This close!

I was this close to finishing a darn crossword. Alas.

I arrived at work today around 8:55 a.m. and spent the next twenty minutes in the security line. We have to go through security to get into the building (which is nice and reassuring). Some people in line were tourists, but it seemed like there were a lot of little political lobbying groups there too. Anyway, it took forever and it was windy, so my hair took a little bit of a beating.

Jason had to run to the Government Printing Office today, so we could have had lunch together, but I didn't have my phone so I didn't know he was in the area. :(

At work today, I watched the live blogging of the health care summit all day long. Now at home we (read: I) am watching the live blogging of the women's figure skating medal round of the Olympics. We could go downstairs and watch it on NBC, but then we might have to battle someone for use of the television.

Our assignment that was supposed to be due tomorrow got pushed back to next Friday, so that's a nice thing. Tomorrow we have class until 2:30 p.m.-ish and then...we'll do something else. The weather is supposed to be cold and windy with potential snow tonight. No snowmageddon this time, though.

Snow Day, pt. 4

Look! A road! We haven't seen one of those in a long time!

We just received word that tomorrow is a liberal leave/2 hour delay day for the Federal government. However, this means nothing for us since we usually have class on Fridays. We are still waiting to hear on whether or not our flight is canceled. BWI initially canceled all incoming and outgoing Southwest flights for Thursday, but later PM flights ended up getting through. Cross your fingers for us; we really don't want to miss a chance to see the Frosts.
We woke this morning to the sounds of a bobcat (I think this is a bobcat?) moving snow from the road. While I am not accustomed or inclined to be awakened in this fashion, I was nonetheless delighted to see that the road was being cleared. Only problem: now the sidewalks are covered/impassable.

I think it's interesting that they haul the snow away in big trucks; the Utahns I know would laugh at that prospect.

Chess update:

Jason 6

Amanda 3

Quick plane update: As of 9:19 p.m., our plane is scheduled to depart on time!!!

Snow Day, pt. 3

Look at the tiny person trudging through the snow in this photograph. He looks so small and alone in the abandoned city and treacherous weather.

Oh look! Upon closer inspection, it would appear that the shadowy figure is none other than Jason Frost, carrying pizza home to his loving (and hungry) wife. How heroic he must be to brave the elements--throwing caution to the wind--in the pursuit of nourishment!

In case you are wondering, we are having another snow day!

It began snowing again last night and is still at it this morning. According to the National Weather Service, we are experiencing blizzard conditions, with winds up to 50 mph and an additional 10-16" of snow. The postal service is now officially closed, but we're pretty sure we have not received new mail since last Saturday. We were really hoping to get our taxes done in CT, but unless my forms come tomorrow, we may not be able to.

This is the view out our window as of 10:00 a.m. The snow is higher now and more is stuck to the screen.

This is the view out the front door of the Barlow Center. The little corner you can see on the left side of the picture is the big granite "The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints" sign in front. As you can see, it has been completely covered by drifting snow. The street you are looking at here is Pennsylvania Avenue (also home to the Obama family).

Interesting tidbit of information: B on the following picture is where we live. A is where the Obamas live. It's about 1 mile from our house to their house. The east-west street at B and Pennsylvania is L street. The tiny M beneath Washington Circle is the Foggy Bottom Metro Station where we catch the subway.

This is L street. Just past the bus stop is Pennsylvania Avenue. As you can see, neither street has been plowed.
Here is the view from our front window.

Last night we watched Doubt on my parents' NetFlix. Perhaps my favorite part of browsing their account is seeing the genre recommendations based on films they have seen/enjoyed: witty British satire, French cerebral comedies of the 1960s...what a funny bunch.

I think probably be playing some more chess today...and tomorrow.

QUICK UPDATE:

Work has officially been cancelled tomorrow. Temperatures should be in the high thirties, though, so hopefully some of this white stuff will melt and let us get out of town!

Click here to read some of the Washington Post info on the storm.

Snow Day, pt. 2

So, we had another snow day today AND will be having another one tomorrow. Everything is still closed, so we've been pretty cloistered today. Since tomorrow is supposed to be even more grim outside than today, it will be interesting to see what we come up with to retain our sanity. Don't get me wrong; staying home from work is a blast. However, it would be more fun if we could actually go somewhere/do something.

