Sunday, July 08, 2007

Day 3 in D.C.

Before I get to today, I had a blast last night board op'ing for Jon Anthony's live show. It's been probably 6 years since I've run a board, and it was fun. Not as fun as switching a tv show, but fun. Made me even more regretful that I didn't get to do a live show on America Friday.

So I got up this morning and had a leisurely breakfast. I'm staying at a place that has a breakfast buffet with made-to-order omlettes. Seriously, I could eat breakfast 3 meals a day. So I'm loving it.

Left the hotel about 9:45, with somewhere I wanted to be at 10:30. So, I decided I'd head west. I was staying on the 900 block of F street... and of course everyone knows the White House is at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. 7 blocks and change. Cake. They wound up being 7 long blocks and quite a bit of change, and it was pretty hot. But I'm glad I went. And I got to see a lot of cool buildings along the way, which I took photos of that I will share when I get home.

I had been to the White House before, around '95 - back when they actually let you go in it. You still can... IF you have a group of 10 or more and IF you get your Congressman to make you a reservation and IF he makes that reservation 2 weeks or more in advance. So I had to be content with looking at it from the fence. It's big.

One thing I haven't gotten the hang of yet is the street structure here in D.C. They have numbers going one way... and letters going another. That's great. I'm at 9th and F... I can find that. My next destination was going to be 11th and K. No problem. But then they put states in the middle of things. I left Pennsylvania and wound up on New York, which actually is a cross street that XM is on - at the complete other end of the city. Wonder how long of a walk that would be?

On my way into work later that morning I stopped into the Spy Museum gift shop. Didn't really find anything I was compelled to buy for Delaynie, but I did discover some cool Nancy Drew books that I didn't know existed. Will pick them up at Overstock.com later.

I spent my afternoon at Eckington editing - chopping up interviews and creating artist soundbite pieces for US Country. Oddly, I don't feel like I've gotten as much done as I should have, because listening to interviews to mine sound out of is time consuming, and you don't have a lot to show for it. But I did get 15 new pieces created.

My eyes were crossing from staring at a computer monitor for the past 5 hours, and I still had 6 1/2 or so hours to go in this shift, so I decided to take a break and head downstairs. Another perk of life at the Mother Ship is that they have a fitness center in the basement. A really nice one, complete with a locker room and showers and big makeup mirrors and blow dryers. I'm horribly jealous, they don't even pay for my Y membership. But I like to at least use it while I'm here, so I swiped a t-shirt off someone's cubicle wall and worked out for about 45 minutes.

Oh, one more perk of XM D.C. - the talk channels have a couple tables where they discard the books that they've been sent to review once they're done with them. I usually come back loaded up with reading material. Currently I'm reading Everything I Needed To Know About Being A Girl I Learned from Judy Blume while waiting on the Metro.

While I'm lounging around playing tourist here in D.C., my husband is left with a Honey Dew list on the house, and my daughter leaves tomorrow morning for her first "sleep away" camp. We are 11 days away from closing on the house we're selling - it's crunch time! It's kind of a nice respite being half the country away from the madness and moving boxes!

Just finished the fruit cup I brought in for dinner, I'm off to schedule logs. Jon Anthony will be doing the Highway 16 Traffic Report live tonight from San Francisco -- be sure to tune in -- you never know what kind of wacky mistake his rookie board operator might make!

4 comments:

Pam said...

One of the perks of beng in the military....... They send packers to come and pack up everything. And I do mean everything. We found an onion in the kitchen stuff we unpacked in Prattville, AL ROFL

We pack the vehicles with everything we don't want packed. (Cleaning stuff, things we'll need on the move etc.) That includes my scrapbooks, which almost fill up the back of my Titan by themselves.

One more move next summer and I think we are done for good.

Producer J. said...

My scrapbooking stuff is all packed, and put in a corner by themselves... those are NOT going to storage, or sitting in a hot moving van!

John C said...

Wow... I was in DC the same time you were... left on the red-eye the night of the 6th, came back early the morning of the 9th!

I was attending Tiger Woods' golf tournament on Saturday (my 40th bday) and then at the Nats game to celebrate Miss DC day with Miss DC herself and her party!

I absolutely LOVE DC!!! I've been there 3x this year already, going a 4th time this weekend... One great thing is you don't need a car there to get around... for someone that lives in L.A. that is an escape on it's own!!!

John C said...

J:

One more thing... The whole street thing is really easy once you get the hang of it, the key though is understanding how the streets work...

The "named" streets almost all run diagonally while the streets with "letters" and "numbers" all run in straight lines... I wish Orlando was so well organized - got lost there like 6x in 2 days!!!

By my third day in my first visit to DC, I walking around there without a map! :)