I got up around 6:00 am and walked to the grocery store this morning. We are supposed to get a foot or two of snow today/tomorrow, however, you would have never known it this morning. It was gorgeous this morning. The temperature felt warmer than the reported 35 degrees. I truly felt “the quiet before the storm.”
I met my friend Kimon yesterday evening at the 18th Amendment, a bar near the Eastern Market Metro. He was meeting some others and invited me to join. The 18th Amendment gets a thumbs up, although I had my doubts when I first arrived. They had a beer from Great Lakes Brewing Co., a 20 year veteran of the brewing business from Cleveland, OH, who is starting to enter in the DC market. I actually was introduced to them (literally I met Bernie the DC sales rep) earlier this week, so ironic that I found it on the menu some place. Give them a try, I especially like their Edmund Fitzgerald Porter, although the 18th Amendment only had the Eliot Ness Amber…also good.
18th Amendment near Eastern Market
While I was at the bar, I found myself talking to Dom, a clinical psychologist and professor at Georgia State University. He is in DC on business, reviewing some grant proposals. Dom is a lot of fun to talk to. I am not surprised that he is a professor. He seems to be able to talk intelligently on a variety of different topics. Even when he has a strong opinion, he tends to encourage discussion rather than squash your ideas with his own.
I find out that aside from being a professor, he is also an official spokesperson for Woodford Reserve Distillery, a bourbon producer. No wonder he is in a bar! How do you get to be an official spokesperson you ask? Well, I am not sure I recall 100% of his explanation, but I believe the gist was that he was hanging around the distillery so much that they just gave him the honor. Pretty cool. His favorite bourbon though is Ridgement Reserve 1792. I haven’t tried either of them. My brother had some Blanton’s bourbon…that was probably the best bourbon I have had.
Although all of this is interesting and very topical given our presence at a bar, especially one named for the constitutional change that enabled national prohibition of alcohol, I wanted to talk to Dom about the $10. I asked him what he was going to do with it and he said that he would probably spend it on alcohol this weekend. His reasoning in his answer was based on the fact that he had received an additional $10 that he didn’t have before and the most honest answer for where that $10 would end up is probably in the cash register of a DC bar. He likened it to the possible scenario of finding $10 on the street. That is how he viewed my $10. He added, “You can’t really make a judgment on how charitable a person might be by what they do with the $10…for that, you should check my charitable contributions.”
Year of Giving 