Sights

Cadets in LBJ Plaza (1). Longhorn quidditch. Note the broomsticks and the hoops (2). The State Capitol on a rainy Thursday (3-4). What looks like nebulas and galaxies while hurtling through outer space but what really is just my phone snapping a photo as it falls into my IKEA carpet (5). Pristine day on campus (6).

Return to the District

My three days back in Washington, DC flew by. Really, what better compliment can you give a city than that? That your time there went effortlessly.

I arrived at Reagan National Airport on a stormy blue Thursday night and met up with old friends. The next day I walked from the apartment where I stayed to Cleveland Park, once my neighborhood, by way of the National Zoo.

(So many "nationals." Everything in DC is "national this" or "national that." Not so in Texas. Here it's "Texas this" or "Texas that." The similarity is that Austin's also the capital.)

In Cleveland Park, my old apartment complex looked foreign yet familiar.

Friday afternoon I visited my old office in downtown DC, making stops at Farragut Square and the White House. Places I'd been so many times before but just not recently. I felt like a ghost, haunting my old city.

It was good to see my onetime colleagues again. But compared to that job, grad school is a bit of a break.

Saturday I had brunch with a friend on an Adams Morgan's rooftop. Then we hung out on top of his apartment, which had a spectacular view of Northwest DC and the National Cathedral. (Another "national.")

Saturday night I went to my friend from work's wedding. That was the reason I'd returned to the District. The event was beautiful and some 20 or 30 people from my previous job were in attendance so I had a chance to catch up again.

I stayed with a friend in Glover Park on Saturday night then had brunch in Georgetown. It proved to be a quintessentially DC morning because sitting two tables away was Alabama Senator Richard Shelby.

I miss it a little. The beauty, the proximity to power, the dutiful feeling of being somewhere important. The longer I stayed, however, the more I missed Austin.

Parting Shots of Summer

It's the last day of summer. The bright, brash year is nearly three quarters over. Life is starting to settle down and feel, dare I say, routine. For the first time since Washington, DC. These ten photos, the final ones of summer, bear that out: they are all either from UT's campus or my Hyde Park neighborhood.

School (1). Colorful campus cars (2-3). Mustangs (4). Evacuation (5). Branches and sky (6). Hyde Park rainbow (7). Campus (8). Capitol in the uneven distance (9). Nancy Gibbs and Michael Duffy discussing their book, "The Presidents Club," at the LBJ Presidential Library (10).