I'm in DC this weekend to help my sister pick out an apartment. Originally my mother was supposed to be here. Ma and Dork were to have a girls' weekend together – while finding my sister a new pad in easy-commuting range to and from her new job doing something in bank customer service just outside Our Nation's Capitol. But my mom is tending to my grandfather, who collapsed from a stroke on Monday, and her thoughts are fixed and focused mostly on that. And what comes next. Which I'd rather not think about. So the trip to DC also works to relieve me of doing that.
My sister found a place she liked. I concurred that it was the best of the options she'd seen, though I only saw two of those three. I hung around while she got the paperwork1 squared away, then we had a moderately adventurous dinner at a generically decorated but still really good Ethiopian joint in Old Towne. There they not only packaged their astounding homemade hot sauce in a plastic tub to go, but bagged it up with a fork and spoon, because why wouldn't you just eat it directly? One of the women working in the kitchen told us her family relied on the hot sauce to cure a sore throat. Ready to use it on anything she would have told me to, I took a pint home with me.
On Sunday I had a few hours to myself before I'd have catch the train back to NYC. I used those hours to venture around the Capitol and wander into the free museums.
In what I'm sure they'd call a extremely fringe use case, I used Tinder to get restaurant and art recommendations. One user, Sabra, turned me on to the Garry Winograd exhibit at the National Gallery of Art and to the musician portraits on display at the National Portrait Gallery. I went to a ramen spot at her recommendation as well before having a beer at a bar I found on my own. I should have got a recommendation from Sabra on a bar too, because the one I picked smelled like a frathouse basement and was filled with a bunch of suited, slouchy, grey-haired guys.
Soon enough I was on the Penn Station bound train, slouching in my seat too, all the way back to Brooklyn. I needed all the rest I could get. I'd spend the next week just unpacking boxes and trying to get set up in my new place.
- In the convoluted math of large apartment complex rent matrices, which change and are recalculated daily through some industry software thing, I saw that it was actually cheaper for my sister to sign a lease starting this weekend than it would be to sign a lease starting for the first of June – provided she stays 15 months. So she signed a lease beginning today. She'll still only move in after June 1st.