Lazy Friday night

It's 6:21 PM on Friday night. We had to get up early for our briefings this morning, so Jason's taking a nap. He's been sleeping for a while, so I keep checking to make sure he's still breathing. So far so good.

Our briefings today were in the Rayburn House office building. Let me just say, the House buildings are not nearly as cool as the Senate buildings (perhaps I'm a tiny bit biased, though)! We heard from Representative Jim Matheson who was awesome; I like him a lot. He had some really cogent ideas about health care reform and wore cowboy boots. For those of you West Wing buffs out there, the cowboy boots slightly reminded me of Bingo Bob Russell (Season 6?), but in a good way. Wow, that was some byzantine syntax. We had half an hour of class before our next briefers: the Kings. Sister King works for Nancy Pelosi and is head of the House Office of Interparliamentary Affairs and Brother King is the United States Ambassador to North Korea re: Human Rights. Both of them were really interesting. After they spoke, we had another half hour of class, then were released for the day. We got home around 2:00 p.m. and had some long-needed lunch (leftovers!). I meant to go grocery shopping today, but that didn't happen; it's been really rainy and I did not love the idea of trudging home with huge bags of food in the deluge.

Hmmm...BYU plays tonight, but I think the game starts at 9:30 PM, which means 11:30 PM our time. That might be just a little late for me.
I thought I'd try to load our mysteriously incompatible pictures from the FDR Memorial and they STILL won't load. Actually, let me clarify: they load like this.
Wait! These worked. Weird. This is Jason and I near the tidal basin on the way back from the Jefferson Memorial almost two weeks ago!
This is me with Thomas Jefferson's statue. My eyes look closed, but I determined on closer inspection that I am just squinting.
Jason by the tidal basin. Check out the Washington Monument in the background; I'll wager my picture-taking skills are improving! What a good lookin' man.

Thomas and Franklin

I have tried several (hundred) times to get all of our pictures from yesterday onto the blog, but something is just not working. It's unfortunate, because the photos include a shot of me and the cutest statue dog in the world and Jason with a giant. Maybe I'll try again tomorrow.

Right now I can catch up on yesterday, though. We walked to the Jefferson Memorial (approximately 2.5 miles) and then came back through (inadvertently) the FDR Memorial. We didn't even realize he had a memorial, so it was an exciting revelation.

Without further ado, here are the five pictures that actually loaded.




We really enjoyed the TJ memorial. They were doing construction, which is kind of funny because I swear they were doing construction when I was here at age 8. Perhaps not, but that's what I remember. Anyway, it was a beautiful day and it was nice to get out of the apartment for a little while.

We walked back the other way, through the FDR memorial. I will post pictures of it later, I guess. It was cool--definitely not your typical stone wall or statue DC memorial (although it technically incorporates both of those elements in new and interesting ways)(and there's the cute dog statue).

Dave Frost alerted us to a website where we could watch the BYU vs. New Mexico game online, so we hurried home for the 4:00 PM tipoff. I think the game took years off my life--it was so intense! Afterward, we had dinner and Jason did our taxes.

Today after sacrament meeting we were asked to be the nursery-monitors for the day. There was only one little nursery-goer, a little gal named Tatiana. She didn't really talk--and when she did we thought she might be speaking French--but was pretty adorable. She liked playing telephone and waking Jason from his "nap" and baking us potato chips in the little kitchen. After church, our ward had another munch and mingle, which did not disappoint. Now we're chilling at the apartment, enjoying our Sunday afternoon.