A Beautiful Day in Our Nation's Capital: A Visit to the WO

I'm in Our Nation's Capital this week on Forest Service Business. Here's a picture of HQ, what we call "The WO" for Washington Office. It's having a face lift. "The WO" is located at the corner of Independence Avenue and 14th St NW, right near the Washington Monument. When I walked by at 7:45 AM tourists were already lined up to climb it. If you look the other way you can see the Capitol of our Nation, in the Capital.











"The WO" is also located right next door to the Holocaust Museum which accounts for the fact that all the windows have blast curtains on them, so the view looks like that to the left instead of that below. Apparently there are a lot of wingnuts out there who threaten to bomb the museum.












I always stop in to say Hi to Smokey when I'm at "The WO." Smokey isn't too much of a conversationalist--he says the same thing to me every time.

In the afternoon we took the USDA Shuttle over to the Rosslyn office where Research & Development has an outpost. Rosslyn is in Virginia, but we don't call it "The VO"--we still refer to it as "The WO." I suppose if we called it "The VO" people would confuse it with booze. I took this shot of the Jefferson Memorial, one of my favorites as we zoomed by on the way to "The VO." I think I will start calling it that.




"The VO" is in an anonymous office building that houses a school of cosmetology, or beauty school, on the ground floor. The students gather in a Gourmet (that's DC language for a cafeteria/salad bar) for coffee and such. They bring their practice heads with them in the morning before school


There are a lot of soldiers in DC, and most of them seem to wear camouflage fatigues. I don't think it works very well. I think if they want to be camouflaged, they need to wear suits or shorts and t-shirts.