We bought a chess set today from Barnes and Noble, so that kept us busy for a couple of hours. Current score: Jason 1, Amanda 2. We're going to be Grand Masters by the end of this week.

Jason took a video of the snow falling outside our window. It's short, but cool.

We are supposed to have another 10-16" between tonight and tomorrow. We'll see if the snow lives up to the hype.

Here is a video I recorded. I like to call it "Jason Vacuuming the Apartment Very Fast."

Happy Birthday Jason!

We decided to start Jason's birthday off right by going to Dunkin' Donuts. We have been pretty surprised by the lack of Dunkin' Donuts locations in the Washington D.C. area; they are everywhere in Connecticut! On our way out of town on Friday, though, we noticed a franchise near the GW gym. Thanks to the closure of the Federal Government, we finally had enough time in the morning to run over for a tasty breakfast.

The walk over was fraught with peril. Many of the side streets have still not been plowed and the sidewalks are either covered with snow/ice or four inches of slush. Jason took the above picture on our walk; I guess the newspaper holders weren't made for snow.

This is in Georgetown. After breakfast, we grabbed some stuff at CVS and bought some thank you cards from Barnes and Noble. Look how deep the snow is!

This is about a block from our house. On the way back from breakfast, Jason helped some guys who had gotten their car stuck in the middle of the road right here. The picture is kind of tiny, but the snow in the road is still pretty deep.

We bought our airline tickets to return to Utah today. We'll fly in on April 17th in the evening. Graduation is the next week on Thursday and Friday. It seems crazy that we are almost halfway through our DC adventure.

We purchased some groceries today, but didn't want to venture out too much in the snow. Crossing the street is especially difficult, and people drive pretty badly.

This is the little tiny cake I made for Jason's birthday. I was excited to discover cake mixes at Trader Joe's last week, but realized today that the mix made an 8"x8" cake. It's a good thing, because we would never be able to eat an entire normal-sized cake. I thought about trying to decorate the cake like an overhead map of the District of Columbia (turned diagonally, of course, like a diamond), but didn't have any decorating stuff, so I stuck with the always-versatile semi-sweet chocolate chips.

What the cake may have lacked in size, it surely made up for in taste. I thought it was very tasty.
Jason with his presents. (The things in his left hand are cuff links, not earrings). The birthday man enjoying his cake.

Hooray for self-timers on cameras. This took two tries.

Happy birthday Jason! You're quite wonderful.

Today was a great day, made even more great by the fact that the Federal government is closed tomorrow too! I think we're going to run to the gym and maybe try to hit some national monuments; all the museums are closed and the metro is unreliable in this weather, so getting out to see things is a bit difficult. Work may be cancelled on Wednesday as well; we're supposed to get 10-16" of snow on Tuesday night. I love the east coast attitude toward snow!

Storm of the Century+The Frosts go to Freedom Land

Big news of this weekend: DC was hit with a pretty major snowstorm. According to the New York Times: "A blizzard that had forecasters reaching for superlatives engulfed the nation’s capital and the mid-Atlantic states on Saturday with record snowfalls that paralyzed transportation, commerce and all but emergency services."

We missed the storm, actually. On Friday morning, we headed up to Valley Forge with our Washington Seminar group. We stayed at a dorm-style facility owned by the Freedoms Foundation, which basically felt like "We love America" summer camp. Our room was in the General Mac Arthur building. Behind the dorms was a fifty-two acre "Living Memorial" to Congressional Medal of Honor Recipients. Supposedly, there is an acre for each state plus the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. I'm no surveyor, but the plots for each state didn't look even close to an acre to me. The weather was cold and the memorial was pretty dreary and we were hungry, but it was kind of interesting.

After lunch at the Freedoms Foundation--where they like to mix their world cuisine--we went on a three-hour bus tour of Valley Forge. This is Jason with a cabin. General Washington's troops stayed in little huts similar to these, although our tour guide was quick to point out that these cabins were 1970s-era replicas and not original buildings.

Me with a field. There are many fields at Valley Forge; in fact, aside from the house where General Washington stayed while he was here and a forge/stable building, the whole park is one big field.

Look, it's a revolutionary! Oh wait, it's just Jason modeling Continental Army gear.

We stopped at the George Washington chapel. This is looking up the carillon bell tower. The church had beautiful stained glass windows inside. I'm not sure how many people attend regular services there, since it's in the middle of nowhere, but our guide says it is still used.

