The Visible Woman...January 4, 2004

The schedule calls for a brunch as part of the official trip. After that we are own our own.

The brunch is scheduled for 9:30 or something like that so I get up and go to the gym. I do a pretty good bike ride reading my book. Sweat a little anyway. FFP finds a coffee service somewhere and gets me a cup. We haven't read the schedule too carefully and are expecting a buffet or continental breakfast but it is a fabulous sit down with Bloody Marys and a choice of entrees. What the heck? I have a Bloody Mary before ten in the morning. Yep...leave me to my own devices and that's the result.

Leave FFP and I alone to decide our day, in fact, and you will find us walking and walking, visiting two art museums and two book stores, and eating two more meals. Both with more alcohol.

When we are worn out, we pile up in bed with our books and watch a bowl game and Sex in the City.

	left to our own devices The schedule calls for a brunch as part of the official trip. After that we are own our own. The brunch is scheduled for 9:30 or something like that so I get up and go to the gym. I do a pretty good bike ride reading my book. Sweat a little anyway. FFP finds a coffee service somewhere and gets me a cup. We haven't read the schedule too carefully and are expecting a buffet or continental breakfast but it is a fabulous sit down with Bloody Marys and a choice of entrees. What the heck? I have a Bloody Mary before ten in the morning. Yep...leave me to my own devices and that's the result. Leave FFP and I alone to decide our day, in fact, and you will find us walking and walking, visiting two art museums and two book stores, and eating two more meals. Both with more alcohol. When we are worn out, we pile up in bed with our books and watch a bowl game and Sex in the City.
since the street in front of the White House is closed to traffic...these gentlemen play hockey
JUST TYPING There are cabs. There is the Metro. But you see more. Walking and walking.
		Food Diary. breakfast [Ritz Carlton, Georgetown] Bloody Mary Crab cakes with avocado and poached eggs and hollandaise. Glass of OJ. Several cups of coffee. [Normally, I've been omitting the black coffee I drink from this food journal. However, recent news that supports the fact that coffee may help prevent Type II diabetes as well as other medical suspicions about it cause me to think I should record the coffee I drink for the sake of the scientists who examine this journal when the story of my health and longeviity are sealed.] lunch [Lafayette Room at the Hay-Adams hotel] an Uncobb salad (shrimp, scallops, avocado and stuff) some bread and butter a Bloody Mary coffee *snacks* an apple dinner [Bistro Francais] mussels bread and butter sauteed kidneys and pommes frites coffee glass red wine Today I - drank at each meal, even breakfast.
Meta: I'm still runnig behind and it is starting to upset me. Of course, someone pointed out that I had 2003 at the top of the first couple I'd posted for the year.		Time flies.... We had brunch and then packed and checked out of the Ritz Carlton and left our luggage. We walked down M until it intersected with Pennsylvania and then down it until we headed south to the Corcoran gallery. Outside a large sculpture echoed a Renoir. Inside a huge number of three dimensional representations of Impressionist paintings are on display that you can walk in and touch. J. Seward Johnson, Jr. does these things. People are enjoying becoming part of the paintings and getting into them to have their pictures taken. "It's too easy," I comment to Forrest and don't take his picture in any of them although I fire off a couple of shots of strangers. We look at some of the regular collection, too, and an exhibit that is an amalgam of "souvenirs" from the Manhattan project and other stuff that is or looks like it is from that era. The place is surreal with the sculptures and the sounds of a gospel group bouncing off the marble walls. We decide to go have some lunch. FFP went to a hotel nearby here (and near the White House) yesterday when we did our tour in order to go to the bathroom. This was at the suggestion of a friend who had stayed there once. He had mentioned that the food was quite nice. So we went to the place and had a very nice espensive lunch on great china. Aw, the good life. So...we do some more walking. All the way to Dupont Circle where we find a cool independent bookstore. After a wander there, we find the Phillips collection and fill up on some more modern art. And more walking...all the way back to the area around our hotel. We hang out in Barnes and Noble until about five and then go find more food. Bistro Francais manages to seem French in a lot of ways, some of them good. We finish up and go to the Ritz Carlton (Georgetown) and get our bags and get a cab driver to take us to the cheap hotel close to the airport that I have booked. It is cheap but the room is large. The bed ain't much but they have a coffee pot and HBO. The van driver offers to take us to a restaurant or the convenience store but we don't really need anything. (Although I could have had another drink. Shut up. I only had three today...one with each meal.) We watch TV, read and sleep. An eight o'clock flight from any place near DC means an early start.

		Reading. Dawn of D-Day: There Men Were There 6 June 1944 by David Howarth Michelin Green Guide to Washington, D.C.; The Best American Essays 2003 edited by Anne Fadiman. This is a great collection. Newspapers. Always fun to look at out-of-town newspapers.
		Yeah, right.
		Exercise about forty-five minutes on the recumbent bike
	. .	I really had that feeling about the good life today but the end of the trip is coming and that was a bit of a downer. That or the crummy mattress in the hotel. (Compared to the Ritz Carlton anyway. It compared pretty favorably with my pullout bed I've spent the last month sleeping on.
	It's a Tangled Web we weave...these days of our lives.	One year ago "There is hope for everyday life in art!" Two years ago "I have a coughing jag. My lungs ache. I am in Islamic Art, as luck would have it, and perfectly alone coughing save for a guard who peers around a corner to see that I'm not going to die. "