trash pickup

i obsess about trash a lot, and today the post runs an article about a former ANC commissioner in carver terrace (on the other end of ward 5 from bloomingdale) who is apparently more obsessed.

kudos to ms. henderson, though. usually, the city does a good job of picking up garbage (i wasn't around in the bad-old-days described in the article, so i can't imagine how bad it once was), but it can't hurt for the dpw to keep an eye on their workers to make sure they're living up to certain standards. if workers are consistently leaving a mess behind, there ought to be a way to reprimand them. i'm sure that's not in the contract with the union now, though...

FOLLOW-UP: george will. well.

looks like our old buddy george is sticking to his verbal crutch. here's a paragraph from today's column:

Nothing, however, will assuage Clinton supporters' sense of injustice if the upstart Obama supplants her. Their, and her, sense of entitlement is encapsulated in her constant invocations of her "35 years" of "experience." Well.

notice that last sentence? "well." looks like our boy can't go much more than a week without falling back on his trademark conservative 'snark'.

i've got a one-word sentence to describe his writing.

oy.

this old house, dcist style.

check this out. heather goss of dcist fame has bought a house up in columbia heights, and is blogging about fixing it up on washingtonian.com.

i hope to be lucky enough to be doing similar work in short order...

(more photos here.)

14th street study=bikes, bikes, bikes!

i stopped in to see the public presentation of the 14th street study at the studio theatre after work this evening.

i'm sure bloggers who are more logan/u street focused will have more to say about this meeting at their sites, but i just wanted to comment on the feature of the plan that i was most excited about.

bike infrastructure!

i had a lot of questions about bike lanes and bike parking, and the ddot people answered everything. looks like the bike lanes are going to be made even more prominent than they are now, with bulb-outs at all intersections and alignments that will keep bike/bus interaction to a minimum. the big news, though, is the bike parking. i was told that there were initially 20 bike parking racks ordered up for the project, but that has been pushed up to 80! that's awesome, as i had to lock my bike to a sign in a treebox this evening. the city needs more bike parking EVERYWHERE, and this is a good start.

this was a pretty cool presentation, especially for a nerd like me. ddot is a kick-ass organization, in my mind. one of the best in the city. they always have tons of people at their public meetings who are more than happy to answer all of your questions. i feel inadequately prepared to talk to them, like i'm slacking by not having more questions ready.

looks good, ddot!

anyone missing a parking ticket?

just a public service announcement for the owner of a gray chevy impala with MD license plate 6DH L59. you have a parking ticket that somehow ended up wedged in the door to my apartment. last sunday, you apparently parked more than 12 inches from the curb on the 1800 block of first street.

just wanted to let you know in case you get booted, and you wonder why.

it's not t.c.'s fault!

the comic at the right (click on it to actually be able to read it), which was in the washington post on january 13, mentions truxton circle as part of the history of thomas truxton. it's a really REALLY brief discussion of the old circle (now gone) at the corner of florida, north capitol, q, and lincoln. it's so short, that its brevity really gives the circle short shrift.

the comic actually says that because it "was constantly tied up with traffic jams and accidents", it was removed. look at the comic. if people were driving the wrong way, i hardly think we can blame that on the poor, innocent circle, can we?

if you want my guess, i would say it was crazy maryland drivers that killed truxton circle. you just can't trust marylanders...they might try to kill logan or sheridan circle next!

update on operation: rename blog

well, checking out the poll from last week, eckington has a slight lead over brookland at this point, with h street being the only other one jumping out from the pack.

whoever voted for park view/pleasant plains, i have to say your neighborhood looks really tempting after this saturday. there were two houses on warder street that really caught my eye. eckington, of course, has a lot of potential, and i saw an interesting house in ledroit park that might fall in my price range, which was shocking. i thought everything there would be too expensive, and didn't include it in the poll.

still have a lot to check out, including some stuff in truxton circle and shaw (yeah, more places that didn't get listed in the poll). i'm finding more potential in the pricer neighborhoods that i thought i would, which really gives me hope.

ask the guys who hang out at 1st and seaton why they disrespect our neighborhood

quick note: i'm just heading out the door to the february shaw neighborhood clean up. this morning when i woke up, i looked out the window, and one of the guys who always is hanging around on this corner was just finishing eating and drinking something.

he looked left, looked right, and when he was sure no one was watching him, tossed his garbage on the ground. then, he got up, walked over to the street drain, and tossed his bottle in it, ensuring it a safe journey to the anacostia river.

