got in around 9:45 AM ET. the train was actually not just on time but ahead of schedule — until we were about ten minutes out of the station, when we were blocked by a stopped freight train. and so we sat there, for almost an hour. quel drag. still, i remain surprised but gratified that my train yesterday arrived in d.c. not more than an hour late, and this one to atlanta got in about an hour late. not bad! not bad at all.

in collaboration with the reverend pirate dan, hatched a plan: i’m going to go out and buy a digital camera for him, and use it on this trip. so, yay, pictures! man, i was so hacked off i didn’t have a camera when i was in d.c. yesterday. it was the most gorgeous, gorgeous blue-skied day, and there are so many neat things to take pictures of.

and then there’s the hoover building, which i decided yesterday is officially one of the ugliest damn buildings i’ve seen. (and i live not too far from the jail on south clark street!) i mean, i’ve seen it a hundred times on the x-files, but up close it was just like … jeez, were you trying to offensively have no aesthetic? it was obviously by the architecture firm of blocky, blocky, blocky mcboxalot. sheesh. i know, you’re there for justice, not for being teh pretteh, but couldn’t you at least have pretended? for me?

(free warning: incoherent paragraph ahead. sorry. i need either more or less coffee; i can’t tell, what with all this uncontrollable twitching. you know.)

got adopted by a friendly homeless man-slash-local tour guide after walking around d.c. for a couple of hours, after i gave him some change and he was like, mind if i walk around with you? so we hung out, had some coffee, heckled things (especially bad architecture), bummed other homeless folks smokes. it was fun for the first hour or ninety minutes or so, but after a while i said that i had to get back to union station to make my train. which of course meant that i ended up back at the station far earlier than i had intended, which was sort of a drag. i had tried to find a place to have lunch, but wasn’t successful in finding some place that looked like a place i wanted to eat lunch (i had in mind a pub sort of place) — all i seemed to pass were fast food and sandwich shops. at one point i wandered into some place called the caucus room, because they had a review posted outside of the doors which sounded good, so i went in, but then they weren’t open until dinner, and it was only like 2. alas. anyways, it was after that that i ran into sammy, the homeless tour guide. and after he walked me back to union station, i kinda felt obligated to stay in the train station because if i went back out and ran into sammy after saying my train was leaving soon, i’d feel like a bad person. so i ended up having some surprisingly pretty ok albacore tuna salad and clam chowder at a train station bar/grill. that part of the day isn’t as interesting as walking around d.c. with sammy, but i’m bored and don’t want to write it all out, so just imagine something. actually, if you imagine what the afternoon was like, write the story in a comment so you can amuse me. if you throw in squirrels, i’ll give you bonus points.