Snowpocalypse

As you have probably heard, DC was hit with another huge snowstorm this weekend. It's actually still snowing, but the heaviest is gone by (if the weatherman can be trusted, which he can't). This one was even bigger than the Dec. snowstorm. Ellin's friend Walter wrote this song, which I think is great and exactly the attitude around here over the past week. Below I have attached some photo's of the snow, primarily digging out my car this morning.

SNOWPOCALYPSE
Bailey/Johnson
(to the tune of Metallica's MASTER OF PUPPETS)

Atmospheric chill
A peaceful calm to kill
Something's brewing in the ocean
A thousand miles away
Closer day by day
Mother Nature's deadly potion

Falling from the sky
No time to question why
Media hypes the lie
Shoveling till we die

Nature cryptic
Snowpocalyptic
A winter septic
Snowpocalyptic

Snowpocalypse calling, time to make haste
Inches of white piled up to your waist
In a prison of crystal you're soon encased
Snowpocalypse coming, no time to waste

Snowpocalyptic

Snow Storm

Last weekend we had a big snowstorm here in the DC area. We got a little over 2 feet of snow here at my place. It's a lot of snow for this area, so it took a while for everything to get plowed. As a result we were snowed in Saturday during the worst of the storm. Sunday and Monday some roads were plowed, but there was no guarantee. Here's a few photos I took from my balcony during the storm (I had a little visitor) and a couple shots of my car on Saturday afternoon. It took me an hour and a half to dig my car out when it was all done on Sunday! Fun times :)

Independence Day

For the Fourth of July I went downtown with Ellin (she works downtown and has a parking pass) to see the fireworks by the Washington Monument. I was warned not to take the Metro, and thank goodness I went with Ellin and stayed away from the Metro. As soon as the fireworks ended, the zillion people who were swarming downtown to watch the fireworks all made a beeline for the subway. It took us a while to get out of downtown, but it was way better than being underground with all those people.

Here are a few shots I took.

A Friday Afternoon

Since we had the day off last Friday due to the Holiday Weekend, Ellin and I went to visit a park near her house that turned out to have beautiful gardens. I only snapped a few photos because there were just too many pretty flowers to take pictures of them all.

Georgetown

On Memorial Weekend I did a walking tour of Georgetown. The kind where you have the map and the list of interesting places and you go at your own pace, not the kind where you have a tour guide. On the whole, it was much less interesting than I thought it would be. Plus it was hot as Hades and twice as humid. So here are the highlights of my couple of hours in Georgetown.

This is a famous/historic church. Like most famous/historic churches, 10 minutes after I left I could no longer tell you why it is famous. I believe it was the first African American church in Georgetown (or maybe DC), but don't quote me on that.



There was definitely interesting architecture in Georgetown. I took pictures of a couple of interesting buildings, but a lot of them just couldn't be photographed well.

I loved the real gas lamps that were on some of the houses.

Cool church. No idea if it is historically significant.

This is the waterfront area in Georgetown. It was really nice and after the walking tour I stopped there to eat my lunch. It was by far the most enjoyable part of the afternoon.

Brian and Jen visit

Easter weekend my cousin Brian, his fiance Jen and their son Connor came down to DC. They live in New Jersey, which is just a few hours away. I hadn't seen Brian since I was in Middle School and he was in High School. That was the last time I lived on the east coast and the last time he lived in New Jersey. Both of us have lived in several other places in the mean time.

They came down on Saturday afternoon and checked into the hotel (yes- a Marriott). I took the metro down to where they were staying and met up with them and then we all headed downtown to the waterfront for a seafood dinner. After dinner we walked down the waterfront to the Washington Memorial then down the mall to the Capitol.

Easter Sunday I met up with them at the hotel for brunch then we headed down the street to the Zoo. It was pretty busy, but it was a really nice day. Here's some pictures of us at the zoo. I thought I had a picture of all three of them, but it turns out I was always using their camera, so I have to get Jen to send me one from her camera.

As you can see, we managed to catch the Pandas eating. If you have been to zoo's with Panda's before you are probably aware that it is not easy to capture a panda doing anything except sleeping and sometimes they aren't even sleeping in a place that you can see very well. Thus, you will have to forgive me for posting multiple Panda pictures. I restrained myself and did not post all 12.

And this guy looked so harmless and cute...

These two anteaters were by far the cutest animals I saw all day. The baby was just a couple of weeks old and he was just riding around on Mama's back.

And here's one of me, Connor and Brian.

Spirit to Serve

A week and a half ago Marriott had it's annual Spirit to Serve our Communities Day. This was the tenth year that the company has done this. In case you do not know someone who works for Marriott and have not heard of this, let me enlighten you. Our company is very service oriented and one day a year is dedicated to as many people in the company as possible going out in their communities and serving. Wondering how many people that is? Marriot has more than 300,000 employees at 3,200 properties worldwide.

