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Yuletide Ball in Washington

My New Year’s Eve started with me day cleaning my home office thoroughly, a multi-day job I am only getting started on; I want to reorganize and deep clean everything and re-configure my home work space…

I wasted a few hours fighting with horribly written Windows software to update our old Garmin StreetPilot 2620 GPS with new maps and more pre-programmed waypoints. The GPS is great, but the PC interface is crap.

We then headed over to the JW Marriott in DC to attend New Year’s Eve Gala at Yuletide Ball with friends. Ann and Dan brought Prosecco which we matched to our own. Montelliana Extra Dry (Montello E Colli Asolani) is fabulous as a dry palate cleanser before dinner.

The gala was a lot of fun, and we got to see many friends we’ve not seen in some time. Squeezed in loads of dancing and saw the current world 10 dance champions Gherman Mustuc and Iveta Lukosiute do some pretty amazing routines.

New Year’s Day we snagged a bite at the Starbucks in the hotel and headed over to the National Aquarium ($7 each) and saw perhaps 140 small and large aquariums with fish, corals, eels, turtles, frogs, newts, and even a couple of crocodiles.

We chased that with lunch and then a lengthy visit to the lovely new Sant Ocean Hall exhibit at the Natural History Museum, which is splendid, and I am still stunned by one high-tech gadget display of a globe with a projector inside suspended by three wires from the ceiling running a educational program about the many important functions the ocean serves our planet; while people watched the globe-screen images from all sides… really amazing… I want a globe like that; wow!

It was called Global Ocean Systems, and apparently there are four shows it is programmed to run. We scored a copy of the museum’s own Ocean book, gorgeous, informative, short article loaded for easy reading in short bursts.

Les Halles is closed, which is sad.

Had fun dancing with Michele, though I had problems with Mambo again. The Ballroom Studio students did well overall.

Woke up Friday to discover the room bill under our door, and they’d charged us $7.70 each for two bottles of tea that had been precariously balanced on a vending plate with sensors under it; the bottles toppled off when I closed a drawer in the bureau that the plate was on top of and we never drank the over priced tea. It’s pretty bad when you lease a room for convenience and comfort and it’s booby trapped with extortion devices. The hotel quickly removed the charges for that.

I bought a new latin shirt from Julio & Julio, and learned that they will be at a few Arthur Murray events this year.

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