hear them ring

today was a lot of fun and very touristy. my mom's sister, aunt margi, was in town. she, her boyfriend [of 24 years or something, what do we call him?] and his parents and i roamed around downtown and ended up at the national gallery of art. lots of interesting paintings in there. we ended up in the creepy part for the first half.. lots of paintings of dead people and other creepy things.

they had to go to a tour at the capitol so i stuck around the american indian museum and had delicious lunch.. which didn't seem that expensive now that i'm used to DC prices. my totopos con pollo was $8. and deeeelicious.
apparently every single native american tribe in america contributed at least a little money to the museum, so they all own a little piece of it. their flags are hanging across the rotunda.

today was the 20th anniversary of the bill that approved it passing so they had a lot of cool stuff going on. i stayed to watch a family sing a couple of traditional songs and dance. in the middle, there's a giant 'sawdust carpet' made of colored sawdust. i wish i had taken a better picture of the thing itself. it was really impressive. and they're going to sweep it up in 3 days!

other than that, i'm just enjoying these lazy days. funny how you'd do anything to be able to take a nap at 4pm on a work day but napping all day long for 4 days gets kind of old.

i made cranberry sauce because i had so much fun doing it at becca's for thanksgiving. who knew it was so easy?

1 cup of sugar + 1 cup of water + 1 package of cranberries. boil for 10 min.

they start off shiny and then get dull and then pop open like pop corn as they heat up. and here' s the secret to making cranberry sauce: cranberries are sooo sour on their own. you neeeed to make sure every one pops open so it can be filled with sugar syrup. i just pop them with my fingers once its cooled down.
voila! it makes 2 1/4 cups.
here's a picture from the football game last week