After a tasty dinner of tacos and tortellini (I was serious about that mixing of food genres thing), we listened to a lecture from a Thomas Jefferson impersonator (although according to his website, he is a "first-person interpreter"). He did a good job and it was pretty interesting. We had some ice cream and went to bed.

We were awakened early in the morning by a snow plow. The group was supposed to leave at 8:00 a.m. for Philadelphia, so we had breakfast at 7:00 a.m. However, it had snowed a lot during the night, making our departure impossible.

We finally left at 2:00 p.m., when the snow stopped and the Valley Forge National Park road was semi-cleared. This is right before we left.

Look how high the snow is!

It took us 2 hours to get to Valley Forge and 6 hours to get home. We were stopped on the freeway for probably 45 minutes or so, and had to keep circling the city and getting on different roads because lots of the highways were impassable. When we finally got back to the Barlow Center, we had approximately 2 feet of snow.

This is the street outside our house. Plows have been going by for the past few hours, but it is still pretty deep. We are lucky, though; there are apparently 200,000 people without power.

Well, that's our adventure. We don't have church tomorrow again, and may not have work on Monday (Jason's birthday)! Now we're just exhausted.

We're going to work

Alas, the roads are clear.

Later tonight...

Today all the interns in my office got to attend a lecture by Marty Gold. Who is Marty Gold, you may ask? Well, Mr. Gold is considered one of the foremost authorities on Senate procedure and practice. He is even the author of a book, entitled Senate Procedure and Practice, of which I now own two copies. Here's why:

Anyone present the night before Jason and I headed out to Washington may remember that we had a rough time whittling our three suitcases down to fifty pounds each. In the process of making weight, my four-hundred-page copy of Senate Procedure and Practice didn't make the cut; it is currently in Utah somewhere.

Today after the lecture, my fellow (prepared) interns sauntered up to Mr. Gold to have him sign their books. I stayed back sheepishly. My supervisor noticed and asked what happened to my copy (since they sent me one in my Senate information package). I explained that I had left it in Utah and she was kind enough to give me another one. I had Mr. Gold sign it, then returned to a project I'd been working on earlier that afternoon. Right before going home, I looked at what he had written and realized that the inscription was addressed to...

Samantha.

I suppose it's still pretty cool that he signed it.

In case you're wondering, he wrote: "Samantha - Thank you for your interest in this grand American institution."

I'm really glad I got to hear him speak. He knows everything about the Senate. He gave us a crash course on how Senate and House rules differ, then touched on points of order, filibustering, unanimous consent, and waivers. After each example, he shared a funny anecdote about how the rule was used or the history of the mechanism. It was really fascinating.

Well, it's supposed to snow 12" on Friday and Saturday. Everyone keeps complaining that this is a particularly harsh winter. I think I'm just cursed with grim weather wherever I go.

Snow Day?

I hope so. We shall see. It's been snowing since about 5:30 p.m. here and we are supposed to get 4-7 inches by morning. This is so exciting!

Tonight we went to see The Rivalry at Ford's Theatre. It's a play about the Lincoln-Douglas debates that was written to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Lincoln's assassination. Four thumbs way up; it was excellent! The actor who played Lincoln looked just like him. There was this neat part at the end where the Lincoln actor said his lines (from one of Lincoln's speeches) offstage and they lit up the box where Lincoln was sitting when he was shot--very powerful. I am so glad we got to go.

Sometimes I forget that Lincoln was a very humble person. I usually picture him as this larger-than-life politician and union-preserver, but in reality--and this was demonstrated very well in the play--he lacked formal education and social status; he was really just a farm boy from Illinois. Much of the play also focused on the issue of slavery, which made me think about how far our country has come since the mid-nineteenth century. Sometimes it seems like our country is divided now, but back then it was really split. That was pretty encouraging; if we can get through something as wrenching and divisive as slavery, we can certainly overcome our petty differences now.

I can't find my favorite picture of the half-finished capitol dome, so this one will have to suffice.In my studies of how to give capitol tours, I learned that the new dome was placed during the Civil War. Lincoln insisted that the work continue to show that the United States would continue. This picture is actually from Lincoln's first inaugural address.

There, I am done musing about Abraham Lincoln.

Hopefully it will keep snowing!