This is a tricky one, of course, since it's a night shot and the flag is almost completely invisible. So, a few hints: It's a big embassy. It's the biggest foreign embassy of the country, although that's probably true for most DC embassies. The building in view is the ambassador's residence; before that, it was the chancery for the half of the 20th century. This country is a NATO member. After taking the picture, I continued down the sidewalk with Kona, and we were nearly run over by a big black Lincoln or Cadillac pulling into the driveway, with diplomatic license plate DDJ0001 and a driver who was not looking for any pedestrians.

I've updated the master map showing where Kona and I have walked. Obviously there are some streets we'll need to attend to.

Much progress on the embassy front:

The answer

Answer

Answer

Answer

Answer

Answer

This one took four tries over many months.

This one is a bonus challenge, although it doesn't count towards the KCC.

I mentioned previously how many of the escalators in the DC Metro are often broken, turning them into uncomfortable staircases. And since there are very few staircases in the metro system, you don't typically have the option to take a regular staircase with landings. You can either go three hundred steps (200 vertical feet) with no landings and not much room to pass or be passed, or you can wait a long time for a very slow, urine-soaked elevator. Twice, since you have to change elevators at the mezzanine. And sometimes there's a real mess:

A video posted to Twitter (below) by user "wfpman" shows people shouting and a lone Metro employee struggling to perform crowd control as masses of people are backed up in the mezzanine, unable to exit, while people coming down both escalators struggle against those trying to walk up.

Update 5:47p.m.: If Metro has attempted to rectify the situation that saw all three long escalators at Dupont Circle's north entrance out of service during the morning rush, their efforts appear to have fallen flat. Just in time for the evening rush, one of those escalators may be, well, on fire.

Update 6:05p.m.: Dupont's north entrance is closed, but that hasn't stopped a mob of people from climbing up a blocked-off escalator, then jumping across a handrail to exit. Trains are still moving and Metro has not reported delays, but shuttle service to Farragut North has been requested.

—Washington Post

Fortunately, $4.9 million has just been allocated to fix the escalators. I have no idea what fixing the escalators might actually cost, but maybe this will be enough. For now.

Answer #24

Answer #25

Oops, we already went here

Answer #26

I was heading in to work on my usual route, southbound on 19th Street. South of Dupont Circle it's a one-way street, and I was riding in the third lane of four, with parked cars filling the fourth lane. If there's light traffic, and hence some empty lanes to my left, I tend to ride in the middle of the lane, well away from opening car doors and taxis and other cars darting into traffic. Today there was a car stopped in the middle of the road in the third lane; they might have been waiting to parallel park but cars simply stopped in the middle of the road are quite routine in DC. I veered left a few feet, and passed comfortable, still in my lane or possibly on the line. The light ahead was already red, so I was just gliding down the mild incline as I veered back to the middle of the lane and braked to a halt behind a parked car at the light. I tend to stop in the third lane at E Steet (westbound—E Street is broken into two one-way roads at this point, with a gap between them to guarantee that cross traffic has to stop at two lights in one block. You can't even blame L'Enfant because this was riverfront in the original plan) because the fourth lane and little turnout fifth lane are usually filled with cars turning right.

As I'm stopping, I notice in my rear-view mirror that a car is stopping right on my butt, so abrubtly that it swerves a bit into the next lane. I turn and look. It's a taxi, and it pulls around in the lane to my right and the driver rolls down his window. (I typed down everything I could remember as soon as I got to my desk, but this is not wholly verbatim.)

Driver, smiling: "Why are you driving here? This is not a safe place for bicycles."

Me: "Well it would be safer if drivers would watch out for bicycles."

Driver, smiling: "But this road, here (gesturing), this is not for bicycles."

Me: "Excuse me? I can go on any of these roads, and be in any lane I need to be."

Driver, maybe not smiling: "Because you are American?" (The driver is Indian, or perhaps Pakistani)

Me: "Because it's the law."

Driver: something about how he's concerned for my safety and why would I act like this and ...

Me: "You almost hit me because you weren't watching."

Driver: why am I getting upset when he is just advising my how to be safe ...

I'm digging out my ID at this point for the garage in two blocks. The light turns and we proceed, still bickering back and forth. I point at the parked bus far ahead of him in his lane and shout, "look out, there's a parked car!" He sneers, I imagine, and falls back and then merges behind me. Half a block later I signal and turn in to the office parking garage and he drives past.

Moral? I dunno. I definitely need to remember to go directly for my camera first. Beyond that, I can't say. It was a very confounding conversation. I don't claim to be beyond reproach on the roads, and when another taxi driver called me out for an error I took the blame. I'll even concede that there are certain roads that cyclists, though entitled to ride on, should probably skip. But a road four lanes wide, full of low-speed traffic moving block to block, in the middle of the downtown core? I've seen up to six or seven bicycles stopped at lights on 19th. And while a few of those bicycles proceed to run the red lights at the first gap in traffic, I don't do that, and I don't think they should either. And at least in the abstract, when I have conversations like this my goal is to maybe connect human-to-human with the driver a little bit, not just to have a fight. But I find that very difficult, because usually when I have a conversation with a driver the circumstance is that they almost killed me out of ignorance and inattention, and typically they never even noticed.

When someone is angry at me for having put my life in jeopardy through their own mistake, I interpret "it's not safe for you to be here" as, "I'm upset that I screwed up and almost killed you, and rather than take responsibility I'd rather displace that strong emotion into anger at you." And I don't think much of that as a rational argument. So that's the conversation I thought I was having, cyclist to driver. But apparently he was having a very different conversation, one involving imperialist arrogance and perhaps white privilege.

For your reference:

Full lane use allowed when traveling at the normal speed of traffic, passing, preparing for a turn, avoiding hazards, traveling in a lane 11 feet wide or less, avoiding a mandatory turn lane and when necessary for the bicyclist's safety.—Selected Bicycle Guidelines for the Washington Area

In 1980 we moved to Washington, DC because my father took a sabbatical from his job at UAA to work at a federal agency for a year. We actually lived in Rockville, about 10 miles north of the District. Among my very limited memories of that year are some mental snapshots of a subway, a futuristic tube with a concrete grid for a ceiling and weird indirect lighting. I also remember the townhouse we rented, which was three stories high and next to a creek. We went past the townhouse recently and it's much, much smaller than I remember—one of those stories was underground. And the creek is still there, but there might be all of five yards of tangled undergrowth between one parking lot and the next. The subway, however, looks ... just about the same as I remember it.

Back in 1980 it was only four years old, younger than me. Although it's picked up plenty of cracks and stains in the last thirty years, it still looks reasonably clean. Not like the New York subway stations, many of which seem to have been built from pre-filthed construction materials. When I was a small child on the Metro, it seemed pretty cool, but now that I live in DC proper, use it for my own transportation, and have seen other subways in other countries, it's a bit underwhelming.

The architecture has some fans, but to me, a lot of the flaws in Metro derive directly from the design and style. First, all of the stations are very dark. The minimalist, indirect lighting bounced off of raw gray concrete, and often blocked by trains in the station, makes you feel like you are wandering in a cave. In combination with the signage style, fairly small white letters on dark brown backgrounds, often viewed through the smoked glass of the cars, it becomes very hard to read any of the station names or see any of the directional signs.

Second, all of the stations share an identical, brutalist grid concrete style. Most of the stations use one of a very small number of design patterns, and have various symmetries. The effect of all this is that you have no clues at all to where you are, which line you are on, or where you are going, and see item one above for why the illegible signs in the dark don't help.

In addition to the poor functionality of the all-identical design, it's a huge missed opportunity for public art. I still remember the mosaic in the Universal City station portraying the history of Los Angeles in both English and Spanish.

