Explosion at the Capitol

Okay, so the explosion didn’t actually occur inside the Capitol building. It happened at one of the House Office Buildings next door. (FYI: members of House do most of their work in these buildings and only go to the Capitol to cast votes in person.) Here’s the story:

There was once a lovely intern who decided to be proactive by restocking the mini fridge in the backroom of her office with water, lemonade, and “soda” (people don’t say “pop” in D.C.).  A split second after the intern grabbed a can of lemonade out of its box on the top shelf, the rest of the cans decided to come crashing down, which of course created an embarrassingly loud sound. If that wasn’t bad enough, two of the cans received severe puncture wounds, and the lemonade sprayed all over the room.

That was the explosion.

And yes, I was obviously the lovely intern. The best part about humiliating myself was when I proceeded to clean up the mess. I looked under the little sink in the back room and luckily found some Clorox Disinfecting Wipes just waiting for me. But wait, what was the scent of the wipes? LEMON. Life is just a little too ironic sometimes.

I really can’t say a ton about my wonderful internship online, but here’s one observation I am willing to share. Acronyms are everything here. What on earth is the Department of Defense? Oh wait! It’s the DoD. And apparently “Capitol Visitor Center” is simply too much to say in one breath, so we’ll call it the CVC. Then of course there’s the EPA, OGR, RHOB…

I guess we do this at BYU (Brigham Young University) too with the buildings on campus (HFAC, JFSB, SWKT)…Now that I think about it, I suppose it’s not entirely unique to have acronyms all over the place. So why do I even bring this up? Because one day, someone at work asked me if I could run over to the CPK with him so he could run inside while I sat in the car and prevented any lurking cops from giving him a ticket for parking illegally. What was the CPK? California Pizza Kitchen- the restaurant. And now I feel entirely ridiculous because I just Googled “CPK” out of curiosity, and “California Pizza Kitchen” was the first thing that came up on the screen. Apparently I’ve been oblivious to the whole acronym over-usage thing until starting my internship.

Speaking of my internship, I regularly walk home, and on one occasion, I took pictures on the way back. These are sights I get to see every day, and they still take my breath away!

Treasury Building

On a different note, this week has been great! I had good experiences every single day including excellent workouts, lectures, sight-seeing experiences, and excursions with friends!

Like my internship, I’m not technically supposed to say a lot about the speakers from my Friday class (what they say is “off the record”), but after one guy talked to us about the economy, I wanted to either live in a hut in the mountains with my own garden, or add a ton of money to my retirement account. A word of advice to everyone, including people my age: you need to start an IRA or 401-K account NOW. It will be worth whatever you need to sacrifice for a while to get it going.

 I also learned from a different speaker that if you want to join the FBI, you need a bachelor’s degree and have to apply between the ages of 23 and 34. Oh, and based off of another briefing, I’ve decided that being a natural disaster reporter sounds like the coolest job in the world!

After class on Friday, a group of my Barlow buddies and I went to Ford’s Theater, where Abraham Lincoln got shot. Below are pictures of the outside of the building and of the balcony where the tragedy occurred.

And this may be showing an extremely sick side of my sense of humor, but I just had to take a picture of this sign when I walked in the theater doors.

An interesting fact about this theater is that there are still performances that happen here on a regular basis.

After going to the theater, my friends and I did the only thing a group of BYU interns could possibly do on a Friday night: get on the metro and eat dinner…at Costco. It was so much fun!

Yesterday (Saturday), I spent some more time at the American History Museum and saw the First Ladies’ Dresses exhibit. The dresses below are the ones that Nancy Reagan and Michelle Obama wore at their husbands’ inaugurations. 

I also saw C-3P0 be standing in the hallway.

Once again, I wrote too much, and the frustrating thing is that there are so many other things I could go on and on about. But I won’t. This is enough. But before I forget, here is what the Washington Monument looked like yesterday! It was partially covered up by clouds!