I’m two weeks into owning my iPhone 11 Pro and I have to say two things have jumped out since I’ve started using it.
The first is that I didn’t think I’d use the wide angle lens much, but in the past couple weeks, being able to walk around with a phone that shoots similar to 12mm, 28mm, and 50mm lenses has been incredibly handy. The quality of photos that come out of it are impressive, but it’s more the versatility of having almost a lens for every kind of photo I might want to take (if it had a lens somewhere in the 100mm-200m range my needs would be complete). Anyway: the camera lives up to the hype.
Second, and more importantly, this was the first iPhone since the first one in 2007 that I started (mostly) fresh on. I’ve done a download backup/restore from backup on every phone until a couple iOS versions ago they made it even easier where you just bring your old phone near your new phone to copy from cloud backups.
Over the last 12 years, I’ve amassed about 500 apps and though I’ve spent the last couple years trying to turn off notifications for all but the vital ones, having 12 years of history and cruft and settings across 500+ screens meant no matter how much I tried to quiet my phone, it would alert me constantly throughout the day.
So for this phone, I made the move to start fresh, but logging into and linking with my existing iCloud account. This gave me zero apps on the device, but I did get all my photos and contacts and Notes and Shortcuts back.
Getting to re-install just the apps you can remember you need was liberating. I stopped at about 20 or 30. And most importantly, as I added each new app I scrutinized its settings, to make sure I minimized notifications and exposure of my data.
As a result, I have a new fast phone with three great cameras that only puts up alerts on 2 or 3 apps I really need for “red phone” communication. Other than that, nothing else can bother me. I frequently go hours between notifications and it’s been remarkably relaxing to gain some control back. I’ve been able to recalibrate what having a phone in my pocket means, and it’s been a huge positive change.
Whenever I upgrade to a new phone in the future, I’m going to skip dragging all my apps and their history and settings over from my previous devices and go this route from here on out.
Crater Lake in southern Oregon is one of the most beautiful places on earth. It’s the textbook example of a lake formed in the caldera of a former volcano and even though I studied this region extensively in college, I didn’t get to actually visit it until a few years ago.
A couple weekends a year, they do something special for everyone: They close about 3/4 of the road to cars and let bike riders, walkers, runners, and rollerbladers ride the perimeter road. I’ve wanted to do this ride for years but it wasn’t until this week when a friend suggested we do it for his birthday—I was totally in.
We had perfect weather and we had a blast. What follows is a list of stuff I learned from this first outing.
Check the Ride the Rim site and the local weather often, and pre-register if you can, but if it’s too late, it’s fine to show up and just register on site.
Remember to bring about $20 to donate (they suggest $10/rider) and the $25 it costs to get into the national park
The north entrance doesn’t have much parking, the south has loads more. I was glad we picked a start at the south parking lots
If you’re coming from Portland (about 5hrs drive) or San Francisco (about six hours drive), stay near Grants Pass, Rogue River, or Klamath Falls the night before. You’ll be about a 60-90min drive from the start, and there are plenty of adequate hotels in all those places.
Ride it counter-clockwise! The organizers set it all up to be a clockwise ride and that’s probably fun if you use their shuttle to cut off the 9 miles of it shared with cars. If you do ride the entire loop clockwise from the south parking lot, you’ll have huge climbs at the start and the end. If you go counter-clockwise from the south, most of your climbing will be in the morning when you have energy. You’ll get to end the day with six miles of descending too.
Stop at every rest stop. There’s water and small light snacks. You should also pack energy bars or sandwiches because you’ll be feeling tapped out around lunch time.
Stop at every lake overlook. Some of them can’t be reached easily by car. This may be your only chance to stand there and get a perfect photo.
It’s only 35 miles but it took us about 3 and a half hours of riding, about 5 hours of total time with all stops. Budget more time than you’d think for a normal 35mi ride.
Nothing is flat. We were always climbing a 5% grade or descending one. There’s almost no flat land around the entire rim road. It’s kind of amazing how nothing up there is flat. It’s a brutal ride, we climbed over 4,000 feet in the loop.
