Meghan and I went north to Elizabeth and Justin's home to meet dogs.

Beyond our shared Medill pride, we went for Walter (shown sitting).

Walter was a rescued dog — predecessor and hero to all dogs there.

There was also a kitten who lived in the bathroom. 

Fun times were had by all except Simon, an orange cat who ventured downstairs at the wrong time, caught the attention of a three-legged dog who proved quicker than everyone else in the room and sparked an all-dog chase followed by all-owner chase of fantastic proportions.

Simon emerged without injury.

Next was Brewer's Art with Steve — an all-star Medill afternoon — and it turned out he went to high school with cousin Tim. He and Meghan told me the downstairs was a dungeon. They were right. But it was a comfy one. We drank beers named Wit Trash, Sluggo and Resurrection.

On our way out, we found sunset shining off the opposing building. 

How could the weather have run so hot? Staying cool felt like success.

Major congrats to friend Jen, my Glee- and Grey's-watching comrade, for her coauthored expose of teacher Kevin Ricks in today's Washington Post.

Sweeping in scope, the Ricks narrative dominates today's front page (at right) and runs deep both in print and online.

Readers aren't going to be able to put this one down. Unlike many news packages of this size, there's minimal filler. Nearly every paragraph contains case reporting. The details span years, mediums and a wide variety of school systems, local and foreign.

Authorities arrested Ricks in February. To the public, the known case involved just one student. Today's story has shown the number affected may explode. The public has many questions to ask of its school and police systems.

Today's opening sentences:

Kevin Ricks was a gregarious, well-traveled English teacher at Osbourn High School, a Walt Whitman devotee who was so popular that a photo of him in class was chosen to fill the opening page of the yearbook. A writer and photographer himself, Ricks would walk the halls of the Manassas school with a leather-bound journal of his musings tucked in his bag, next to his laptop computer.

What teachers, parents, students and even his wife didn't know was that his journals contained decades of dark secrets, a running handwritten commentary of Ricks's world of obsession, infatuation, pursuit, sexual abuse and international child exploitation.

Again, read it in full here. Jen and her fellow Posties, stunning work.

Update, late in the day: Catching up with Jen this afternoon, it turns out friends Jon and Kat did the A1 design and the digital timeline, respectively. It's terrific to be in a metropolis where great young journalists abound.

Hilary invented the word. Sheri approved it. "Jobirthday." When you take major job action on your birthday. Webster's, you're on notice.

Delayed a few weeks for trips, work, illness and more, we dove into the Art and Soul cocktail list. There were egg whites and sno cones.

We walked to Chinatown and Red Velvet and started work on photo submissions to a new Tumblr, Dudes with Beards Eating Cupcakes.

Then down the street to Pitango Gelato. Shown left to right: Chocolate chip, banana, espresso. The hundred degree temps? We fought back.

Later, we witnessed the best Metro hook-up ever. A drunk dude and his drunk blind friend boarded the train and met a drunk girl. The dude complimented the girl's shoes. They began making out. But! She then realized she'd ridden many stops in the wrong direction. (These things happen when you're in love.) The drunk blind friend confirmed it for her and said to his friend, "I'm sorry, dude, I had to tell her!" Another rider politely informed him that his friend had left the train with the girl. The drunk blind friend let loose the best laugh I'd heard all week. I wanted to follow the two friends around town and chronicle their lives forever.

To recover from this excitement, sangria. A happy jobirthday for all.

Did you ever consider not becoming a writer?

Do you mean did I ever consider becoming something else? Yes. As a boy, I wanted to be the Peruvian Diego Maradona. Sadly, Peru hasn't made the World Cup since 1982, so I guess I did well to choose something different. But, more to the point, not becoming a writer is something I consider every single day, if only for a moment. What if today I didn't write? What would I do?

It's cool, Daniel. You can still blog. And hear the words in your head. Beautifully beyond you but near you, around you. Ready for purpose.

Yet another highlight from the 12-day first work week, ending today.

Through the tunnel from the Terminator and Independence Day scenes.

