Capital is closed

I had a great week. Last Sunday, I left for Baltimore, Maryland, with my friend Robert Mayo to teach another of the Auction Technology Specialist courses offered by the National Auctioneers Association.

Monday night we went to the the Pier in Annapolis and ate oysters at a place called McGarvey’s Saloon. While the area of town appeared quite affluent, with brick buildings and very nice aesthetics, the meal was delicious though surprisingly affordable.

Tuesday we went with Sarah Sonke with Auction First as she took us on a guided tour of our nation’s capital. She used to live there for a time, and was quite good at taking us between the various sights and monuments.

We first stopped in front of the capital building, where I took the picture on the right.

Robert’s son is named Lincoln, so high on our list of priorities was the Lincoln Monument. We passed the mall and the various museums on our way from the capital to the Washington Monument. As we arrived at the Lincoln Monument, we realized it wasn’t going to be very easy to get there easily on foot, so we went past it and turned around by the Watergate and Kennedy Center. Coming back from another angle, we stopped just north of the Vietnam Memorial where we exited the vehicle. We walked through the Vietnam Memorial on our way to the Lincoln Monument, where we got several pictures and Robert purchased some memorabilia from the store conveniently located in the corner of the monument itself.

Once we got back into the vehicle, we continued our tour, driving as close as we could to the White House. We ended up by the Air Force Memorial, the Pentagon, the Jefferson Monument and the Ford Theater.

Before we left town, we ate at Ristorante Luigino where I had the petto e cosciotto d’anatra, or leg and thigh of duck. We were sitting among a bunch of suits who were loudly discussing the proposed automotive industry bridge loan [read: bailout].

The class was well received, as was the last one. We had a great time, and the restaurant connected to the hotel had fantastic crab cakes, which I ate at nearly every meal. The market catfish was also quite good.

Sale on political merchandise

We came back Thursday, getting to the airport about four hours before our flight’s departure, leaving us plenty of time to mill about. We stopped to eat one more crab cake at one of the airport restaurants before we left, and I also found a neat shop that had some political merchandise. They told me I wasn’t allowed to take this picture when I asked, but the coolness of the sale on McCain merchandise was too cool to pass up. I walked behind one of the shelving units and literally shot this picture from the hip.

As for the pictures, I’ve included some below. My camera sucks, and Robert’s was set accidentally to a low quality setting, so none of the pictures are really good as pictures go, but I thought I’d share nonetheless.

Aaron Traffas, Lucas Maddy and Chris Goering

Thus ends the three-day weekend of relaxation. Today was the best day by far. Erica ate with us this morning and when I dropped her off she ended up with both of my cell phones. There is an unexplainable sense of peace that accompanies the knowledge that nobody can contact you.

It’s weird having Erica here and Megan gone. My sisters are quite similar and yet quite different. I’m excited to get to know her as I got to know Megan.

I’m watching Chelsea Lately with Lucas and Diane and plugging away at finishing the new shows section of the website. My mother was in town all day Saturday and never contacted me because she thought I was in Omaha because that’s what my website said. We had booked a show there and when I Twittered regarding its cancellation I never got around to updating the convoluted event calendar that was nailed on top of Wordpress. That’s all fixed now, as the new shows section now includes all shows, both upcoming and past - all the way back to the first launch of the site when Trevor Burgess and I were playing at Fats.

I’m typing away on my Apple slim aluminum keyboard. It’s the one I poured nearly a full cup of coffee into a couple weeks ago. I dried it, wet it, dried it again and when it wouldn’t work I’d left it for dead. A week passed and I tried it one more time and it’s been working well ever since. I guess I bought a pair to have a spare. With all the damn computers around here, I guess it will get plenty of use.

I’m selling my Cloudbook at Thursday’s auction. I couldn’t ever get the wireless to work as well as I wanted, though it seems I’m not the only one. The graphics always seemed weak, though VIA just released an open source driver for it.

I’m currently rocking the ASUS EeePC 900. It’s quite possibly the finest piece of equipment on which I’ve ever laid my hands. I turned it on long enough to hit restart on the Knoppix distribution of Linux so that I could install Ubuntu. I had good luck with Ubuntu-eee as opposed to Eee-Ubuntu. Everything worked pretty much right away. I had to load a different kernel to get the microphone working so I could play with Skype with Diane.

I got Diane an Acer Aspire One as an early birthday present. It’s slightly bigger than my Eee, but the difference in the keyboard size is pretty huge. It also runs Windows XP, which is pretty much a must for her iPod Touch. It was also crazy-cheap, weighing in at $349 at Best Buy.

It seems like John McCain’s Eskimo running mate’s daughter is knocked up. How fun.