The closest thing to that in DC is posters from the military-industrial complex

Third, the station design templates seem naive to the notion that human beings will be traveling through these stations. There are many choke points where even light crowds consistently jam. Many stations have no stairs at all, just small escalators between the different platforms. They apparently got a bad batch of escalator parts some time ago, because a good fraction of the escalators in each station are either stopped or partially disassembled at all times. My nearest station, Dupont Circle, has three very long escalators from street level to ticket level, and I've only seen all three running simultaneously a handful of times in ten months. Checking the status page today, it appears that every station has at least one escalator or elevator out of service.

So the stations are dark, brutal, interchangeable caves with jingoist propaganda in place of human art and broken escalators instead of stairs. But the thing that makes Metro really Metro, that gives it its special personality, is the people. I was on a full train once and some poor soul got partially stuck in the door. As they desperately tried to free themselves, we heard the conductor over the loudspeaker: "This train will go out of service if you don't stop blocking the door." That's right, on top of misunderstanding the problem, blaming the victim, and making the problem worse when the conductor is precisely the person charged with solving the problem, they also promised collective punishment.

Another time, an indefinite delay was announced for trains in the direction I was going. Since I was only going one station, I thought I might just leave and walk. I went up to the little booth, where I disrupted one of the attendent's Facebook session, and asked if they had any more information on when a train was coming. I don't know if they did or not; maybe there were radio announcements, maybe they weren't listening, maybe they had no idea. But the person I asked refused to answer the question, and the other person said, "What does he want to know for? Either he's going to wait or he isn't going to wait."

The subway has a no food, no drink policy, which I think is a good idea. But I still remember this news item from years before I came to DC:

Willett was eating a PayDay candy bar while riding the escalator ... The police officer warned Willett to finish the candy before entering the station because eating or drinking in the Metro system is illegal.

Willett nodded, kept chewing the peanut-and-caramel bar and stuffed the last bit into her mouth before throwing the wrapper into the trash can near the station manager's kiosk ....

[The police officer] turned around and followed Willett into the station. Moments after making a remark to the officer, Willett said, she was searched, handcuffed and arrested for chewing the last bite of her candy bar after she passed through the fare gates. —Washington Post, 2004

The fifth problem with the system, and the worst by far, is the pattern of fatalities. In the last year, it's hit an all-time high. Excluding suicides:

• June 22, 2009-Two trains collide near the Fort Totten station, killing train operator Jeanice McMillian and eight passengers. Another 76 are injured. Deadliest accident in Metro history.
• August 10, 2009-Metro repairman Michael Nash, 63, of Silver Spring is fatally struck by the ballast regulator while conducting track maintenance along the orange line. (WMATA)
• September 10, 2009-12-year veteran Metro employee John Moore, 44, of Arlington "walked down a staircase in a vent shaft, opened a door to the track bed area known as the 'right of way' and was struck" by a six-car train, causing major delays on the blue and yellow lines. He dies four days later. Moore is the third Metro employee killed in 2009. (WMATA)
• November 29, 2009-Three Metro employees are injured after two out-of-service trains collide at the Falls Church rail yard in Fairfax County. According to WMATA: "Service to customers was not affected...."
• January 27, 2010- Two Metro employees working on the tracks are killed when struck by a Metro utility vehicle (WaPo). Jeffrey Garrard, 49 of Clarksburg and Sung Oh, 68, of Montgomery Village had been installing new train control equipment around 1:45 a.m. (WTOP).
• June 22, 2010-Metro officials memorialize the victims on the anniversary of its deadliest crash in history. NTSB notes that none of its resulting safety recommendations have been implemented. (WaPo)

—Washington City Paper

This isn't just bad luck, and it isn't just a sudden thing: "Metro has had six worker fatalities on the tracks in the past four years, accounting for almost 40 percent of the national total." —Washington Post, 2010.

And it isn't just a pattern of poor performance. The Capability Maturity Model describes five levels of performance for an organization. At level 1, people just do stuff however they can. At level 2, some deliberate management happens. Level 3 introduces standardization and repeatability. At level 4, organizations can make quantitative measurements of themselves. At level 5, the top level, organizations are reliably self-correcting and self-improving. Most organizations are at level 1 most of the time.

The DC Metro, however, seems to be defining a new level in this model. In 2009 Metro banned monitors from the Tri-State Oversight Committee from access to live tracks, even though the monitors had legal authority over Metro. After six months of negotiation, just as the monitors threatened to use that authority, Metro allowed them on the tracks. Soon thereafter:

A team of independent safety inspectors was nearly hit last month by a Metro train that appeared to be traveling at full speed and making no attempt to slow, as required by agency rules. —Washington Post

What CMMI level do you assign to an organization that not only performs poorly, not only fails to improve, not only fails to allow external entities to investigate it, but accidentally almost kills people trying to help it? They are anti-capable. We need a CMMI scale that goes to negative numbers.

The root causes of this dysfunction presumably go to Metro's nature as a local entity in a federal district. Much of its funding depends on politics in Maryland and Virginia, and on the utterly broken model of having the federal Congress directly fund and oversee DC activities. A few of the key managers at Metro have left this year, but the question remains of how thoroughly broken the organization remains. The fish stinks from the head and from the tail. How could you measure this? What percentage of WMATA employees can never be rehabilitated? What percentage are still utterly invaluable? What percentage are not performing now, but would with a better culture or leadership? On the one hand, I want to see the whole organization reconstructed, seeded with staff from Danish and Singaporean and Hong Kong and other successful systems. On the other hand, I read posts like this:

The bottom line is that there could have been more progress and there could have been less. The Post's coverage, however, seems to follow a pattern of reporting everything bad that happens at Metro and very little else. Meanwhile, if Maryland MTA, PRTC, Ride On, the Circulator, or other transit agencies do something wrong, it doesn't seem to make it into the Post.

...

I was also disappointed by the articles responding to the recent "Vital Signs" scorecard General Manager Sarles created to track Metro's performance on various metrics. He decided not just to release data to the Board, as is common, but to open up these metrics to the public. That was a nice gesture of honesty with riders.

But how did the press reward this move toward openness? The Post headline was, Metro system performance fell short in April.

When you look at all of the work implied in the Vital Signs scorecard, it's clear that there are plenty of good people at WMATA, working very hard. It's just a shame that, whether because of erratic funding or institutional rot or some other factors, Metro fails so often, provides a customer service facade of relentless hostility, and, most shamefully, kills people so frequently.

I went to another PMI DC event, this one a Wednesday breakfast at the National Press Club. A retired Lieutenant Colonel spoke about leadership. The premise was that he was drawing from his recent experience teaching at West Point to tell us how the military is teaching leadership.

I picked this event, even though it cost $35, for a few reasons. First, the speaker's book looked interesting. Second, it's really hard to sign up for PMI DC events in the walkable city center; they tend to fill up instantly. There are a lot of PMI events in the DC area, but most of them involve driving 15 miles through rush-hour traffic to a suburban office park far from any good transit. And third I was vaguely curious about the National Press Club.

The speaker was in fact an interesting guy: ex-military, with a lot of command and control mindset and habits, but clearly also a more engaged mind that could reflect from a broader worldview. The talk was probably not the best talk he could give; it relied heavily on Powerpoint slides and aphorisms. The talk was scheduled to start at 8 am; I didn't any thoughts provoked until 8:18 (I checked my watch when it happened).