Into downtown Los Angeles, close by City Hall, to the Redwood Bar.

Home to the karaoke in 500 Days of Summer and my favorite lines.

First up, the folk-rock-meets-Mordor sounds of Eagle Winged Palace.

Then the rock-meets-spaghetti-western awesomeness of Spindrift.

Meriah made it happen. We praised smoke machines, CNN-reminisced, discussed her band's coming album, imbibed, and felt like gun slingers.

No better way to beat jet lag than to live late and embrace the West. 

The harmonies of Ivan and Alyosha, which are, of course, not names of anyone in the band. Dostoyevsky, apparently. Mellow but a good time, especially when you can hear them warming up as you sit at your new desk and then walk feet down the hallway to see them play for you…

As usual, expect the performance to appear soon on Tiny Desk's page. In the meantime, hear one of the songs they played, Easy to Love.

Along with seeing music in the office, another adapation in my two NPR weeks has been finding the ropes of a more collaborative environment. Seeing the band on Wednesday, a recent Alex Ross line came to mind. Ross was grappling with the use of music in dance — the discomfort he felt at dance performance when always, to a music person like himself, "the movements of the dancers seemed at odds with the rhythm and the structure of the music." I've felt the same way for years. But I liked where Ross landed on matters. Writing on a new show in New York:

"The choreography imposed a different, quicker kind of logic, but by now I've seen enough dance to understand that music need not always set the pace: as so often in the art of collaboration, a loss of creative independence can be a gain in creative power."

Part of my latest New Yorker catch-up attempt, in the June 28 issue — neurologist Oliver Sacks examines the case of a writer who suffered a stroke and lost his ability to recognize all written words. As the writer struggles to practice his craft again, Sacks covers how reading works.

We are all faced with a world of sights and sounds and other stimuli, and our survival depends on making a rapid and accurate appraisal of these. Making sense of the world around us must be based on some sort of system, some swift and sure way of parsing the environment. Although seeing objects, defining them visually, seems to be instantaneous and innate, it represents a great perceptual achievement, one that requires a whole hierarchy of functions. We do not see objects as such; we see shapes, surfaces, contours, and boundaries, presenting themselves in different illumination or contexts, changing perspective from their movement or ours. From this complex, shifting visual chaos, we have to extract invariants that allow us to infer our hypothesize objecthood. It would be uneconomical to suppose that there are individual representations, on engrams, for each of the billions of objects around us. The power of combination must be called on; one needs a finite set or vocabulary of shapes that can be combined in an infinite number of ways, much as the twenty-six letters of the alphabet can be assembled (within certain rules and constraints) into as many words or sentences as a language ever needs.

Bringing you a Speedway Moment.

Late night Los Angeles, what were we doing? Where were we going?

And why was there an Earnhardt tribute in this place of business?

'Cause we were going go-karting, that's why! High-speed go-karting!

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First morning back in the D.C. area. As I attempt to return to Eastern time, catch my breath, answer your e-mail, and, good Lord willing this week, get the blog back on track, Morning News digs into its archives for "Lone Star Statements," a fun and highly readable set of "excerpts from actual one-star Amazon.com reviews of books from Time's list of the 100 best novels from 1923 to the present." My favorite of them:

The Sun Also Rises (1926)

Author: Ernest Hemingway

"Here's the first half of the book: 'We had dinner and a few drinks. We went to a cafe and talked and had some drinks. We ate dinner and had a few drinks. Dinner. Drinks. More dinner. More drinks. We took a cab here (or there) in Paris and had some drinks, and maybe we danced and flirted and talked sh*t about somebody. More dinner. More drinks. I love you, I hate you, maybe you should come up to my room, no you can't'… I flipped through the second half of the book a day or two later and saw the words 'dinner' and 'drinks' on nearly every page and figured it wasn't worth the risk."

Elvis!

Los Angeles, give me Norfolk Virginia,
Tidewater four-ten-oh-nine,
Tell the folks back home this is the promised land calling
And the poor boy's on the line.