"A summer without country music is like a life without love"

(feel free to quote me on that)

come home!

I love my brother Jacob. There is no one in this world quite like him and it is impossible for someone to fully appreciate that until he or she meets him. An example of his awesomeness is the time he decided to be a hobo for three days because he wanted to know what it'd be like.

like.

Today my family left in our RV to pick him up in Des moines, Iowa. My entire family besides me (and my favorite brother in law, Josh) has left to pick him up. Do you know how long it has been since my ENTIRE family has been together???!! A long time.

So naturally I spent the day wishing I could be with my family. A fellow coworker suggested driving/flying out to meet up with them.

impossible.

Soon enough there were about four of my coworkers helping me find a ticket to Iowa. 2 hours later bada-bing bada-boom. SJ's got tickets to fly out and meet up with her family!! I AM THRILLED!!!! I'll end up missing four days of work, but the staff and interns kept urging me not to worry about it and that they'ed cover for me. I love 'em.

Tomorrow I'll be seeing Jacob, one of my best friends. I miss that kid more than the words in my vocabulary can express.

My contribution to FHE

Every Sunday my family goes around and says something we learned during the week and/or something good that happened to us. I would like all of my family members to know that if I was home tomorrow I would dominate the discussion. I learned a lot this week and I had many good things happen to me.

What I learned:

• Never buy six bag of groceries including a gallon of milk when you live farther than a half mile away from home. Your circulation in your fingers will cut off on the walk home.
• A lot of people think they have the answer to everything
• I was very lucky in Provo when it comes to proximity of things. It takes an hour for me to get to work every day out here.
• Remember when people said, "Once you get out of high school age doesn't matter"? That does not apply to the east coast. Every one out here thinks Alisha and I are babies, but I think they are getting used to it.
• Working nine hours a day is exhausting
• Living costs a lot of money
• I don't think I gave my friends who left home to go to college or my friends who are on missions enough credit. Being away from home and working all day is mentally draining.
• You can find a friend in people you wouldn't have expected it from
• Being optimistic about a negative situation will make the experience twenty times better and sometimes it helps to just laugh about it.
• Not having a car makes things VERY hard to get places (especially when everything is far away)
• The amount of energy I put into this experience will either make me love being an intern on the hill or hate it. Let's shoot for "love it".
• If someone bugs you it isn't 100% their fault. Sometimes it is your fault.
• I learned A TON OF new facts about the capitol, but if you want to hear it you will have to come out to DC so I can give you a tour of the capitol :)
• How a Senator of the United State's staff operates.
• Humidity is a deathly deathly thing. There is no purpose in trying to make my hair look good. However, today I went on a run and between the mix of humidity and rain it felt like I was running through mist. Pretty awesome feeling.
• How a metro system operates. I dominate the underground.
• Enya makes the world a better place

Good things that happened to me:

I already wrote about meeting a Supreme Court Justice and the dome tour so here are a few other things

I know for a fact I got the best staff on the senate side of the hill. Every Wednesday we make green jello and allow constituents to come talk to the Senator. It was a hit on the hill and even made front page of the politico!

I had like three of those little jello shots.

On Thursday the staff took three of us interns to get "Seventh Hill". It was authentic italian pizza and in the words of a coworker, "If God were a pizza, he'd be seventh hill pizza".

Every Friday we have cookie Friday where we invite another senator's office to come eat cookies and tour our office. I, being an intern, got the privilege of making the cookies. It was awesome except every time I took a batch out of the oven I had to eat one to make sure they tasted okay. darn.

We also went out as an office and saw a Nats game. My first major league baseball game!!! The field was green, the lights were bright and the hot dogs were tasty. The staff from the office is pretty young, and if they aren't young in age they have the great ability of acting young. The highlight of the night was when we all got on the HUGE jumbo-tron.

Between the interns and the staff we have a bunch of great personalities mixing together. It was a party. After the game we went to china town and treated ourselves to some frozen yogurt. The place we went to was no yogurtland, but it will suffice.

After two weeks of waiting and trying to be patient I got a letter! scratch that. TWO letters came from a boy SJ thinks very highly of :) It made her very happy.

Capitol Dome

Interning is full of a lot of envelope stuffing, errand running and phone answering. But every now and then there are some perks. Take yesterday for example, I and about forty other interns from Utah, got to meet Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. I was also able to take a break from my duties today and go on a tour of the capitol dome. This tour was a surprise so I didn't bring my camera to work and, unfortunately, had to make do with my phone camera. I learned a ton of cool facts and it was pretty awesome to see a part of the capital that is not seen by most.

Where the tour started. We walked up about 300 stairs to get to the top

The ceiling of the rotunda and the other side of the dome

the outside of the dome (walking up the steps)

We were able to go outside of the dome and had a great view of DC

Where we stood on the outside

birds eye views of the tours below

This is as far as we were able to go.

P.S. Happy Birthday to my dad!

picture

I love my mom!

Apparently the numbers on the bus mean something

It is impossible for me to recount all the things that I've experienced in the past 48 hours. Everything is a blur from the Holocaust museum, the metro, the white house, meeting the staff from Mike Lee's office to spending an afternoon on my own. Everything has gone super smooth except for one little incident...

There I was... enjoying the freedom I had as I explored Washington DC. Ok...didn't really explore. I snapped a picture of the Washington Memorial then walked down the street to the metro, but it was all on my own!

I was excited to see if I'd be able to find my way back to my apartment from the Washington memorial. I made it to the metro. From the metro I made it safely to the stop I was looking for, Pentagon. From Pentagon I was to board my bus and it would take me safely home.

Only too bad for lil SJ cause that is NOT what happened. I got on my bus and it did not take me safely home. Nope. It started driving and all of a sudden I got this feeling that I did something wrong. I didn't freak out, but I was freaking out that I wasn't freaking out, in a mellow kind of way. I asked the bus driver for help and he kindly fixed the situation for me.

I had to get off at the next stop. Board the next (also the last...good thing I didn't miss it) bus back to Pentagon metro. Then wait for 87 Bus. The bus I accidentally boarded was 42. All I thought I was supposed to do was board the green bus....yeah....they are all green...Apparently the numbers on the bus mean something.

I then had to wait another 30 minutes for my bus to come. I eventually made it home after an hour-in-a-half excursion, ate a PB & J and now I am safely atop my bed writing this blog entry. Maybe one day I'll get the hang of this whole thing.

This is a picture of the sign I noticed after I came back to the station

Peace Out P-Town

Provo, You have been good to me. Provided 14 years of good, solid, quality fun. I know there are a bunch of Provo haters out there. (K...maybe not haters, but people who don't think much of it). However, having grown up in Provo I can proudly say I am proud to have lived in such a fine city (no, my dad is not paying me to say this).

For those people who think Provo is a little bubble that doesn't know how to have fun I can reassure you that my friends and I found plenty of ways to have a good time without causing too much trouble.

Besides the good times it's provided it has also has beautiful scenery. I love the mountains that surround us and a drive up Provo Canyon in the fall is a beauty. I love the fireworks on the fourth of July, Stadium of fire, The spirit the city gets when there is a BYU football game, the city buzzing with college kids, Utah Lake, the community gathering to watch promenade, jogging down Timpview drive, biking up the canyon, Riverwoods, downtown Provo, the MTC missionaries playing on the fields, tubing down the river, the view from the Y and the view of the Y. I love it all. I love Provo. Who ever runs this city deserves some serious praise.

The good news is that the goodness doesn't stop in Provo. It seems to have seeped into every part of the world! tomorrow I get to explore a new city and see the wonderful things it has to offer. I am excited!

Provo, Im gonna miss you.