Old trick from high school and college: instead of setting aside certain hours to be Work Time, I sometimes set aside time to be Not Work Time (because work time is Every Other Waking Minute).

So today I finally got some time to walk around the Museum of the American Indian, though, with voices speaking all around you in small enclaves, and a starry sky stretching out overhead.

Received photographs of my cousin's office Halloween party, which had a Candyland theme and featured him as the Jolly Gumdrop.

Went into the Air and Space Museum and was struck speechless for a few minutes by ALL THE AIRPLANES!!! (and spaceships). Realized that I would never be satisfied by even a few days wandering through the space, decided I would pick one area and explore the heck out of it, spent a half hour running madly around the section with old mail planes and peering up at really ancient-looking aircraft trying to figure out how they were fabricated. They also have flight simulators, and if I get another aero/astro geek to visit the museum with me at some point I'm going to try to persuade them to pair with me on the F-4 Phantom II jet fighter sim (you need one pilot and one gunner and you actually get to drive and shoot).

Stood stock-still for 9 minutes filming a strange sculpture with changing lights for my little brother's design project. (It was a "Hey, you're in DC, can you go see this?" kind of thing.) I am not sure what he is doing with this, but ever since he switched from engineering to design at Stanford, he's seemed much happier and I've started to get increasingly more entertaining phone calls and emails from him. Of course, this just makes our parents more concerned about the both of us...

In between stops, I paused, whipped out my laptop, camera, and a thick sheaf of receipts, and incrementally worked my way through expense reports. The only things remaining to do on those now are pulling my photographed receipts into one giant PDF, typing the whole shebang into Oracle, and hitting the I Am Finished button. Let this be a lesson to me to never get behind on expense reports again. First and last time. Whoo boy.

I'm writing this from the Robert and Arlene Kogod Courtyard at the National Portrait Gallery, about to catch the train back to the house and get back to work (expense reports, finishing my Marketing feature profile and wrapping up Marketing stuff so I can head to Singapore, another round through POSSE APAC stuff). I may or may not get a nice flight o' beer at Gordon Biersch before I hit the train; I will decide that when I walk outside.

Tomorrow is GOSCON! I'd better have my stuff all done by then - it's a nice carrot to make sure I wrap up things before I bike into town for that. (I think if I roll up my pants legs and wrap them in velcro, I can bike into town in slacks without getting said slacks ripped/muddy/bike-chain-greasy - we'll find out shortly.)