In which I travel to DC, start an internship, and find an apartment

So.  Last week, on Friday, I flew into Dulles.  I figured I'd spend a couple of days staying with my cousins in northern Virginia, and I'd find an apartment and move into it very soon, maybe Sunday or Monday.  It didn't so much work out that way, but a week later, I do have an apartment.  Details later.

I am in DC for a summer internship with The International Council on Clean Transportation, which sounds fancy and you've never heard of it.  This is the group that found the data that tipped the EPA off to the fact that Volkswagon was cheating at their emissions testing procedures.  Anyway, my internship will be about biofuels technologies and their current states of development, for a document that will eventually be part of a larger document, that hopefully European lawmakers will read and use when making legislation about biofuels and transportation technology and climate change.  It looks like it's going to be a lot of fun.

I have spent the first week of the internship doing a lot of background reading, and a bit of research into biogas, which is what you get when trash or other organic materials decompose, and release methane and carbon dioxide.  Methane burns, so it is a useful fuel.  The research and background reading are really interesting.  Technical enough to keep me interested, and not so technical as to be tedious or unpleasantly difficult.  That's it.  It's pleasantly difficult.

The people I work with seem cool and smart and nice, and I look forward to working with them. I have the impression that a very high quality of work is expected here, so I'm partially nervous about doing a good job, and partially excited to be pushed and see what I can do. 

In the meantime, for this first week, I was living with the aforementioned cousin, and commuting in to DC.  I was looking for apartments, but it has turned out to be fairly difficult to find an apartment that is furnished, available short term, near a Metro stop, not too sketchy to walk around at night, and costs less than a third of my income. (It's a paid internship.☺)

I'm living with a friend who used to live in Houston, and moved to Austin for graduate school.  She also has a summer internship in DC, (and she may also keep a blog; if so, I'll link it. ☺).

After finding a lot of scammy listings on craigslist, and looking at a handful of places, we found an apartment in a basement under someone's house.  It is all of the things I listed above, though in some cases only barely.  I moved in yesterday, and today we went grocery shopping, and now I have a home!  🏠

Fun things.  Last week my cousin and family and I went to the National Zoo.  It was fun, although it was a lot of walking for surprisingly not so many animals.  Also, it was super busy.  (It was a beautiful spring Sunday afternoon, what did we expect?)  I did not take any photographs. 

In fact, I haven't taken any pictures yet.  I have a camera.  Maybe I will get better at that.

Also, I got a library card.  I guess I live here now. :)

In Which I Spend Time Outdoors

Today was my synagogue's annual Mitzvah Day.  This is essentially a day of community service; a day when we go into the community and lend our time towards any of a number of projects.  This year, for the third time, I led a group to the Nature Discovery Center, a small park and (as the name suggests) nature learning center in Bellaire, TX.  It is a delightful little place, which I highly recommend visiting.

We were originally going to dig up a path in preparation for repaving, but circumstances changed, and the naturalist asked us to do some different projects.

First, we planted (or, rather, 'sowed') seeds in little tiny pots.  We lined the little pots in plastic trays, and filled them with a mix of soil and vermiculite, which is white stuff that sort of fluffs up the soil and improves the drainage properties.  Let me tell you, the soil needs fluffing up.  The local soil is known as "clay gumbo", which seems to be a mix of clay and rocks.  We would encounter clumps which we tried to break up, only to find that they were really soft, sculptable chunks of clay.  (I even made a dreidel!)
We then sprinkled each pot with a few seeds.  My table had Rudbeckia (black-eyed susans), and the other table had Gaillardia (firewheels).  And then we watered the pots.  There is an older lady who used to be a very active volunteer at the park, though her health does not let her do as much anymore, she takes care of the little seed-starting pots and waters them until they are grown enough to go into the ground.

After we filled all of the trays with planted pots, we still had an hour and a half left of our scheduled work time. (We were simply too efficient!)  So, we spent the remaining time digging up monkey grass from a patch of lawn.  Let me tell you, this is tricky.  The monkey grass is challenging to distinguish from the rest of the grass types (at least, for me).  Additionally, it has runners that tangle up with the runners of the other grass species, and untangling them without breaking and losing them is hard.  We didn't finish (not possible in one go!), but we removed a lot, and totally plowed up the corner of the lawn.  It was fun.

The whole morning was fun, really.  The weather was perfect, the work wasn't too hard, and we got to contribute to a local organization.  Success all around. :)

An Afternoon in Downtown Houston

I did not bring a camera.

But, yesterday, I took a walk around downtown Houston with some friends and this is what we saw there.

Just behind the Wortham Center, there is a bridge over Buffalo Bayou.  It is a nice bridge, with beautiful columns with what appears to be children's art cut into metal panels.  

I don't know how the art was selected, or what the children were asked to draw, or how old they were: the drawings included, among many things, musical instruments, a drawing of the med center, a 'say no to drugs' poster, and a computer monitor on tractor treads (that's what we decided it was, anyway).  

