So, I warned her that if she had any specific sights or mvsevms that she wanted to see then she needed to make sure that I didn't suck her into my slack vortex (Sunday night's term coinage was "slack horizon"), and either she didn't take me seriously or the mvsevms weren't all that important.

Thing one: we were two hours late Sunday night meeting with Koog, and approximately as late getting to Columbia but we didn't actually miss any of the show.

Thing two: out of 44 available hours of the weekend, only one was spent at a mvsevm.

Tino often comments that I work too hard or too much. I don't really have much of a reply to that statement, 'cept that I probably don't work too much, really. Like my father, I don't have varying qualities of working. I'm either working too hard or I'm not working. The flip side of this is that my unproductive time is really unproductive.

I do believe that a splendid time was had by all though. Saturday night I ended up with a dozen (a dozen!) people in my apartment, and I made pizzas on the pizza stone I got a few years ago. I haven't really cooked for people the two years I've lived in the DC area. This isn't terribly surprising, as most of my friends here are vegematarians and I don't know my way around the vegetable end of the food spectrum well enough (I can't stand eggplant, never really got into squash, and half of the vegematarians hate mushrooms) to accomodate them, so I haven't tried.

Pizza's pretty easy to do in crowd-pleasing fashion though, so it worked well. My one complaint was that the pizzas ended up taking longer than I remembered them taking (14 minutes each) which meant that the whole thing was strung out over a longer period than I expected (the cooking, not the party). I spent a good portion of the first half of the party in the kitchen while the guests were in the living room, but that's par for the course.

The best idea I had was to go ahead and make the dough on Friday night and stick the pizza-size balls of dough in the fridge covered with damp kitchen towels (restaurant experience pays off occasionally). The downside of that was I was guessing how many people would really show up (if I hadn't guessed high there would have been trouble) and then making an appropriate amount of dough. Kneading triple the amount of dough by hand is also more than a little tiring.

Saturday after Em and Dave got here we got lunch in Adams Morgan (mmm ... mango margaritas), then walked to Dupont, where Em bought some CDs and I bought a rolling pin (later to come in handy) and a mortar and pestle (which I didn't use to make pesto after all, but now I have one). As Em's still hobbled we got a cab back to the house and they napped while I started the sauce. Since there wasn't any dough in the way, it was easy to get the sauce started and have all the dishes clean and put away so there was room on the counter for the actual prep. Oh, and the fresh tomatoes instead of canned were a good decision.

Best pizza of the night:

Roll out dough and rub with olive oil (I started out stretching the dough by hand, but it was a little less elastic than it needed to be for that to work well and I didn't have the patience to fight it)
Sprinkle corn meal on paddle; transfer dough to paddle
Spread a layer of pesto on dough
Sprinkle generous quantity of grated mozzarella cheese
Add: fresh spinach, sliced kalamata olives, chopped sun-dried tomatoes, thinly sliced red onion
Bake on a preheated stone in a 450-500 degree oven for 15-20 minutes

To that if you feel like going absolutely bonkers you may also add sliced fresh mushrooms, roasted pine nuts, crumbled feta cheese, or artichoke hearts, but it's quite good as listed.

Five bottles of wine and maybe a dozen beers were consumed. Nobody seemed to have any problems with the cats. Nothing was broken. Emily inspired me with some of her pictures from Paris, and I had to go grab my Paris photos (which took some looking and finding) and we stayed up until almost 3am talking.

Sunday saw us sleeping in, eating around one, and being late as mentioned earlier. In digging around the box of photos I had come across my Berlin pictures, so Sunday I ended up sharing those as well. I had numbered and packed up four rolls worth of prints and sent them to my parents while I was in Germany, and had used the numbers to provide annotations. Yesterday reading this stuff I was terribly amused. It's very lucky that I captioned all of them that way though, because without the notes I had no idea what some of those things were anymore. Oops. Maybe I'll get around to scanning some of the better ones eventually.

Phish were fun, the glowsticks were entertaining, the parking lot scene is amusing (I almost bought a t-shirt of the infamous picture of Nixon and Elvis in the Oval Office, retouched to have Elvis be one of the Phish guys, but I thought the tour dates on the back detracted from the shirt), Amanda made somebody's day by giving them her spare ticket (she'd bought four and we only used three), and there were several other Phish concert attendees at Bob and Edith's at the same time we were (who else would be that hungry at 2am Sunday/Monday?).

Oh, and note to Koog: isn't it obvious enough by now what the consequences would be, when I can get to the point of doing a Yoda voice with a Kinder Surprise toy unaided? There are secrets man is not meant to know, and I think what I'd be like stoned is on that list.

Today we were once again slow to rise. I made coffee and realized as I was putting the weekend's third load of dishes in the dishwasher that I'd cooked 18 person-meals in 48 hours. That's almost a month's worth of cooking when measured against my usual habits. Eventually we left the house, dropped Amanda's car off at her place (I'd driven it last night and dropped Amanda off at home before coming here), and got the aforementioned hour at the National Gallery. I've lived here two years and I'd never been to the East Wing.

Dave and I pondered over why they'd found it necessary to secure the ends of the big Calder mobile into a fixed position, and I concluded it was because of the temporary partitions they had installed on the upper level. Just a guess though. I was then sucked in by the 20th Century Art galleries, where I pondered over my affection for Warhol (is it wrong that I think he's a genius?), was fascinated by several things by people I'd never heard of, was gleeful at the Jasper Johns pieces they had ("Ooo! An actual Savarin can!"), was once again surprised and impressed by how talented Lichtenstein actually was, and then was totally entranced by the Calder room. The Modigliani and Matisse pieces in the little galleries leading to the upper observation area for the Calder room were just extra added bonuses.

I don't think I've been as instantly and viscerally moved to joy as I was in the Calder room since seeing Matisse's Apollo at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm. I often find that the art I like best is the stuff where the artist explores his or her own virtuosity, the stuff where I can imagine him or her thinking, "look what I can do!" I also like the stuff where that's turned on its head, hence the love for Warhol. But most of the art that grabs me is the stuff that is more appreciated than enjoyed.

Not so with Matisse, or, apparently, Calder. Matisse may have indeed been thinking, "look what I can do!" but what he could do better than anybody else was portray joy itself. When I came upon Apollo in Stockholm, it brought a light to my eyes and warmth to my heart. It's about three meters square, and the curators of the museum have thoughtfully placed a bench in front of it, where you can sit and soak it in. I returned to it twice during my visit. I had that same feeling of wonder in the Calder room this afternoon. It's not very often that the artists I like make things because they're beautiful, so I'm always (pleasantly) surprised to find beauty (a fish sculpture made of broken glass) and not just significance (Lichtenstein interpreting cubism or doing five views of Rouen Cathedral with Ben-Day dots; Green Marilyn) in what I'm looking at.

All that from a mere hour at the mvsevm.

(19 sep)