PS, DC, I love your timers

In DC, while I was doing all that walking, I learned to love the timers associated with the pedestrian walk signs. When the sign clicks over to walk, a timer starts letting you know how long you have to get across the street. Very useful! If you just get to an intersection in my town, you don't know if the light just changed or is about to go red. When the timer gets to zero, the traffic light does change immediately to yellow and then red, though, so you do have to hustle if the numbers are in the single digits.

The Metro rail system also had timers in all the stations telling when the next train was coming, which was uber-convenient, too. I found these things especially useful as our hosts had few clocks and I didn't wear a watch the entire week. I really just ambled about with no real concept of the time and that was nice.

And even though I slept late every morning I was there, I somehow adjusted to the time there over the course of the week, because I'm knackered by 9 o'clock and have been waking up every day at 5am now that I'm back. That one hour extra in the morning is really annoying - I'm not actually awake enough to get up and do anything about it, but I'm awake enough to have a hard time falling back to sleep.