Big Weekend!

Hello All,

I'm sure anyone who knows me can understand why I'm referring to this weekend as a big weekend. Let me start, however, with Wednesday. Wednesday was a work day. If memory serves, Wednesday was the day that I started logging Bruce's events into the same system we keep the mail in to help the scheduler keep track of people he has met with. Other than that, I don't think I did very much out of the ordinary on Wednesday. I did learn the procedure for walking people over to the Energy and Commerce committee room when Bruce is there for hearings, markup, etc. As of now I haven't actually walked anyone over, though.

Thursday was a long class day. We went to the Hill for a panel discussion on health care that Boston University put on. It was pretty informative, but, to be honest, I'm getting kind of tired of hearing about health care. That afternoon, we went to a downtown law firm for the class portion of our day. We discussed the Supreme Court and how Justice's ideologies rarely change drastically over the course of their careers. We also tried to work our ways through the legal argument behind allowing or disallowing gay marriage at the Supreme Court level. It was a pretty interesting intellectual discussion, though I'm not sure we made a whole lot of progress. That evening, we had another panel discussion, this time just for ND students, discussing the implications of the Obama presidency. I really enjoyed it, and I actually got involved in the discussion, which was a lot of fun.

Friday was another work day. I went to another briefing, this time on campaign finance reform, specifically a system of public financing for federal elections. I also took a resolution over to the Capitol, which was sweet. I guess I didn't do much else on Friday, at least not that I can remember, and therefore it must not be very noteworthy.

Saturday was another big day. Went to the farmers' market again. Bought a whole bunch of pears and apples, as well as a loaf of apple bread and a half pound of smoked, jalapeno cheddar cheese. Needless to say, I'm pretty excited about my purchases. Then we headed downtown to the National Aquarium. to be perfectly honest, it was not great, and it cost $7. It was also not terrible, and there were some pretty sweet fish which I took pictures of. (I swear I will post pictures to some blog posts eventually.) After the aquarium we headed down to the mall, and through the National Book Festival and to the American History museum. We went through the water transportation section. At this rate, I will get through that museum before we leave. After the museum we went to grab some dinner. We went to Five Guys, which is a DC institution. It...Was...Amazing! In addition to really good burgers, you get fresh-cut, fresh-made fries, and you get a ton of them. I think I've found my new favorite burger place. We got back to the apartment to watch the ND game (I was also following the Iowa v. Penn State game on my phone). The ND game was pretty rough. It was a close game throughout, though ND led most of the game. We played without three of our four best offensive players for most of the game due to injuries. Purdue took the lead with a couple minutes left and Jimmy had to come back in to lead a game winning drive. It was an exciting drive, capped by a fourth and goal touch down pass, but it would have been nice to win by a bigger margin. On the other hand, for the second straight year, Iowa knocked off an undefeated, top-five ranked Penn State team. This year, Iowa won big, hanging 16 points on the Nittany Lions in the fourth quarter, and 21 unanswered points after the first quarter, to win 21-10 in Happy Valley. The win propelled Iowa to a number 13 ranking in the polls and talk of Big Ten championship possibilities. All in all, it was a great college football night for me.

Today was another big day. We went to the DC United (soccer) game at RFK Stadium. even though United lost, it was a cool experience to go to a professional soccer game. I even bought a United t-shirt. To make up for United's loss, the Pack did win today. It's not looking so great for my fantasy team though, the old reliables didn't score well today. I may be able to eke out a win still, but I'm not sure. We have now made it a goal to get to all five major professional sports teams in the DC area. So far we've hit 2, we've still got to get to the Wizards, the Redskins, and the Capitols. We had Chipotle afterwards, which is kind of becoming my Achilles' heel here in DC. It was especially good today, though. Then we went to Mass. I'm liking this mass so far, it's a nice substitute for dorm Mass. Now, in an effort to negate anything we may have gained from Mass, we are watching "Old School". Back to work tomorrow, but at least there aren't votes tomorrow so I can dress down a little bit. I'll try to remember to blog more often this week.

Later,

Jes