It’s not that bad to ride the section where cars are allowed if you’re riding it counter-clockwise. After about 2 miles of slow climbing, you’ll descend to the parking lot at speeds faster than a car for several miles.
Bring plenty of cold weather gear. It’ll be chilly in the mornings and no matter how much you sweat on the climbs, you can get cold on descents. Even on a mild sunny day without much wind, I put on a jacket for the longer downhills.
Don’t forget you’re riding at 6,000-7,500 feet above sea level. I was surprised because I forgot to look this up ahead of time and our hotel the night before was around 1,500′ in elevation. The rim road is akin to riding high up in the Rockies.
The lake reflects the sky above so it looks best on a sunny day. You’ll see a deep blue like you’ve never witnessed before and can’t even adequately capture on film.
He does a great job breaking down a good/better/best approach for video meeting hardware, with the relative costs of each option. My advice on webcams was firmly in the “better” area of his advice, and I must say I purchased the ring light he mentions in his post and it’s working pretty well for me.
For reference, here’s what my current setup looks like with a ring light and a SAD light going in a meeting.
And here’s what I look like today using those lights during a meeting.
I’m using the Logitech Brio’s auto-smoothing which kinda makes you blurry to hide wrinkles (lol) but good lighting and a good HD camera really help make video meetings pop. I don’t know if I’m ever going down the route Scott suggests of using a dedicated digital camera as a webcam, since I think this is good enough and pretty simple to wire all up.
You know what basic feature we should rethink on phones? Do Not Disturb.
A couple months ago, I went out at night alone while on vacation. I unexpectedly met up with my friend Jason that I hadn’t seen in ten years. As a sign of respect, I put my phone face down on the table and we talked for a couple hours. It was quite late when I headed back in a Lyft, so I checked my phone only to find half a dozen increasingly frantic texts from my wife sent over the past few hours. I never got a ping on my watch, and nothing buzzed on my phone even though she’s in my favorite contacts and Siri knows she is my spouse. I assured her everything was fine but I was annoyed she got hours of radio silence from me, thanks to DND settings on my phone that quit sending alerts promptly at 10pm.
Another data point. At the end of most days, I spend an hour or so watching TV on the couch, and it frequently overlaps with 10pm, then I go to bed right after. Sometimes when I wake up, I find out I missed 2-3 messages from coworkers or friends that were muted by DND. I was fully awake, watching TV on a couch, but it happened to cross that 10pm threshold, so I never knew about them until morning when DND ended.
DND is a great feature and vital to my phone. In the early days of iPhones, too many friends on the east coast woke me up with 5am texts without thinking about our respective time zones. And with junk phone calls rampant these days, I wouldn’t dare turn off DND again.
But what exactly is DND protecting by walling off 10pm-7am for me? And why isn’t it any smarter? Is that time period really so sacred a phone can’t make better decisions about when to still notify me of an alert? Especially when it’s an outlier of some sort? Does DND have to be all-or-nothing? Can I carve out one or two apps that let alerts through, ignoring DND?
When I was in that Washington DC bar chatting with a pal, my phone’s location could have known I wasn’t at home, and I wasn’t at my hotel, and that I was fully awake and wouldn’t be disturbed by a notification. When I’m on the couch after 10pm, I wish my phone could realize it’s being periodically picked up and used and might be just fine ignoring DND settings while I’m still up.
I don’t know what the solution is, but I really wish DND mode only kicked in when I was in bed. I know it’s not easy for a phone to realize which room in a house it’s located in, but I would be willing to setup iPhone beacons or something to let my phone know when I was in my bedroom. With a combo of accelerometer and GPS data, my phone should be able to figure out when I’m outside my house and still moving my phone around after 10pm and not actually asleep.
I suppose I should just shift my default DND settings to a later hour when I’m more likely asleep, but I wish our smartphones could be a little smarter.
I just read Mike Davidson’s great post on remote work advice after a year of it at Invision. I realized I’ve been remote for four and a half years at Slack and before that I ran my own company from my home office and before that I worked remotely as well. Since I moved to Oregon in 2003, I haven’t worked in a traditional office and I wanted to share the things I’ve learned.