Under a pair of these columns is a little brick alcove -- only accessible by foot or bike.  In this alcove is a red button.  (This alcove is at the corner of the bridge closest to the Wortham Center.)  Push the button, and then run out to the middle of the bridge, and look down.  The button bubbles the water! It is not nearly as exciting as it sounds, and yet it was delightful.

Back up and across the street is a small park called Sesquicentennial Park, with a statue of James A Baker (I don't remember which one) and a monument to all of the James A Bakers who served Houston and the United States (which is all of them).

At Market Square, there is a clock.  A real, mechanical clock, but it was not running.  City of Houston, why is the clock not running?  There is even a window where you can see the mechanism, and everything!  

But right next to the clock is a tapas restaurant, called Batanga.  When one of my friends saw the phrase "Platanos Maduros" on the menu, he pushed the other two of us into the restaurant.  We shared 5 plates and a dessert between the three of us.  All of  it was good.  The highlights for me were the Eggplant Fries and the dessert.  The eggplant fries were not like french fries.  They were chunks of peeled eggplant fried in batter and topped with mint, honey, cumin, and cheese, and it was so good.  The dessert - I don't remember the name - was dollops of chocolate mousse with olive oil and flaky salt and toast.  It was a peculiar combination, but very, very good.  Also, the service was excellent.  Our waitress joked around with us. The whole experience was very pleasant.

And then we walked back to our cars in the rain.

In Which I Travel to Seattle and What I Did There

We arrived in Seattle uncomfortably late on Friday night (11:30 pm Seattle time, which is 1:30 am Texas time).  The first thing to happen after getting off the plane was my purse breaking.  The bit that connects the strap to the rest of the purse is no longer capable of that role.  I tied a knot.  It holds.  (In case Mom is reading this: This is my old purse, not the nice new one you gave me.)  Not exactly an auspicious start.

I reserved a car with Budget.  Fortunately my companion had the foresight to actually have the reservation confirmation number on hand.  I’ll have to remember that trick for next time.  I reserved a "standard 2- or 4-door" car.  Budget, it should be noted was cheap this weekend.  As in ~$100 less then the competition.  So it was the natural choice for us.  And apparently also for everyone else.  We didn't get a car until at least 12:30 am, and when we got our car, it was a cute, compact Dodge Journey. 

Driving an uncomfortably large vehicle in the middle of the night in an unfamiliar city with unfamiliar hills is not my favorite thing.  Thanks to my excellent navigator, we made it to the hotel.

The hotel was lovely.  It is all suites.  It did what we needed it for.  But the parking spots are so narrow, that in combination with the big car, parking was a nightly ordeal.
The hotel was almost at the end of a dead end road, which made for little traffic and a cozy ambiance.  (Next to the hotel, at the end of the dead end, there is a church called (of all things) Crossroads Church.)

Saturday morning, we went to Top Pot doughnuts, which I’d heard was good, and which in reality was too sweet. Eh, well.  Next we went to Pike Place market.  It was cold and damp.  Coming from 95+ degree days (that’s 35 C or more), the 50 degree morning (10 C) was distinctly too cold.   Parking was hard, and expensive.  Discovering the Seattle Art Museum (SAM) on the way, we detoured.  We were going to go on Sunday, but after the trauma of parking, my companion figured we wouldn’t want to return to the area. (Ha!) The museum was nice.  A good variety of media, geography, styles, time periods.  Sometimes abrupt transitions, but overall very nice.  We got our first taste of Chihuly, with whom the entire SeaTac area seems to be obsessed.

The market is something else.  At lunch time on a holiday weekend, it was teeming with people.  Teeming.  There are fruit vendors and fish vendors and flower vendors and food vendors and any think else you might like to buy.  Sadly, we were still full from the donuts, and off our regular schedule, so we were not hungry, so we only bought postcards.  Then, we met up with some friends and headed to Boeing.

The Boeing Everett location includes the largest building in the world by volume (wikipedia).

We went inside.  On a tour.  This is a space large enough to have four or five 787s lined up in front of each other as they are assembled, in only one small section of the building.  It is a good tour.  You should take it, especially if you like airplanes.  It seemed as though the tour guide was trying to sell them to us.  As though we, personally, would shell out the cash for our own planes.  They’re proud of what they’ve got there, and I suppose they ought to be. No pictures were allowed inside, but here are some flowers from the grounds outside:

The planes are wrapped in a special green protective coating while they are being shipped and transported, to prevent oxidation and such. The next day, we saw some plane fuselages being transported by train: 

It's a plane on a train!

Apparently, while being shipped cross country, people like to take pot-shots at the plane bodies, and Boeing has a standard procedure for repairing bullet holes.

I had planned to write more, but I need to learn to write these promptly.  It has taken a month to get from Seattle to blog.  In brief, there were rockets and glass and salmon sashimi and kayaks and Dominion and friends, and I got better at driving. 

Here are some pictures:

Chihuly sculpture on bridge in Tacoma

Chihuly 'venetians' on bridge in Tacoma

Seattle-gull

Obligatory Space Needle