Lost your way?

 I slept until noon on Saturday, an extravagance of which I was not even aware until I finally roused myself and looked at a watch in my bedroom. I walked downstairs, still a little disbelieving, to find my roommate stretched between our sofa and end table. “I thought about waking you,” she said, “but figured you were sleeping off your sickness.” She is very wise, as that seems to have been exactly what happened. For the past few weeks I’ve been plagued and pestered by a cold that seems, finally, to be gone.
We spent the next few hours in companionable quiet in the living room, her with her laptop and me with a book and our sweetheart of a cat curled up on my lap. The rest of our Saturday is pleasantly relaxed: a bit of shopping, watching most of an Astaire & Rogers movie, a late-night run to the airport to pick up a friend. Driving out to Dulles at midnight, we sing along with Flood, switching off which of us is singing which John’s part.

Sunday sees us at the National Building Museum. We went to see the ‘Unbuilt Washington’ exhibit, which is quite interesting, but by far the best part of the visit is a group of model plane enthusiasts flying their tiny creations in the enormous atrium of the building, motorized vehicles on one side and rubber-band-powered ones on the other. I’m fascinated by the latter, love the way that they spiral towards the ceiling then dip slowly towards the floor, like butterflies looking for somewhere to alight. It’s a wonderful and perfect use of the museum’s amazing space.

I’d walked over (a healthy five-mile stroll from our apartment) but the trip home saw us vying with Metro’s inevitable weekend single-tracking and station closures. When we went underground it was still fairly light out, but by the time we finally emerged at our station it had gotten noticeably colder and the almost-full moon was high and bright in the sky, and we walked home in the reassuringly January-esque weather.