A dedicated space is vital
Themost important thing that made this a stable, reliable, and workable option in my life was getting a dedicated room in my house set aside for work. Having a home office with a door that cut me off (mostly) from whatever else was going on in the house was key to making it all work.
I freelanced for years in San Francisco from a desk in the center of a tiny apartment and my work was inconsistent. It was always a challenge to concentrate and get into a flow with distractions everywhere. Later in Oregon, I had a larger apartment with my own loft space dedicated to my desk, but it was still open to the rest of the apartment’s various noises and continued to derail me.
When I moved into a new house in 2005 that had a dedicated home office with a door (just like any other bedroom, but with no closet), everything changed. Now I had a place to work, even if my commute was just down some stairs. I could shut the door and have a quiet space, even when I had a toddler in the house early on. The door is mostly glass, but my family knows if it’s closed completely that I’m in a meeting. Having a glass door was a good middle-ground between total isolation and still knowing what’s going on in the house, so if something urgent was happening I could see it and help out.
Simply put, having a dedicated space lets you do more concentrated work, take video meetings in peace and quiet, and also helps separate your work from your home life when you have a room as a work-only space.
Coworking spaces are ok, but far from perfect
I want to mention coworking desks because it’s not a bad solution for remote employees. You get a work space that isn’t in your home that you can commute to, you can interact with others, and you still get your work done. After trying out a few different options, I found that even though coworking spaces were slightly cheaper than trying to get your own small office, it wasn’t drastically cheaper. Where I live, a very small office might run $400-500/mo while a coworking desk is closer to $250-300/mo.
Coworking’s biggest problem for me is how you have video meetings in peace and quiet. At a busy coworking space, often people put on headphones in the middle of a large table full of people and just participate in their meetings. I find that behavior obnoxious and of the three coworking spaces I’ve experienced, all had different options for “a quiet room” that ranged from hard-to-get free phone booths to requiring you to book a private space for a meeting (some charging up to $50 per half hour).
Being remote means you’re going to have a lot of video meetings, and this is where a very small private office somewhere for slightly more money can make more sense.
Pro Tip: Your local library is like a coworking space, but free
Most local libraries (ideal ones are college libraries open to the public) have decent wifi, desks, and places to work alone for no cost. Doing video meetings is still an issue, but it’s a great place to work without bothering anyone or being bothered. I tend to listen to white noise (from Noisli) on headphones and I can get more focused work done in a small cubicle study desk than even my own home office. The college library I often work out of even has dedicated quiet rooms I can borrow for occasional meetings when students aren’t using them.
Remember to get out and interact with people
Six months after I started working from home, I was at a cocktail party when someone asked what I do and how things were going and I suddenly clammed up. I stammered out something and later I realized I had become terrible at making small talk by being out of practice on my own.
Ever since, I’d made a point of getting out of the house every day even if it’s wall-to-wall meetings and I built into my budget going out to eat lunch in town most weekdays, just to regularly interact with strangers.
It may sound silly to extroverts, but I warn everyone who starts working remotely for the first time to remember to keep deliberately practicing small talk by interacting with strangers because it’s way too easy to fall into a hermit lifestyle in your own space.
Video is important and worth taking seriously
Video conferencing has been awful for 25 years but in the last few years Zoom has really transformed video for meetings by just being reliable and smooth and is a killer tool I use many times a week. Zoom is now my lifeline to colleagues and for something that important, take it more seriously than using the default camera that came with your laptop.
Have a clean, clear room as people may obsess about what’s behind you
Place your desk in your home office so your background has very little clutter. Be careful of windows since it can throw off your camera’s exposure and make you look weird when backlit.
Find a webcam with the widest possible angle camera lens
In modern offices you’ll often be shown in a room on a 65″ TV monitor and it wasn’t until I was visiting an office and I was in a meeting with someone else working remotely when I realized just how HUGE the remote person’s head was when they’re the only one on video.
Zoom’s office video cameras are extremely wide-angle so you can fit a whole room in, and you’ll want to shoot for your head taking up less than 50% of the frame, and a wide-angle lens is key in your home office as well. An old GoPro can make a great super wide-angle webcam, but it’s kinda tricky to setup. My favorite nearly-as-wide 4K webcam with an easy setup is the Logitech Brio. It’s plug and play on a Mac and it’s less than $200. You’ll get better color and lighting in video than a default laptop camera, and going wide-angle also means your head won’t be 4 feet tall on a monitor in the main office, since there will be more of your surroundings in the shot.
