Post Apartment Therapy Tour Post + Valentine’s Day

Soooooo the sequence of my life can forever be categorized as LBAT and LAAT: Life Before Apartment Therapy, Life After Apartment Therapy.

I have so many new people reading the blog because of our apartment-tour, and will probably retain about 3 of them. Haha life on the internet is so transitory. But to any single human being that’s new around here, I’m glad to have you.

After my enthusiastic blogpost letting my readers know that our home-tour had been featured on Apartment Therapy and to “go seeeee!” it, Maxwell Ryan, the FOUNDER AND CEO of the site, wrote a post about my post about my tour.

Just casually one of Maxwell’s ‘latest posts.’ –

And now I’m writing a post about his post about my post about my tour.

Maxwell’s name is synonymous with the site, to the degree that he does not need a last name. Like Madonna. And Mugatu. If you hear someone uttering the name “Maxwell,” you know they mean Apartment Therapy. Seeing a post he wrote, about my blogpost, and the fact that it spread smiles and belly laughs across the Apartment Therapy headquarters, was probably the single coolest and most surprising thing that’s ever happened to me. My favorite part (other than every word) was the headline: “We feature The Hyperbalist and She Almost Explodes : )” It was so sweet and ACCURATE, because that’s exactly what happened!!! If I’d written my own headline about that post it would have been: “Apartment Therapy features me and I nearly explode; smiley face.” Maxwell, you’re a headline-writer if I ever met one that I haven’t met. There is quite literally nowhere to go from here.

So that happened.

(If you don’t know how the internet works and have missed the last two links to it, read his post here: http://www.apartmenttherapy.com/we-feature-the-hyperbalist-and-she-almost-explodes–184169)

And then Thursday was Valentine’s Day.

Alex and I both took work off and had a little DC Staycation. It started with home-made pancakes that I don’t have a picture of because sometimes I defiantly just decide to NOT photograph what I’m eating to prove that I can still do it.

Then we drove to Roosevelt Island–a teeny ‘lil “island” (please, it’s barely that. Is it surrounded on all sides by water? Yes. But it’s like 1 foot from land. It makes me laugh out loud to refer to it as an island).

So supposedly Roosevelt Island is kind of a secret in DC. Very few people have ever heard of it. I remember my brother used to go there in the evenings on summer nights with his friends and play it up like it was the coolest thing that nobody knew about. And tell me that it was haunted and I think they used to canoe or boat or swim or do something you should definitely never do in the surrounding water. It’s really neat– it’s small enough that you can walk the full circumference, and on one side you see The Kennedy Center, Georgetown Waterfront, etc. They have plaques all over the island that you are hoping tell you really fascinating facts but instead say things like “Marshlands are lands that are formed from marshes.” I’m NOT KIDDING. The most fun we had was running up to each plaque to read more things like, “Mud is often a result of local soil getting flooded.” Literally ridiculous. They were hysterical. We kept being like, “BOOOOOOOOOOORING, tell us that someone died here or that some rich patron of the island was a former alcoholic and buried his collection of maps somewhere on the island.” (Again, “ISLAND” with huge quotation marks).

In the dead-middle of the island is this weird completely-circular clearing with a totally modern cement statue erected to Roosevelt; and benches, etc. You basically just walk around.

And mimic Roosevelt’s stance, obbbbbbbbbviously.

The coolest part was finding out that there used to be a ‘mansion’ on the highest point of the island, where The Mason Family (son of George Mason i.e. George Mason University) used to vacation and spend their summers. All that’s left of the house is a few bricks, which you can actually see and are just kind of scattered about in the area where the house used to stand. It was even more fascinating when we found out John Mason and his wife had TEN children, and thought about ten little 18th century humans running around the grounds of the island in the summers and like, fishing and playing hide-and-go-seek throughout the woods in  bonnets and knee socks. And then we couldn’t stop wanting to know more about the Masons and why the house got torn down and what happened to them. It’s the historian in me, I am ADDICTED to that kinda shit. Let me tell you, the Wikipedia article on the Mason estate did NOT satisfy.

We packed turkey-avocado-sprout-cheddar sandwiches and ate them in the car after taking the footbridge back. Then we drove to Gravelly park to watch the planes take off from Reagan Airport. Between Roosevelt and Reagan we really should have saved our Valentine’s Day itinerary for President’s Day aka today. Seeing the planes take off from Gravelly Park is a very DC thing to do. You kind of can’t live here and leave without doing it. It’s totally TERRIFYING! It makes me never want to fly again. Alex loved it. Every time a plan took off he’d ask to stay for one more and I’d be like IT’S THE SAME THING EVERY TIME DUDE, SAME THING EVERY TIME. Every time it gave me a rumble in my stomach in my heart. Oohh I get shivers just thinking about how close you are to those terrifying machines. My feelings on flying are captured perfectly by Louis CK when he says YOU’RE IN A CHAIR, IN THE SKY. Like….HOW DARE YOU BE SO NONCHALANT ABOUT IT.

After Gravelly, I diverted our car to The Coffee Bar DC. I had read this article on Refinery about its opening, and figured a day off was a good time to check it out for the first time. The owner, Cait, was there (she’s so pretty) and I LOVED LOVED LOVED the vibe. LOVED it. Loved everything about the space, the blackboard behind counter, the mint green espresso machine, the landings by the window, it was very cool. I can’t wait until a friend visits from out of town and I can take them there. I got a hot chocolate that was disturbingly good and had a heart-foam perfect for instagramming, since nobody has ever instagrammed a foam heart before, least of all on Valentine’s Day.

