Hill Rat: April 2008

Wednesday, April 30, 2008

Good Shopping on the Hill this Weekend

This weekend is the seasonal opening of the H St. Farmer's Market. Woo-hoo! For those of you who haven't been, I highly recommend you go check it out and I'm not the only who thinks it's great.

This Sunday is also Eastern Market Day. In addition to the usual vendors that are out, there will be a ton of additional food carts and Rick Franklin and the Delta Blues Boys play at 10:30 a.m. and Reverb performs at 1 p.m.

Here are the details on the Farmer's Market from the FRESHFARM Market website:

H STREET
Saturdays, 9 am to noon, 625 H St, NE

Market re-opens this Saturday, May 3, 2008.

OPENING DAY, May 3: Omawali Stewart is our featured "Chef at Market."

Fill your market basket with spring produce, pasture-raised meats and eggs, goat and cow's milk cheeses and cut flowers.

At market this week: Welcome back our farmers and producers including Atwaters Bakery, Blueberry Hill Farm, Cedarbrook Farm, Highfield Dairy, Keswick Creamery, Quaker Valley Orchards and Richfield Farm.

Saturday, April 26, 2008

Saturday Morning

I took this week off from rugby for a couple of reasons; allergies are killing WifeRat and BabyRat so they weren't going to come this week, I blew off Thursday practice to go to the Nats game, a friend of mine from high school is coming for dinner tonight, and I also had the Ward 6 Education Forum this morning. The wife has been awesome about letting me play as much rugby as I wanted to this Spring, so I try to repay the favor by taking off weeks (like this one) when playing is going to be a hassle for the fam. We could have made it work, but I try not to be dogmatic about my "right" to play rugby.

BabyRat's allergies are really bad this morning and she's super fussy, so we decided to skip the Ward 6 Education Forum and right now we're all sitting on the couch watching the Backyardigans. I would have liked to go, but the forum seemed like it might be little more of a circle jerk than I cared to deal with on a Saturday morning.

Friday, April 25, 2008

Safe @ Home

Got off the Metro at Eastern Market and stopped at Tunnicliff's for a short one and to see SOS. The place was mobbed with folks that had just left either the Nats or Wiz game. After a quick bourbon (God's gift to you and me), I took one of those wonderful late evening strolls across the Hill and enjoyed the beautiful weather.

Life is good.

Thursday, April 24, 2008

Live Blog - Metro Complaints

Nats win 10-5 and the Wiz was up by 30 when I left the box.

Are you shitting me? 11 minute wait for the blue line heading towards Maryland and a 19 minute wait for the orange line. Of course blue & orange lines heading to VA are coming every two minutes. I wonder who the target demographic is here?

Live Blog - Grand Slam!!!

Woo-hoo!!!

Game just busted wide open.

Live Blog - Bottom of the 6th

Two men on no outs.

Stupid me, I just went down to the Stars & Stripes club and realized
they had a Ben's stand in there. Oh well I'll know next time.

Live Blog - Waiting for Food

Of course my cheap ass company didn't pop for any food or drink in the box. I wouldn't mind nearly as much except I got another one of those e-mails talking about how well the company did last quarter on the same day that I got a raise that didn't even cover inflation. So now I'm waiting in an enormous line at Ben's and my beer is already gone.

A helpful cashier just directed me to a shorter line, sweet!

Live Blog - Nats game

Metro is running slow tonight, but I'm only taking it to the USDA. Bossman has a parking pass for us, so we're driving to the stadium.

Drowning in a Tidal Wave of Pee

BabyRat has been potty-trained for a good long time now; when we first started putting her in underwear we had the inevitable accidents and it was no big deal. We kept her in diapers at night for a while because it was easier, but eventually we let that go too knowing full well that we were going to have some night time accidents. Things were going really well, and for a couple of weeks BabyRat stopped having accidents altogether and I thought we were done with potty training. Unfortunately, like so many other times in my life, I was wrong, Wrong, WRONG!

First the night time accidents came back, so we started taking her to the bathroom about two hours after she went to sleep and that seemed to help. If the problem had remained confined to the night time hours I could have lived with it, but now BabyRat is having day time accidents again.