The worst PMI events are those were, at the end, all you can say is that you got your PDU credits (toward renewing your certification) for attending, and this was certainly not that bad. Leadership is a well-worn seminar concept, and this didn't break any new ground, but you can always reflect and review your own performance and glean a few new insights. Here are my notes from the talk:

• Leadership involved making clear "the commander's intent." Doing this well "is why we won so many wars."
• To be a leader, you need followers. You can measure your success as a leader by looking behind to see if anyone is following. Joel's thought: How do you figure out if anyone is following, in a workplace or other non-military context?
• Almost every guy (it's maybe 60/40) in here is wearing a suit and tie. I guess they're all going to work. I hate the East Coast.
• The function of leadership is to grow more leaders. (Ralph Nader)
• "You are always on parade." E.g., you are always being observed and judged. It's hard to deny the truth of this, but I find it unpleasant. Part of being effective is to think and predict at a higher level than the superficial. E.g., in a meeting, to know not only what the topic at hand is, but who agrees and disagrees, and why, and how you might persuade them. You have to do this to be effective, but 1) you have to do it carefully to avoid sliding into Machiavellian and/or manipulative behavior, and 2) it gets tiring. Similarly, having to be on parade at all times get tiring. Some of this is how it's always been, but some of this relates to the decay of boundaries between professional and personal. (Okay, so in a 1950's office you might have been judged by your country club membership or whatever, so this blurring is nothing new, but it subjectively feels like technology is taking it to a new level.)
• The speaker contrasted an exciting project he worked on (something about nutritional support for pregnant mothers, kids, etc) with one that was hard to be enthusiastic about: "A new IT system--yippee." I think this is another East Coast vs Silicon Valley difference. If you asked anybody at a PMISV event what they were working on, the modal answer would definitely be a new IT system, and many of them would be enthusiastic about it.
• National Press Club offices: lots of dark wood panel. The dining room seemed okay, with a very high ceiling, and one wall was all windows, and it's on the 13th floor, so you'd expect a nice view, but the curtains were drawn. Sorta what's wrong with office work in a nutshell.

---

Update: Thirty-five bucks doesn't, apparently, get you this guy.

The gPhone doesn't take great night photos. This is what the Syrian embassy looks like at night, after image processing:

But you should be able to guess this one:

the answer. Update: This was a repeat. Kona's Country Club holds steady at 23 members (plus the US and Singapore).

Two factoids about Obama in this post. The first is that I have now had a meal with five of the six people in the management hierarchy between me and the President. The second is that I am 80% sure that I finally caught a glimpse of the president in a motorcade.

When I started at OPM last fall, I was in ASMG, which was in CTS, which was in HRPS, which is part of OPM. The Director of OPM, while not a cabinet secretary, does report directly to the President (though in practice it seems like he might reports a little bit to OMB). So my boss's boss's boss's boss's boss was Obama. Then my group reorganized, and then all of OPM reorganized, and now I'm in PRODDEV, which is in ASMB, which is in HRMS, which is in LTMS, which is in HRS, which is part of OPM. Thanks to a combination of being a Presidential Management Fellow, being in the right place at the right time, and just plain showing up, I've had lunch or dinner with all but one person in that chain, including the director (very nice guy; our lunch was postponed by the series of blizzards and when we finally did have lunch, he spent the beginning explaining the decision process behind deciding when and how to shut down the federal government due to inclement weather. I wouldn't want that job.)

As to the motorcade, I live on 19th Street, and I work on 19th Street, and Pennsylvania Avenue crosses the stretch of 19th Street that I commute on, and the White House is at 1600 Pennyslvania. So I've been stuck for coming up on ten motorcades. This is a thing that is fun exactly once. And almost all of them are Biden's motorcades, I'm assuming, because 1) they are arriving at the White House around 9 am or leaving around 5 or 6 pm, and 2) they don't have the ambulance or military command truck in the rear. On the other hand, neither of the limos had a presidential seal.

But the motorcade I got stuck behind tonight was going to the White House, not from, and did have the extra trucks, and did have somebody sitting in the back of a limo staring out whose face was consistent with Obama's.

But, when I checked the schedule,

The President will then travel to Buffalo, New York. ...

Later, the President will deliver remarks at a DCCC fundraising dinner in New York, New York. The President's remarks will be pooled press.

The President will return to Washington, DC in the evening.

I saw the motorcade around 6, and he gave a speech in New York around 7, so I guess that wasn't him.

All of the EU embassies in DC had an open house yesterday. The flier had room for seven embassy stamps, which I took as a challenge. The first nine embassies I went to were all a few miles from my apartment, further than Kona and I normally roam. It was nice to see the interiors of these places, but not terribly revealing since they all have intentionally public spaces where they host parties and whatnot. The lines started getting out of hand, especially for the shuttle buses, but the weather was decent. After finishing two distant legs, I came home around 3, got Kona, and went for the local embassies with time running out. Stamps only, this time, didn't want to leave Kona outside for too long.

Alas, Estonia wasn't doing any stamping, and the person doing stamping at Bulgaria had already packed up. The lines at Ireland and Greece were prohibitive. Luxembourg and Cyprus were quick operations, in and stamp and out. Portugal had already stopped admitting visitors, but the nice man went in and got me my twelfth and final stamp.

The final tally was Denmark, Italy, the UK, Finland (nicest embassy), Belgium (awful crowd control), Slovakia, Austria, Czech, Hungary, Cyprus, Luxembourg, and Portugal.

This morning Kona and I went out and visited Bulgaria again to express our dismay about the stamping situation. (We did Estonia months ago.) Below are flags from several countries Kona has visited recently, including this morning's walk. Can you guess the countries?

the answer

the answer

the answer

the answer

I'm trying to go to all the museums in DC while I'm here, mostly in descending order of annual attendance. The public museums are all free, but the private ones charge something. The Newseum was recommended by a few people, and if I could remember who, I would stop speaking to them. It was awful. Despite underwriting from the big news companies, admission still cost twenty dollars. It's a big glossy building, but surprisingly void inside, and hard to navigate. There were some interesting things here and there, most notably the exhibit on journalists killed in the line of duty; the majority of the material was unengaging. The "new media" exhibits took up a lot of space but had no depth. It was not completely uncritical of journalism as a profession, but you had to look closely to see any hint that the history of American journalism was anything other than triumphant.

In other words, it was just like the news corporations themselves: flashy, hollow, and nearly devoid of introspection. This button being sold in the gift shop captured well, I felt, the sense of unearned and exclusive entitlement:

It says,

Freedom of Speech is not a license to be stupid.

Which country?

Which country?

Which country?

Which country? This one's pretty tough with the nighttime lighting, so here's a hint: the picture was taken at 38° 54' 45.78" N latitude.

Which country?

Whose flag is this?

Answer

I showed my co-worker this picture from the KonaCam. She asked, "Doing laundry?"

"Doesn't seem to be; she's just lying there."

What country is this?

The answer is here.

And this one?

Answer is here.

Which embassy is this?

The answer is here.

My physical therapist has recommended swimming to help gently strengthen my left shoulder, and happily there is a public pool two blocks from my apartment. I couldn't find much information on the internet, so I went to scout it a few Saturdays ago. The whole complex, the Marie Reed Recreational Center, which is contiguous with or adjacent to or quite close to the Marie Reed Community Learning Center, is locked up on weekends, but I found this:

I spent some time accumulating critical accessories: goggles and a lock. Then one Tuesday morning I made it to the pool (after having to double back to get the money I'd forgotten, and then on the second walk I broke the goggles while trying to adjust the nose strap), and then at 6:45 am to find a group of people milling near the locked door.

"It was like this last week too."

"Have you been here since six?"?

"That woman that just left said it's been like this the last three weeks in a row."

So I gave up and went for breakfast. And I started mentally composing a story about how DC isn't quite a first-world place, and how everybody here is used to this kind of story and just rolls their eyes. My poor mood may have been slightly influenced by the hassle of the goggles: after scrounging for the receipt, I eventually went and replaced them. But the new pair is missing the different nose pieces, the attempt of which to change was the cause of breaking the first pair. So maybe that's just as well.

