DC Scenes, 2019

Half our fall excursion, after Knoxville, was in DC, visiting daughter Rachel and her husband Will, and house- and pet-sitting during their various excursions. Though there is much of DC we have not seen, we don't regard ourselves as tourists, since we've seen most of it over the years. As in Knoxville, we stayed put, mostly, attending to various projects and interests, but occasionally we got out to see a few old favorites and a few new things. But mostly it was about staying put and working on our projects...and my seeing two wonderful friends of old from the humanities, Edie Manza and Esther Mackintosh.

Rachel and Will at Cantina Republic, the new neighborhood Tex-Mex down the
street

We spent one pleasant day at the National Gallery of Art--
elsewhere in this blog are posts and pix from numerous
previous visits--it's one of our favorites; this visit we did
the 18th and 19th century French paintings tour, which was
outstanding (NGA has lots of Fragonards and the largest
Watteau I have ever seen); most of the permanent collection
and of course the gift shoppe; the above reminds me to
mention we also saw several episodes of the Great British Bake-
off and that we gave Rachel a copy of Mary Berry's baking
cookbook for her birthday

We made it at last to the National Museum of African American History and
Culture--doing just the history part, the first three floors, was all we could
handle; the silence (and inherited guilt) on the first floor was reminiscent of
the Dokumentation Center in Berchtesgaden...

We'll be back sometime to focus on the cultural part...

Sic transit, Gloria...the glorious old Carnegie Library, now the Apple Store

Historic preservation

Jane Fonda's in there somewhere

Yes, let's... 

Scooters lying around everywhere, as in other large cities; this one decapitated

Rachel and Will were off on a road trip, so Vicki and I had a "quiet" Turkey
Day dinner, courtesy of Marie Callender; the Veuve Cliquot was a nice touch,
however (just kidding, Rachel)

Daphne, sweetest dog ever, dressed for a walk in the cold (the Poop Loop)

Desperately hungry house cats of DC...Peter, stupidest cat ever, lapping up
drippings in the dishwasher

"If it be now, ’tis not to come. If it be not to come, it will be now. If it be not now,
yet it will come—the readiness is all"--Bianca's thoughts as she awaits the
automatic cat-feeder's next dump