Tidbits

Things I may not have mentioned:

My sublet does not have a television. Which is probably lucky for you (if you are reading this, I mean you!) as I would certainly not update as often if I could vegetate in front of crappy television on the couch like I'm used to. I understand though that my beautiful Sony Bravia looks very good in Miss E's apartment. This does not give me much comfort. I am however able to watch a fair portion of garbage on hulu.com so thank god for my lovely MacbookPro.

This photo is of the view, more or less, from my office. It looks out onto part of our Grand Foyer (or foy-yer as they say here which cracks me up. Have I mentioned that already? perhaps...) and out to the Potomac. Do not think for a minute that I have a glamorous office (well it's all kinda cool, but you know), the Fellows currently working in Development as I am, sit on the balcony to the Grand Foyer. The perk is the natural light and the view. The slight downside is the noise, as there are two stages in the foyer - one at either end - where community programming happens every day and so the sound checks etc. can be distracting. Yesterday we had a dance troupe whose name I've forgotten but consisted of all male, gay cowboys line dancing to disco. I thought it was fabulous (how can you go wrong with singing and dancing gay cowboys?). I started to do some of the moves, but only my French fellow friend joined in (clearly we are going to be the strange foreigners of the bunch).

The other slightly unnerving thing is that helicopters (I'm assuming military ones as they are somewhat more butch looking than the TV camera crew ones I'm more used to seeing) buzz the building pretty much at eye level to my office. I'm going to try to get a photo of one but in the meantime, believe me that it is alarming to see one flying RIGHT there.

One of the interesting things I am experiencing is the concept of starting and ending meetings on time. The reality is that there is just too much going on to drag things on endlessly or to wait 15 minutes while everyone shows up. It starts whether you are there or not and it ends when it's scheduled to because everybody then has to be somewhere else. And decisions get made in these meetings and action items that are decided upon get emailed out within minutes of the meetings ending. It's all a bit unnerving it's so efficient. I could suggest that perhaps a few less busy organizations could learn from this approach. Ahem.

We are confirmed for our White House tour in two weeks! Very exciting. However there will be no photographic evidence of that either as we are basically only allowed to carry our ID in with us. Still it will be very cool. I am waiting to hear back from the Canadian embassy as I want them to invite me to something. A lunch or gala of some sort. No biggie.

And, in closing, a bird pooped on my hair yesterday. My FFF (French Fellow Friend) and I were having G&Ts in a very civilized fashion at a somewhat swanky but not, bar along the Potomac towards Georgetown. And plop! Poop. That's good luck, right?