One silver lining of regularly heading to a Residence Inn in Macon, Georgia, is that it does have a pool, and you can have the pool completely to yourself. So I did manage to get in the water, do some floating, swim a few five-yard laps. But I needed some serious lap swimming. I checked my photo of the hours and compared it to the online hours. And Monday night, I tried again.

And again I had to double back to grab some money and an ID. But I finally made it around 7 pm on a Monday night, and the door was open. And I went in.

And I was completely blind as my glasses fogged. But slowly, I figured out that there wasn't an office, you just take off your street shoes and go to the locker, shower, and then jump into the pool. A perfectly nice, standard 25-yard heated indoor pool, lanes and all. A lifeguard on duty. Totally free, just go and start swimming. I did seventeen laps of various speeds and styles, including a length of butterfly and a few tedious laps with a kickboard. My first serious laps since high school swim team, and by the time I finished I could barely move my arms. But three days later they seem okay; maybe the left is a bit sore but that was the point, I think. And hey, totally free pool. Five evenings a week. Two blocks from my apartment. DC isn't so dystopic after all.

Here is the story of how I changed insurance companies as part of changing jobs, and how that affected my ongoing quest for medical car for my broken clavicle, and what it is like to get health care from Kaiser Mid-Atlantic.

As an independent contractor in California, I didn't have very many choices for health insurance; I went with Anthem Blue Cross high-deductible and paid about $100/month including dental. This is for coverage with a $3500 deductible, meaning that I pay the first $3,500 in medical expenses per year. There's a strong economic argument that you shouldn't get insurance for anything where the worst-case scenario wouldn't bankrupt you, because the insurance companies, like the casinos, know the odds much better than you do, and over the course of your lifetime you'll come out behind paying monthly premiums instead of a few multi-thousand-dollar payments. Like most economic arguments, it gets very complicated in health care.

I followed that logic to get the high-deductible plan that essentially only protects me from getting bankrupted if I'm in a major medical emergency. But even if you could afford to pay a million out of pocket, you should still have health insurance, because it gets you access to the negotiated rate, which is often half of the list price. Not that you can find the list price for anything medical before you buy, but that's another digression.

After six months they increased my premium from about $90 to about $160 per month, and I think also upped the dental rates. I called to ask why they increased my rates, and the lady said that my six-month introductory period was over and they were allowed to raise the rate.

"Okay, you're allowed to raise the rate, but why did you?"

"Your introductory period was over."

"I understand that you were no longer prevented from raising the rate, but why ... did I age into a new bracket, or otherwise change categories, or become a bigger risk?"

"No, nothing changed, but your introductory period was over."

Two things I regret failing to ask: was there a law preventing them from raising rates in the first six months, or was it just a trick to get new customers? And was there anything preventing them from raising my new rate right away, and if not, why hadn't they raised it to, say, $300 or $1000?

Anyway. In the end I got the last laugh because I paid less than a year of premiums and got tens of thousands of dollars of care, thanks to getting hit by a car, but I'm going to write about the medical/financial side of that incident separately. Today I want to talk about Kaiser.

Oh, and the other piece of background you should know is that, by the last visit with my surgeon, I was pretty sure I wanted to get some physical therapy because my shoulder, while much improved compared to "broken", was not quite right yet. This is no doubt to be expected with a surgically repaired clavicle, but I wanted to see what I could do, with help, to get those last few percent of function back. But the wait to see a therapist was several weeks, and my moving date to DC was several weeks in the future, so I put it off.

Federal employees get a choice of health insurance provider, from a list of maybe as many as ten. Blue Cross is on the list; I decided to go with Kaiser. I've always had a PPO before, not an HMO, so I thought it would be interesting to see the difference. Kaiser on the West Coast is generally well-regarded and is often cited as a model for how to both contain costs and provide good service. I heard less flattering things about Kaiser Mid-Atlantic, but figured what the heck, I can change it later.

I filled out my health insurance form during my first pay period, since I was told that it wouldn't be effective until partway into the first pay period after the one in which I submitted the form, carefully walking it over to the person on the second floor who actually processes the forms. Then nothing happened for almost a month. Then I got email telling me my login information for eOPF, the electronic access to my personal personnel file. One of the recent documents in that file said something about Kaiser, so I called Kaiser directly. They said I had been covered since my third week, and had had a Kaiser account since my fifth week, and would be getting something in my mail, and yes, they could give me my Kaiser account number over the phone so I could start booking appointments.

So I made an appointment to see my Primary Care Physician (PCP), conveniently located almost directly on a line between work and office, and 39 days after starting my new job, saw a doctor. He agreed that I should see a physical therapist, so I got a referral and then made an appointment for that. Two weeks later, 53 days after starting my new job and ten weeks after being cleared by my surgeon for resuming general activities, I finally saw a physical therapist.

Who told me that the only thing my PCP had written was "joint pain", and that she couldn't take my word for what my surgeon had said, and that without a note in the system from the PCP saying that I was okay for therapy and what the limits where, she couldn't do anything other than a preliminary evaluation; she couldn't do any therapy with me or recommend any exercises. We spent about an hour going, not in circles, but in perhaps a spiral, and she did ultimately listen to my description of what had happened and what the surgeon had said, and suggested that I try swimming as probably the best possible immediately therapy for the shoulder.

I also have been having some problems with my finger, the left index finger. At first I thought it had to do with the knuckle, which along with several others was scraped bloody—always wear gloves that cover the complete hand, not cool, comfortable ones that leave the last joint uncovered, that's another lesson I've learned from this— but was the only one to permanently scar. The scar hurts if I bend the joint all the way, but it turns out that the muscles or ligaments anchoring the finger are also damaged in their own right. I found this out when I tried to open the door of a 1993 Miata. The door handle of this model is a canonical style of the triumph of style over function; the modern term for this is FAIL.

The opening (affordance, in usability lingo) is so small that you have to pull it open with one finger. But the force required is the same as for any car door, and do you make a habit of opening your car door with one finger? I made the mistake of opening this door with my left index finger, and it briefly felt like I'd torn the finger off. This is when I learned that all was not right with that finger. The door, by the way, can be safely opened with one finger if you are slow and careful and use a healthy finger. But Miata eventually figured out that "barely possible to do without injury" is not the same as "fun", and this is the newer Miata door handle:

So I raised the issue of the finger, along with a few other aches and pains that seemed related to the crash, and the therapist said that each appointment could only deal with one body area.

So. Now what? She suggested I transfer my records from Stanford Hospital into Kaiser, and also that I see an orthopedic surgeon within the Kaiser network. So I did all of that—of course, I couldn't just make an appointment with the surgeon, and she couldn't give me a referral, she could just suggest to my primary care physician that he give me a referral. A mere ten days later (six working days, and let me just mention that most Kaiser services are only available during regular nine to five hours, which means I was taking time off work for each and every visit) the doctor agreed and provided the referral, and two days later, I was seeing the orthopedist. Which was a very cursory visit during which I learned nothing, but did get the x-rays taken which you see in this post. My clavicle looks the same as in August, which I guess is good since in August it looked joined.

Once the bone grows together, there is still a multi-month process of recalcification or crystalization or one kind of bone replacing another etc etc, so it's not done, but it's basically together and fully, if gingerly, weight-bearing. And it's still at an angle compared to the normal side, sticking up a bit and stretching the skin at the top of my shoulder. But the best news was that I could go see the physical therapist again and get some actual therapy. (I did try to go to the public pool near my apartment; more on that later.)

Long story short, I had a very productive first real visit with the physical therapist. A different one, since mine is vacationing in Thailand. We did a number of exercises that amount to strengthening and stretching the shoulder muscles, and I got some giant blue and red rubber bands to use, and a recommendation to find a gym with a hand-cycle.

