Winter in DC is the time to prune trees

Brr! It was cold last weekend but I went to a elm tree pruning workshop organized by Casey Trees anyway. They described it as a structural pruning class but since it was set at the National Park Service elm tree nursery and all of the examples were elms it is really an elm tree pruning class.

Then I was frozen solid (did I mention I biked there?) so I stopped in and visited Megan and Saúl and warmed up with several cups of hot tea.

Things I learned at the workshop:

• NPS works hard to grow American elm trees to maintain and replace the rows of elms on the Mall. 
• They can slow Dutch Elm Disease down a lot by constant vigilance and removal of infected branches when they leaf out in the spring. 
• Elm trees grow fast when young and need aggressive pruning the first eight years to set them up with proper shape for a healthy and attractive life. 
• A 2% solution of isopropyl alcohol is the best disinfectant for cleaning pruning tools between trees. I was glad to learn that because I hate using bleach solution--I think it rusts the tools and I always seem to get bleach spots on my clothes. 
• Oil your pruning tools occasionally so they slide through the wood easier. 

Here's some pictures of January in the District.

Looking across the Potomac at my neighborhood

Ice on the Potomac

Up the river to Rosslyn and Memorial Bridge

There's the Washington Monument

Sunset from my bedroom window

The tip of the Washington Monument is behind a building in the center right of the picture if you look closely

Then I made empanadas with a bean filling and a coconut oil crust

I like the way the coconut oil worked in the crust although I think it would go better with a sweet filling rather than a savory one

Cooking the pumpkin puree to dry it out

I need minimally wet pumpkin goop to make good pumpkin gnocchi

Fun in November

Happy Armistice Day! (I think that's a cooler name than Veterans Day.) We had super lovely weather in DC today. There is a crazy big concert going on on the Mall...glad they aren't freezing people out! It think it was lucky all around because the freezing air currently snowing on Minnesota is scheduled to hit us the end of the week.

Elizabeth and I went on a bike ride to Glen Echo and Bethesda.

The C&O Canal path and the Capitol Crescent Trail (the paved one)

I love crunchy leaves!

There's Elizabeth by the bikes.

Sky view

Cyclist selfie

Here's the Spanish Ballroom from the outside.

 So Glen Echo is where I like to go for swing dances. Here's what that looked like last week at the WWII Canteen Dance with the Eric Felten Jazz Orchestra.

And I got some great views on my way home from the ECRI conference on complex patients. 

Makes DC awesome: the Washington Monument from the Constitution Garden pool. 

Not Pictured

So my blog turns out to be mostly about what I'm eating. Not the most scintillating for you perhaps but it keeps me entertained. I'll add stories to go with it. Check out my dinner tonight. Wasn't I good at eating my veggies?

Tuesday's dinner: eggplant salad, squash, corn, and Ethiopian flatbread. 

The eggplant is the Indian eggplant salad from page 48 of The Enchanted Broccoli Forest by Mollie Katzen. It's a very excellent vegetarian cookbook and that particular recipe is delicious. I broke it out to help handle the eggplants coming out of the garden. So far I've only had to compost one that rotted before I could eat it, but they are starting to build up and I need to apply myself. It's far to easy to have an apple, some bread, and cheese for dinner which isn't terrible nutritionally but probably leaves my short of my five servings of fruit and veggies a day. This dinner had three servings all by itself though and when you add that to the blueberries and oatmeal for breakfast (the blueberries were from Canada by way of Costco but they were really good with an almost huckleberry flavor) I'm doing pretty well. 

The other thing I'll be eating a lot of for a while is the squash. That's the one crop that did fabulously in the garden this year. I've got 10 butternut squash sitting in my big basket and I bet at least that many more still in the garden. I even bought a heavy duty vegetable peeler at Eastern Market to help deal with them. Fortunately I really like squash so this should not be a problem. 

Here's my other really excellent dinner plate of recent days. 

Sunday's dinner: A Cherokee Purple tomato with chevre, lettuce salad, and Alaska salmon. 

Of course what's not pictured is the leftover chocolate cake I had for breakfast. I make a layer cake, vanilla cupcakes, and chocolate cookies for the bake sale at St Augustine's end-of-summer fair. That was Saturday and it was also the SW Art Fest. We spent a while tabling about the community garden project. It was a fabulous day. Here's a couple of pictures I took down by the church so that you can see how nice it was. 

