day i almost fell asleep SO many times! i have my own computer, email address (bethc (at) nlihc.org, if any of my lovely readers want to contaminate my work email!) and extension. that's pretty cool. i'm going to be doing a big project on waiting lists for section 8 vouchers. there are thousands of people trying to get housing vouchers (for reduced rent) but they have to wait for years because there aren't nearly enough vouchers to go around. my project (i think) is to try to figure out how many people are on the waiting lists and how long they have to wait and probably other things about them. today i read a book called "advocate's guide." and i met people in the office. and my supervisor took me and the real research analyst to lunch. and i looked for a report called "waiting in vain," and i found it and read it on lexis-nexis, and i did other stuff until it was time to go. i work in one room with mark treskon, the real research analyst, and danilo, the research boss, works in another room. we have a corner office but it just looks out onto other office buildings...like the alley or something. there are 3 other interns but i'm not sure if i will really do much with them, it seems that our functions are pretty separate. i'm nervous for 2 things: 1. staff meeting on thursday. 2. writing my bio for the memo to members.

tomorrow i move into the real apartment! that's another thing i'm nervous about, i guess. at least it won't smell like wet socks, like the hostel does. i'm staying in a youth hostel which is pretty nice, but there seems to be a leak in the roof which got the carpet wet which made the room smell like wet carpet which smells like wet socks. we had the windows open in the hostel to air it out, and i guess mosquitos got in, and one of them must have bit me on the eyelid while i was asleep. when i woke up my right eye was so swollen! i almost couldn't see out of it. the swelling went down a little before work so i didn't look like a complete freak. it's almost gone now.

the girl behind me in this cafe has the same computer as me.

i can't wait until RC comes here, it is lonely only having 1 person (a German hostelroommate) to talk to, and i want to live in my REAL apartment and hopefully get a REAL BED too. the hostel only has foam mattresses. i hope for better.