We’re under a Winter Storm Watch again tonight through Monday, with a storm moving up from the Gulf into the cold front that’s sitting right over DC. Looks like it will begin around midnight tonight and should stop some time tomorrow evening, with expected totals around 4 to 8 inches. You wouldn’t want February to end any other way right?

Right?

Ahem.

I see. Well, March is just around the corner, but it looks like we won’t see 50°F until at least the 9th or so. But take heart, Spring is nigh. Three Weeks From tomorrow on your way to the office, Spring will have sprung.

This post appeared in its original form at DC Metblogs

Did you guys know there’s still a roller rink on Franconia Road in Alexandria?

We went to this place last night for a friend’s 30th birthday. It’s set back behind a gas station not far from the Kingstowne shopping center. I was excited, since I skating was one of my favorite things to do as a kid and I hadn’t been out to do it in a while. When we got there, I remembered why. I briedly wondered if the rinks I had skated in back home had been as ghetto is this one- well, yeah, they probably were.

I came to the conclusion that before there was LiveJournal, there were roller rinks. Scores of emo kids cussing at each other, playing out the archetypal dramas of pubescent life while ignoring the grownups trying to accomplish the utterly trivial task of renting skates at a skating rink. The older kid who hot-dogged by everyone else, backwards, forwards, with dance steps, who pwn3d that rink, but is no doubt the world’s biggest loser everywhere else. The eight year old who was pretty good on his blades, but will no doubt remember most fondly the couple-skate in which he got to spend a whole song holding his little crush’s hand.

Was I ever that young? Nights like that make me want to call my mother and apologize for my entire adolescence.

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DC Property Values are up 14.6% from last year, it seems. Data shows that most of the poor and working-class neighborhoods are showing some of the biggest gains. It should shock no one that DC property values are up, especially since we’re in the high-turnover post-election property sell-off and buy-up! To see that Kalorama and Georgetown are up 94% in 3 years, or Alexandria up 113% since 2000, though, that is a shock to me.

There’s the ugly side to this, though, in the tax assessments that come with increasing value. As I’m sure Tiffany would say, any time you have to take out a loan just to pay your taxes, there’s something wrong. As property values climb, so, too, do the taxes based on those values, which puts many homeowners in the District in a bit of a pickle. With property taxes around 12-13% of the value of the property, that can sting pretty good.

If you’re interested in seeing the neighborhood by neighborhood breakdown, it’s available online.

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With The Feds closing at 3:30, I was expecting pandemonium on 14th street shortly thereafter, to my pleasant surprise, the trip back into Northern Virginia was reasonable and measured. No word yet on if OPM will be shutting the doors in the morning, but they usually wait until the last second. Many of the schools in the area have already announced their closings, and will keep a lot of folks off the roads. Man, I was hoping winter was done, and that Topper Shutt would be done with his snow plow routine.

Not so.

In the meantime, enjoy the Post’s Spring Training Journal.

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Looks like we’re due for yet another snowstorm, dropping around 3-5″ on the metro area tomorrow, sadly not in time to cancel school for tomorrow for most places. The winter hasn’t been as harsh as some, but certainly more snow than I’m used to. But there’s light at the end of the tunnel. Set your calendars for late March for the Cherry Blossom Festival which will happen 26 March through April 10. Get your film out, your cameras tuned, oh, and get ready to deal with touron after touron on the Metro, not to mention buses all around downtown and the Mall.

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Tonight at the Black Cat is the monthly “Right Round” 80’s Alt-pop dance party. It’ll be spun by the excruciatingly hip DJ lil’ e, and the cover is a measly $5. It starts at 9:30, and do yourself a favor: leave the jelly bracelets at home and don’t even think about requesting Michael Jackson.

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And the winner is… Z104?!. Looks like that the pop-station owned by WTOP will be broadcasting 120 or so game, with the other Bonneville AM property 1050 AM will be broadcasting the other 40 games. Apparently deals with Clear Channel and Infinity both fell through.

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I flew Independence Air this week to Chicago, and I had no idea they were in such bad financial shape. Hell, they had a plane repossessed on Sunday. My questions are, though, did they leave the safety message in the plane with Carville and Matalin? How did they distract the gate agents while they hooked up the tow-truck? Where does one store a repossessed plane? Wacky.

This post appeared in its original form at DC Metblogs

Partial Season Ticket Plans for the Washington Nationals are now on sale. If you were on their email list, they started to email folks with their special pin numbers around 9:30pm last night to log in, and sales for the public open on Monday at 12:01.

You will find me at Section 511, Row 2, Seats 1-6 for 20 games this season. Go Nats!

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Our friends in New York got Mike Piazza, holding a press conference in which he did NOT come out of the closet.

Here in the national capital region (Okay, Baltimore, but close enough), we get a politician holding a press conferenc to announce that he is NOT cheating on his wife and that someone is spreading nasty rumors about him.