So, all done, just had to stop by the medical records department to pick up the inch-thick stack of Stanford paperwork I'd dropped off the previous week, and then to Radiology to get copies of those new X-rays, about which I'd heard nothing and therefore assumed, and as of this writing continue to assume, indicate no special problems.

Those records I'd dropped off the week before, when the woman at the counter had looked at me like a crazy person when I said I wanted the papers back, and then I said, okay, fine, I'll go make copies, and she said, no, it's okay, leave them here and you can pick them up tomorrow, and I said, okay? Today's lady behind the counter said they were all at central processing and I couldn't have them back.

"So are they going to be destroyed?"

"They're at central processing. They'll be added to your records."

"I understand that. What will happen to that inch-thick stack of paper once it's added to my records?"

"Oh, I guess it'll be destroyed. But it'll be in our records."

... So I can then either fill out your form and get your printouts of your scans of my copies of my lawyer's copies, or I can get fresh copies from my lawyer, or I can fill out Stanford's form and get those copies again. Whatever.

So off to Radiology.

"Yes, we have your X-rays in our system."

"Great, so can you burn me a cd or something?"

"We have them in the system. You don't need a CD because your doctor is in the system and he can see them."

"Great, but I would like a copy for myself."

"Are you going out of system? We can make you a copy if you are going to see a doctor out of system, but you can't just have copies for your *personal use*." (said disdainfully)

At this point the locus of the conversation shifts from the lady behind the counter to the somewhat more smiley guy who's been listening in behind her.

"So if you were going to Georgetown University hospital you could get a copy," he says, helpfully.

"So if I tell you right now that I'm going to go to Georgetown, you'll give me a copy, but not if I say that I just want a copy myself."

"That's right."

"I'm going to Georgetown tomorrow. Could I please have a copy?"

"Sure. It'll just take a minute; have a seat."

He and I are grinning at each other; the lady has a disgusted expression. And that's how I got the pictures that you see in this post.

So, from the time I thought I might want physical therapy to the time I had my first real appointment was about three months, because I was moving and changing jobs, and because of delays built into the HMO system, and because of capacity limitations. I moved all of my records between systems myself, in some cases physically carrying copies of papers to the records desks; it's possible I could have done the same thing by mailing some forms around, but the last time I waited for Stanford to respond to requests for records it took about four weeks. I had to lie to get copies of my own medical images. And I had a $30 co-pay for each and every visit, so I had to pay for the three pointless meetings whose only purpose was to prevent me from stealing physical therapy services that I might not have actually needed (and prevent me from suing Kaiser for prescribing therapy that I wasn't physically ready for). In other words I paid an extra $90 in addition to my regular payments and my employer's contributions to do things that were only in Kaiser's interest, not my own.

Explain to me again how having the government run health care will result in a burdensome system with rationing of care and some bureaucrats coming between me and my doctor? 'Cause I'm afraid that particular scare isn't very powerful any more.

We have an "Open Season" in a few weeks, when we can change our insurance. I am of course leaning strongly towards leaving Kaiser, held back only by the headaches involved in starting over and interrupting what might turn into useful physical therapy, and by a sense of duty to you, my dear readers, that if I go to a better system, I might have fewer stories to tell you.

Kona and I made another youtube.

So I'm a fed now.

I work in the Automated Systems Management Group (ASMG) of the Center for Talent Services (CTS) in the Human Resources Products and Services (HRPS) division of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), which is an independent agency in the Executive Branch of the US government; our Director reports to President Obama, although I have the impression that he has to be very nice to Peter Orszag, the Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). I started on August 31, 2009, after coming through the Presidential Management Fellowship selection process. I talked to many agencies during the job fair and followup process, and ASMG seemed to present the best chance to do what I wanted to do in government: find some little corner of the machine in which I could make things better and have fun doing so.

The Automated Systems Management Group manages one automated system, USA Staffing. USA Staffing is an automated hiring system that other agencies in the Federal government (and some state and local) pay for to help them post job vacancies, receive applications, administer online questionnaires, and make selections. It has roughly a quarter share of its market, competing with companies such as Monster Government Solutions and Avue, among others. USAS, or any of its competitors, provides half of an automated hiring system. The other half is USAJOBS, which is a website with almost all of the civilian job postings for the Federal government. USAJOBS was the other Automated System in ASMG's name, I think, but it got outsourced to Monster a few years ago.

So ASMG, together with its partner group Technical Services Group in Macon, Georgia, is essentially a small software company within the government. Because it sells its services to the rest of the government (a form of transfer pricing) via a "revolving fund", it has more budgetary flexibility than other agencies or other parts of OPM. And so that's where I've landed: an unexpected little corner of the Office of Personnel Management, which I doubt I'd ever heard of before starting my Fellowship application. (The OPM administers the PMF; in fact, ASMG shares an office with the people who run PMF.)

And, two months in, I have to say I'm pretty happy. I found exactly what I was looking for and what I was led to expect. I like my co-workers, and things are functioning well enough that I'm part of a success, but not so well that I can't help make things better. Within our own group, we have plenty of expertise in federal hiring but not much in professional software development and product management. And in OPM and the federal government hiring process, things are not all roses.

Some thinly researched institutional History

OPM used to be the Civil Service Commission. The Civil Service Commission in turn draws its roots from the 1881 assassination of President Garfield by disgruntled job-seeker Charles J. Guiteau. In consequence, the entire federal hiring process was reformed, replacing the spoils system with merit hiring.

For most of its history (I think; I don't really know how it worked in the early 20th century), the Civil Service Commission performed the essential HR functions of the federal government. In the '80s and '90s, most of the hiring was delegated to the various agencies, but without funding, knowledge, or institutional support to do hiring well. OPM, which shrank roughly in half from its peak size, now serves primarily to support the rest of the government in doing hiring, rather than to actually do the hiring. There are a lot of problems with the current federal hiring process; here are two reports:

MSPB Report: What's wrong with federal hiring?

• The hiring process is too long and complicated (average 102 days between making request to fill a position and filling it)
• The assessment methods used are poor predictors of performance.
• There are too many bad exceptions to the merit-based system.
• Background investigations block hiring and take forever

How to fix it:

• get better qualification standards: multiple hurdle approach (use progressively more expensive tests to shrink the applicant pool)
• spend more time and money on better assessment tools
• several recommendations that amount to "do better"
• train HR staff better
• simplify the laws and rules

Factoid:

[I]n 2002, 1.8 million people applied for 55,000 screener positions at the Transportation Security Administration. Only about 340,000 met the minimum qualifications for the position and only 100,000 were rated as fully qualified.

Many agencies are now doing their own hiring instead of using OPM. 60% of those hires use essentially the "point method" on the chart. This method is cheap and simple, having only the drawback of working very poorly. Cognitive tests are much more effective, but lead to discrimination, and face serious legal challenges.

Most jobs have a one-year probationary period during which it's much easier to fire people. Less than 2% of probationary employees are fired in their first year.

[A] study found that selecting officials often feel they know who would be the best person for an internal job promotion before they announce the vacancy. And they select that person 80 percent of the time.... The cost of applying this competitive process—when selecting officials already have a good idea of whom they will promote—was about $102 million in 2000, just in supervisory expenditures. This does not include the costs of administrative tasks performed by the HR staff.

PACE: good predictor, ruled illegally discriminatory in 1979 by Luevano judgement. Written ACWA test: introduced in 1990 as replacement for PACE. Pretty good, and better than the post-Luevano hacks. But the Form C, derived from ACWA, leaves out too much and is not good. Other authorities created so address Luevano, including Outstanding Scholar and Bilingual/Bicultural Hiring Authorities, are lousy at predictive performance and lousy at increasing dirversity.

