Antarctica Starts Here.

The past two weekends have been more or less non-stop running around so I haven't been writing about them lately. To make a long story short, Lyssa and I are fixing up the apartment a bit more and so are doing quite a bit of reorganizing. This weekend just passed we bought a new dresser from Ikea which wound up being an all weekend job of assembly. Last night we had to run back out there (and made it from Virginia to Maryland in record time on the beltway let me tell you, though most of it was due to Veteran's Day) to pick up some replacement hardware (as always, there were a few pieces missing from the kit) and mounting screws for the closet organizer. Hasufin was nice enough to lend us a power drill which, when coupled with the drill-to-power driver adapter kit from Home Depot made short work of the rack of organizer hooks.

Now it comes down to going through our respective sets of clothes, picking out the ones we don't wear anymore to donate, and swapping warmer weather garments for colder weather, as well as cleaning up the kitchen and library (the latter I think will wait until this weekend, actually). It's probably time to cull the contents of the bookcases and either take them to Goodwill for donation, or take them to the local coffee shop to leave them for others to read.

On other fronts, this marks my second week not in the field, not that I'm complaining any. If nothing else, it's cheaper to do laundry at home than it is in a hotel. On Sunday Lyssa and I visited Bronwyn and Laurelinde in Maryland, and spent the afternoon lounging around the house watching Babylon-5 on DVD (we're trying to get Lyssa hooked) while I worked on squeezing a few more compute cycles out of Bronwyn's laptop computer (which is regrettably infected with Windows Vista) and making a few more pocketwatch fobs out of sundry odds and ends laying around the apartment. Laurelinde was kind enough to roast a chicken in the oven for dinner, and we'd stopped off to pick up pumpkin pie from Whole Paycheque for dessert.

It's finally starting to turn cold in DC. Temperatures were in the high 70's and low 80's all the way up to Halloween this year, after which things turned colder, wetter, and more grey in short order. It finally feel's like fall's come to the east. I was wondering how long the warm time would last, and what its possible effects would have been, but now it's academic.

As for two weekends ago (my first at home in a while) Lyssa, Laurelinde, Hasufin, and I braved DC traffic in the TARDIS to visit Spellbound, a new gothic and industrial dance night every Saturday in the DC metroplex.

We've found a new weekend home. You have to love a nightclub where not only is there garaged parking a block away, but it's on the main drag of the city so it's easy to find, and where the people there don't take themselves seriously to a painful extent. Case in point: A selection of the music in a one hour period included Covenant, Underworld (old school trance), the Sisters of Mercy (This Corrosion, of course), Siouxie and the Banshees, and Dee Lite.

Yeah. Groove Is In the Heart packed the mother lovin' dance floor (it was rescued from Nation before it closed in 2006; the parquet shows its age and needs repairs in one or two places, but it's the same wood). We like it there, we do.

The cover charge is reasonable, and $10us to park in a secure garage a stone's throw from the basement club is hard to beat. The bar also has a small kitchen, so you can grab a bite to eat while you're there if you so choose. They've also tuned the sound system so that hearing protection isn't required to have a good time, though of course I recommend that everyone purchase a baggie of disposable rating-29 earplugs at the drugstore for a couple of dollars American. There's no sense in doing any more damage to your hearing than usual, is there?

In short, if you happen to be in DC on a Saturday night and G/I is your bag, hit up Spellbound. You won't be sorry.