The Good and Bad of the Weekend

I arrived home on Friday evening to see the Verizon van in front of my house, and the installer getting all the equipment out. Awesome! This guy braved the icy conditions to run the new fiber-optic line from the telephone pole straight to my house, and hooked everything up by that evening. He was rewarded with homemade chocolate chip cookies that Ellie helped make. A couple of quick tests showed that my connection is now 5.18 mbps download, 1.87 mbps upload speed. So now instead of downloading at 40-50 k/sec according to Firefox, I’m downloading at 500k/sec. My podcasts in iTunes take at most 3-4 minutes, and that’s when 3 are downloading simultaneously. I am very happy, to say the least. This’ll definitely work for VOIP, and I’m cancelling my old DSL today. Seriously, it is faster than my connection at work.
On Saturday, we had Evan’s official Christening portrait done. Relatives should expect their copy in the mail sometime in March. Very cute. We also hit up Costco, for a very rare quick trip, and then braved the crowds to check out Wegman’s. Wegman’s is much loved by Northeasterners for some reason. To me, it was a packed, difficult to navigate annoyance. Maybe it would have been different if we had known where things were like we do with Whole Foods and Safeway, but as it is, I’m not planning on going back there any time soon. It’s really far away from us, and we’ve got almost all the same stuff locally at the Whole Foods. And Whole Foods has more competent cashiers. The Wegman’s cashier spent half her time ogling the cart fetcher (“Omigod, here comes the love of my life. He is soooo hawt!”).
We decided on Sunday to head downtown and try to catch the Chinese New Year parade through Chinatown. We got there in plenty of time, but then ran into a parking crunch. I knew we should have taken Metro. There was some gymnastics meet or some such at the Verizon Center, so all the close parking was taken, or cost $20 for the “event.” When we finally parked at the outrageous price of $17, and arrived in Chinatown around 2:30, the parade was already over! Poor Ellie was disappointed, as she wanted to see the cool dragons (we had seen some the day before at the mall after Evan’s pictures). So instead, we joined the other hipster parents and went to the National Gallery. Seriously, you have never seen such a collection of MacLaren and Peg Perego strollers. I really wanted to shoot myself for being one of them. At any rate, Ellie enjoyed the impressionist paintings of ballerinas (she’s starting ballet in April), and especially enjoyed the gelato (the only food place that was still open at 4pm).
We finally went back home after a long couple of days and had our barely Chinese stir fry with Japanese soba noodles and watched the PBS Chinese New Year special which featured a lot of dancing, including a really cool glow-in-the-dark dragon dance while Evan watched in his Chinese outfit that we bought in Hong Kong years ago. Yes, pictures of that are definitely forthcoming.