Merry Christmas 2019

Merry Christmas to all.  The most beautiful tree I came across this year on my annual Holiday Lights run is the Library of Congress tree.

Season's Greetings from my house to yours, especially to my long-estranged children.  Today I'll stop by Westover to see if those bad boys of mine have finally gotten over their brainwashing during the divorce by their mother and her cadre of wicked, well, evil courthouse riff-raff like Meg (who is still destroying other families with cold aplomb), charlatan Victor, scumbag Joe, unethical or worse Bill, and all the other divorce lawyers (spots reserved for y'all on the lowest rung of hell) and mental health "professionals" who, as mature mercenary adults, knowingly helped to murder the childhoods of my children at their oh-so tender ages back then, scarring them for life.

The National Tree from a few years ago.  I led a group of runners out at noon from work to run by it.

The National Tree this year.  Here's to a better next year, when we can start restoring America's greatness after three years of wallowing in the sewer due to ignorance, myopia, perceived victimhood and desperate false hope leading to blind unthinking cult worship.

Christmas Trees in the District

The District is full of beautiful Christmas Trees at this time of the year if you know where to find them, like this one in the Library of Congress, easy to get into, no ID required, there's almost never a line and the restrooms are good.

Take a self portrait on the giant ornaments gracing the outdoor tree on the porch of the Canadian Embassy.

Stop by the Peace Officer Tree outside the municipal DC Courthouse on Indiana Street NW, where many of the ornaments specifically memorialize slain police officers.

Union Station has a spectacular tree in its rotunda, presented each year by Norway, and there is a busy, expansive food court down below and inside access to the Red Line of the Metro.

The Botanical Gardens at the foot of the Capitol has a tree with a Thomas the Engine train running around its base.

You could imagine this largely unadorned evergreen outside its entrance as a Christmas tree if you're in the proper holiday frame of mind.

Or this potted evergreen tree near the Mary L. Ripley Garden by the Smithsonian Textile Museum next door to the bigger Enid A. Haupt Garden.

Inside the Willard Hotel, which has fabulous bathrooms, there are public alcoves decorated with little trimmed trees where upon glancing up at a portrait on the wall, you'd see you are in the presence of Abe Lincoln and his sons.

Christmas Tree Run 2019, Part III.

About two weeks ago I set up, upon request, a Christmas Tree Run around the Mall for today at noon, but that person couldn't make it at the last minute, so I went alone.  I had done a precursor run last week to scout out some promising locations already, like to Trump Hotel, here's how it looked today with a view upward towards the open glassed in ceiling.

A nice touch was a real person sitting in a chair by its base wearing a Trump 2020 hat, as though he was auditioning for a spot in the White House or maybe at Justice.  He had bought a bowl of cheez-its, after all.

Going across the street I viewed the beautiful tree in the Willard Hotel.  It always feels welcoming to stop in that venerable fabulous hotel.

I looked for the National Menorah on the Ellipse but I couldn't find it so I don't think it's been erected yet, although it's supposed to be lit in three days so maybe it'll be erected on that day.  The National Tree was memorable, as usual, especially with the Washington Monument as its backdrop.

Heading over down Pennsylvania Avenue towards the Capitol, I went over to the Hotel Monaco, the old Patent Office Building turned into a posh hotel, if you can call tiny offices with marble floors and granite walls converted into hotel rooms posh.  The hotel didn't really have a tree, rather it had a series of small lit evergreen trees which did create a holiday effect of sorts.

Nearby was the National Portrait Gallery which didn't have a tree but there were a series of Nutcracker figures outside in an outward sidewalk Christmas mart.

Continuing towards the east, I went by the beautiful tree at the Canadian Embassy.  Every year it presents the most beautiful outdoor tree on Pennsylvania Avenue, including the National Tree which is, in essence, a tree covered in a shroud which houses the ornaments, they are not hung on the tree itself.

The Congressional Tree was spectacular, as usual.  The 2019 Christmas Tree Tour over, I returned home.

Christmas Tree Run 2019

Today was a cold but bright and dry day, perfect for going on my annual Christmas Tree Run on the Mall.  This year's run was a short one, only about three miles with lots of lengthy stops at the various sites; I took Metro to the District and here's the Christmas tree at the place I started from, inside the Smithsonian Castle.  I am so addled by old age though that although I carefully placed in my vest pockets a credit card and what I thought was my Senior Half-price metro card, when I ran to my local station from where I parked my car at the last free spot where it was free parking 3/4 mile away, when I arrived at the station I discovered I'd pocketed my lifetime free pass to National Parks for seniors instead of my Senior Metro card so I had to use my lunch money, a twenty-dollar bill, to purchase a regular metro card and thus spend twice as much on transportation, about nine dollars there and back.

