An Epic Reunion

Melissa is spending the weekend with me. This is very exciting for me, especially since she really wants to carpe diem and cram every possible tourist attraction into a 72-hour period.

But it always seems to be the unplanned things that are the best. I was planning on leaving her at the apartment for the day and finally coming to get her around 5:00 like a little latchkey kid, but Melissa would have none of that.

So my only alternative was to take her to work. I kinda sprung that on my boss, but we were really quiet and she just worked on the computer the whole time so he didn't end up caring much.

After an hour, Melissa slipped off into the abyss known as Connecticut Street, at which point she raided the bargain store Filene's Basement with admirable tenacity.

Since it was "Embassy Day" at the program, I headed over to the Indonesian Embassy at 3:00. I would absolutely love to be a foreign diplomat, so this was a highly anticipated visit. Unfortunately, it turned out to be numbingly dull. Try sitting through 15 minutes of tourist promotional videos, which I suspect were totally misleading about the country. Then it was Q & A about the nation. That would have been interesting, but the spokewoman who did the answering gave excruciatingly drawn-out, non-helpful answers to every question. Aaaagh.

We headed to the reception, located at the program headquarters. Thankfully, they were well-stocked with mini-tacos and egg rolls.

My friend Peter and I headed over to the Books-a-Million bookstore, where we found Melissa foraging through travel books and I introduced those two. We talked for awhile -- Melissa and I interrogated, as usual.

Then it was girl time. Melissa and I hit up Cosi's, a chain restaurant that's the stuff of legends... or at least, we'd seen it on the Facebooks of friends who visited DC. Unfortunately, the staff-to-customer ratio was approximately 1:75, and after some serious confusion on the waiters' part, we finally flagged down some help. I never knew a Caesar salad could take 25 minutes to put together, but if anybody could perform that feat, it was Cosi's.

Eventually, they felt so bad about the abysmal service that they started just dumping extra bread on our table. Melissa got the idea of butter in her head, at which point she put on the charm and tried to schmooze the waiter into bringing some. He brought this elaborate plate of bread -- and this mountain of cream cheese. We sent it back and they brought us yet another plate of bread with some sickly looking chunks of butter.

By the time we got out of the restaurant, we had enough bread to feed the 5,000, all on the house. I'd call that a success.

Other highlights of that evening:

- Melissa and I discovering how to creep out pedestrians: get a window seat in a restaurant, pull out a digital camera, and have another person zealously point out people passing by. Surprisingly, a lot of these folks are camera shy.

- Climbing trees in the middle of the night.

- Trying to figure out how to create a viable bed for Melissa from the couch and a pile of sweaters for a pillow.