Category: fun
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Photography Class – Franciscan Monastery
A lovely friend of mine gave me as a birthday gift a photography class put on by a company called the School of Creative Photography (www.schoolofcreativephotography.com). We spent several hours at a Franciscan monastery in northeast Washington, DC taking photos of the monastery and the surrounding grounds (who knew there was a Franciscan monastery in…
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Inn at Little Washington birthday dinner
We had my birthday dinner at the Inn at Little Washington a couple of weeks ago. The Inn was kind enough to do a somewhat individualized menu for us, and I feel inclined to gloat about the meal, which was fabulous, even by the Inn’s usual impeccable standards. We started off, of course, with truffle…
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Awesome Con 2014
Because Jim and I are awesome parents, we took the kids to Awesome Con at the Washington Convention Center on Sunday, April 20. This was an interesting sociological event. Awesome Con is unlike Star Trek conventions, which are dedicated to one show (more or less) and are totally obsessed by that one narrative (not that…
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Children’s Ball 2014
The Children’s Ball, a fundraiser to benefit the Children’s National Medical Center, was held on Friday, April 11 at the Ritz-Carlton in Washington, DC. The Ball was co-chaired by Yousef and Abeer Al-Otaiba (the UAE Ambassador and his wife) and Amy and Bret Baier. There were over 900 people in attendance with a lengthy waitlist…
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Spring Break in the United Arab Emirates
The UAE might come across as a strange choice for a spring break destination, but we chose it for several reasons. First, it’s a warm climate destination and after the winter we’ve had, none of us had any desire to go somewhere cold. Second, we thought it would be a good experience for the kids. …
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A Palo Alto Wedding
I took our 12 year old son to Palo Alto for a cousin’s wedding on March 15. We arrived in Palo Alto late Friday night (which was made even later with a request for a late-night snack of black truffle French fries). Once we finally got up on Saturday, we made the obligatory brain-washing visit…
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Mamma Mia!
We took the kids to see Mamma Mia! (the musical) a couple of weeks ago at the National Theatre in Washington, DC. It was a fun production with a very good cast, all of whom looked like they were having a lot of fun. The lead character (the mother), in particular, had a lovely voice,…
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Chef Mavro
In our latest visit to Honolulu, we decided to dine at Chef Mavro, a restaurant we had dined at several years ago but had not revisited since. The first time we ate there, it was a Valentine’s Day fixed menu, and we thought the dinner was good but not great. However, we revised our opinion…
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Snow Day Activities
While the MLK long weekend gave us sunny and even warm (relatively speaking) weather, Tuesday brought us 6 inches of snow. For hardy Midwesterners and New Englanders, this amount might be a mere blip on the winter radar. However, for the mid-Atlantic and for DC in particular, it’s enough to shut down the federal government…
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Movie review: The Desolation of Smaug (Hobbit II)
While I’m a huge J.R.R. Tolkien fan, “The Hobbit” has always been my least favorite of his Lord of the Ring series of books. And I simply could not fathom how anyone could make three movies out of such a short book. I liked but didn’t love the first Hobbit movie (you can read that…