Friday means I get to sleep in tomorrow!

Today was an exhausting day, but still great. Leslie and I thought we were done with our bus mishaps, but after staying around in DC to get dinner with the other SFLA interns, we found out the bus we needed lied in its schedule. Well, maybe that's a little extreme, but they definitely had a 7:25 departure time, and that bus apparently only *drops* people off, doesn't pick more up. Soo long story short, after about an hour of making scrambling phone calls, another intern Chris just made a long drive to come get us and drive us to our family's house (Maureen and Dan were both out for the night!)

This place came recommended from one of Harris' staff.
From left to right: Chris, Leslie, Ruben, Lindsey

The Rally for Religious Freedom was today outside of the Russell Senate Building and it was really interesting. There were lots of speakers, and some I really loved whereas others spoke in such a way that I could just imagine citizens from the middle ground shutting down after hearing. The thing is, you don't have to bring Jesus, doom and gloom, or heated propaganda-like language into the discussion to logically show that the HHS mandate is unconstitutional. Something I've found myself grappling with here on the Hill is both trying to be understanding of the "other side", and standing up apologetically for what I believe. The speakers today were definitely unapologetic about where they stood. I admire their courage, and want to be able to proudly state where I stand, but I find myself being very conscious of how the "other side" is perceiving my words. It's not that I don't want to offend (because I know that's no way to live), I just want to promote dialogue and not just turn people away with extremism. Anyways, more to come on those thoughts later.

Left to right: Leslie, Chris, Lindsey, Me, Ruben (2 interns not pictured)

Besides the Rally and bus troubles, I spent much of today operating a fancy-schmancy folding/enveloping/sealing machine. Congressman Harris's office had to get 2,700 constituent letters prepared to send out--all constituents who wrote him concerned about medicare and healthcare. For such a complicated machine (it folds 2 pages of a letter, stuffs it into the envelope, seals it, and spits it out in 5 seconds), the manual part is amazingly simple. You just have to feed it an envelope every 5 seconds. So I did that for a few hours :) After a while I thought I might even be able to do it with my eyes closed... so I did!! Success.

Quote of the Day: [as we were walking back from the Rally to the House buildings and huge crowds of Girl Scouts were crossing near/with us (hundreds of Girl Scouts are having some kind of gathering here this weekend)] "It smells like tourism." --Chris 

And here Leslie and I take our first
"touristy" photo since being here!