Looking across the street to Arena Stage

St. Augustine's, if you look closely there's an airplane flying out of DCA 

As a bonus for reading to the end of this rather rambling post, here's a provocative NY Times article arguing that bike helmets are bad for cycling. Basically the author is making the case that requiring helmets is a major barrier to cycling becoming normalized and the risks of brain injury from falling off a bike are no greater than the risk of falling off ladders or slipping in the shower. Requiring helmets for biking makes a relatively safe activity (statistically) appear much more dangerous so people just don't do it. Leading of course to the greater dangers of automobile congestion, air pollution, obesity, and heart disease. 

So what do you think? To helmet or not to helmet? 

Flight day at the National Building Museum

I had a fun day today. And yesterday for that matter. It was 65 degrees on Saturday, can you believe it? I went for a bike ride in a T-shirt and enjoyed the evening sun going down over the Potomac River.

Today I started with the usual Sunday morning volunteer gig cooking at the St. Augustine's meal program. I like making the pancakes. This was an extra-special morning though because we also had a performance by the saxophone choir! It was an ensemble of 8 saxophones (2 each soprano, alto, tenor, and bass I think) plus a drummer and a pianist. I was very impressed by the care and restraint shown by the drummer. He made sure he backed up the music without ever overwhelming it. He even played the snare with a brush at one point! Here's the YouTube version of the song I liked best (Chasing Cars by Snow Patrol). It was actually a lot better with saxophones and without lyrics, but you get an idea of the harmonies which were gorgeous this morning. They stood all around the room for this song so music came from every direction. I'm afraid I didn't think to take my camera, so you only get verbal pictures. They played a concert Saturday evening too which I sadly forgot about, probably because I was distracted by the bike ride and the sunset. But I caught a little of it Sunday morning so that was very nice.

Here's a little background info on the concert project:

Connie Friego's ROC Ensemble features eight saxophones, one jazz piano and one percussionist playing songs of Michael Jackson, Stevie Wonder and Radiohead!

Ms. Friego received a small grant from the Friends of Southwest DC (FOS), a nonprofit organization which supports educational, community development and charitable activities in the city's southwest quadrant. Last year, she had received a grant from FOS for her quartet to play a similar musical residency in the community and it was so well received that she applied and received a second one in 2011.

Also, Connie Friego is a former resident, July 2009 to August 2011, of Southwest, and for two years now she has organized these free concerts for the enjoyment by all residents of SW. The ROC Ensemble will also play early Sunday morning for the breakfast mainly served to homeless people at St. Augustine's.

After that Elizabeth, a friend from HUD, and showed her around the neighborhood a little because she is looking for a new place to live and is thinking about Southwest. We had to go see the Titanic Memorial statue because it is just so mind-boggling. With soooo much cultural baggage on display.

Then this afternoon I met Chelsea at the National Building Museum. I suggested it because Tom and Linda said it was so nice and there is an exhibit on display right now called "Unbuilt Washington" about the serious and not-so-serious designs that were proposed but never built in this city. Including the Lincoln ziggurat. But actually we never ended up seeing the exhibit because they were flying model airplanes in the main atrium and it was really fun to watch. Again I forgot my camera though. Sorry about that. We'll just have to go back another day to see the actual exhibit.

Anyway the planes were balsa wood and plastic models, one to two feet long mostly. The building is almost 5 stories high with the entire central core open from the ground to the roof and galleries you can walk around the first three levels. There are six huge pillars with highly ornamented tops and windows all the way up. It is really light and open. Apparently it was originally built as the record storage and office space for the US pension department in 1880. It was the green building of the time too with "healthful light and air" for the clerks. They even had document rails around the edges (rather like Paul's meat rails in the cooler) which would be used to slide baskets of documents back and forth. It had to be built of brick so it would be fireproof to protect the pension documents.

They were flying airplanes all over this space. One end was the rubber-band-powered section where, I think, they were having contests to see who could stay in the air longer. Those planes were adjusted so they flew up and up in big circles. The other end was electric planes which would buzz around and do loop-de-loops as they were actually steerable. It wasn't clear if they were having any kind of contest or just having fun. There was even a dragonfly with flapping wings and a Nemo-fish blimp. That was pretty cool; it was an oblong helium balloon, about 2 feet long, painted like a clown fish with attached fins and a tail. It had a small weight on a rail along its belly that could slide fore and aft to point the nose up or down. The weight was adjusted to just a hair less than neutral buoyancy for today's air pressure. All this meant that Nemo slowly sank when his tail wasn't moving. However the driver could slide the weight back to point the nose up and flap the tail back and forth which generated just enough of a force to make the balloon rise. It could also turn side to side. So it was really fairly maneuverable in a slow and stately way. The electric planes were more zippy and exciting but the rubber band ones were really meditative and relaxing to watch, particularly the larger ones which leisurely spiraled up toward the light.