Light yourself
Another pro tip: put a Seasonal Affective Disorder light on your desk, next to your monitor but aimed at you will brighten your face up considerably. Trust me, you’ll look much better with some light on you (and maybe by accident in the winter you’ll feel better—who knows).
Apple AirPods, 1000% percent
Apple AirPods are the best simple headphone/mic combo that works great with Macs and Zoom. Your ears won’t sweat or overheat like over-the-ear headphones and the newest ones can run for 2-3 hours between charges. They’re so small they barely show up on video and without wires to trip you up, you can move around as needed during a meeting. They’re pretty much perfect for video conferencing, even if you think they look silly (and yeah, they’re a tad expensive).
Remote is better for some roles, unfortunately
Mike mentioned this in his post, but I would agree with him that today, remote jobs tend to favor more senior, specialized positions where it’s easy for someone with lots of experience to take on a self-directed role. My current one is ideal for remote work, where as a senior writer with 20+ years of experience I can go off to write by myself for hours, and it doesn’t really matter where I am doing the work. Other writers on my team tend to do the same, working frequently from home or in the office library—wherever they do their best work—and it’s rarely at their office desk.
For now, it’s likely harder for junior employees in new roles to have a great experience while working remote at most companies, but I hope it’s changing as remotes roles become more accepted and companies implement it in a thoughtful manner. In 5-10 years this should be much more accessible to junior positions but it may be a bit more of a challenge finding jobs that support you remotely for now.
It sucks being the odd one out
I work for a big company with offices around the globe so whenever we have cross-functional meetings, having 3-4 people in various locations over video conference is the norm, and those are the easiest meetings to feel equal with your colleagues. On smaller projects and in smaller teams, I’m often the only person not in the main office and those are tougher. I don’t know why but it gets WAY easier if there’s at least one more person on video with a larger team in the main office. Just something to keep in mind—when you’re the only remote person on a team, you’ll have to do extra work to feel like you’re on equal footing with your office coworkers.
A good Slack team makes it all possible (but only if it’s good)
I’m biased of course (I work at Slack), but a Slack-first company where everyone communicates in Slack and tracks projects in Slack and does standup meetings in Slack makes being remote as close as humanly possible to being in the office. The first time I visited Slack’s early SF office, I couldn’t believe how quiet it was, since everyone was “talking” in Slack instead of over their desks. It made it easy to work from home, since I knew I wasn’t missing much aside from hallway rumors, as everything else took place in Slack.
It does require discipline in how your company uses Slack. It’s good to have a bit of water-cooler chat in #random, but also have a team channel with your immediate colleagues where you check in with each other every morning. For distributed teams, doing work in project-focused channels is a great way to coordinate everyone’s efforts. It also helps to have a culture where asynchronous communication is OK. Not every Slack conversation I have with others has the expectation they’ll answer me immediately. In fact, in my own team of writers, we tend to chatter away in Slack the first hour of our work day, then it slows to a trickle until the end of the day with people checking in and updating everyone on their work before they head home. There are times where I get 3-4 hours in the middle of the day without a single ping from Slack, and it’s only because everyone is conscientious of how and when they choose to alert others. It takes a lot of discipline and practice and people that are thoughtful about how they work together.
Touching base with the mothership helps a lot
I know a lot of remote-first companies do giant company trips where everyone meets face-to-face and they plan their work ahead together in person, and some companies do that once a year and some do it twice a year. Over the past few years, I’ve found an ideal cadence for me is going down to San Francisco every 1-2 months for a couple days of meetings. It’s only an hour-long flight for me, but I find if I haven’t been down to SF in 3 or 4 months, I start to feel a bit out of touch with my team. I tend to pack my days in the office with meetings with people from all over the company and we typically plan the next few months of work. I find the best type of work in person is brainstorm sessions where the ideas come fast and loose. You can still do those meetings as a video chat, but they just work better when everyone is in the same room riffing off each other.
