Back in DC; Back to Work

Hello All,

So, as usual, I failed maintain my self-prescribed blog schedule and am blogging for the first time in almost a week. Alas, but such is life. The rest of last week was pretty lax, as a week of break should be. I'm going to try to break it down into categories rather than day by day.

1. Swimming: I managed to make it to four swim meets during the 8 days I was in Iowa. I think that's pretty impressive, even for me. I went to the girls' MVC varsity meet the first day I was home, followed that up with the girls' city meet on my birthday, next was the Iowa double-dual with Michigan State and UW-Milwaukee, and finally the girls' MVC sophomore meet. I thought that the Senior girls swam very well in all the meets I saw and I can't wait to see how they do these next few weeks in their championship meets. Jordan is also swimming well this season and the Hawkeyes are 5-0 on the season.
   
2. Food: Since it was my birthday this past week, I went out to eat several times. Included in these meals were my two favorite places to eat in Dubuque: Bandana's and Taiko. Both experiences were amazing, even if I came out feeling like I was going to explode. I also went to Old Chicago in Cedar Falls with Michael on Saturday since he couldn't make it to IC with Caity and I for my actually birthday (Sorry, I had to work a jab in somewhere).
3. Schools: As always, I visited both Mazzuchelli and Senior while I was home this week. While I never went to Mazz, I like to go to help out my mom sometimes and I know a few of the teachers there. Obviously, I always love going back to Senior and visiting with my old teachers. My experience at Senior and my interactions with teachers and administrators since graduating is one of the main reasons that I am considering a career in education at some level.

I think that pretty well sums up my week. On Saturday, while Connor was at the MVC sophomore meet, I managed to catch a little bit of the ND game while Michael and I were at Old Chicago. As I followed it on my phone when I went back to the meet and then in my car on the way home, we managed to escape with a win over BC, which proved to be enough to get us back into the rankings. Speaking of college football, Iowa played two of the most exciting minutes of college football I have ever seen at the end of their game Saturday night. The last second touchdown pass caused my heart to temporarily stop, but also propelled Iowa to #4 in the latest BCS rankings. In a word, it was incredible. Needless to say, I was not able to get to bed nearly early enough for my 3:15 AM alarm for the trip to the airport the next morning. Fortunately, I wasn't driving and I made it to Moline and ultimately back here to DC. After lazing around for most of the afternoon, I went to Mass with several of the guys and then out to the Diner, one of our favorite restaurants here.

Today was back to work as usual. While I was gone, they evidently started work on a major remodeling project in the office. There is no longer an intern desk in the front office and there are two more desks in the back. Oh, there's also a new wall in the front office. Unfortunately, my nemesis, the constituent mail inbox, has thoroughly re-filled itself while I was gone. Today felt really long, but probably because I was exhausted from yesterday, and out of my normal working routine for a week. Hopefully I can get back into the swing of things within the next couple of days. It didn't help that nothing out of the ordinary happened at work to help keep things interesting. More work tomorrow, and hopefully I'll be getting back into the routine of both work and blogging here pretty quickly.

Until we next speak,
Jes