I haven't blogged much recently, so I'm going to recap it all and then split this up into the appropriate days sometime later. Mmmkay? Now then, we're here in wartime. I haven't really covered much of that yet, but here's today's action: Baghdad is still getting the shit bombed out of it, and we're working to assemble more troops before taking the city by force on the ground. Of course, the war is being completely over-covered. Yesterday's report that a certain crew was undermanned and malfunctioning was (in my opinion) very irresponsible. One one side, they say they won't do anything that would put a soldier or a mission in jeopardy, but then they announce to the world (and therefore the world) that there's a weakness and oh by the way, here's what they're eating and here's what they're shooting. Here's how young they are, etc. This is gettign very irritating. I consider myself a smart media consumer and this kind of journalism in time of war really gets to me.

So anyhow...

I took Thursday and Friday off work to hang out in Richmond with the crew. Thursday was spent mostly in Washington D.C. though. I was up at 8am and drove to the Manassas Cracker Barrel to meet Mike and his brother Adam. They had already arrived 30 minutes before schedule. Traffic was apparently pretty light. ...Or Mike just drove really quickly. (I'll let you guess which was the case.)

I had a catfish breakfast. It was awesome. It was a large breakfast, but I knew we'd have a long day of museum walking ahead of us. Dayum good breakfast. We piled into my car and left Mike's WRX behind as we went to Reagan National Airport. The goal was to park at the airport garage and take the metro into the Smithsonian station. Parking near the Smithsonian during a workday during wartime wasn't going to be a wise thing. So the D.C. Metro was the way to go.

We got to the airport's Metro station and got new passes for the day. We came up and waited for the blue train. It was a pretty crowded train after we got to the Pentagon stop, but things cleared out before the final stop at the Smithsonian.

We walked out of the Smithsonian metro stop and I spoke to a bum for a while. He was a hell of a tour guide. He asked me where we were going and before I knew it I was trapped and had to talk to him. So, he pointed me to every Smithsonian in the area, showed me where all the museums were ande then (yea, there's always a catch) tried to hit me up for money. While I REALLY support people offering services for donations as opposed to just begging, this was an unsolicited service. I'd equate this to someone coming to my car and washing the windows.

We walked on around D.C. (whitehouse too) and went to the Natural History museum. A giant mammoth was there to greet us, just as it had been when I was a kid visiting there. The dinosaur area was pretty cool too! We toured everything there was to see in this museum (which was a lot of fun). We learned about the evolution of man and even the birth of beastiality.

After the Natural History museum, we hit the American History museum. This is one that we'd seen when the whole gang was up here. I did see some new things though, including the American presidency area and the American pop culture TV area. The presidency area featured among other things the suit worn by Harrison Ford in Air Force One among other things. The popular culture area had a lot of cool stuff. It was neat that Mickey Mouse was recorded into permanent history.

After the museums, we headed over to the big Air & Space museum. Nothing new to me, but Adam hadn't seen it, so we went through it and had a good time. I took a few shots here and there, but didn't do a whole lot of camera-shooting. I got the wierd astronaut suit and a plane called the little stinker, but nothing else worth shootin'.

We were tired so we came back to the metro and called it an evening. We still had to drive to Richmond, so around 5, I was getting antsy to get out of town before the traffic got much worse. Nice of the metro to wish us farewell. That was sweet.

We got back in the cars and made it down to Richmond, where we moved more of Mike and Lauren's stuff back to their SouthSide home. I hung around and did very little Thursday night. I was there to relax, on vacation.

On Friday, I went to lunch with Chris and Kelly while they were on their lunch breaks. I got some interesting news from work, which I'll share later. Remind me if I don't write it later, mmkay? After lunch, I went to see where Chris worked. He's got an office. A real office where the monitor doesn't face people walking by. Must be nice. Then I went over to Eric's office. Eric's got a cubicle, and was going to show me his lab, but they had people over so I couldn't see it. Eric and I drove over to VCU to register for the 10k, then back to Short Pump to get my car. I drove solo to the South Side (now I can do it on my own. I've been here enough times). We got together for dinner at Pasta Luna. Great food. HORRIBLE service. The entire gang was disgusted that we couldn't split up our checks. I bring cash for this reason, but no one else had anything. And since we were in dispute, I really wasn't going to give them my credit card. I mean these people were snotty. SNOTTY. Bastards. Great food though. I'd still go back, just not with a group I didn't plan on paying for all on one check.

And then came race day.