I think the main reason is because we've got to kickstart our social life again and get caught up in the heady whirl that was DC before we spent a month away.
That certainly didn't happen this week. I spent two entire days sorting out photos from our travels (me and the Facebook photo uploader are going to fall out...), which was nice because - as you may've noticed - I love photos. But it's weird, having been immersed in them for two whole days, almost the memories of our trips have been reduced to those photos rather than what actually happened.
Then on Wednesday I was really ill with food poisoning, so felt very sorry for myself under a duvet on the sofa. Turns out being ill isn't so much fun if you don't have an office you should be going to - it means it's literally you're own time you're wasting and there's no incentive to give in to being sick and take a day off. That was annoying.
While I was in LA, I picked up an email from the London-based TV company I've been doing bits and pieces of work for over here, asking if I could do 3 days a week for them for 5 weeks, doing development writing for the head of documentaries. This means coming up with ideas for new programmes and/or researching ideas that have already been had in London and writing them up into persuasive pitch documents for my boss to take to TV channels to get commissioned.
Fortunately they don't want me to start until next week, so I had this week to settle back into DC life, sort my photos out and be sick.
But then More4 contacted me because they needed someone to book political people for filming they're doing in DC and New York this month, for interviews that will serve as those ponderous interstitials they have between programmes with thoughtful people like Gore Vidal, Debbie Harry and Noam Chomsky.
Because it's just a booking job that pays astonishingly well and because they're doing the filming next week, I figured I could do a couple of days this week and maybe even a couple next week and it not interfere with the 3 days a week for the other company. Though obviously this means I'm now staring down the barrel of a full week of work next week, which I'm not much looking forward to!
Yesterday we had a fantastic webcam chat with our friends Matt and Jilly. We nattered for two hours and it was as though we'd popped over to their flat for drinks, which was so lovely. Unfortunately they're among the people I miss the most, so it didn't help ease the homesickness but was just so nice to see them and chat as a foursome in a way that phone calls don't really allow.
We spent the rest of the day with another dear friend: The Wire. Series 5 arrived on DVD while we were in Costa Rica and it has caused us physical pain to have to wait this long to watch it, but we've fired through it all this week and yesterday finished it. Forever.
Compared to the previous four series, it hasn't been great, but compared to everything else that's ever been on TV, it's been amaaaaaazing. The writing is just astonishing and the acting is so natural that it feels like the most authentic thing you've ever seen. I think the reason it wasn't as good as the other series is because it had to abandon subtle and slowly unfolding plotlines in order to fit everything into a much shorter series.
**MASSIVE SPOILER ALERT / boring paragraph that will mean nothing to anyone who doesn't watch The Wire** It was a bit horrible to see McNulty revert to type, but I prefer him like that than the lame-o he was in series 4. Amy Ryan's speech about why he should sort himself out was fantastic. And I tried to ignore the fact that I'd accidentally read about two major plot points (Omar and Snoop) but loved the way that Omar died, so simple and bathetic after managing to rule the streets by himself and take on huge gangs of people and come out on top, to then be shot by an opportunistic child. And I liked that Bubbs sorted himself out and that David Simon was clearly settling some scores with the characters in the newspaper office. But my heart literally broke in two at the end of the Dukie/Michael storyline. I sobbed and sobbed and wept and sobbed. Just too too sad for words. And a little hokey that they so obviously set up all the same archetypes as we'd seen in previous seasons: Dukie becomes Bubbs, Michael becomes Omar, Marlo becomes Stringer, etc. Oh, but Dukie - noooooooo! The scene between him and Prez was just amazing.
It's amazing to see how big The Wire has become in the UK - they're having a weekend-long event, screening all of season 5 at the Curzon Soho, with guest appearances by David Simon and Dominic West. Part of me is uncharitably sad that we started watching The Wire back in 2004, when Entertainment Weekly kept raving about it as the saviour of TV, forcing us to get the DVD of series 1 and it was like this little treasure we'd found, but now it's become trendy to say you like The Wire. But of course that's just a function of me being a terrible person, because of course everyone should see it and it should get all the recognition it deserves.
**ok, Mum and Dad - you can start reading again** So the main reason we made sure we were out of DC for all of August was because everyone warned us that the humidity and heat are just unbearable for the whole month and that everyone arrives everywhere dripping with sweat and it's gross and you can't do anything very quickly or you'll drown in your own sweat.
I have to say, in the 5 days we were here between Costa Rica and Denver (with a bit of Florida in between), the weather was just lovely. Really really hot, but not at all humid and just like being on holiday.
Today however has been groooooody. But it's September! Stepping out of the house felt like stepping into a gigantic sauna whilst wrapped in an electric blanket. So we were going to avoid going out once I got back from church, but then we heard about the Adams Morgan Festival that was happening, so tore ourselves away from the documentaries on the Wire DVD (which are excellent) to check it out.
As we were passing the Belgian bar/restaurant at the end of our street, we noticed Megan's boyfriend Jonathan having a drink outside with a friend, so said hello and were invited to join them, which was really nice (but for feeling like we were chickens, slow roasting in a very humid oven).
Jonathan's friend was Eric, who's a lawyer and lots of fun - definitely someone we'd like to see more of. And Jonathan is starting a new job at Oxfam tomorrow, which he's very excited about. There was talk before we went away of him getting a job with the Obama campaign in Central America and the Caribbean, mobilising the ex-pat effort there, and I think they offered it to him, but the Oxfam job was better, or something.
Apparently Megan's having a bit of a hard time of it in Chicago, with Michelle Obama's speechwriting team. It's really hard work, but most of the legwork has already been done, so for example she didn't get to go to Denver, because Michelle's convention speech was written long before Megan joined the team, and she just finds herself editing and tweaking existing speeches and comments, rather than writing anything from scratch.
We felt a little anxious sitting out on the street with Jonathan so near our flat, because it turns out that Anne really doesn't like him AT ALL and I'm sure if she'd seen us with him, she'd have been cross!
The festival was a huge affair, stretching all the way along 18th St from our road and along some side streets, with food, clothes and art stalls and stages and dancing and stuff. It felt like a scaled-down version of the Notting Hill Carnival and was nice and bustly.
It's quite ridiculous, and I don't know why I got emotional - whether it's all the divisive stuff that's been going on in the past few weeks of conventions where people very staunchly pick sides and attack the other side, or whether I was still thinking about poor Dukie - but we wandered past this fun old man doing a karaoke version of 'Sweet Caroline' and everyone standing around or walking by was joining in. There was such an amazing spectrum of age and ethnicity that it made me sad that the world isn't more like that. Though I realise that effectively what I'm suggesting as a creator of world peace is a big Neil Diamond sing-along, which is obviously silly. But it just made me a little sad.
Elsewhere, there was cool African dancing, where a dude span round horizontally in the air a lot. Unfortunately I never quite caught him in full flight:
It was so boiling hot that on the way home, Maxy indulged in that most American/Kwik-E-Mart 
of refreshments: the bright blue slurpy, which I took disproportionate pleasure in serving up for him.
Tonight, we watched 'The American President', which was written by Aaron Sorkin and bears an uncanny resemblance to 'The West Wing', but isn't as good. It was funny to see the parallel characters and to see Martin Sheen in the Leo (chief of staff) role, rather than POTUS, but after watching 7 series of The West Wing over 2 short months, the movie felt really slight and as if nothing really happened. And Martin Sheen seemed way more presidential than Michael Douglas, which was a bit of a problem. Annette Bening is beeeautiful, though.
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