All About the Animals

Ah, what a wonderful Labor Day weekend we've had to wrap up summer and kick off the fall! 

This weekend was so much fun, and we have pictures to prove it. Isaiah is all about animals -- mostly anything he can equate with marginal similarity to a dog or a cow, the two sounds he knows how to make. 

Dog: urf, urf, urf, urf. This would sound more like a grunt to the untrained ear.

Cow: Uooooooooo. To anyone else, this would sound like a ghost sound.

So we headed off to the National Zoo on Saturday afternoon to see real lions and tigers and bears, oh my! And cows.

See tiger just to the left of Isaiah. He put on quite a show!

It’s an Earthquake! It’s a Hurricane!

Nope. It’s just something to talk about in August.

Some places August is the peak of summer. Some places it’s the end of summer, when kids go back to school. Some places it’s time to retreat to the air conditioning. Here, it’s recess.

This is the first time since I started back to work fulltime that both the House and Senate have been in recess at the same time for more than a day. That means everyone wears jeans to work, catches up on emails from three months ago, has lunch at new restaurants outside our general sphere and either gets off a little early or drops in to work a few minutes late. Ah, recess.

But we don’t have anything to talk about during recess. You know? Paul Ryan hasn’t come out with a new budget number in months. Coburn hasn’t resigned from a Gang of 6 or 5 in eons. The president’s T-time is thoroughly uninteresting. And we are political nerd buckets up here in D.C.

So we got an earthquake.

Rain

You know how back home in the south people say "we have a good chance of rain" on a cloudy day?

I was walking to a great little deli/bakery called Firehook for a hot date at noon today, and I thought I'd better grab an umbrella because "we had a good chance of rain." It occurred to me, in a city where we walk everywhere we go, yards are 10'x10' on average, trees grow every year and rain is just a messy nuisance that makes the traffic move slower, do people say "today we have a bad chance of rain?"

6 Weeks, 10 Photos

If I had taken a new full time job and therefore find myself with lots less time to blog, it's also possible that I might have missed six weeks worth of "extremely" newsworthy events. Catch up with a few photos...

A sunny day in Washington, DC

The WWII Memorial with Mammy

Transplanted

I’m a transplant.

I thought our family was settled, at least for awhile. We’d bought a house in the country, added a baby to our family of two, settled into careers we loved.

Then over a normal lunch on a normal day, a friend casually suggested we turn our life upside down.

I laughed. Then I told my husband, my dad and my boss, as a joke. Then my husband started looking at houses, my dad started talking about finding your purpose in life, and my boss said I could take my job with me.

That’s where it got serious. Two weeks later my husband had an interview. Five weeks later we both had jobs. A week after that we had a rental home, and three weeks after that my baby and I were on a flight across the country to meet up with my hubby and start a new life.

So now we live here. Well, not here, but you get the idea.

I’m not just any transplant, though. I grew up on a ranch in the middle of Texas nowhere. Most of my childhood was spent on eight miles of dirt road. The first time I lived in the city limits was when I went across the state for college. I know about preg checking cows, windstorms and burning trash to keep the critters away, but I do not know about traffic circles, recycling pickup on Tuesdays or community green spaces.

Because every day I laugh at myself over some new revelation about city living, my work in agriculture and politics, my life with a 10 month old, my marriage to Mr. Wonderful, and the absurdity of how life has changed in just one year, here’s my blog…