Work/home balance is an obvious problem
One of the thorniest issues working from home is learning to separate your work hours from your home hours. At an office, the change of location and scenery makes it obvious. At home, I feel weird taking a whole hour to get lunch. I tend to check in on things at night, and sometimes I start my workdays early. Studies show remote workers tend to work 10-20% more from home because it’s so easy to lose track of your time.
It took years of working way too much from home and having trouble shutting down from work mode to realize I do my best work when I give myself boundaries. Maybe it’s don’t start work until 9am or walk out of your home office every day at 6pm and don’t return until the next morning. It might be no laptops or phones after dinner. Whatever system you devise, figure out your guardrails to protect your off-hours. When I ran my own company I didn’t have an unplugged weekend for over a decade and it was awful for me and all the relationships around me. These days, I relish my time off and the more I wall off personal time from my work hours, the more diligently I can work during the day.
Don’t forget to move around
Another obvious one is you need to build exercise into any remote work arrangement. When you’re not commuting and you’re in your own place you’re going to walk much less. About a decade ago I started going to a gym with a trainer waiting for me twice a week in early mornings. We mostly do core and flexibility work, and it keeps me from getting injured whenever I go out and do physical things like cycling, running, or kayaking. Without a trainer, I couldn’t motivate myself to do this regularly, so that part is key to make it stick for me.
Outside of gym days, I also try to do before or after work exercise, and this year it’s been early morning runs and weekend cycling, and during summer months I try to ride my bike around town as much as possible.
The benefits of remote work can’t be ignored. You get to live where you want and support your family without having to spend a lot of time away from them commuting to an office. On the flip side, the company gets the best possible person for the job and it’s probably cheaper for them in the long run, but every company is different in how they support remote employees. Depending on the role and the company, it can be a challenge to feel connected and part of the greater team and takes constant upkeep. It’s been a great experience for me personally, and I hope it becomes the norm for a lot more people and companies in the future.
These days, pretty much every bar or restaurant with outdoor seating has some string lights set up for mood lighting, and though I’ve always liked the look of them, in the past they’ve tended to be kinda expensive for a long string of them. But with cheap LEDs becoming increasingly prevalent, they’re getting cheaper and cheaper.
I recently picked up a 100-foot long string of lights on Amazon for $57 and they’ve really transformed my backyard. You never know what you’re gonna get when you buy something cheap but so far they work great, plus they shipped with 4-5 extra bulbs that came in handy when I accidentally broke one of the hundred lights.
For warm nights in Summer, we’ve now got our backyard deck lit up as well as a gravel path to a second deck at the end of the yard after stringing the lights among the rafters then through the trees.
Yeah that hummingbird looks nice but he terrorizes the smaller ones. Total dick.
I have jealousy for friends that have a nemesis who is some kind of bird. And it’s usually not a single bird, but more often an entire species.
When I hear phrases like these from friends it’s a reminder that my priorities are somewhat out of whack.
I wish I had a bird nemesis!
I wish I watched my backyard garden enough that I not only noticed the birds, but could build a hierarchical list of species ranked by relative worth of bird, identifying the one I should hate.