BR pissed herself twice this morning and I got a slightly frantic and annoyed phone call from her daycare class teacher. So I go downstairs to the daycare center and talk to BR for a little while, she wiggles around and doesn't answer my questions for a little while. I keep on asking questions and getting some nonsense answers, but I plod ahead until BR finally tells me that she's peeing on herself because she "wants attention."

Now I had been telling my wife this for a while and she would get mad at me saying that BR is too young to know what's up, but I knew better. When I finally got WifeRat on the phone I was irked 'cause I had to stop working to go home and get clean clothes and I couldn't get her on the phone when the shit (piss really) was hitting the fan. After relating the entire episode to WR, she finally agreed that BR was peeing her pants to get attention.

WR says that every information source is in agreement that you can't punish kids about any of the bathroom stuff. OK, fine but what the hell are you supposed to do? As far as I can tell we're losing this battle; BR wants attention, so she pees on herself. Then we have to clean her up and put clean clothes on her, so she's getting the attention she wants.

The question is: what now?

Help me Obi Wan Kenobi, you're my only hope!!

Wednesday, April 23, 2008

Jimmy Valentine's Lonely Hearts Club

rokkit:

this friday, 4/25, DJ Strange & DJ Medusa host Wasteland, our
longest-running monthly promotion from terrible folks anchoring our status as a miserable bar for bad people. check out their most recent set list here
http://www.medusapromotions.com/wastelandmar28.htm

this saturday, 4/26, DJ Mellie Mel & DJ Dribble host Filth, our
second-longest monthly promotion from wretched criminals proudly bearing our standard as a rotten bar for dirty people. you wouldn't believe their set list if there was a record of it anyway

recent bloggers have called us "not my kind of thing" and "ghetto"

thank you!!!!

troy&dawn&mark

ps. d thrett's in argentina (that's dawn by the way), she's never left the states before and doesn't speak a lick of spanish, your prayers can really help

pps. one-year anniversary party sunday may 25th, this is gonna be a holy mess and no your prayers won't do a damn thing

Monday, April 21, 2008

Ward 6 Education Forum

So in keeping with my theme of reporting on Swiss Family Rat's struggles with finding a school, I bring you information on another school meeting. This one is for all of Ward 6 and is being sponsored by our council member Tommy Wells and our "State" Board of Education member Lisa Raymond.

Breakfast and babysitting services are being provided free of charge at the meeting site at Miner Elementary School. Agenda items and some boilerplate can be found by clicking here.

For those of you who can't be bothered to click, here's the pertinent info:

WHEN:
Saturday
April 26, 2008
10 AM – 12:30 PM

WHERE:
Miner Elementary
601 15th Street, NE

TO GET INVOLVED:
Contact Lisa Raymond at lisajraymond70 [at] yahoo [dot] com or call 202-316-5096 for more information.

Thursday, April 17, 2008

Jackie Robinson Night

On April 15, 1947 Jackie Robinson broke Major League Baseball's long-standing color barrier when he played his first game as a Brooklyn Dodger. To commemorate the 61st anniversary of this historic event, The George Washington University Jackie Robinson Society will celebrate Jackie Robinson Night on April 17, 2008.

The evening will feature the presentation of Jackie Robinson Society Community Recognition Awards to Bobby Mitchell (the first African-American to play for the Washington Redskins" and JC Hayward (Washington, DC's first female news anchor) for displaying the courage, commitment, and perseverence associated with Jackie Robinson's life and legacy and for their substantial impact on the Washington, EC community. The keynote address will be provided by Professor Michael Long, author of the recently published and highly acclaimed "First Class Citizenship: The Civil Rights Letters of Jackie Robinson."

The program starts at 5:30 pm and there will be reception afterwards at 7:00 pm. The event is being held on the GWU campus at:

Media and Public Affairs Building

Jack Morton Auditorium

805 21st Street, NW

First Floor

Washington, DC 20052

Wednesday, April 16, 2008

great tats

Words fail me. -HR

Tuesday, April 15, 2008

I Hate Losing

My rugby team had been a roll for most of the last ten months or so, before losing to the Syracuse Chargers in the Four Leaf Fifteens Tournament we hadn't lost a game in almost a year. This past Saturday was the first round of the MARFU playoffs, we played the defending MARFU champions Harrisburg RFC.

