All Up Inside This Beltway

Hey! It's me!

Here I am, blogging from Washington, D.C. You all knew it would happen, eventually, but so soon? Haha, OK, I kid. I honestly didn't intend for it to take this long. But long story short, Comcast, notwithstanding its suck, still has a monopoly in D.C., so after weeks of thinking myself the savvy shopper, seeking out alternatives, I finally gave in and ordered up some Comcast. And now, for $113 a month, I have already resumed my favorite habit: trying to blog/e-mail/what-have-you while watching DVR'd Daily Shows and Colberts, rewinding three or four times every five minutes when I realize that my Internet activity has distracted me from the show and I have no idea what Jon or Stephen is talking about.

Yup. That long run-on sentence says it all: I'm back, and wordsmeathier than ever.

Ever since that early morning 20 days ago when I hopped in my car and embarked on hurtling myself into a whole new existence, I have on many, many an occasion thought of things I wanted to blog about when I finally returned to MySpace. Now I have way, way too much to address, and probably never will address all of it. I will do what I can when I get a chance, but tonight, it's already 11:15 p.m., and I need to keep it quick. So this post will have but two purposes.

First, I am pleased to announce the creation of my new Blogspot: All Up Inside This Beltway. The title is really just a ridiculous attempt to play off my new location - "Inside the Beltway," as the politicos call it - while doing my best whitey-talking-street impression. It is a cleverness that fell flat on its face, and yet I'm sticking with it. Deal. All you really need to remember (and you don't even need to remember this if you play your bookmarks right) is the URL. This is another example of clunky silliness: MrSmeathGoesToWashington.blogspot.com. The caps, of course, are not necessary, but it looks less lame that way.

But never fear, MySpace subscribers. You don't have to venture over to Blogspot if you don't want to. For the most part, these blogs will be cross-posts of each other. The idea was that I have a bunch of MySpace friends who subscribe to my blog here, and it's easiest for them to continue to read when their MySpace alerts them of my new posts. But I have other people in my life who are not on MySpace, so they don't get any Dougy goodness. (That, by the way, is a lot like doughy goodness.) I guess there may be a time or two when the two blogs don't match up completely. I do expect my Blogspot and MySpace audiences (my, my, aren't we pretentious: "audiences?") to be slightly different in scope. So there may be posts that show up on one site but not the other. That probably won't happen often.

OK. Point No. 2 of this post: to get y'all some my-new-life pictures. Quick, quick rundown: I live in Adams Morgan, one of Washington's coolest neighborhoods, if I do say so myself. Give it a Google if you want to learn more. I live in the basement of an old Victorian rowhouse. But it's not nearly as dismal as you might think. Here are the pictures. The only ones I took myself are the ones of the interior of my apartment. And I didn't intentionally put Edison in so many of them; he is apparently ready for his closeup.

When you walk in the door:


And then you turn around:


Then you walk into the living room:



Then on to the kitchen:


And the bathroom:


And, finally, the bedroom:


Let's go outside! My house:


Other homes in my neighborhood:


Around the corner, the shops, restaurants and bars on 18th Street:


Here's the party they threw to welcome me to the neighborhood. OK, it may have been a coincidence, but it seems like a pretty profound coincidence that Adams Morgan Day just happened to be the first full day I lived here:


And, finally, here is Dupont Circle, the traffic circle that serves as the centerpiece of the neighborhood (by the same name) where my office is located:


You like? OK, then come visit!