The day actually started before that at my local blood donation center where I gave a unit of plasma, platelets and spun red blood cells (they withdraw the blood into a machine, spin it I guess, and return it about a million times until they get the amount of concentrated particles they want), a process which takes 95 minutes and is very boring as you just lie there on a gurney, hooked to a machine by a needle in your arm, and I whiled away the time by admiring the Christmas tree in the blood-draw center.  That was my 129th time donating blood or blood products (110 times of whole blood donations--a process that only takes about 18 minutes); how's your donation schedule going?  They like my blood because it's O+, a universal blood-type that can be given to anybody except persons with O- blood, which is the true universal blood type that any body can accept, and I get blood donor calls daily, almost hourly, from the Red Cross which I never answer (I give to Inova in Northern Virginia) and even, occasionally, from blood centers as far away as Cincinnati, where I donated a unit of blood once after a marathon in 2008 as I was passing through the airport (I have tried unsuccessfully for years to get myself taken off that list--but how can you yell at volunteers calling even from a thousand miles away trying to address a continual blood crisis?).

Once in the District I ran around downtown near the White House, stoping for awhile at the National Tree on the Ellipse, and then having a fascinating conversation at Pershing Park across from the Willard Hotel, which I then subsequently forgot to go into, where they always have a beautiful tree.  In Pershing Park (named after the WWI American Expeditionary Force's commanding general, Black Jack Pershing), a film crew was shooting the vacant mostly concrete park and IT-type guys were "digitizing" the statue of General Pershing so they could put a 3-D recreation of it on a WWI Centenary internet site (commemorating 100 years since the end of the war, only a years too late) because ground-breaking was going to be done later this very afternoon on a project to reconstruct the park to create an interactive site there where, now that ALL veterans of the war have passed on, the public can finally learn something about the sacrifices and heroic achievements of the Doughboys who were Over There winning the War To End All Wars.  I like to question people when I see things going on that I run by, I learned this is an ongoing project already five years old.

I went on from Pershing Park to the Trump International Hotel which was filled with eye-candy  exquisitely dressed mature women and fat-cats in natty dark business suits, but they always have a nice Christmas tree in there.  Then I ran past the Washington Monument on this stark but beautiful day, ducked into a couple of Smithsonian Museums where they have small but well-lit Christmas trees somewhere in the premises like at the Museum of African Arts inside the Enid Hauptmann Garden Plaza and ran to the Constitution Center in L'Enfant Plaza where my former agency is located and dialed the four or five persons there for whom I have numbers in my cell phone to see if they, impromptu, wanted to have coffee but everybody either eschewed picking up my call, or picking up a 202 (the area code for the District) number they didn't immediately recognize or expect or were busy or out.  So i happily had a guilty-pleasure late lunch of noodles and mushroom chicken at the Panda's across the street in the food court and returned home tired but relaxed.

Holiday Tour, Part Two

This month I went into the District to do a holiday decorations tour on a bicycle. I spent a little time enjoying the National Tree with the National Menorah and the Washington Monument bookending it.

Downtown I went into the Willard Hotel and the Trump International Hotel to see their trees and warm up for a little while.  DC in December can be cold and raw even when the sun is out.

The Nutcracker Sentries were manning one of the the Willard Hotel entrances and outside the Portrait Museum some life size wooden soldiers stood guard.  The Hotel Monaco had a nice little tree in its tiny lobby.

The Smithsonian Castle always has a tree.  The nice thing there is that there's never a line to get in and it has bathrooms and even a small food court.

The Capital Tree was nice, although it's always dwarfed by the Capitol.  After seeing it from afar, I went up to Union Station to have lunch in its food court and see the tree in the massive lobby.

I headed back to Haines Point to retrieve my car and drive home.  Along the way I ducked into the almost totally underground African Arts Museum to see its tree and conclude this year's holiday decorations tour.

Holiday Lights Tour, Part One

I went on my yearly Holiday Lights tour in the District this month, fitting it in before my mid-month operation which limited my mobility severely.  I bicycled over to the Ellipse from Haines Point, where I parked my car, to view the National Tree.

From the White House, I entered the Willard Hotel to see its Christmas tree, always very well trimmed.  The old Postal Pavilion, now known as the Trump Emolument Violation Hotel, is across the street.

      

I went into enemy territory to see the Trump Tree. Inside I fell into a conversation with a Californian lawyer who was arguing before the US Supreme Court the next day on the interesting question of national sovereignty for Indian tribes, and the more I chatted with him the more I started to think he was in the Trump Hotel for a reason, as when he boasted that "Kamala Harris always lost to me."

