Susan Says Goes to Washington...

I recently took a break from this blog so that Seth and I could visit the boys as well as enjoy a family reunion of sorts down in Washington, D.C.

I thought the entire experience would help refill the depleted vessel of my creativity and provide me with blog topics for weeks, if not months, to come.

After all, I'd be doing a lot of driving, which -- in the past -- has given me ample material: left lane laggers, non-yielders, women putting on mascara while doing 90 all make for some good snarky stuff.

Everyone was
very polite...

But people on the road were on excellent behavior. They moved out of my way accommodatingly when I bore down on them with my hi-beams blazing, were pleasant at merges and waved me in repeatedly when I attempted to join traffic.

What the hell?

Surely the hotel would provide some fodder...idiots in the elevator, a bad mattress, a nasty desk clerk perhaps? Nope. While extremely crowded for the Easter weekend, people in the elevator were festive and pleasant, the mattress was exceptionally comfortable and I slept like a baby and the front desk staff was gracious to the point where they kind of scared me.

Bad food in the restaurants? Nope. Horrible babies banging spoons and howling? No. There were babies but they were the best behaved damn babies I've ever seen. And if one of these magical babies even so much as looked as if they were going to blow, they were whisked away by attentive and considerate parents.



Many of the babies wore
 tuxedos and carried
walking sticks.



What was going on here??

Lousy waiters? No again. Gracious and attentive, they brought extra parmesan without being asked, made sure my water glass was filled and picked up my napkin every time it slid off my lap.

Did Tom or Charlie do anything to piss me off? No, the bastards. How about Seth? I couldn't even count on him.

This should have
been me.

Like most Americans, I was starting to suspect a plot.

And, thanks to my lovely niece, Lauren, we had a series of government tours scheduled. Here, surely, there would be some mishap--an unintentional security breach ending with me in a strait jacket, being wheeled out on a dolly after being tasered.

There would certainly be some pratfall where I crashed down marble stairs, landing on a precious antique or a confrontation between me and Bo the White House Dog after he smelled cat on my pants hems and attacked me, both of us ending up on the front page of the Washington Post....

But no.

I smell those cats
but I'm a Democrat.

While I admit that the security guards and Secret Service (despite their recent interest in South American prostitutes) have absolutely no sense of humor, I sailed though the metal detectors without a hitch, kept my footing on the stairs and was ignored by Bo despite, at one point, actually being within smelling distance of him.

In fact, our tour of the White House was perfect. Inspiring. Moving. We stood where JFK conferred with his brother by the Rose Garden, leaned into the Oval Office for a long look and stood in the lobby where foreign dignitaries are seated as they wait for the president to receive them.

We stood here.

Jokes were put aside as I gazed through the same windows as FDR, DDE, JFK and LBJ had during their administrations.*

Our tour of the Capitol the following day was equally stirring. My normal jackal-like sense of humor was on hold and my hyena calls of laughter were silenced as we quietly walked through the beautiful hallways of Congress.

I even passed Nancy Pelosi's office without having to squelch a single wisecrack.

We sat in the cool dimness of the House floor and while, for a fleeting moment my hushed conversation with my sister did touch on digestive difficulties occasionally experienced when away from home, mostly we just thought about the history that had been made within the walls of this great chamber.

The back of Mount
Vernon faces the Potomac.

We rounded out our weekend with a trip to Mount Vernon, the magnificent home of George Washington without me making a single comment about wooden teeth. We just soaked it all in....the beauty, the history, the leadership and sacrifice of the man who had gazed at the Potomac from his back porch and died upstairs in the sunny bedroom we'd respectfully filed past.

I am obviously going to have to pick a fight at Walmart, slip in some cat vomit or torture Seth in some way in order to provide a new stream of blog topics since everything went so well in Washington.

Hey, I see a patch of cat vomit now...wish me luck!

*This would have been a perfect place to insert (hahahaha) something about what Bill Clinton might have gazed upon while Monica was under the desk but, in the solemn spirit of this post, I will not do so.

I'm very sorry but this was too good to leave out.