Week IV: A New Pope

Four weeks into it, it’s hard to believe how quickly everything has gone by! Less than 2 and a half months left! The Pope was here this week, which meant about a million other people were too. Nevertheless, Saturday we went to the H-Street festival in an attempt to find some cheap food. We managed to walk the mile long festival full of mini-concerts and food stands (not to mention strange people) without getting anything to eat, just going to Moe’s instead (way to go, us). Sunday, the American History Museum was on our list. While the museum, as a whole, was slightly boring, it did have some fantastic parts. In a room full of cultural mementos of American history, there were Mohammed Ali’s gloves from the George Foreman fight, not to mention an Apple II and the original Kermit. They also had a section on the wars of American history. As the room was so interesting, we did not even make it past the Revolution before the museum closed, planning to finish it later. Sunday evening, some of us went to the National Mall to see history under cover of nightfall. It was quite nice, much better than fighting the crowds of the day, and the quiet certainly makes each monument and memorial seem more important.

It rained Monday! Yeah, finally! And guess who forget an umbrella that day? This guy! I managed to make it back to the apartment with my jacket in my backpack, but the concierge thought my struggle was very comical (it took a bit for me to laugh about it). The Papal visit was certainly interesting. As a result of the traffic from his visit, many TWC interns got a day or two off from their internship, but not me. Wednesday, I got back to the apartment at 6:00 only to find Mike and Dee, who did have the day off, completely asleep (it took everything I had not to hit them with a pillow!). They can enjoy their moment in the sun now; I will have the last laugh on payday! The work this week was fairly interesting. With my scholar in Slovenia, nearly everything consisted mainly of “long term projects,” reading studies and writing abridged reports over them. I did, however, get to type the transcript for Cato’s “Reforming the Federal Reserve’s Rescue Authority” panel discussion with Elizabeth Warren and David Vitter.

Story of the Week: Arthur tends to take one of the chairs from the kitchen to study. It had never been a problem, but Arthur said he heard a loud pop when leaning back toward the end of this studying. Thinking nothing of it, he simply put the chair back. However the next morning at breakfast, in the dead quiet of tired guys in the morning, the chair gave way, the leg breaking off, and Arthur (along with his rice crispies) being thrust onto the floor. This has prompted an inundation of jokes toward Arthur about when he plans to break the rest of our furniture with us betting on what will be his next victim. So, when he does inevitably break all of our chairs, we have planned to have him break the table as well, allowing us to sit on the floor in the midst of our wasteland of broken furniture without having the table too tall for us to eat.