This past weekend was an unexpected gift. Originally it was scheduled to be a gaming weekend (once a month I travel down to Suffolk, Virginia–about 2-1/2 hours away–for a tabletop rpg), but that was postponed because half the group had the flu last week. However, it looked like I was going to have to work all weekend anyway (ref.). After staying at the office until 9:00 Friday night, though, I felt I’d gotten as far on the project as I could without additional feedback, so I sent what I had completed so far to my boss’s boss, who was going to be working on it over the weekend as well, along with my home phone numbers and email address so that he could contact me once he’d taken a look at it. I didn’t hear from him all weekend, though, so we began to take advantage of the time to do other things.

Saturday evening we saw Finding Neverland at the Cinema and Drafthouse up the street. It was about the most crowded I’ve ever seen the theater, and we ended up having to sit in the center, smoking section near the back. Normally we can avoid the smoke by sitting along the sides, but all those seats were taken. The cigarette smoke definitely bothered me, but not to the point of completely detracting from experiencing the film, which I found very moving. The boy in the role of the young Peter Llewellyn Davies, especially, gave a powerful and affecting performance, and I was delighted later to read that Johnny Depp, who worked with him here, specifically requested him for the title role in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory due out this summer (and which I’m eagerly awaiting).

Sunday morning we had an 11:00 brunch reservation at David Greggory, where we enjoyed Easter brunch last year. This year’s meal was every bit as good, though my roast pork was a little fatty and the bison, sadly, was missing altogether; the incredible polenta, though, and the delicious, spicy cole slaw and barbecue sauce almost made up for the absence of the bison, and I had two huge helpings of the first.

Afterwards, we took the Metro to Gallery Place and walked to the National Gallery of Art, where we saw the Toulose-Lautrec and Montmartre, Cotton Puffs, Q-tips®, Smoke and Mirrors: The Drawings of Ed Ruscha, and André Kertész exhibitions, as well as Andy Goldsworthy’s incredible Roof, of which I took quite a few photos.

Sunday evening Jeff watched Touching the Void (I was at the computer, but gave about half my attention to the film), the amazing documentary about the experience of two mountain climbers ascending a Peruvian peak when a series of mishaps and accidents leads to one of them making the decision to cut the rope of the other, letting him fall, thinking that otherwise both would die. The climber who was cut loose, however, managed almost miraculously to survive and make his way back to base camp. It’s a gripping film, with particularly incredible cinematography and sound.

So Sunday night ended and the weekend was over, and still I’d done no extra work. I experienced a slight sense of dread upon waking the following morning (though it turned out that the information I’d provided Friday night was accepted nearly as complete, and left me with relatively little to finish up on Monday), but not for a moment did I regret the welcome and unforeseen gift of time I’d been able to spend out and about and at home with Jeff.