Solopsistic Sunday ramble

As I get ready to say goodbye to my phone of two years--and, naturally, overthink the events of those last two years as coexperienced by that phone--I have to wonder (or admit) that I'm easily amazed, and definitely caught off guard by the passage of time. This sometimes manifests itself in silly, basic ways--every week, as I empty my vacuum canister, I'm amazed at how much dust and dirt accumulated in my house since I so thoroughly cleaned it the previous week. And now it's manifesting itself in a more profound way, as I go through the photos on my phone, wondering which are worth keeping (and what had kept me from deleting some earlier). These aren't all the pictures I took; my iPad, once I won it, became the tool of choice to capture the garden (and Gracie), and I continued to take vacation/travel pictures with my actual camera. But my phone was there when I didn't think I'd need a camera; it captured everything incidental about the last couple of years.

So here's what my phone saw, in the order that it saw it:
my roses in bloom;


Artomatic (2012); dinner at Rasika; a rooftop pool party; a dude at the airport dressed in what I'm guessing was regional garb (his face photoshopped out);

Nina, looking happy and lovely at her wedding reception;

Gracie, too lazy to move a ribbon off her head; the tasty vegan burrito--the first solid food I had after having my wisdom teeth pulled--at Surfside in Glover Park, to celebrate Alex's last stand before he went back to law school;

the river by my parents' house, and my dad grilling veggies--the ones my mom would (figuratively) throw in my face a day later as a sign of how I lived my life wrong; the cookies we baked over the holidays--the very relaxing holidays I did not spend with my parents, because my mother had decided I was dead to her; Jay's visit--specifically, the stale he didn't lick, even though it looked like a cookie to him; a sign at Bilbo Baggins, site of another pointless date; Jay and I, decked out in Colonial garb for Alexandria's Washington's Birthday parade last year; buying carbs with my "I Eat Carbs" bag; the sun setting over Southwest DC as I walked to Arena Stage;

 Walking back to the office from the Hill.

a spider on my keyboard; my immersion-blended finger, in and out of the Statoil-sponsored treatment room in the ER; my painted-purple nails and one still-gauze-wrapped finger holding a wine glass in view of the Potomac, at a wine-tasting fundraiser where I felt very, very out-of-place;

 an odd set of gargoyles in the fountain in the garden at the Middle East Institute,

 where I went to a book reading; one of my dahlias in bloom; scenes from a pool in DC; a bunch of pictures from the Kreeger museum;

the puppet sex scene, in the rehearsal room for "Avenue Q;" another plant in bloom, one that was sadly later dug up by an animal;
Carnival in Provincetown; the river by my parents' house, again--the first time back since the falling out--and my dad, standing near the water; the moon (over the parking lot by Michael's); the twilit Capitol Building, on my walk to the metro; a body of water taken from the plane window, since phones could be left on at that point; the empty shelves at Trader Joe's after a snow storm; my friends and I at trivia night, with the plate we'd used for calculations and notes; snow, on the way back to the office from a Hill event.

My new phone will have an even better camera. May it bare witness to even more beautiful incidental adventures.