First - a bit of shameless self-promotion. I'll be performing next Sunday (the 20th) at the Jewish Folk Arts Festival on the University of Maryland Shady Grove campus in Rockville. I'm on from 2:30 to 3:15 and will be telling mostly Chelm stories.
I have a couple of leftover items from last week. Somehow, I completely forgot to mention the ceiling coming down in my office. Well, not quite over by my cube. There was a leak and a flood and a general mess. Alex salvaged all of the stuff from Norm's area (where the ceiling collapsed). That was all last Friday and Monday featured various relays of plumbers replacing a part and truly amazingly awful smells which would make anyone afraid to go near the water in our building again. The worst part is all the mold spores that got swirled around in that, triggering my usual allergy problems.
My second left-over item has to do with baseball. I'm very disappointed that Theo Epstein resigned from the Red Sox, particularly since he didn't do so in order to become my love slave. I read that he might be interviewing with the Dodgers, but I'd actually like to see Kim Ng get their general manager job because it would be cool to have a woman GM.
I have a note to myself to write about hotels and women business travelers, which obviously has to do with an article on that subject I read this week. Oh, yes, I remember now. The article talked about things like security (e.g. clerks not announcing your room number out loud) , which is good. But there was also a bunch of stuff about amenities that failed to mention my single greatest annoyance with hotels. Namely, skirt hangars! If I'm on a business trip that's two or three days I have at least two suits and having just one skirt hangar doesn't cut it. Having none is even worse. I've actually chosen not to stay at particular hotels because of this.
While I'm on things read in newspapers, today's Washington Post had a rather startling statistic. They claim that 19% of Washington area residents walk 3 or more miles a week and that the average Washingtonian walks only one and a half miles a week. I figure I average 10-15 miles a week, depending on the weather. There's over a mile a day just walking to and from the metro at both sides of my commute (that is, home to metro, metro to office, and vice versa) and, in decent weather, I walk the first three miles of the way home. And then there's the more or less weekly Volksmarch, which is at least 6.2 miles. This weekend, I did the historic walk in Fredericksburg, which is always a pleasant town to wander around in. The directions for the part of the walk on the Mary Washington College campus were a bit too vague, though. I also walked back up Caroline Street afterwards to get some lunch and browse in a couple of shops, including a used bookstore where I managed not to buy anything at all.
Other events of the week included a bit more excitement at my apartment complex than I'd have liked. When I got home on Monday evening, there were several police cars, including a couple of SWAT team vans. The other side of the street was taped off with yellow police tape. I never found out exactly what happened, and it didn't impact me per se since nothing was happening around the building I live in, but the note management sent out the next day made me think it was probably a domestic violence situation. They said it was resolved peacefully and one person was taken into custody. I checked the county police web site, but didn't see any information yet.
Copyright 2005 Miriam H. Nadel