Many agencies have used technology to automate poorly designed processes, so that they are slightly faster and cheaper at hiring bad candidates.

MSPB Report: A Review of Federal Vacancy Announcements

The conclusion is that federal vacancy announcements are not very good. Too long, written to fulfill requirements and rules rather than to attract and inform applicants. Why? The HR staff writing them aren't sufficiently trained, experienced, supported, or competent. Every job application has to have two pages of explanation of veterans preference and other narrowly targeted programs. And USAJOBS has similar problems, in that it's not designed for the user.

So. How do I feel being a tiny cog in a giant machine? Prior to this gig I only once worked in a company bigger than a few hundred people. I was a contractor, but I would still get company-wide email, and some of it was pretty soul-killing, like the CEO arguing shrewishly—to his own employees—that the Gartner Group assessment of the company was unfair but not to worry, they'd get into the good quadrant next year. And yes, we get plenty of spam at OPM; I described some of it earlier. But some of the dictates from on high at least come from fairly high. This showed up in my inbox one day:

The White House yesterday released an Executive Order signed by President Barack Obama that states, in part:

"Federal employees shall not engage in text messaging (a) when driving GOV (Government-owned, leased, or rented vehicle), or when driving POV (privately-owned vehicle) while on official Government business, or (b) when using electronic equipment supplied by the Government while driving."

This Executive Order is effective immediately for all OPM employees and OPM contractors.

All things considered, I don't care much for DC's street layout, more on which later. But the basic grid is sound. It's defined by the Capitol, which divides the District into four parts, NW, NE, SE, and SW. North-south streets have numbers, and east-west streets have letters. I live on 19th St NW, so I'm 19 blocks west of the Capitol Building. I'm pretty close to U Street. All of the buildings on U Street between, say, 15th and 16th Streets NW are numbered something between 1500 and 1599. Very logical.

So 101 K Street NW would be on K between First Street and Second Street. And the street signs at those intersections would say, under K Street, "100" and "200". But what street is one block to the East? That turns out to be North Capitol Street (in NW and NE). And does it say "000" on the street sign. No, it does not. See for yourself:

What country is this?

I was considering signing up at the gym under the Department of the Interior, because they are across the street from my office. Since talking to the physical therapist re: my clavicle, though, I've changed the focus of my procrastination from weight-lifting to swimming. Weeks after giving up looking for the DoI gym's website, I just stumbled across it by accident. Some of the upcoming events look pretty exciting:

SOFTBALL: Now is the time for organizing the 2004 IDRA D.C. Softball League. All who desire to field a team and those wishing to play should contact AMBROSE HARRIS, III
IDRA Fitness Director on 202-208-5756 as soon as possible.

I get a lot of internal spam at the office, mostly from the Director. Here are some examples (the bold ones were flagged important by their senders):

Annual OPM Toy Drive
Green Gov Challenge
Take the GreenGov Challenge
REMINDER: Save Awards
Hispanic Heritage Month 2009
National Preparedness Month
CFC Chili Cook-Off Update
OPM Walking Challenge
CFC Bingo!!!
GOLF NOTICE - 4 DAYS TO GO!!!
Constitution Day, 2009

The individual initiatives may well be worthy, but it turns into a stream of noise that I just automatically archive (so that I can compile it into a post like this, just another service I provide to you, my readers). But every now and then something stands out and I read the entire email.

"If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog."

Contrary to folklore, President Truman never made that statement. But it is not bad advice. To celebrate your friend, furry or otherwise, HRPS is sponsoring a first time OPM CFC event, the Cute Pet Contest. You can enter your dog, frog, cat, rat, parrot, or ferret. Photos will be on display at TRB December 1 - 3, 2009 (a notice will be sent for the location). OPM staff can vote – preferably by using a voluntary dollar bill – for the cutest pets. 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place photos will be honored with posting on THEO. All monies raised will go to CFC undesignated funds.

...

I happen to believe I have the most cutest, kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful dog in Washington. But that makes it hard for me to pick which specific picture is cutest. Please tell me which picture is going to win her the Cute Pet Contest:

I got an alert the other day from the cyclist advocacy group that I joined at a street fair. After going home to walk and feed Kona, I rode down Massachusetts in a light drizzle to the public meeting, which was at the Carnegie library on Vernon Square, in front of the convention center.

The public meeting concerned the K Street project. No, not that one, but a project to rebuild the physical street. The event was staffed by city employees plus the architects and engineers—since everything is outsourced these days, these are exclusive sets. Apparently this started five or six years ago with the notion of repaving K street, and has spiraled into a general plan to reconstruct all of K Street and add an exclusive bus lane to the middle, a little bit like the Orange Line in LA, but only a few miles long. Only one of the three alternatives includes any accommodation for bicycles, and that only painted bicycle lanes. If you've ever cycled in a city, you know that cars and trucks and buses that wouldn't imagine stopping in the middle of the street are totally happy to block a bike lane; a street with bike lines is only marginally better than no accommodation at all. And even the plan with bicycle lanes had them overlapping with truck delivery areas. Our instructions from WABA, which I wholly agree with, were to show up and ask for a bicycle lane separated by a curb. They do this in Copenhagen, and it works very well:

I couldn't stay for the whole presentation and public comment, but there were maybe a dozen or twenty staffers present and roughly the same number from the public, and most of the public seemed to be cyclists, so I guess WABA's mobilization system worked. We'll see if it has any effect, though. The guy doing the initial presentation explained that this is the last step of the Environmental Assessment. Depending on how this goes, they can either get FONSI— Finding of No Significant Impact— and then proceed to finalize the plan and funding and begin construction, or they could find enough issues to have to do a complete Environmental Impact Statement.

I've written before about the importance of understanding that, in government, the goal of efficiency should usually rank below the goal of fairness. You can see from this slide, showing a straight line to the FONSI and not even showing the EIS as an option, how these planners view that tradeoff.

This has been a very gray and wet Halloween weekend, but during a dry spell Saturday afternoon I headed out to Northern Virginia to visit Joni and family. I intended to ride on surface streets the whole way, with stops as necessary to check GPS. But I ended up on a dedicated bike trail shortly after reaching Virginia. This turned out to be the Custis trail. As a reasonably capable road cyclist, I generally avoid dedicated bicycle trails because they aren't very safe, at least not at cruising speed. You are dodging pedestrians, who can dart in any direction, and other bicycles, and there are hairpins turns and other features incompatible with going above 10 miles per hour. On the other hand, I haven't done many long (where long > 2 miles) rides since getting hit, and I had a cold and didn't do hardly anything strenuous in the last few weeks, and I felt completely un-conditioned, so I resigned myself to the trail with a certain amount of grim relief. Here are snapshots from my new tailcam:

Eventually the Custis trail terminates, and although there is another, much longer trail that goes almost exactly to my destination, the transition between the two isn't very well marked. Here's GPS footage of my attempts:

That's no less than four doublings back and two missed turns. I can't say if there were missed signs, because I missed them. I finally did get on the Washington & Old Dominion trail, but quit it almost immediately after going over a teeth-rattling timber bridge. I then set out for Route 29, embodied mostly by the Lee Highway, which would be fairly awful even if it weren't under construction.

The Lee Highway is dirty and heavily trafficked, and has no shoulder. Construction to either side is one-story retail, cheaply constructed and generally un-landscaped. Think of the many long stretches of Los Angeles streets that look like crap, and then subtract the charm and the sunshine. I wouldn't make a habit of riding on it, and I was very happy to reach my turn and zip up to Vienna. Altogether, 16.76 miles, average speed 10.01 mpg, average moving speed 11.87 mph. Pffft.