After coffee bar we drove home and snuggled up in bed for 2 hours watching Workaholics and youtube videos, like this one of Kai singing. I’m in love with him. He sounds like Bradley Nowell and he’s clearly insane and I’ve been stalking the internet for any updates on him since his debut video, where when asked if he had a last name, he acted genuinely confused and responded with, “nah brah, I ain’t got nothin.’” He prefers to say that he is “home free” rather than homeless, and my favorite thing he says is, “I can’t call it,” both when it makes sense and doesn’t make sense. Reporters will be like “Kai, what’s next for you?”, and he just says “I can’t call it,” in his super-stoner surfer voice, which in that case makes sense. But then sometimes they’ll say, “Kai how old are you?” and he says “I can’t call it”, which like, sure, I kind of get. How old are any of us, really. I can’t really explain the whole Kai story to you if you don’t know about it, you just have to google it, but he is my favorite human ever. The other Kai highlight, or as I JUST COINED RIGHT NOW BY ACCIDENT, KAI-LIGHT, hahahha,– is when he says “Straight outta dogtown,” when asked where he came from. He’s like….part poser, part cliche, part genius, part legitimately insane, and a clear drug addict. Kai. So hot right now.

After listening to Kai’s dreamy voice, we then drove to Capitol Hill to try Hank’s Oyster Bar. My relationship with Oysters has been one of the more confusing relationships in my life. I’ve never been so vehemently, violently, aggressively, adamantly positive about hating something with the fire of every ounce of hyperbole and enthusiasm my body has; and then… after deciding I had the grace to try them yet again (knowing how much I despised them), finding myself head over heels in love to the point of emotional addiction with financial consequences. I was the kind of person, who, before New Year’s Eve of this year, thought people were sociopaths who liked oysters. It was something I was certain I’d go to the grave with. The feeling of “what the fuck is wrong with you if you enjoy oysters.” It’s a slimy, smelly, fishy-tasting, disgusting, gross, vile, amorphous, gelatinous, alien-like specimen. And I would try them too. Alex, my friends who eat them, would beg me to try them and I WOULD. I gave oysters a shot maybe 8 individual times and every time I was affirmed that I was normal and anyone who eats oysters is mentally ill.

But then on New Years Eve, a handsome spritely gentleman was shucking oysters and something about the evening intoxicated me to their appeal, and I walked RIGHT UP to said shucker and voluntarily said “you know what? Maybe the last 8 attempts at oysters have not solidified my feelings. LET ME TRY WHAT YOU’RE SHUCKING.” And I ate one, and it was pure magic in my mouth, and then ate like 400 more, and then the shucker got tired of shucking and I asked Alex to shuck for me and he doesn’t know how and whined that “it’s really hard to shuck,” (not to mention sort of dangerous?) so then I tried to coerce the shucker into shucking more but he wanted to actually enjoy his party that he was hosting and so I stared into a sink full of unshucked oysters that I could never have because New Year’s Eve at 1 a.m. in the cold at an outdoor sink was not when Alina Gonzalez was going to attempt to shuck an oyster for the first time and so now I wake up wanting oysters for breakfast and lunch and dinner and they’re really fucking expensive. All I ever want are 4 dozen oysters, minimum. I’m an oyster whore. East Coat, West Coast, I’m all up on that shit. I want to bathe in oysters. Mignonette sauce? That shit is my JAMMMMMMMMMMMM. Lemon, mignonette–what world was I living in when oysters weren’t my favorite food of all time? I shudder.

Hank’s Oyster Bar was AWESOME. WE HAD THE BEST TIME. It’s going to be a regular haunt. We sat right at the bar with Gina, who apparently like owns the place and is a mixologist extraordinaire on the DC scene. She’d made a special drink menu for the evening named after famous couples who fight; like Peg and Al Bundy. The Al Bundy was orgasmically good– it had gin, beer, grape juice made from like…vine-ripened grapes straight from Italy and aged in a barrel for 5 years or something ridiculous, citrus, and club soda. I don’t like mixed drinks but I’d have an Al Bundy every day. We had 2 dozen oysters (the horror) and then we went next door to We The Pizza to get pizza since 2 dozen oysters is like eating air. As is 4 dozen oysters. Let’s face it oysters don’t keep anyone full and take half your spending money for a given pay period but it’s fine. We The Pizza and its next-door-neighbor-burger-joint Good Stuff Eatery are two very famous places owned/started by Spike Mendelsohn, who was a Top Chef Star. I think he won. So he was the Top Chef for the show for that given year. As Alex very astutely pointed out while we observed the “Press Wall,” Spike owns no less than 5 different fedoras. In various features from Washington Post to New York Times, bro is rocking a distinctly different Fedora.

See below, in photos I saved to my desktop as “Spike Fedora 1-5″:

And that was our Valentine’s Day!

Short List:

• Roosevelt Island
• Gravelly Park
• The Coffee Bar
• Hank’s Oyster Bar
• We The Pizza

A very DC kinda Valentine’s Day.

Next up…..how we spent our weekend!