Every week Carole offers a Ten on Tuesday meme. This week’s asks for your ten favorite tv shows:

1. Castle — I love character-driven shows and this one is populated with lots of well-thought-out personalities. Castle and Beckett have great chemistry, but it’s Castle’s interactions with his daughter and (until recently) live-in mother are what moves this show up to the top of the list.
2. The Big Bang Theory — Ah, nerds! We missed much of this season with the transition to digital tv, which resulted in a temporary but prolonged loss of CBS. We have it back now (most nights) and look forward to catching up with what happened after the guys left for Antarctica last spring.
3. Glee — It’s interesting, because the writing on this show isn’t great and the songs are often over-produced, but I love it anyway. The kids seem like real, if often one-dimensional, teenagers, and it’s great fun to sing along with the soundtrack. If you somehow missed this show in the fall, turn in tonight.
4. Bones — “Quirky” is probably my highest praise for characters and this forensic drama is populated with them. Our appreciation for David Boreanaz in this show has even made us investigate one of his earlier shows, Buffy.
5. Chuck — We missed the first few seasons of Chuck because it conflicted with other shows we liked. However, the aforementioned channel blackout effectively took them off the air, leaving us with plenty of time to watch this fun spy show.
6. The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson — He sings. He dances. He doesn’t have a script. He crosses lines left and right. Funniest guy on tv.
7. A Mets or Nationals game — I don’t watch baseball indiscriminately, but am more than happy to watch my two favorite teams play. We don’t have cable and have lost Channel 50 (which airs a Nats game once a week), so we’ll have to rely on the Fox Game of the Week to help us out with this one.
8. Mystery — PBS is lost to us these days which has directly affected how much more often our tv is turned off these days. But when we had access to it, we loved the Sunday nights where we got to follow Miss Marple, Inspector Lewis, or Lynley and Havers.
9. The Mentalist — Emotionally stunted ex-con man Patrick Jane helps a California Bureau of Investigation team solve murders with the hopes that they will enable him to catch the mobster who murdered his wife and daughter.
10. Masterpiece Classic — Again, no longer accessible, but oh! what great BBC costume dramas these are! Dickens, Gaskell, Austen…

Numb3rs would have made the list, too, because I really liked the family dynamics of the show and might have a small crush on Charlie’s character, but it ended its run earlier this year.

How about you? What are your top ten tv shows?

If you don’t live in the area or follow the news, you might not be aware that there’s currently an international nuclear summit going on in D.C. I admit that the first I’d heard of it last Sunday and I live here, so don’t feel bad if you didn’t know.

Visiting dignitaries are nothing new to our nation’s capital. Important people routinely caravan across town, pausing our lives with their motorcades. However, a simultaneous visit from nearly 40 heads of state and another dozen VIPs from around the world is another magnitude above and beyond what even locals are used to.

Obama is holding the summit at the Washington Convention Center, which is located about half a dozen blocks from my office (which is also four blocks in the other direction from the White House). Last week, word began to leak out about road closures. Then we learned there would be a secure perimeter. Some businesses located within the fencing were opting to close for the duration of the summit in order not to lose business. Residents of the housing project located along one edge of the perimeter would have to turn out their bags and pockets every time they want to return home.

This was not going to be your everyday Washington meeting. [Editor’s note: D.C. or the District is what locals call the area where we live. Washington is used to refer to the federal government or by people outside the region. It is frequently said with scorn or disdain.]

By Friday, our building was astir and managers instructed employees to check the hotline before coming into work today. The helicopter presence ramped up on Saturday and at this point their whir is omnipresent. The boosted police force in the metro and on the streets became noticeable with blue or black uniforms, flashing lights, and sirens becoming commonplace.

I thought I was prepared until I stepped outside by my office this morning. There were cars parked at every corner for blocks in order to stop traffic at a moment’s notice. The streets were laden with dark SUVs (which, it turns out, have been rented by the Indian media). National Guard vehicles were posted along the outside of the perimeter along with dump trucks filled with sand. A squadron’s worth of police officers seemed to be on every corner.

So much hoopla was associated with this event that when I left my office at 7 to discover the building swathed in yellow police tape and the road closed just outside that I wasn’t surprised. I saw a protest walking down the street next to ours and assumed the two events were related. Apparently not. The local media is reporting that a cyclist was somehow struck and killed by one of the National Guard vehicles as it was pulling into place to block the road for a motorcade to pass through. The details are few at the moment, but it is a terribly sad thing regardless.

I hope good things come out of Obama’s summit because certainly nuclear weapons are a serious problem requiring intense discussion. And I appreciate that the topic and the quantity of heads of state from around the world dictate that a high measure of safety precautions are imperative and take precedence over our desire to get around unimpeded. But it does make me wonder if maybe a large conference call or online chat might be a better option next time.

ETA Tuesday a.m.: This morning’s sad email informs me that the cyclist was a colleague. I didn’t know her personally, but we often lunched at the same time upstairs. My thoughts go out to her family.