Toilets in BloomingdaleDC Alleys

Alley behind First St NW

Alley behind First St NW

Every once in a while I take a walk through the alleys behind our houses in Bloomingdale just to see what there is to see, to avoid traffic and to get a different view of things. Yesterday's walk elicited two toilets.  One seems to be positioned in a back yard where I assume there are people working on the house and the plumbing isn't working  yet. Or maybe -- so my mind rambled -- it's like that situation in the book "The Help" where the householder didn't want to share her toilet with her domestic servants.  I was also fascinated by this standing plastic toilet being red and white and blue. Is there something all American about toilets that I don't know? The other toilet has less to say about itself as it has clearly been abandoned and knocked over, lying in the alley behind a house that may have been renovated recently but I couldn't discern that.  I've seen these thrones kept and used as planters for geraniums but this one's previous owner apparently is not into that type of recycling. You just never know what you are going to see in the alleys behind the houses.

Inside the Eisenhower Executive Office Building

There's something about being inside the Eisenhower Executive Office Building that makes me think that I've stepped into the story of American history being made. After all, such meetings are not every day occurrences and I don't get invited that often. But it's the high ceilings, painted walls and columns, mouldings and lighting fixtures that are so elegant and ornate and old and I always get the sense that I'm walking where other really important people have  walked before. I like the highly polished waxed marble floor of diagonal black and white squares that you think are going to be slippery but they're not. Shoes always clickety-clack when you walk to the room where you are to meet the President's staff and there's been more than one occasion when I've got lost on the wrong floor or down the wrong corridor before finding out from a passing friendly staffer where I am supposed to be. I've probably been in this building a couple of dozen times over the past 20 years, but each time I am impressed with its grandeur. I don't always remember what the meetings are about or what happened, but I do remember the place. Is that mysterious or what?

Damn the Torpedos, Full Speed Ahead!

Not far from where I work is Farragut Square that I stumbled into today and snapped a shot of ole Admiral David Farragut, the guy who apparently said, "Damn the torpedoes, Full Speed ahead," during the Battle of Mobile Bay in the Civil War. I looked him up on the Internet of course -- as who has encyclopedias in their houses anymore? Sure enough, Wikipedia gave me all I needed. He was the first rear admiral, vice admiral, and full admiral of the Navy and is the guy who said this all-American type phrase. His statue had some pigeons napping on his feet and walking on the four cannons pointed in all four directions at the park visitors.  No-one who walked by appeared to notice him in the afternoon sun and he seems to stand there, at least thirty foot high, but invisible.. The statue faces towards the White House and I wonder what they think of him there, if they think of civil war at all. ..