Marcella and I went back to work this past week after having had the previous week off. The time off seems to have done the trick. There’s some sense of returning refreshed and with a fresh attitude.

We took a short trip up to DC and stayed overnight one night. We stayed in this kind of quirky hotel called the Helix near Dupont Circle. It had cool retro styling, and was sort of fun. Our main objective while in DC was to visit the National Gallery. We felt like a nice dose of art would be good for our souls.

Because we didn’t have a whole lot of time we did the “one hour” tour to focus on some of the most notable works in the gallery. But then we went to an exhibition called Medieval to Modern: Recent Acquisitions of Drawings, Prints, and Illustrated Books and spent our remaining time there, basically until the gallery closed. This is an exhibition I could go back to and spend much more time. It’s a fairly large show, spanning a good half-dozen rooms. I could probably spend an hour per room to absorb more of the fascinating work. The engravings and etchings, in particular, are engrossing in their detail, and then I always become enthralled with simple line drawings combined with watercolor washes. Click this link to see a Winslow Homer called Four Boys on a Beach. It is both incredibly simple and endlessly detailed. This is the kind of thing I love to just stand right up close to and pick out the little details and then go step back and absorb the whole, and then repeat. And there were many many instances of this kind of thing in the exhibition.

So, the exhibition was very good. We also went out to dinner at a local popular grill, and had a very nice meal. In the morning we had breakfast at Kramerbooks and Afterwards Cafe (please note this link opens a page that starts playing a really annoying video/audio file), and browsed the books for a while. Seems like a pretty great place, and I often wonder why similar places don’t seem to exist in other towns I’ve lived. I guess it takes a city of a sufficient magnitude to really support the business model, but I can imagine Marcella and I getting up to go to a such a place pretty regularly.

We also visited Alexandria and I showed Marcella a couple landmarks from my childhood. We saw a couple of schools I attended and a couple of the houses I lived in. It seemed like there were generally more cars parked on the street in the rosemont neighborhood than I remembered. There were always some, but now every block seemed full of cars. Maybe it’s just my memory is faulty.

The only drawback about the whole trip is that I came down with a cold and sore throat just as we were going, so that probably put a small damper on my enjoyment, but it was still a really nice get out of town trip.