After a lovely visit and many slices of homemade bread with butter and fancy honey, I had to head home. Feeling fairly wiped, I just rode the two miles to the Metro stop and settled in for an easy cruise home. Although my last two trips out to Vienna on the Metro had been delayed half an hour or so by track maintenance, none was scheduled. What actually happened, of course, was that we stopped between stations for the operator to go puzzle at something between the cars (as with most trains in the US, there is little to no provision for bicycles, so I had my bicycle wedged in a way that blocked the operator's door so I got to keep moving it around for him), and then when we pulled into Ballston he announced the train was out of service, opened the doors, and turned off the lights.

So I got fed up and decided to cycle home. I took the elevators out of the station and found myself at the end of Fairfax. The bit of Northern Virginia closest to DC has been refurbished on the surface and boasts five or six metro stops in four or five miles. It's quite corporate and soulless; it's a failed attempt to create an interesting, walkable, livable city. But at least it's an attempt. The rest of NoVa follows the more typical design pattern for America: developers buy land and put up something awful, end of story. So, buoyed by bicycle lines and a sense of place, I hopped on the road and made it over a mile before realizing I was going in the wrong direction. As I retraced my tracks as it started to sprinkle. I hopped into a fake 50's diner in search of cheesesticks and/or a nice juicy burger (with veggie patty), but settle instead of black bean patty pineapple sliders, which were unexpectedly good on dark, dense buns. Back on the bicycle and home through Arlington and Georgetown in the wet falling dusk.

My left shoulder is still a bit stiff and doesn't feel the same as the right shoulder, and the end of the clavicle protrudes up through the skin a little bit at the top.

My physical therapist recommended swimming (which I last did on a regular basis in 1990) as the best initial treatment. I just googled for pools, and there's one by my apartment. But closest to my office is the National Swimming Pool Institute. Naturally, it's on K Street, the infamous home of the American lobbying industry.

NSPI doesn't seem to have a website, so I can't check what their policies are. Most of the people on K street seem pretty predictable: people with wealth and power use their wealth and power to preserve their wealth and power. And somehow this always seems to involve collateral damage. Depending on the industry, this can be brutal and horrible—think of the blood on the hands of those who have prevented effective food safety procedures in the United States—or fairly petty, such as the compromise agreement between the US and Singapore that allowed US gum to be sold in Singapore (which banned chewing gum years ago) provided it was sugar-free and prescribed by a dentist. I can't help but wonder who the National Swimming Pool Institute opposes in the name of unfettered profiteering. Lifeguards? Water wing salespeople?

I've been walking past a sign for the National Museum of American Jewish Military History for a while now, and, since they are closed weekends, I took advantage of the Columbus Day holiday to visit. It doesn't seem like they get a lot of visitors, but only part of the building is the museum; the rest is offices for the organization. Shortly after I started browsing, a docent came down to chat. It turns out that this organization dates back to the US civil war. And there is another organization of Jewish American military history, currently based in New York, which descends from the Confederate Jewish veterans' group.

I really had no idea what to expect, but it turned out to be pretty cool. It's the usual museum stuff: pictures, stories, some artifacts, done very well. The ground floor has some background information on women in the US military and then profiles of a number of Jewish women, from WWI to the present. It made good fodder for trying to imagine them as real people, to be in their present. There was a section on concentration camp liberation, and downstairs many more exhibits. I don't think I'd seen a Medal of Honor in person before. You can see a list of everything on their website; I saved some of the permanent exhibits for another trip, and finished with "A Mother's Grief", which profiles Sanford (Sandy) Kahn from birth, through school—they have his baseball glove—into training, to deployment in France, including his last letter home, to getting three bullets in the back of the head.

The flag belongs to this country.

We visited the embassy with this symbol (the flag is basically the same):

which belonged to this country. And we visited an embassy under this flag:

which was this country.

Moving. My new theory is that it's a bit like pregnancy. It's all-consuming while it's happening, and afterwards your life is not the same, but you forget all of the pain or else you would never ever do it again. For the record, I only needed one of those storage pods, and I didn't come close to filling it.

While a dog is much less likely to support you in your dotage, they still require a bunch of maintenance. I wrote up a checklist of things that I was afraid I would forget. Of 13 items, fully five were about Kona.

The airline had their own list.

So. Washington, District of Columbia. By population, it would be one of the smallest, but not the smallest, state. They didn't get the right to vote for the president until the 1964 election, they don't have a senator, and their representative in Congress can't vote. A recent deal to finally give DC a vote in Congress was sabotaged by the NRA. The whole issue seems to be a sore spot in the District.

We landed on a Wednesday, took refuge with a college friend and her family in Northern Virginia, and set out Thursday in a rental car to find an apartment. We checked out about eight apartments in three days, in most corners of the city.

The District is majority black and has a poverty rate higher than any state but Mississippi but is embedded in a fairly wealthy and majority white metropolitan area. In America, race and class are as closely related as electricity and magnetism, so figuring out where you can afford to live is a fairly charged process. My office is in the northwest quarter, and NW also has the nicest houses and neighborhoods and all of the embassies and I looked hardest in NW, but I also looked at a place in Northern Virginia and a place in Northeast and a place by Howard University, among others. Some places were nice but in fairly desolate neighborhoods. Other places were not as nice. This carpet was even worse in person than in the picture.

There are bunch of nice stone townhouses, but mostly they are divided into a house, which is too big and expensive, and an "English" basement, which is too dark. But I would have liked to have lived in a little garret like this one.

Consistent with that theme is this building, in which the top floor of office space is for rent. If I'm ever in charge of any sort of evil organization bent on world domination, I think I would try to get this space for my headquarters:

One apartment I looked at was quite close to this lovely monument to ignorance:

But the apartment I ended up in is only two blocks from this awesomely malicious foolishness:

My new apartment is also close to this exciting museum. I'm assuming they're sharing space with the National Museum of American Jewish Sports History to save money, but that's just a guess.

So. I ended up here:

It's not quite fully equipped, compared to some others I saw; no garbage disposal, no dishwasher, no washer/drier, no microwave. And it faces a street that is completely gridlocked through rush hour and most evenings, in both directions. The fire department is two blocks away and treats the street like their favorite shortcut. But it's not small, and it's incredibly walkable; the office is 1.5 miles away, the Metro is five blocks. I can walk to groceries, walk to coffee shops (not counting Them, of which there are probably fifteen or twenty within a mile), walk to hardware stores and hundreds of restaurants and many shopping streets, walk to the brand new dog park:

The apartment was a little bare at first. It's an old building, with plaster walls covered with lead-based paint, and lots of patches and accumulated cruft. The wooden floor is probably original, and looks okay at a glance, but when you try to clean it you realize that those hairs and bits of dirt and gunk are all under the sealant.

After a few trips to IKEA, we are much more comfortable.

So here we are. Busy making tracks.

Andre Ethier booted pinch-hitter Pete Orr’s fly to right field in the ninth inning, allowing Justin Maxwell to easily score, and the Nationals averted their 100th loss of the season with a 5-4 victory over the Dodgers on Wednesday night. —AP

"Booted." Well. That's not how I remember it.

You can file this blog post under your choice of my pet themes, either the oxymoronism of sports journalism or the magic of baseball to illustrate concepts of statistics and truth. An "error" in baseball is an official thing, designated by a paid scorekeeper and affecting standard statistics. The Dodgers were charged with one error in last night's game. But in fact they committed two errors in the previous inning, and the error they were charged with was a good play, in my opinion.