I went to the Portrait Museum next, where they had a holiday tree set up in its inside, covered courtyard.  I love the way the shadows created by the iron lattice roofing play off the walls.

From there I went to visit the Peace Officer tree outside the DC courthouse.  The tree is adorned with ornaments honoring slain police officers in the DMV area and I was saddened to see that the previous evergreen tree had been removed but gladdened to see that it had been replaced, albeit with a tiny new one.

My next stop, midway through the tour, was at the US Botanical Garden to see its tree.  That stop was memorable because while I was inside, the Federal Protective Service called me outside over the PA because I had parked my Capital Bike-Share bicycle by the entrance, which, it was carefully explained to me by an armed policeman, is definitely a big no-no for some illogical reason concerning a skinny little bike with no bags upon it.

Christmas 2018

Christmas this year was a very wonderful day, to add some cheer to an otherwise very difficult year.  It started with fruitless stop to pick up fresh bagels at my local bagel shop--I should have known it would be closed!  As I proceeded to my friend's house to celebrate the day, I stopped to wish a Merry Christmas to my friend Treavor at his workplace on the corner of Highway 29 and I-66 and I stopped briefly as the noon hour approached at my local pizzeria, but I didn't recognize anyone who was around.

Bloody Marys made with a succulent mix and celery and horse radish made up for the absence of bagels, and then we had stuffed omelettes and ginger cookies to cap off the meal.  Because of the weight-limitation imposed upon me because of my recent surgery of five pounds, I didn't bring over to my friend's house my five-foot artificial tree to trim, rather we made do with a lightweight plastic snowman as a tree this year.  We opened our gifts, reflected upon our ties to other loved ones with phone calls and thoughts, and enjoyed holiday cheer for awhile by watching the puppy channel and dancing to Chuck Berry on the jukebox.

Before dark, we drove back to my house so I could drop off my car before darkness, because of my nighttime driving limitation for now, and as we drove around my neighborhood, we were amazed to see an owl with a 5-foot wingspan fly right past the windshield before it perched nearby on a fence where we watched it for awhile as it occasionally rotated its head around to see us; I have never seen so large an owl before.  Then we went to the teeming Eden Center in Falls Church and walked around its grocery stores where we marveled at the mostly Asian products offered there, two-feet tall thick carrots, long-neck clams with necks protruding eight inches out of the clamshell, lemon grass with chili peppers, and coffee laced with chicory, a New Orleans treat which I haven't seen in my supermarkets for decades and which I enjoy very much; I bought a can.

We capped off the wonderful day with a dinner of Indian fare at the Haandi's in Falls Church, where we split a bottle of its signature beer, a Taj Mahal IPA.  I received some wonderful, thoughtful gifts this holiday season, the Ken Burns PBS documentary The Vietnam War, a graphic bound comic book on the Warren Commission Report on the JFK assassination, two bottles of whiskey barrel aged especial beers, a handsome flannel work shirt, a bottle of Argentinian wine and a pound bar of Belgium chocolate.  Yes Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.

A Merry Christmas

The winds were ferocious on Christmas Eve and overnight.  It blew down the Christmas Tree I had set up on my covered porch, trying something different this year, and the tree lay in a distressed heap on the driveway in the morning.

Time for a re-boot.  I brought the tree inside, untangled the garlands and trimmed it.  It came out okay.

Christmas breakfast was a treat.  Lox and bagels, loaded further with cream cheese, capers, onion, cheese and brown tomatoes from Mexico.

It was so filling that although it was cold, a walk was called for and a wonderful, packed North Pole on 14th Street in the District was discovered.  A Merry Christmas was had by all.

Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas to all.

Here are hopes for a happy and better New Year.

There's a lot to be thankful for, like family and friends.

Life is too short not to forgive.

Still More Christmas Tree Traipsing

A new stop on the annual Holiday Lights tour is the Christmas tree at the Trump International Hotel, the made-over Postal Pavilion.  I preferred its old iteration, as I preferred the company of normal citizens to plutocrats.

The public can still go up into the tower at the building, though.  The NPS runs it during business hours, it's free and the view from there is unparalleled.

There is a nice tree outside the Willard Hotel.  Across the street from there is Pershing Park, where you can see a statue of Black Jack Pershing, who directed his men, according to the president's telling of a phony legend, to smear their bullets with pork fat and thereby quelled a muslim separatist and nationalist movement in the Philippines when it was a colony of ours and he commanded our troops there.

Memory Lane contains Christmas trees too, such as this one at the Occupy Camp on Freedom Plaza.  This photo of that tree is from 2011.