Arriving in the District

Well, kids...we made it.  Here we are in our new semi-autonomous U.S. territory home known as the District of Columbia.  I decided that setting up a blog would be the best way to update all of you on our new adventure out here in the East.

It's been a whirlwind since I arrived.  We were insanely fortunate that one of my friends here in the District recently met the new owner of the brownstone building next door to him, and wouldn't you know, needed tenants for the English basement around July 1.  He completely gutted and renovated the place and is in the process of putting in a new flagstone patio in the back.  Many of you would say that I pulled an "Erik" on this one.  I flew in...crashed with my friend Paul...checked the place out on June 30 and fell in love .  This is the building.  I'll have more pictures soon, but we love it.  Soooo DC:

Mike and the cat (Nemo) arrived on my first day of work.  I owe Mike A LOT for transporting our poor new feline thousands of miles across the country.  Apparently, the drugs only kept him asleep for a fraction of the trip, but he seems settled in now.  For those of you who don't know, we ended up having to rescue a cat two weeks before we moved to DC because he was close to being sent to the pound and put to sleep.  Although it was a little more work than we were planning on, we love the new member of our family.  This is about as much parenting as Mike and I can handle right now.

Surprisingly, the weather has been quite good the last few weeks....for DC.  Only in the last few days has the heat index reached 103 or so.  Otherwise, it's been relatively dry.  My job is phenomenal.  Every day I come to work, I'm amazed that things came together as well as they did.  I can already tell it's going to offer me a lot of unique challenges after school, but I love (most) of the staff here at NCAI.  It should be a lot of fun.  And, we're hoping to buy our own building an open an "Embassy of Native Nations" in the next year or two, which would rock.

Some observations to leave you with:

- The entire city of Washington runs.  Mike and I have never felt so lazy in our lives.  It's as though some natural urge overwhelms people after work and they just have to dash out their door for a several mile jog.  Gotta get that gym membership soon.

- Nobody knows what the Soup is on E!  This disturbs me.

- Thus far, I have counted 12 different "official" police forces while I've been in town.  There's the Capitol police, Supreme Court secret service, National Parks police, DC police, Metro police, and the list goes on.  The ones that scare me are the ex-navy seal looking ones with no markings on their black cars that just hang around the Hilton on Connecticut ave.  I just stare straight ahead and walk briskly.

- Mosquitoes.  They're these bizarre and heinous agents of the devil that land on your skin and bite you to suck your blood.  If they ever were in California, I think we killed them all ages ago...probably because of some foreign foliage or something.

- Fireflies: drive Nemo crazy.  Thank god they're just about dead.  He was spending every night at our living room window jumping up to try and bat at them.

- Kalorama: our new neighborhood.  So, we back up to the French and Chinese embassies in DC's most affluent and one of its oldest neighborhoods.  As Mike was coming back home the other night, some random Spanish national was apprehended by another one of these strange police forces.  As one long-time District resident told me at the bar: "the entire city could be in chaos and burning...and Kalorama would just go on as if nothing was wrong in the world."  Ok...we admit it...we moved from one insanely bougie neighborhood to another.  We can't help ourselves.  We're gay.

So...the whole point of this blog is to highlight mostly funny observations about moving here from WeHo...check back often...I hope you enjoy.