I am home.

♥♥♥

We got the first snowfall of this season (that stuck). Definitely one of the best days ever.

An unpublished post from last week sometime:

I don’t know if they were testing the fire alarms in my building today, but they went off.

I didn’t run out in panic. No. The first thing I do is look at my crazy excel spreadsheets I’ve been working on for the past whatever hours for work and I save them to three different places so they’re accessible outside from my own computer.

I’m on deadline. And I’m sick, so I’m working on stuff from my dorm.

I’ll be damned if my laptop catches fire and all the work I’ve done is ruined just because some moron forgot how to cook ramen.

Where the hell did November go? Where the hell did these past 10 weeks go? I’m leaving DC in a week!!! So I didn’t exactly finish NaBloPoMo, but I’ll be adding in entries just to fill up the calendar

Happy December!

The [FUGLY[imo]] Christmas tree in front of the White House
& the Washington Monument @ sunset

I woke up yesterday morning feeling like absolute crap. So I didn’t go to the office, I worked from home. It was really nice. Lots of quiet, I didn’t even have the TV on, and I had the window open from my apartment out overlooking the street. And I noticed the trees had become very bare, very quickly. When I had first gottten here, they were still pretty lush and green. Then they had turned shades of yellow, brown, orange and red, and just as quickly as they had changed colors, they were gone, swept off their branches by the winds.

I’m going to miss this city, its been so good to me:

• All the sights,
• the history of America just seeping through every monument, every memorial, every park and every street corner
• the good company; my amazing roommates and the friends I’ve made in the program and in the city
• the amazing internship with the opportunities through my co-workers and mentors
• I’m going to miss the area I live in, walking right two blocks and seeing the White House
• the late nights and WAYY too early mornings
• Reading The Washingtonian
• Trekking to the Metro and off of it to explore neighborhoods

…and much, much more. Here’s to my last week in DC.

Class yesterday consisted of half the class talking about their internships. I think now that its all ending everyone is seeing the silver lining of the grunt work they’ve done. Had lunch with some of the class at this sushi joint located above the local CVS market. lol. Wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t amazing either. I swear, I can’t wait to get sushi back in California.

Is it just me, or does the tuna not look very fresh?

Did some work, then headed to the Kennedy Center to see the Philharmonic Orchestra of the Americas play. It was so good, and it was free too! Their performance in DC was the last in their No Borders tour, which went through parts of Mexico and parts of the US.

The Kennedy Center holds free performances all the time, and the theatre was intimate. The music was really good, you can actually catch it here. Will update later, got some work to finish so I can go to New York :crosses fingers: this weekend . Till then:

We got pretty good seats!

Solar Panels Galore!

In the National Mall, from October 12-20, between the Capital and the Washington Monument, the Solar Decathlon was held. A competition between 20 colleges worldwide (though many of them were from the US), in building energy-efficient solar-powered homes. Entries were scored in 10 areas, including: Architecture, Comfort Zone, Marketability, and Energy Balance.

There was probably one thing that many of the homes had in common besides solar panels and, though: they were all IKEA‘d out, like model homes whose decorator had nowhere else to go.

The decathlon invited everyone into the homes to tour them and the students that built them provided lots of information on the engineering and architecture of the home. There were pools of water that collected solar energy and warmed whole rooms, tabletops made entirely of recycled paper, and whole gardens outside that helped with irrigation. One of the schools even had other students over for dinner and they prepared meals strictly from their garden.

See the red/orange details amongst the green?

There were many homes that were so detailed-oriented! Many of the schools’ homes had plants growing on the walls outdoors; one of the schools artfully designed the plants so that the school’s logo could be made out. There were homes with koi fish, others with deck space for lounge chairs, they stressed on the importance of one seeing themselves being able to live there. [And I think the students kinda did, as some of the homes had laptops and backpacks stored behind shelves, or food in their fridges, lol]

I thought it was pretty damn nifty. Santa Clara University won third place, YAY! They almost didn’t make it too! When driving their home over, the truck broke an axle and they lost three whole days. Go Broncos! [Beautiful campus, I went to summer school there once]

The spaces alloted to built a home were small, but many of the schools used the space very well. I don’t remember which, but one looked really homey, with its high vaulted ceilings and anterior and exterior consisting of this warm-looking wood. It was modern and clean, yet very inviting.

What struck me was the idea that these may be the homes that will be on the market, its just a matter of time. Imagine whole communities completely solar-powered and absolutely green.

Oh green living! Organic, natural, and so harmonius. Makes me wanna hug a tree.

Inside the United States Botanic Garden