Had an excellent weekend up in DC, visiting Matt. Bryan and Brian flew up from Georgia, where they’re both currently stationed. Matt’s friend from college, Jay, also was out visiting from Colorado. I left work early to drive up, which took me around 4 hours all told. Halloween in DC was a pretty big event, though not by comparison to San Francisco. I ended up borrowing a complete outfit from Matt, comprised of his Wellies, overalls, and an orange German fireman’s jacket (it said Feuerwehr on the back [Fire Department]). It worked out pretty well. Brian had orange prison overalls, Bryan was Elvis, and Matt and Jay were in full Scottish regalia, complete with blue pix face paint (a la Braveheart).

7 or so bars in the downtown area had an agreement on Halloween for a shared cover. Once you paid the $7 cover, you could get you into any place, after a line of course. We picked the wrong place (Rumours) to wait in line though, as the line stopped moving after we had already been waiting about half an hour. After giving up on Rumours, we went to The Front Page, which was packed. We had a few drinks/shots, and Matt and Jay were garnering some decent attention. Both were putting on their Scottish accents, of which Jay’s is impeccable.

One girl came up to me asking “Sprechen Sie Deutsches?” because of the german jacket, to which I responded “Nein”. She was pretty cute, but for some reason I didn’t feel up to engaging with her. I guess I had decided earlier that this evening was about hanging out with the guys, not cruising, and couldn’t or didn’t want to switch gears. During another pass through the bar she approached me again, and it turned out she was American but just spoke German. In retrospect, her persistence was a glaring potential opportunity missed. Shmuck.

Then, after meandering through the city in search of a better bar, we decided to just go straight to waypoint Bravo. Matt had bought tickets for a club called Home. There were two floors, and we spent the duration on the upper floor, where they were playing this weird mix of latin and “club”. The entry floor was pumping out trance/house, which would have better. Oh well, we were mostly just barflies, although Matt was working it. I got fairly inebriated, and we took a taxi back to Matt’s at around 5.

Saturday started off late, at around 1. Brian headed off to Delaware to visit with his folks. Matt, Bryan and I went back to Dupont Circle to pick up Jay and his friend Sarah. She’s really cool, I like her, definitely at ease around guys. We headed towards the Eastern Market, which was closed by the time we got there, so we grabbed a late lunch. That night we just basically did a pub crawl until fairly late again. I viewed myself pretty much as an observer, taking in the socialogical perspective of the bar scene. You know me, I can’t help systemizing things, so I was trying to figure it all out.

On Sunday I left Matt’s around 1 and headed over to Russ’s place in Centreville, about 20 minutes away. It was nice to see his place, his townhouse is frickin big. Seriously, like double the width of most other I’ve been in. We went out for lunch at Lone Star, and then I headed back at around 4. I can’t figure it out, as I got caught up in some major traffic leaving DC, which I thought set me back at least 40-50 minutes, but I made it home at around 8:15. So I must have been flying home.

My mom was waiting for me, she had been staying in my apartment while I was gone. It was really nice to see her, I recounted my weekend to her. On Monday my dad came back, and we went out to nice dinner at the Carolina Inn with the new Dean of Education at UNC Chapel Hill and his wife. Monday was his first official day on the new job, so he was still adjusting to the differences in life at NYU.

I overnighted my documents for the second offer on the house back to Mark yesterday. Haven’t heard from him yet, I should give him a call and see what is going on. Our office admin, Tanya, arrived from Oakland last night. It is nice to have her out here, she’s a kick. It’ll be my job to get her all set up in the upstairs office, my “old bedroom”