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This morning, I was sitting in C Terminal at Washington National, waiting for my flight to sunny Orlando, when who should I see but Senator Fred Thompson (aka District Attorney from Law and Order, aka Carrier Group Captain from Hunt from Red October) with his wife (?) and a small child in a stroller. The Senator was carrying the diaper bag, God bless him.

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The DC Examiner is out on newsstands for the very first time today. Formerly the Journal newspapers, there’s a new daily on the streets as of this morning. I have yet to see a dispenser by my downtown office, but, for the PDF-inclined, they do offer downloads of their daily paper to view on your local computer. I definitely welcome competition in the news marketplace, which is something we certainly don’t have now (sorry Washington Times, you just don’t count.) but may have in the coming months. Will the Examiner catch on? Perhaps it will, perhaps it won’t, we shall see.

A word on the Examiner name, an aside from a previous life. The summer I worked in San Francisco, I would commute in by car to the Richmond BART station (think Glenmont or Franconia-Springfield) and pick up a Chronicle at the station and read it on the way in. On the train home, however, I got to delight in the ever-so snarky and yet, still quite excellent, San Francisco Examiner. Sadly, the paper I once knew as an afternoon daily seems to have morphed into something a bit different. The pair were an excellent way to bookend the day on the commute. Perhaps this may yet be true for Washington.

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Your aunt has unexpectedly come into town and wants to take you to dinner. Where do you go?

Well, if you have a sense of direction like mine, you go someplace close to her hotel so you don’t get lost on the way back. Fortunately, she was in Woodley Park, so we chose Medaterra on Connecticut Ave. from the host of options available to us.

The place was nearly empty when we arrived, so we received immediate service. We ordered the calamari, since I get it wherever I go, and the baba ghanouj, because I’d never had it before. The calamari wasn’t the best I’d ever had, but the sauces it was served with were excellent- a cold bruschetta-style tomato sauce, and an off-white aioli that I couldn’t quite identify. And if Medaterra’s baba ghanouj is any indication of what baba ghanouj is like overall, I think I have found my new favorite snack…

(It was at this point that my aunt, who spent some time in the Middle East in her 20s, told me a very amusing story about trying to make baba ghanouj in a friend’s kitchen but instead she caused the eggplant to explode all over the room.)

I ordered the sirloin special, which was very tasty and had an especially good gravy poured over it. But the real star was the lamb shank special my aunt ordered. The meat was falling off the bone and practically melted in your mouth as you chewed it.

For dessert, there were a number of interesting-looking options, but as I was mostly full from dinner, I chose the mango sorbet. It was a much larger portion than I had intended. It was 5 small scoops, sprinkled with powdered sugar to offset the tartness of the fruit. Mmm. But of course by the time I finished it, I was stuffed.

So two thumbs up, though I do recommend the ethnic dishes over the American-style ones. Price: ~$20/person.

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Cold Ducks
Originally uploaded by tbridge.

It’s cold in DC this morning, it was about 17°F when I snapped this shot of the ducks in the fountain at Freedom Plaza. I was hoping that yesterday’s thaw would get a chance to last us through the cherry blossoms, but I believe the phrase goes “No Such Luck.”

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The folks in Chicago have come up with a new metric for urban density and business growth. Here at my office at 12th and F above Metro Center, we’re at 61 SBD, and my condo over in Fairlington is at 32 SBD. Converting the metric into Starbucks per Square Mile (S/mi^2), that’s a 0.77 S/mi^2 for downtown and 0.40 S/mi^2 for Fairlington.

I actually expected a lot higher cluster of Starbucks downtown, but apparently they’re all over by Georgetown. What’s your Starbucks Density?

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Yesterday, an assistant superintendent in Prince George’s County was indicted on charges of money laundering for a drug ring. The indictment spans 267 pages and charges 30 people with charges ranging from selling drugs to money laundering. The local news was interviewing parents last night who hardly seemed shocked, but yet appeared quite upset that their administrator was involved in a drug scandal.

It’s not yet clear how deeply she was involved, as the five charges she was indicted on are only related to Money Laundering. There is, of course, more in the Post.

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Metroblogging DC’s own Julia has some suggestions for Metro behavior.

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How do I know they’re here? Well, if you take 14th Street into DC, you literally cannot miss them. They’re lining both sides of the street with 8 foot tall pictures of dead babies with such thrilling titles like “God Bless America?” and other such slogans. Don’t have breakfast before driving in this morning, and expect to be greeted with the same on your trip out.

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The Washington Post has been an incredible source for great photography over the last few days, and the Inauguration events have been very good for the photographers. They’ve done something great, though, in making an Inaugural Photoblog. Lots of great shots in there from the day’s events.

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DCFoodies.com has some recommendations on where to go for Valentine’s Day. Make your reservations now, or do like I do and cook for Valentine’s Day.

This post appeared in its original form at DC Metblogs