For no reason, a list of things I’ve done in California since being born there in 1972:
Stood atop Mt. Whitney, the highest point in the lower 48 states
Climbed Half Dome too which has cables as handrails on the top and it’s terrifying to climb down, climbed Lassen Peak, climbed Mt San Jacinto many times, made it about 3/4 up Mt. Shasta before sliding down, climbed Mt Baldy in the summer, and Mt. San Gorgonio
Swam in Lake Tahoe
Hiked the Lost Coast hours north of SF where the fog is so thick it sits on tops of giant trees where it condenses and falls to the ground so it basically rains 24/7 all year round
Partied in San Bernardino
Attended Mule Days in Bishop many years in a row
Stayed at Harris Ranch, a hotel inside of a cattle lot in the central valley where it was well over 110ºF each day while smelling like a cow’s intestines
Cruised the main drag in Palm Springs in a lowered mini truck (my truck—sorry)
Stood at the base of the Golden Gate bridge while holding a laptop like a pizza for a NYT photographer
Hiked the Anza-Borrego desert
High school ditch day entailed going to Raging Waters in San Dimas where we remembered to be excellent to each other
Dug 6 foot deep pits for soil samples way outside of Yreka near the northern border while cows wandered around us 50 miles from nowhere on BLM land
Rode my bike down to the California/Oregon border on the coast
Backpacked at Joshua Tree and hiked miles to an oasis that we had to find and pump water out of because we’d run out
Rode out the 1994 Northridge earthquake on the 21st floor of a hotel at Universal Studios, which caused all the glass on the building to shatter, and because I ran out of the hotel barefoot, I had to live out a Die Hard fantasy I never wanted to actually experience
Opened my sunroof so I could smell the orange blossoms whenever I drove through the orange tree orchards north of Riverside every Spring
Proposed on top of Mt. Tamalpais
Whale watched out of Long Beach (and saw lots of whales)
Ran the Death Valley half marathon but got on the wrong bus to the start and ended up running 20 miles through abandoned mines down to the finish line
Camped in Big Sur
Watched 1992 Bill Clinton on the campaign trail drive into a private fundraiser in a Beverly Hills home while standing on the curb out front with Robert Downey Jr.
Did aquatic and sediment chemistry research on Lake Elsinore, the only natural lake in all of Southern California (every other one is man-made, all of them) where I also learned to water ski as a teen
Raced bikes at Candlestick park before they tore it down
Met Huell Howser at a chili cook-off in El Toro
Got a poster signed by Neil Finn backstage at a Crowded House show in Hollywood
As a kid my dad drove us all up to Half Moon Bay then asked where the giant rock was and was told by a state park ranger that we were looking for Morro Bay with its rock about 4 hours south
Scuba dived in Laguna
Ran the LA Marathon and vowed never to run another marathon ever again because even after years on cross country teams and numerous 5k and 10k and half marathon races it was just too much running for one day
Went tide-pooling in La Jolla many times
Watched the sun rise at Mono Lake
Got a concussion bailing out on a BMX jump in Huntington Beach
As I looked out of the back window of a Lyft as I crossed the Potomac, it was the first time in my entire life that I got to see Washington DC in person.
I immediately laughed.
So much marble. So much pomp and circumstance. A city carved from stone standing as a beacon made to look like the Greeks designed it over two thousand years ago?
It was all a bit nonsensical at first glance.
What first popped in my mind was Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion. It looked almost fake, like a movie set.
Everything in marble, designed to last for thousands of years, looking like it was always there, but largely built when the country had barely formed.
And where did they get the money? Could you imagine today if a developing country was in a prolonged war, then won it unexpectedly, and proceeded to build an opulent capital city out of the finest materials before they’d barely developed their first laws or established their banking system?
Ooooooh right. Free labor is how they did it. Funny I never heard this in my history classes growing up.
The National Museum of African American History and Culture was incredible. You have to reserve tickets online at 6AM to get in the same day but it’s a really great set of exhibits in a beautiful building.
The museum’s basement begins with a story I’ve never heard examined before, the prehistory of American slavery, from the 1400-1600s and how Europeans gradually built the slave trade.
The rest of the exhibits didn’t go as hard as the Whitney Museum did, but I walked with an afternoon tour and it covered the highlights of how gruesome slavery was and how much money it made and how it continues in many ways today.
The first few floors are pretty heavy, so it was good to see the upper levels of the museum celebrate black culture in many different facets.
When you leave the African American museum and you head to the National Gallery of Art next door, there’s a bunch of shaker furniture on display but after you’ve left a heavy exhibit about slavery, it’s kinda difficult to muster up appreciation for silly rich people stuff like fancy ass chairs.
By the way, the weekend we were in DC, there was a 100,000 strong motorcycle rally for “freedom” and you’d see old guys in leather vests walking around literally everywhere, but I never saw any of them at the MLK memorial or at the NMAAHC. I wonder why…
The Metro subway in DC was incredible. We happened to have a station right next to our hotel and getting all over the city was fast and easy. Every time we arrived at a station a train was no more than 4 minutes away. The only subway I’ve ever used that was this reliable was the London Underground. I’ve never experienced an American subway system that was so quick, easy, air conditioned, and beautiful. Also? I’ve NEVER been on a subway before that told you which side doors would open just as you approached each station. It was so human and so handy.
