For those of you who’ve seen me through the past two years of home ownership, it’ll come as little surprise that I spent our last Sunday afternoon in DC spread out on our patch of outdoor space, toolbox open and tools scattered about, sawing and hammering away. The particular project at hand was the making of window screens (a requirement of our buyer), and so I managed to pick up one last bit of DIY knowledge, adding to what in hindsight is a pretty substantial list. Two years ago, I didn’t know how to:

• Hang sheetrock
• Pull up carpet
• Lay hardwood plank flooring
• Refinish stair treads
• Put up glass tile
• Caulk a bathtub
• Mud a drywall corner
• Move an electrical socket
• Install butcher block
• Replace a kitchen garbage disposal
• Build a built-in bookcase
• Sink cabinets into a wall
• Install built-in wardrobes
• Replace a bathroom ceiling fan
• Grow a tomato plant
• Build a wall

It’s been a good run…how we’re going to go back the world of renting (where even painting a wall might require a landlord’s permission) is beyond me…

bq. __Monday, March 28, 2005, 6pm__
“Kamui”:http://www.kennedy-center.org/programs/millennium/artist_detail.cfm?artist_id=KAMUI, a group of professional sword-fighting specialists, most recently choreographed the fight scenes for the movie Kill Bill in which they played the Crazy 88 characters.

Anyone wanna join me?

(Man, I love the “Millennium Stage”:http://www.kennedy-center.org/programs/millennium/schedule.html)

Nope, it was a sheer, stomach-clenching dread of dealing with the DC MVA that kept me from fulfilling my bureaucratic obligations. Virtually every DC resident with whom I’ve spoken has offered horror stories of cranky clerks, regulatory catch-22′s and the purgatorial feeling of waiting hours for service, and it didn’t help that when Jenny went to get her DC license a mere week after moving here, she had an experience that was positively Kafka-esque (suffice it to say that she wound up having to find someone to notarize her signature on a copy of our lease – note that I didn’t say a notarized copy of our lease, but rather a notarization for her signature on the back of a photocopy of our already-signed lease!). From the look of the website, registering my car in DC looked like a potential nightmare.

However, I’m damned sick of getting parking tickets for parking in the neighborhood on the days that I work from home, and a few months ago I got a creepy note on my windshield that informed me that the DC Police had observed my car parked overnight in my neighborhood twice in the past 180 days, and that I was thus warned of possible (and unspecified) penalties.So, today I gathered together every scrap of documentation I could find relating to my identity, my place of residence, and my car, and taking a deep breath, dove in headfirst.

Within two hours, I was done.

That’s right, in less than two hours, I was able to drive to the vehicle inspection site in Southwest, get a clean bill of health for my car, drive up to the Brentwood MVA office, wait in the “Information” line, show the clerk a folder full of documents, get the appropriate forms, have my number called before I’d even finished filling out my application for a license (!), get a new license, register my car and get new plates, drive home and swap my shiny new new DC “Taxation Without Representation“plates for the old MD ones.

I’m utterly flabbergasted. DC’s supposed to have the worst bureaucracy in the country, even the world, right? The civil servants are supposed to be cranky, mean-spirited people who delight in making their poor petitioners jump through hoops (repeatedly, if possible). This was supposed to take me several days, involve repeated trips to the same MVA office, and just plain suck. Instead, everyone I interacted with, from the guy at the inspection station who called me “chief” to the unbelievably friendly woman behind the counter at the Brentwood office, this was actually a pleasant process.

I’m still in shock.

1. I do think of blogging as a very public thing. A coworker here at the Center said today that it’s more like a broadcast than a conversation, and I sort of didn’t feel like broadcasting for the last month. No real reason; just was “in my own head” for a few weeks, and am just feeling an outward pull now.

2. I’m struck by the extent to which I think of my blog (and blogs in general) in terms of feeds, rather than as a tangible site, with design and an actual presence. RSS has become my dominant paradigm for online information, and it was almost a shock to see my blank blog index page – almost like the way that catching the flu reminds us that as much as we think of ourselves as minds, soaring across information landscapes, we’re still rooted in physical, fallible bodies.

Anyhow, I’m back.