On a more exciting note… my hometown team, the Portland Trail Blazers, are into the NBA playoffs.  As a bit of a sports girl, I have always been a Blazers fan, but never quite like this season.  The team is just so incredibly exciting to watch and there isn’t a single member of the team who I dislike (though admittedly I have my moments of frustration with a few of them).  So after watching a majority of the games this season, all the while trying to not get my hopes up too much, my boys “grew up” faster than expected and found themselves in the the 1st round of the playoffs.  The city of Portland is going a bit Blazer crazy and I am doing my part in DC.  It’s been a rough round so far though.  The Rockets are a tough matchup for the Blazers, the team is experiencing their first trip to the playoffs and we’re not getting too much help from the refs. To recap the series so far:

Game 1: in Portland. Lost to the Rockets by 27 points. I watched this game at home by myself and spent the first half yelling and swearing (to the point where I closed my porch door because I was afraid I maybe was scaring the neighbors). By the 3rd quarter I was just a bit emotionally drained and was angry at how awful the game was playing out.  I had spent the whole week reading everything online that I could find about the Blazers and I couldn’t tell you the last time I had been so excited about something. So the loss of that magnitude was a bit of a shock to the system.  I had to give myself the entire next day off from reading anything online about the Blazers.  Luckily it was 3 days until the next game and I, and more importantly, the team, had time to accept the loss and move on.

Game 2: in Portland. Beat the Rockets by 4 points. I watched this game with a bunch of high school friends who now live in DC who are all crazy Blazers fans.  Wore what I decided was going to be a lucky pair of red underwear.  Incredibly nerve wracking game. Probably took 3 years off my life.  But we pulled it off, despite lots of foul trouble. I took it upon myself to eat a ridiculous number of red and brown M&Ms (which my friend had separated from the other colors during a conference call he had been on earlier in the day!) noting that they seemed to play well while I was eating them.  By the time the game ended I thought I might get sick but I was ready to do whatever it took to help the team out!

Game 3 (earlier tonight): in Houston. Blazers lost by 3 points.  Also watched with my high school friends.  Wore my same and now lucky (and washed!!) red underwear. While the first loss was an angry loss, this was more of a sad one.  The Blazers shouldn’t have made so many jump shots, officiating was terrible, Roy had a quiet game. Yet they managed to keep it pretty close throughout and at the end pulled it within reach. Then Roy fouled out and the Blazers did some horrible clock management and while a slew of late threes made things exciting, Blake made an awful decision to shoot a rushed 3 pointer when he should have taken his time a bit more and basically threw hope of winning the game out the window. Basically while expectations were that they wouldn’t win this game, it was totally within reach. Ate many more red and brown M&Ms to help out the boys but alas, it wasn’t enough tonight. I clearly need to rethink my red underwear and M&Ms strategy.

So now onto game 4 on Sunday.

Go Blazers!!!

Obsessed.

Most every bar has specials and all of my friends talk about meeting for happy hour.  While in theory I like the idea of happy hour, I don’t like how around here it comes at the expense of going out in the evening.  In NYC, I occasionally did happy hour after work but for the most part it ended up being in a pain in the ass to plan since nobody knew what their hours were going to be on any given day.  We would all agree to a day a week in advance and then inevitably on the day of happy hour, friends would get stuck at work at the last minute or not be able to make it until 8pm.  So our happy hours tended to miss the actual time when bars had specials.

Most of the time, we would just skip attempting happy hour, and go out later on at night.  I can see how people would rather just go out directly after work and then have the rest of their nights to relax.  I personally like an occasional happy hour, but for the most part I would prefer to go out later instead.  Gives me time to go home and change and maybe throw in a run, eat dinner on my own, perhaps watch my shows and then go out in the neighborhood.  And being somebody who stays up late and didn’t have to be at work early, this worked out perfectly.

This DC happy hour obsession is because everbody around here gets off work at a decent, dependable hour (the concept of of 9:30-5:30 job is so foreign to me!) when they can actually take advantage of cheap drinks plus an overall culture of not going out on weeknights.  Which I think is kind of sad.  I miss going out during the week.  Not necessarily until all hours of the night, but just a few drinks.  But then this prob isn’t a DC vs NYC phenomenon, it’s more of a NYC vs the rest of the US thing.  Sigh I miss NYC.

PS- I’m really trying to not be one of those NYC is amazing and the rest of the world sucks people.  There are just so many simple things that NYC does right that the rest of the world should adopt.  My friends can tell you I hate people who think NYC is perfect and the center of the world and I am apt to get into arguments with people who are born and bred New Yorkers with that view (yet I somehow dated a Brooklyn born, “the rest of the world sucks compared to NYC,” never moving away from the city type for 15 months. Go figure. But that would be part of why that didn’t last.  More on that silly boy later.)  So while as I’m getting used to DC, I’m sure I’ll do plenty of posts about the things I miss about NYC, but there will also be observations on things that are amazing after life in NYC (like long milk expirations and garbage disposals).

This is NOT my view on the world

My story on how I got to DC (the short version)… Grew up in Portland, Oregon…

Portland

Went to Wellesley College…

Severance Green at Wellesley

Studied abroad in Bologna, Italy…

Le due torri in Bologna

Lived in New York City for 4 years, first in the Upper East and then in the East Village…

East Village

And decided it was time for a change (more on that later) and moved to Adams Morgan in Washington DC…

Adams Morgan Metro

So here I am!! Getting used to life in DC.  In search of edible bagels, a good Italian deli and a fun neighborhood bar.