[rant]Now I have to pause to have a little rant here about how much our union (the PRU) sucks ass. For years now, the PRU has promised to help procure practice and game fields for DC based teams and has consistently reneged on that promise. The PRU even went so far as to create a new position of Grounds Director or some shit like that, but all that did was allow the Super League teams to steal the good practice fields that were found in DC from teams in lower divisions. Even that wasn't that big of a deal because we were able to go out and cultivate a relationship with a rec center and now we have a practice field that can't be stolen from us.

The problem is with game fields, specifically when the PRU declared the fields at Kenilworth Park unplayable a couple of years ago. That would have been OK too, if the PRU had put any kind of resources into either rehabilitating the fields there or found some alternative place for DC based teams to play. Naturally, they did neither of those things and each team had to scramble on its own to find somewhere to play their games. When you see kickball dorks or various soccer leagues playing in the area, those individual teams aren't out beating the bushes to find a playing field; their league takes care of all of that for them and I have to wonder why can't the PRU do the same for us? We pay those jerkoffs a lot of money every year for next to nothing. In closing, fuck the PRU!!! [/rant]

So after a lot of drama about where we were going to play, we finally were able to borrow Western Suburbs field for this past weekend's playoff game. Harrisburg didn't travel as strong as I thought they would, I think they only had 18 or 19 guys dressed, but that didn't keep them from laying the wood to us. We're not used to getting smacked around, we do the smacking around; we're a big, physical team that is used to imposing our will on our opponents. Unfortunately, when we ran into a team that we couldn't just shove around, we didn't do a good job of adjusting our game plan. Harrisburg scored in the first five minutes and then scored again about 15 minutes later to go up 14-0.

On the ensuing kickoff, HRFC didn't field the kick cleanly and our big men charged on like a pack of rabid bulls, fly-hacked the ball into the in-goal area where Alabama Sam touched the ball down for a try. Momentum was swinging back in our favor and we were able to keep the ball in HRFC's half until we forced a penalty and Bible put up another 3 points to make the score 14-8 going into the half.

We subbed in Little John for Dain at the half at hooker which definitely gave us a boost. About ten minutes into the half Skip decided to sub in Sharp for Pete the Rock, but I think PTR's game is a little more dynamic than my own and took myself out instead. Ego and pride reared their ugly heads, but I had to put team goals in front of what was going to make me feel good. Sharp played well with fresh legs, he made about a half dozen tackles and seemed to be everywhere for the 30 minutes he was in the game but it didn't matter. We couldn't ring the bell again as HRFC converted a penalty kick and then scored a try to ice the game with about five minutes left for a final score of 22-8.

HRFC played well, but we could have and should have beat them. It's been a long time since losing a game has stuck in my craw like this, I didn't want to win this game for myself but I wanted to win for Skip and for Coach Kruger. They've put so much of themselves into this thing that I really feel like we've let them down by not winning on Saturday.

Monday, April 07, 2008

Jimmy Vazeline's Lonely Hearts Club

bust out the dancin shoes, we gotta couppla sets of DJ's from ol' Kingpin days this weekend:

this Friday, 4/11, Big Nick spinning soulful funk, reggae & mostly hip hop
this Saturday, 4/12, DJ's Todd Mack and T-Dawg working a lot of hip hop with a splash of reggae

besides donating to the Fraternal Order of Police, we also give money to the After School Program at Webb Elementary here in Trinidad, which is run by Catrice Smith. most of the kids in the 'hood here need some place positive and productive to hang out after classes and before they go home, so any of you locals who wanna help out please just let us know and we'll steer you to Catrice.

we also sponsor Elzee Racing, which is our good friend Leon Zelensky's independent motorcycle team. Leon's an expert level racer in the Championship Cup Series (Mid Atlantic Region), and treks down to South Carolina this weekend, but he's got a couppla races you can check out this May only an hour from here at Summit Point, WV, which is a cool track for spectators. if you're interested in bikes/racing please talk to Leon 'cause he's extremely helpful with his considerable knowledge and can point you towards the right gear and/or roadracing instructors. if you don't know him just ask us, we'll hook you up, he's a genuinely kind guy. that's him up top and here's a link to his racing schedule/website, we'll keep you posted: http://www.elzeeracing.com/schedule.html

rokkit

troy&dawn&mark

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