Thursday my aunt Zita treated me to a dinner at a cool-looking restaurant called Pazo. They serve tapas and other small dishes. The mushrooms and the ciabatta bread were my favorite. As I waited for Zita, her neighbor Caroline and friend Steve to arrive I had a drink at the bar.

Today Joe and I went to the National Building Museum and saw a documentary on the architect John Lautner (a student of Frank Lloyd Wright) and an exhibit on environmentally "green" homes. It made me want to live in a beautiful house made of concrete and glass in the hills overlooking Los Angeles with cork and bamboo flooring, solar panels, and recycled glass tiling throughout.

Here's what we saw on our walk from the museum to have some lunch and then to the Metro.

McGruff the Crime Dog making an appearance at the National Policeman's Memorial	Interesting architectural styles near Chinatown
A ceremony at the Navy Memorial	It's been a while since we've had masala dosas from the food court at the Old Post Office and they were as big and as delicous as we remembered them
A group on a segway tour of downtown	A lookout on the roof of the White House
He was probably watching these protestors.

I bought a little 1GB jump drive so I can carry data around when necessary.

OK, you're right, I bought it because it is cute but I am sure that someday soon I will find it very useful. I also could not resist the little outfit that has a clasp for easy accessorizing.

Thursday evening I went to my aunt Zita's house to help her install AOL broadband. It should have taken an hour or so but it ended up taking 4 hours. We had to run to Apple store to get the lastest version of Mac OS X and install it. That took about an hour and a half. The rest of the time was dealing with Verizon's crappy install software and annoying technical support. When I finally reached someone who knew Macs it was so much less annoying.

AOL tech support was fairly decent. I talked to a guy in India and he admitted he did not know Macs that well but he obviously had good step by step instructions. As we were finishing the call Zita asked me to find out his name and where he was. His name was Arun and he spelled it for me: A as in apple, R as in rock, U as in unicorn... I found the unicorn part to be quite entertaining so when he said he was in India I told him I might be visiting India at the end of the year. He invited me to come visit hime in Bangalore and told me how many kilometers and how many miles Bangalore is from Chennai (the only city I know we might visit). Anyway it all ended on a nice note and Zita can now have her email open all day without worrying about paying for every second she is online.

Tags: family, neighborhood pictures