All in all that was a wonderful time at the museum and we had a good talk as well. Chelsea is another 2011 PMF at SAMHSA.

A paycheck is certainly news!

I got my first paycheck today. Ok, I electronically received my first paycheck today. It actually doesn't seem nearly as exciting to log in to your online bank account and see the line item "Fed Payroll something-or-other" as it would be to take an actual paper check down to the bank and cash it. But on the other hand the electronic deposit comes a lot faster, and I didn't have to do anything in order to get the money in my account.

I'm still waiting for them to process all of the employee benefits (like health insurance) so I don't think all of the deductions are correct yet. However my pay grade and salary look right so that is a very promising start. TSP was only 3% rather than the 5% I wanted so I changed that through the online interface. (I also got the Employee Personal Page login today.) The rest I will have to wait and see. For those who don't know, the Thrift Savings Plan is the Fed equivalent of private 401(k) retirement savings programs.

In other news, I had a good trip to Chicago last week. Most of you probably don't know that I arrived at HUD and immediately had to arrange federal travel to fly to Chicago the week of September 12 for a program office-wide training event. It was a little bit hairy getting all of the paperwork and my travel credit card and all processed on time. However it all worked out with only a little bit of correction after the fact so I did pretty well. The training session was very good. The biggest benefit was meeting all of the other new employees that have been hired by the Section 232 component of the Office of Healthcare Programs over the last year. We compared new employee notes quite a bit. For some perspective, the number of applications they receive under 232 has gone from about 200 per year four years ago to almost 800 a year today. Apparently it's been a huge workload increase and they really need more people although they've done a great job improving the process and are up to [I ought to have this in my head, but I'm going to get the number wrong!] 600+ applications processed this year.

If you are lucky I will get a couple of Chicago pictures posted in the next couple of days...including a shot of the big shiny "bean" that is such an iconic tourist picture. I didn't photograph the new Marilyn Monroe statue since I'm not very well practiced at carrying my camera around. Here's a link to a Huffington Post blog with pictures if you want. Curiously the statue will only be up for about a year. I wonder why.

Kevin and I went for a great bike ride yesterday afternoon. Sorry no pictures though. We rode across the river and down the Mt. Vernon Trail to downtown Alexandria. Then back over the Potomac on another bridge and up through the new National Harbor development, Oxon Hill Farm, and some rather hilly parts of Anacostia. It was a radically varied range of city environments. Old Town Alexandria is very quaint with brick architecture (Federal style maybe?). The Woodrow Wilson Bridge was long and steep. It reminded me of cousin Gary talking about riding over the bridge in Florida in order to train for hills. National Harbor is very spanking new and still in development with the roads that lead to empty fields with "future site of..." signs. They were building fancy bike paths but didn't yet have many users down there.

Oxon Hill Farm is apparently a National Park Service site. It had classic farm buildings and lots of nice woodlands. We saw a bunch of silly little Eastern whitetail deer down at the bottom of the hill. I didn't spot any antlers. I think they seemed darker and smaller than our whitetails, but I didn't get that close of a look at them is it is hard to be sure. Nice woods and fields and it was a great temperature for a bike ride so this part of the trip was really nice.

Getting back through Anacostia was a bit more interesting. We ran into a couple of places with nowhere to ride safely since the road was fast with no shoulder so we had to hike our bikes along the barrow ditch a bit. But we got through eventually and rode up MLK Avenue. Clearly not a great part of town, but it looks like redevelopment and gentrification is even going on there. I didn't feel unsafe, but I won't be biking back there either. If nothing else it was just too hard to find a direct way though without any bike lanes. I guess if I want to go back to Oxon, I'll either take Metro or go around through Alexandria. I might be able to bike there from the Southern Avenue station.

This Thursday there is a bike party down in Yards Park, which is on the river near the Nationals baseball stadium. It's sponsored by Capital Bikeshare in honor of their one-year anniversary. I'm certainly planning to go so maybe I can get some more bike maps and learn new routes there.

That's all for now. It's late here and time for bed!

Love to you all.
-Sarah