One Week to Go

It’s like being pregnant. Instead of “When is your due date?” it’s “When do you leave?” Next Thursday, August 10. But Friday is pizza night no matter where we go.

Today CaSt and I did a completely decadent thing. My excuse is: 100 degrees and the air quality is terrible. The kids don’t want to go anywhere because it is too hot–the complaining that starts as soon as we leave the lobby of the hotel is too much to cope with–or so Camille and Stefan tell me. I paid $14 for a taxi to the National Art Museum, which is probably less than I would have paid if we had walked, considering how many Starbucks there are between here and the National Mall. Today the paper confirmed my hunch: Washington DC has more than eleven Starbucks for every 100K people, the most in the country, even Washington State. Camille says we go to Starbucks ten times every four days. But I figure we are going to the last Starbuck-less place on Earth, so it’s okay.

At the National Art Museum we walked through the Rousseau exhibit. They ingeniously have cell phone-like devices with a little symbol for kids to look for, enter in a number and listen to a shpiel about a painting or two in each room. This was great, as somehow they managed to make it interesting to kids, although I suspect Stefan was just interested in the listening device itself. I got to read lables and actually look at the paintings. Camille has all kinds of information about Rousseau now: Did you know he carried a sketch pad with him at all times? I forgot that he painted Carnival Evening and it was a treat just to see that one painting. Stefan wanted to go see any other exhibit that had the listening device, but the museum closed. And I found $110 dollars on the floor of the cafe, beating the record for the time I found a $100 dollar bill in a gas station parking lot. Quite a memorable afternoon.