Les Bonnes Choses

So as you may have noticed, Scrabulous has been pulled, when I was but seven tiles from finishing a tied game. Now I'll never have closure.

In other news, I'm back from Washington, where I got basically no sleep in the $2000/night (that's not a typo) room I shared with Ken. Ken snores. He also requests 7:45 am wakeup calls that don't actually wake him up, which is understandable because people were in our room until 1, then 2 then 3 am on successive nights. The wakeup calls, however, were effective at waking me up, as I would lay there thinking, "Is he going to get up? He said he really needed to make the 8:15 talks...Damn! Now I can't sleep!". Remarkably, I didn't feel really crappy during my stay, and I seem to have reset my internal clock so that I am tired by 10 pm because I'm not yet caught up. So to recap: free stay at an expensive hotel, a chance to do some sightseeing, and a recalibration of my sleep cycle. I'll call that a big win, all-around. Now I just have to wait and find out whether the whole reason for my traveling down to D.C. paid off.

Oh, and when you're traveling in a Robert Q shuttlebus, please have the good sense to turn off (or at least turn down) your bloody Blackberry. I couldn't have been the only one in that small van who was irritated with 20 minutes of near constant custom alert tones at 80 dB.

Final story for the day: yesterday I made my way to White Oaks Mall where Rebecca would pick me up on the way to sushi with Amy, Aneta, Jeff, Daniel, Deanna, Miranda, Graeme, K-Max, and someone else whose name escapes me because I've only met her once before. En route, the bus, driven by a really abrasive female driver who sometimes drives the Windermere bus I take most days, stopped to let on a woman with a stroller. A bumblebee also got on at that stop. This was apparently worrisome to enough people that the bus driver wouldn't proceed until the bee was off the bus. So we sat there at the stop for a few minutes. As they can't comprehend the concept of windows, flying insects are notoriously bad at navigating out of interior spaces, and I saw the thing fly out of the side door twice only to immediately fly back in and bump along the windows while the rest of the bus cringed as it swooped around them. Fortunately, I have never been stung by a bee, so I'm not particularly afraid of them and instead think of them as industrious little guys, which was helpful in this situation. Seeing it fumble around the side door again, I got up and sort of pushed it out of the door, letting it bounce off my hand as it flew around. I was listening to my mp3 player at the time, so I was not able to hear the applause and exclamations of "my hero!" that certainly followed. I think the main point of this story isn't that I'm awesome (though I clearly am), but rather, that bumblebees make good terrorists, and can effectively take a city bus hostage.