The weather suddenly turned perfect this week (well, except for a bit of rain on Friday) and the cherry trees blossomed exactly on schedule. All of which had me happy enough, though too busy to get out much during the week. I'd have liked to have gone and walked around the tidal basin after work on Wednesday, but I had a meeting near home and wasn't about to go back into the city. Which was all the more reason to go to the parade and festival yesterday.
I didn't get as early a start on the day as I'd hoped to, so had to deal with major tourist crowds. The parade was still worth seeing. Assuming, of course, that one likes that sort of thing. They spread out the bands and floats more than I'd expected, so it took over an hour for everything to get by. For future reference, the best vantage point is the upper terrace of the American History museum. I hadn't figured that out and was peering over heads at street level. So I was actually rather glad that I hadn't bothered bringing my camera.
The festival was a bit less packed and I picked up various odds and ends - brochures about Japanese language classes and about travel and a free water bottle and so on. There were some nice crafts items for sale, but I'd sooner buy things Japanese when I'm there in August. I did buy some tasty vegetable tempura and rice for lunch, though.
I thought about staying in the city longer and going to a museum or the like, but the crowds were too annoying. I don't dislike tourists per se, but why do they have to move so bloody slowly? They're at their worst on the metro, of course, where they can't seem to master the concept of moving away from the doors and they don't know to stand right and walk left on the escalators and they're just generally loud and clueless and irritating. I, of course, behave perfectly whenever I go somewhere else.
As for other stuff I've done this week, I'm making a start at my spring cleaning. Some of that involves finishing odds and ends of household paperwork, including my taxes. I'd expected to owe the state money, but it turned out that they owe me a whopping three dollars! It was tempting to just donate that to one of the various charities listed, but they didn't have the Fairfax County Public Library Foundation on the list. And, really, a three buck donation is sort of silly, too. What's even sillier is that I actually qualify for the accelerated refund processing, though I had to go to their website to figure it out as nothing in the instructions indicated how you can tell if you qualify.
Copyright 2005 Miriam H. Nadel