A Touch of Teal | Washington, DC Lifestyle Blogger

dc food + drinks

3.22.20

DC Dinner Club: March 2020 + My Favorite Restaurants Offering Takeout/Delivery

If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you know that I love eating out and it is one of my favorite ways to spend time with family and friends. While I am fully embracing social distancing, I do miss the joy of eating at a restaurant and so look forward to eating out all the time when it’s safe to do so again! Since that doesn’t look like it will be for at least several weeks, I wanted to go ahead and share my March Dinner Club post now. Luckily, I was able to eat at some really delicious places before it wast best for all of us to hunker down—and am hopeful I can get back to enjoying dine-in experiences at DC restaurants soon!

Restaurants and their dedicated staffs have been hard-hit, and since I am lucky enough to be in a position where I can help, I plan to order takeout and delivery from some of my favorite places in the coming days and weeks. My friend Justin of DC Food Porn has an amazing guide to every DC restaurant offering takeout and delivery, which you can get details about HERE. I’m not going to try and reinvent the wheel when a comprehensive guide is already out in world for us all to take advantage of, but I did want to shout out some of my favorite restaurants during this difficult time—so you can see a roundup of some of my favorite places doing takeout and/or delivery after my roundup of March’s restaurants.

Another way I’ve been trying to help my favorite restaurants is buying gift cards since it’s a great way to give them some cash flow. For instance, I needed to buy a wedding gift, so I gave the couple a gift card to Screwtop Wine Bar, since it’s a place we both love. Another friend just had a baby, and since traditional meal trains aren’t an option right now, I’ll be gifting them a restaurant gift card.

link love

3.20.20

Link Love #134

Happy Friday! I am excited it is the weekend, even though this one will look different than most. This was my first full week working from home, and it became easier to get into a groove each passing day. I am also enjoying some work from home benefits—like a really, really short commute! 😉

I am grateful that work is a constant in my life at this time of rapid change, and especially grateful for a few really busy days because then the time passes quickly. I feel like my emotions were all over the map this week—and I am sure many of you felt the same! There were times when I was super happy and other times where I found myself in a moment of panic. Once I started limiting my consumption of the news to a reasonable amount each day to stay informed, but not panicked, things got a lot better.

I know I am really lucky that I can work from home and safely practice social distancing, when many heroes among us cannot. Me having to stay cooped up in my apartment—beside my daily walks which I so look forward to!—is a small price to pay to keep us all safe. For those of you out there working on the front lines, I am thinking of you! Thank you!

Yesterday would have been the start of March Madness, which bummed me out a bit since the rounds of 64 and 32 are so fun. And, until last week, Men’s Final Four was my big project at work, so needless to say, I’ve been working on other things this week. On the bright side, I suppose UVA will be defending national champs for another year—and to that I say, Wahoowa!

This weekend, I’m going to go on some nice long walks, get lost in a good book, work on some new blog posts, and shoot a few new IGTVs for my Instagram. Sitting at home for a week has also made me realize how much I need to deep clean my apartment—so here’s to hoping I find the motivation to do that, too!

I hope you all have a great and safe weekend! x

How to Stay Busy While Social Distancing

Editor’s Note—this post was last updated on 3/24!

HELLO FROM DUPONT CIRCLE! How is everyone fairing out there? I feel like I’ve lived a whole year in the past week!

Let’s back it up a little bit: last Monday, my company had us all work from home so we could test the VPN and make sure it would stay up with increased demand. Tuesday, we headed back into the office like normal and I went to OTF with my squad after work—and looking back, that day was probably my last normal day for a long time! On Wednesday morning, I had a dermatologist appointment before work, so arrived late and then went to a lecture-style training meeting. On the way back to my desk, I somehow managed to chip my front tooth on my laptop—you literally can’t make this shit up! Luckily, my dentist could squeeze me in over the lunch hour, and afterwards, I just headed home to work from there for the afternoon. While I was at the dentist, my company asked all employees to work from home, effective Thursday. So, since then, I’ve been spending a lot of time at home, settling into a new routine of web-conferencing work calls and eating too many of my ‘rona rations.

While I ventured out some Friday and Saturday, since Sunday, I’ve fully embraced social distancing and plan to for the foreseeable future so I can do my part to flatten the curve. If you want to better understand why this is our best chance to stop the spread of Coronavirus, I cannot recommend this interactive Washington Post article enough. (And while you’re at it, check out their TikTok because it’s amazing!)

I consider myself *SO LUCKY* to be able to work from home and to have circumstances that allow me to socially distance, since I know many do not have these luxuries. And I am especially grateful to all the healthcare workers who are on the front lines, putting themselves at risk for us!

Growing up, my mom always told us that only boring people are bored, and I am fully embracing that mentality over the next couple of weeks at home. So, I thought it would be nice to share some of my favorite media—books, podcasts, TV shows & movies (and where to stream!)—as well as a few other ways I plan on keeping busy during this time. I am still keeping a normal schedule during the workday, but since all my social plans after work and on the weekends for the foreseeable future have been postponed, I, too, will be looking for more ways to stay busy at home!

Also, if you’re not following me on Instagram, I am sharing a ton of content in real time over there—I’ve also saved everything in a highlight called “Quarantine”—I would have named it “Social Distancing” but it was too long! I am doing daily work from home walk + talks where we can check in with each other about how we’re feeling and talk about a topic of the day and I’m also sharing a ton of non-Coronavirus related content that’s been on my list for a while that I just haven’t had the time to create—like my makeup tutorial!

I’ll plan to make this blogpost a “living, breathing document” as we say at work, and will update it regularly throughout our time at home—please live any suggestions you have in the comments below so we can all help each other out during this crazy time!

One last thing before we dive in. Today, I really beat myself up for not being able to focus and be super productive at work like I normally am—and then I decided to stop and just give myself a pass. And, last night, I had a really hard time focusing on my book and going to sleep—two things which usually come to me no problem. There is so much information coming at us on a 5-minute news cycle and the world today is a different one than we were living in just let week. So I’m trying to be really nice to myself and others during this time—let’s keep morale high and support each other, even from afar!