NEW FRIENDS

CURRENT NETFLIX OBSESSION: 'Pushing Daisies'. We love it! Anna Friel wears pretty dresses, our West Wing pal, Kristen Chenoweth, is brilliant as the excellently-named Olive Snook, and it's really funny. I'm only sad it's been cancelled after two seasons.

While I toiled away at this blasted Lib Dem project, yesterday, Maxy got a herogram from the head of BBC World News! It was an email just to Maxy, with the head of Online cc-ed in, thanking Max for all his excellent work surrounding the election and signing off with the line, "You thoroughly justified our decision to give you the job"!! Yippeeeeee!

And while Maxy was excelling at work, I was enjoying my own bit of success on the domestic front, by having the carpets cleaned. Our sitting room and bedroom have a ridiculously pale cream carpet throughout and, I guess because this place is a rental, no-one appears to have been very bothered about spilling stuff on it. So it's an embarrassing and grody mess of red wine, sauce stains and messes that I don't want to give too much thought to what might have caused them.

It was particularly gauling to have Max's predecessor-but-one identify at our housewarming party back in May which stains his children were responsible for!

It just really grosses me out and it doesn't help that our hoover doesn't work, so I've been badgering Max for ages to get the BBC to agree to sort out a carpet cleaner and today he came! And it was AMAZING!! Some of the stains were really really dark and looked like they wouldn't go anywhere, but after an afternoon spent steaming and spraying and scraping, the magician that was the lovely carpet cleaner man got them all out and the carpet looks awesome! It was my very own transformation like in home improvement shows!

Unfortunately I somewhat hilariously hadn't factored in that the carpet would need to dry for some time when I invited Oliver over for dinner last night:

clean carpet - yeay!
Pre-dinner chats squished into the corner of an empty room - boo.

dinner in the entrance hall. Nice.

Today I ploughed on with Lib Dem man's stuff and then this evening, we went for drinks with a couple called Joe and Molly, who our friends Matt and Jilly met in Belize this summer. When Matt and Jilly heard that Joe and Molly were from DC, they put them in touch with us and it turns out they live literally just up the road!

So we met them in a really cool dive-bar on 18th St called the Toledo Lounge. It looks really scuzzy, but the beer's super-cheap and the jukebox is amazing. We purposefully planned to haveh supper at home, to give us an excuse to leave if we didn't hit it off with Joe and Molly, but it turned out we needn't have bothered - they are SO nice!

Joe's an architect and Molly's a middle school teacher who works in this really interesting experimental school in DC that puts a lot of emphasis on vocational and kind of 'real world' teaching, as much as the academic stuff.

They got married in the summer (Belize was their honeymoon) and are a really nice couple. We chatted nonstop for about 3 hours and then they mentioned in passing that they'd been in West Virginia at the weekend. I said the first thing that came into my head when I thought of West Virginia, which was had they been there on a retreat? Much to our mutual surprise, they both said yes. So I asked - expecting a bemused 'no' - whether they'd gone with Grace church and they said yes - becoming increasingly freaked out - and then Max and I were able to blow their minds, by reeling off all the people we know from Grace - that's the church that Alison, Emily, Brewster et al go to!!

Turns out Joe used to be in a study group with Brewster and Molly sat next to Emily at breakfast on Sunday and they all know the same people we know! It was really fun to freak them out, because it was such a crazy coincidence that we know all those folks and yet were introduced to Joe and Molly by our UK friends on holiday in Belize!

So, having rather reluctantly met up, with an escape strategy of needing to go home for supper, we left Joe and Molly at about 10.30pm, starving hungry but with two lovely new friends!

Joel McHale was on the 'Countdown with Keith Olbermann' repeat when we got home, inexplicably holding his baby boy during the interview!