the kicker is that there are two garbage cans on the corner (which this guy usually leans on to watch traffic and women go by), and he couldn't take the effort to actually throw the garbage in one of those cans.

this is why we can't keep the neighborhood clean. people like these guys just don't give a damn.

shaw neighborhood clean up this saturday at 10:30

this is 440 rhode island avenue nw, which is right next to where we're going to meet saturday morning at 10:30 a.m. for the first of this year's shaw neighborhood monthly clean ups. i've written about this lot a couple of times before. the owners have done a generally crappy of job of keeping the lot clean, and have also had a hard time keeping the fence around the property from eating up the sidewalk.

well, for some reason, most of the fence completely disappeared yesterday. is it because we're going to be cleaning up their property for them? not that that would be a terribly bad thing, but hopefully this is really just a sign that the owners are finally going to do something with this prime lot other than let it be a dumping ground.

see you saturday at 10:30 at 5th and rhode island!

more watha t. daniel demolition

just a couple more pictures from this morning of the bunker being torn down. they're spraying the building with water to keep the dust down as the heavy equipment tears into the building:


check out the mural of the leaning tower of pisa on the second floor wall that's about to bite the dust!

new trees in bloomingdale

wow, it looks like the ufa is already out planting trees for this season. i figured early february was kind of early, but, given the way that the local climate is probably permanently screwed up, i suppose an earlier planting season isn't such a strange thing.

these trees are on the 100 block of seaton, near the corner with 2nd and rhode island nw.

they got the maps wrong at DCA

here's a little geographic nerdiness for you. i was waiting at the luggage claims at DCA last weekend, and i snapped these two pictures of the map of the airport terminals:


notice anything weird about them? the first one shows the airport correctly, but the second one is a mirror image of how the airport is actually laid out. the old-fashioned A terminal is hanging off the wrong end of the airport in the second map.

way to mess that one up, DCA. maybe next time, you should hire a better cartographer to make your map. i wonder where one could find a decent cartographer in this town?!??

i wish every day was super fat tuesday!

there's one reason i'd like to see multiple things that distract everyone in DC in the evenings every day...

empty whole foods!

i walked into the p street whole foods around 6 this evening, and for the first time in memory, there was no one in there! all of the usual yuppies must have been out watching election returns or flashing other yuppies for beads, because the store was dead. i couldn't believe i could choose from multiple check-out lanes with no one waiting in line. it was like heaven!

could we please have super fat tuesday every day?

update on the pop-up from hell

well, prince of petworth beat me to this today, but i was out this afternoon poking around town in this amazing, unseasonable warmth. got a couple pictures of the horrendous pop-up on p street just east of north capitol that i chronicled here earlier. suffice it to say that the one thing i hoped for (the addition is made to look like it really should be part of the house architecturally) just ain't happening.





not. even. freakin'. close.

ugh.

help me rename the blog

now, the thing is, you don't REALLY get to pick a new name for my blog, but you can vote for a big thing that would influence a new name for the blog. here's how:

last year, i posted about why i named this blog bloomingdale (for now), and i said that i was starting to look for a house to buy. well, it turned out that i didn't have enough to afford anything in this town (shocker, eh?). nearly a year has passed, and in that year, i got a new, higher-paying job, and the real estate market has cooled off a bit, so i'm out on the prowl again.

this is where y'all come in.

i'm looking all over the place, and finding there is stuff that falls in my range in more than a few neighborhoods. there are a few that i'd consider moving to, and i've listed them in the poll below. i'd love to stay in bloomingdale, but there just aren't any single family houses in my range (i'm not interested in a condo). i take that back, i've seen one in my range, but i don't think i'm going to have what it takes to single-handedly gut a house!

so give me your opinion. what neighborhood should i try to buy a house in, and leave a comment about the blog name if you'd like. use the other category if you want to make a pitch for another part of town. maybe bloomingdale (for now) will become rosedale (for good).

walter reed shuttle to the white house?

my office window downtown looks over 16th street between l and m. every friday morning, police block traffic so a few buses with walter reed logos on the side can get through southbound unimpeded by traffic. now, i'm curious, what are these buses doing? i can't find any information about this with a cursory glance around the web. are injured soldiers being brought down to the white house for press availability?

please tell me if i'm wrong about this, but if injured troops are being paraded in front of the cameras for propaganda purposes, i think that's pretty low. hopefully, these shuttles are for something less sinister.