As I talked about yesterday, I dealt with the issues of the lost wallet and having new items issues.

I had intended to meet a fried at their house to run but traffic in the Washington, DC area deterred that activity. I was going to drive over to Springfield and meet Chris to run. The trip over would have taken me about 25 minutes but the trip back would have taken me over an hour. I did not think that was worth running 3 miles for. I had started to drive over but got on the Beltway and saw that traffic as already backed up a long way and that meant it would just get harder and harder to get back to my house. Unfortunately, I just did not think almost two hours of driving was worth running 3 miles with Chris.

Driving, and the necessity for driving, is one of the things that has always bothered me about living in DC. We have a metro system and bus system but they are not universal especially in the suburbs so they are only really useful either in DC proper or the near suburbs. For almost 7 years, I did not own a car and was perfectly happy without it. I took the metro to work or worked from home. I rode my bicycle around Alexandria or walked. If I needed to go further afield where mass transit was not available, I would use an Uber. Most of my life really revolved around Old Town Alexandria and downtown DC so not having a car was not horrible. I, also, had good friends who would give me rides on occasion especially to the Saturday morning runs if they were too far to run to or bike to. The issue with Chris is he lives beyond the Beltway where there is little mass transit access and off the Beltway which is hard to travel on during rush hour.

I joined Emily for some rosé wine in the evening. The weather was lovely to sit out in which is great this time of year. When I am in Alexandria, Emily and I regularly get together to share some wine. Emily’s house has fireplace so it winter it is nice to enjoy a fire and in summer the house has a nice garden courtyard to sit in.