It’s a gorgeous subway from end to end, and it was really impressive and yet another reason why it reminded me of a foreign country’s system. I’ve never seen anything like this in America before.
The many memorials were incredible across the board, but I think the public doesn’t quite understand them when they’re first built and gets mired in criticism about where they were placed and how they might look, but that all goes away after they’ve been around for a couple decades. I remember controversies around several of them when they debuted but they’re revered now and I have no doubt the new MLK one will fall into the pantheon of celebrated works on the mall.
I got to visit the White House and it was a really weird experience. First off, you’ve got to find the secret gate entrance for visitors, then you have to wait in a long line for multiple levels of security screening. It was clear about half the people there were reluctantly visiting like me while half were definitely fans of Trump and happy to be there.
It was a trip to look at the buildings and know you’ve seen those same places in breaking news before. Oh that’s where he did the weird handshake with the French guy. Oh that’s where he did the stupid burgers for college football players. Oh, that’s where Obama would do the state of the union.
It was weird to be there during a large protest and be on the other side of the gates for it. I was glad to get away from there as fast as possible.
Also, I bet he hates seeing this prominent Bill Clinton portrait every day.
The portrait gallery was amazing.
I remember a wave of sadness hit me after seeing the Barack Obama portrait. It’s so beautiful and as bright and brilliant of a painting as the man is, and to think that he presided over Washington for eight years and now the shitshow clown we currently have gets to follow him—it was just a bit depressing to think we went from the best to worst so quickly.
The Air and Space museum kinda sucked because they’re going through such a large renovation, so it felt like only about half of the collection was on display with lots of boarded up rooms and hallways due to construction. I was happy to be reminded that the Wright Brothers were not only bike shop owners but also made a few bikes and they had one on display that would look at home at any current National Handmade Bike Show.
A highlight of my whole trip was getting a personal two hour tour of the Holocaust museum and the exhibit about how America reacted to Hitler, the war, and the holocaust from the creator of the exhibit. We got to learn why each display was selected and why it was there and how it related to the larger story along with the transitions between exhibits. Of course, viewing it today, it was easy to make parallels to current news, but the exhibit was created in 2014 and connecting the japanese internment camps to the ones you see today in El Paso, or the rhetoric found in headlines and speeches of Hitler that mimic a lot of the ways we talk about immigration in 2019 was entirely left to the viewer.
I so quickly got used to every museum being free. I remember going to London and being amazed that museums didn’t charge admission, but once you’re in DC and enjoying museum after museum after museum and there’s no charge for it, it just makes sense. You’ll never think of a completely different way to look at something until you get to experience it, and then it seems bananas we don’t do it everywhere. Why not use an endowment or sponsor or any way you can to keep a museum free and open to the public for all to enjoy and be educated? After a week of free museums, it’s going to feel weird to pay for a ticket at one in the future in other cities.
Food was expensive as fuck! Our group of three ate at a variety of places, from cheap pizza/italian to sidewalk cafes to fancy seafood joints. The bill for lunch or dinner at just OK places was frequently $60-70 with no alcohol. One lunch we splurged and it ended up costing $110 for fairly decent seafood but not what I’d expect for the money. This was all in the central district, so I’m sure it’s a bit of a tourist tax going on.
An outlier was going to an Eritrean/Ethiopian restaurant, buying a variety platter bigger than our table, buying a beer, and having the entire bill be only $22. I tipped $10 because they deserved it and it was frankly too cheap for such incredible food.
I’ve always wanted to visit DC and before a month ago, I never had the chance.
Actually, there was one chance where my fourth grade class all got to go to DC and I asked my parents but they didn’t have the money to cover it so I sat and read books at the school library for a week while my classmates enjoyed seeing government in the flesh. I resented my parents for years after for denying me this experience, but I never had the chance in all my travels as an adult to check out DC.
So it was great to finally see where laws are made and where people work in government and those kooky stone buildings that hold it all in.
What an utterly ridiculous but unforgettable place.