In the bottom of the eighth, with the score tied, nobody out, and a runner on first, this happened. That's obviously a fly ball that should be caught, and either Kemp or Manny could have caught it with ordinary effort. But Matt Kemp apparently lost it in the lights, and Manny properly did not go running under the ball since Kemp, the center fielder, is the captain of the outfield and is responsible for directing the other players. Unless he screams "you get it, I lost it", Manny shouldn't be running to catch it, eyes up. So that's Kemp's error, but officially, losing a ball in the lights isn't generally an error. Sherrill then induced a foul out, which should have been the second out, and then got Dukes to ground into a double play (which should have been a single-play inning-ending third out). But. Hudson (I think; it might have been Furcal) throws wide of first, and the Nationals score a go-ahead run. The norm for scoring broken double-plays is that there's no "should have" for double-plays; if at least one out is made, there's no error on the play. But the same throw would have been an error if it hadn't come as the pivot of a double-play. The Dodgers give away a run with two errors, but neither is officially scored "E". Here's how the bottom of the eighth looks on my scorecard:

The Dodgers tie it in the top of the ninth. The Nationals load the bases with one out in the bottom of the ninth. With even a minimally ambulatory player on third and less than two out, any moderately deep fly ball wins the game. The Dodgers position their outfield commensurately with their option matrix: in, way way in.

The outfield is in this close because any ball hit over their heads is going to win the game whether they catch it or not. With less than two out, the runner on third can simply return to the base on any fly ball, wait until the ball lands either in a glove or the ground, and still be able to run home. So any defensive coverage more than three hundred feet from home plate is wasted, and playing this close in they can, for example, turn any bloop singles into outs. Orr hits a fly ball to medium-deep right, an obvious game winner right off the bat. Ethier's defensive prowess is intermittent (see FRAR and FRAA), but his arm is fine (and in fact, literally as I am typing this sentence, the night after the game and watching tonight's game live, Ethier just threw out a National at the plate running from second on a single to right). Still, to run backwards and catch a ball and then quickly throw it hard to home plate behind you is going to be a hell of a trick. Simply catching the ball has no value; he has to throw out the runner or the game is over. What actually happens is that Ethier runs crazily backwards, glove over his head, and gets to the ball, only to have it bounce off his glove. When the ball touches glove leather but isn't caught, it's almost always scored an error. But given his initial position, Ethier did well simply to get his glove to the ball, and it's entirely possible that he missed the catch because he was trying to catch it while positioning for a throw to the plate. Remember, just catching it is worthless, because the runner comes home and the game is over. So, the Dodgers lose the game on two bad plays in the eighth that aren't scored as errors, and took appropriate risks in the ninth, only to be charged with a pointless error. Insult to injury, the reporter then describes the fly ball, which bounced off Ethier's glove, as "booted".

That silliness aside, it was a lovely game. The ballpark is reasonably intimate, and non-corporately named. It manages to have no particular personality but also to not be bland; it's just nice, in a non-pejorative sense. There were enough of us Dodger fans in our area behind third base that our "Let's Go, Dodgers" chanting drowned out the booing from, basically, the rest of the field level on the third base side, and there were maybe twenty of us, so you can do the math on the attendance and allegiances. There's a Metro stop a block from the park, but Metro made my friends twenty minutes late, and then trapped us for over half an hour going home before making me change trains, so that a 15-minute incoming ride took almost an hour going home. And to make that even worse, they let us fill up a full train, maybe a thousand people, and then just wait there, with only one or two announcements and nothing like "it will be 30 minutes until this train even moves". If they'd said that, we could have just walked to a nearby station on a different line that wasn't undergoing track maintenance. It's the sheer indifference of the Metro employees to the passengers' well-being that makes it so frustrating. Let me be the next to say, Metro sucks. They put a nasty end to a pleasant night at the ballgame.

Although Kona has begun to mingle with the other dogs again (to the extent that she ever mingles with dogs: grudgingly and suspiciously), she returns from time to time to the north corner of the park to wait for the Hotel Lady to return.

Kona hit a trifecta on our walk this morning. I've included a map to help you.

Here's the flag of the first country she went on.

The second:

And the third.

Kona resumed her vigil for the hotel lady, although she did take some time out to chase other dogs, so perhaps the spell is starting to wear off.

We went for our night walk.

There were too many embassies to visit them all; maybe fifteen or more in a mile plus. At one point we passed Myanmar, Lao, and Ireland in 4 buildings. We conducted some business at this one. Which country is it?

The answer is here.

Our neighbor in Half Moon Bay tended to put up a different flag every few days, anything from India to Arizona to the Subcarpathian Voivodship.

Here in the heart of DC, there are so many embassies that I can't take a picture of every flag I pass. Instead, I'll be photographing only the flags of countries that Kona has been on, if you catch my meaning. For our purposes of pooch piddling, the front lawn of each embassy will be treated as national territory. So far in her life, Kona has been on the US, Singapore, and possibly Japan—we don't know if they walked her during her two stops as luggage. Today, she was on the country with this flag:

Can you guess the country? It's not so easy as Half Moon Bay; the embassy flagpoles don't face the Pacific Ocean and its gentle breezes. The answer is here.

My second week at my new job, they sent me to Georgia for training and to meet our technical team. Gus' friend Jill, who was in town for a convention, was kind enough to take Kona to her convention hotel and dogsit all week. I handed apartment keys to a friend of a friend of a friend last weekend, and left Kona alone in the apartment when I left Monday, and she was there when I got home Thursday night. If not for the facebook postings of Kona lounging around in a hotel room, it would have been like she was there the whole time

Friday night we met at the local dog park, which coincidentally just opened a few days after I signed my lease, and is two blocks from the apartment, and is extremely nice. I mapped our journey with the GPS in my google phone:

Kona instantly recognized her hotel lady, who now had her own dog with her. Jukebox is 11 years old, and ignored all of Kona's provocations, from playful nips and jumps to outright why-won't-you-play-with-me barking in the face.

Eventually another corgi showed up, Clyde, and I was talking to her owner as Jill and her friend Allison left. Clyde is a bit portly, but despite my experience keeping a corgi trim, backed up by showers of compliments from the vet, I didn't think it was my place to lecture his owner. Yet. While we were talking, I realized Kona had disappeared, and eventually I went and found her at the other end of the dog park, by the water fountain, waiting for Jill to return. A guy named Reyno, with two pugs, asked if I was her owner and said that he thought she'd been abandoned, because she was staring out of the fence so intently and desperately.

So, when Kona and I went back to the dog park this morning, guess where she set up shop, waiting for her hotel lady to come back.

In the last week and a half, I started a new job; took the civil servant oath [affirmation]; filled out the Declaration for Federal Employment (Optional Form 306), Employment Eligibility Verification (I-9), Statement of Prior Federal Service (Standard Form 144), Designation of Beneficiary (SF 1152), Education Data Update Form (Attachment 6 to FPM Ltr 298-42), Voluntary Separation Incentive Payment (Buyout) Certification Form, Self-Identification of Handicap (SF 256), Ethnicity and Race Identification (SF 181), Person to Contact in Case of Emergency (OPM Form 2927) and many others; went to a lot of meetings and met many people whose names I probably won't remember for another month; looked at eight apartments; signed a one-year lease, moved in, unloaded a storage unit, made extra copies of the keys, waited hours for the cable guy; mostly reassembled my bicycle; looked for and failed to find four critical retaining pins; sent in for Kona's new dog license; three times went looking for the new dog park in the wrong direction; twice went by the brand-new dog park when it was closed; given keys to a friend of a friend of a friend as part of the backup to the backup to get Kona taken care of during my first federal employee travel next week (Georgia, 3 days, business modeling training and meeting the technical counterparts to my Group); walked by the White House five or six times but only been able to see it through the trees once; and accidentally stumbled upon the Treasury. Details to follow. Today, a pilgrimage to IKEA.

Look closely at the middle of this picture. What's that by the streetlight?