Antietam

After sharing a great breakfast of French toast with strawberries with our friend Dave, Nicole and I hopped in the car for a short trip. This weekend's destination was the Antietam battlefield.

Let me tell you, it sure felt weird to be enjoying a pleasant walk on a sunny day through fields where more than 20,000 people had been killed or maimed in a single day.



I don't know what else to say about that.

One thought that did keep coming up: The leaders of the Confederate army were clearly much better than the leaders of the Federal army. Here's how you can tell: The Federal army outnumbered the Confederate army 2 to 1. They had better artillery. And - here's the biggie - they had a copy of the Confederate army's battle plans.

That's a sizable advantage.

But check out the final tally.
- Confederate losses: 10,700
- Federal losses: 12,410

Not an impressive "victory" for the Feds, but apparently it was enough to push Robert E. Lee back into Virginia, and prevented Great Britain from officially recognizing the Confederate government.

There was one cool thing I wanted to get in the bookstore. It was a CD-ROM with an animated, minute-by-minute overview of troop movements. Basically it was gave an aerial view of the battlefield, and you got to watch all the little pieces move around. Pretty neat, but not worth the $25 they wanted for it. There is also a set covering 3 Civil War battles for $35.

Anyway.

Now we're back home and Nicole is making more calzones. She's unstoppable.

Where We Live

Here's the scoop regarding our current apartment.


Good

• - It’s a month-to-month, which gives us some flexibility as we search for a permanent place
• - It’s cheap (relatively)
• - It's a basement apartment, so it will be cool in the summer
• - There is a cool exposed brick wall in the kitchen
  
• - It has lots of storage room
• - We can walk out onto a small lawn, which will be perfect for BBQs
  
• - The ginormous Rock Creek park is a 3 minute walk away
• - Our landlord is cool. A nut, but cool. He’s a producer or something for NPR.

Not so Good

• - It has a beam running through the center of our ceiling. There is about 6’ of space underneath that beam. For those of you who have forgotten, I’m 6’3” tall.
  
• - When it rains, the floor in the storage room gets wet.
  
• - There’s a huge support pillar in the center of the living room.
• - It doesn’t get much light, which can be depressing, and prevents us from having lots of houseplants, which we both want.

Me and the Knock-Out Beam

We’re looking to move into a permanent place in September. In the meantime, we’re happy... especially now that I've taken to wearing a helmet at home.

Employed!

Like everyone else in the world, I’ve been on a quest to find the world’s perfect job. Most of you thought I’d found it when I was working from home in a beautiful small town on the west coast.

So, yeah, it’s fun to work in your underwear all day long. Or not. That’s fun too. But come on. I was sitting in front of a computer all day long. I didn’t have any coworkers to tease. And in the end, I just wasn’t sure I really wanted to be a fundraiser.

And here I was thinking about settling down in the near future: tricking some poor dame into marrying me, starting a family, buying a doublewide.

It seemed wise to explore alternate careers ASAP, before all of that got started.

I’m still doing that. But, let’s face it, unemployment is not exactly lucrative, and I’ve got to EAT, dagnabit.

So here in DC, while I continue to search for an answer to “what do I really want to do when I grow up?” I’ve found a short-term home with Experience Corps.

Experience Corps is a national organization, and is the key partner of the place I used to work for in Boston, Generations Incorporated. Experience Corps is building a nation-wide network of projects that recruit retirees to meet their communities’ most pressing challenges. Right now they focus on engaging retirees to serve as mentors and tutors to elementary school children. The basic idea is perfect, their programs are awesome, and - like Generations Incorporated - they’re filled to the brim with good people.

I’ve signed on to work for them through the end of August.

It’s perfect for lots of different reasons. For one thing, it’s going to help me pay the bills. Plus, the short-term contract allows me to settle into DC and explore my full-time options. Moreover, it won’t take me long to get up to speed in the organization since I’ve worked in the Experience Corps network for 5 years and I know almost all of their staffers. Perhaps most importantly, they’ve got me working on some really interesting projects: working with their in-house fundraising experts to develop/refine their sustainability plans, creating content for a website, yada yada yada.

I’m stoked.

I started on Friday, and it went smoothly. Nicole even baked a “thanks for hiring me” present for me to take in on my first day. I forget what it’s official name is, but it was basically a strawberry/cheese Danish the size of a football. They all had the same reaction to it that I did, which was to say: “holy crap, that Danish is as big as a football!” It was gone in an hour.

Now Nicole is talking about making éclairs for me to take to work on Monday. This girl. I’m telling you.

I know, I know, I know

I know I should have been updating this more often, but listen: I've had a lot on my plate lately. I've been looking for a job, settling into a new city, and dealing with this one girl who won't leave me the heck alone. So cut me some slack already.

:)

Expect a flurry of posts over the next couple days, and then about 2 posts a week after that.

Go Red Wings.
Go Pistons.
Go Tigers.
Go Sox.
Go MATT MILLEN!!!!!!! (idiot)