We do a lot of fundraising and serving throughout the rest of the year for charities like United Way and Children's Miracle Network and local food banks, but this one day is special. When you are on property like I have been for the past 5 years, not as many people can go at once, so it stretches out over a week or two with various different activities.

Being here at corporate this year has given me a whole new perspective on it, and I liked it a lot. There are a lot of employees at a large hotel- several hundred, but at corporate there are several thousand of us. On May 13th about 2,000 employees from corporate went out into the DC area and served our community. It started that morning with breakfast at the associate entrance, music playing as we walked up, and everyone in jeans and their Spirit to Serve t-shirts. Everyone gathered outside the associate entrance for a quick rally and Mr. Marriott gave us a pep talk. Then we headed over to our buses- there were 20-30 buses in 4 lines across the parking lot waiting to take the first round of teams to their service site. Not everyone left the building, some people stayed at HQ and did service projects in the building like making sandwiches for a homeless shelter in the kitchens.

The Global Revenue Management Team went to the CHI Center (except for a handful that went with the Fairfield Inn team to a Habitat for Humanity site). The CHI Center serves handicap people in our community by helping them find employment in the community if they are able, providing employment at the center for people who are not able to go to a job site but can still do things like stuff envelopes and put mailing stickers on them or other simple tasks like this, and some are so severely handicapped that they come for daycare. They also help their clients to find living situations appropriate to their abilities and check on them periodically to make sure everything is well at home. I was very interested to learn about the center because my friend Kelly in Minnesota used to work for a similar type of organization (from what I understand).

We mostly worked outside on the grounds weeding, cleaning windows, washing and cleaning buses, picking up trash, etc. We did get to see some of the clients when they were arriving in their buses (and some of them were very curious about us!) and we also saw them at lunch time. In order to keep from disrupting their routines we did not do much work inside the building. Despite the centers lack of organization in preparing for 40 volunteers, it was a good time.

If you are interested in reading more and learning what some of the Marriott teams in other countries did, check out this story.

Cherry Blossom Festival

Back at the end of March/early April DC had its annual Cherry Blossom Festival. I thought it sounded really fun and headed down there at the peak viewing time. I had visions of strolling along the path by the water and the Cherry trees and enjoying the sights. Indeed, there was water and there were Cherry trees, my vision just didn't take into account the other 5 million people who would also be there.

I was told there would be a lot of people there, but as I came to find out, my understanding of "a lot of people" was insufficient to accurately describe the situation. The best way I can describe it is if you've seen one of those photos of a beach in China where you can't even see the beach or the water because there are so many people- that's what downtown DC was like. It was nearly impossible to take any pictures with that many people around and honestly, I find it nearly impossible to enjoy anything with that many people around.

Here are a few photos I did manage to capture:

The Zoo Part II and Other Random Bits of Life

Well, it's taken me a while to get around to posting the second part of my photos from the zoo. Since then I have also visited the Museum of Natural History and the National Holocaust Museum.

The Museum of Natural History is too big to do in one day, so I just plan to keep going back until I've made it to all of the different areas! Plus, it is very busy and I get tired of the million kids who are there on school trips and couldn't care less about looking at the exhibits.

The Holocaust Museum was also very busy, but luckily I was there in the off season when you don't have to pick-up time cards to the visit the main exhibit. It was very interesting, although after living in Switzerland and studying World War II and the Holocaust while I was in school there, I was surprised by some of the things I thought they very briefly passed over or did not mention that I expected them to spend more time on.

Besides visiting downtown DC, I have also been busy with the last trappings of the move. Primarily, getting a Maryland Drivers License and registering my car here. Getting my car registered here turned out to be more of a fiasco than I expected since they require a long and expensive safety inspection, from which they made me get several hundred dollars worth of work done on my car. The fan belt I was happy to replace as from what I understand that is a rather important thing and bad things happen if it breaks (yes- clearly I am mechanically inclined as I can explain it so well!). They also made me replace this broken piece of plastic on the edge of one of the rear wheel wells. Now, you have to understand my car is plastic and the broken part wasn't sticking out, it was just a big crack. This piece had also been broken for the past three years and the state of Hawaii had twice inspected my car and deemed it safe even with this piece of plastic cracked. But the state of Maryland- NO, they decided it was a clear safety hazard to have a cracked piece of plastic on my car. And could this piece of plastic be replaced while I waited? Of course not. I had to leave my car for two days and get a rental car because the stupid piece of plastic needed to be painted and the stupid paint had to dry. (Okay- I will concede that I am not ghetto enough to drive around with a different colored part on one piece of the car, so the paint part was necessary.)

I have also found a great church out here and I have recently started attending a Bible Study at the church and a small group in my area. I already love the ladies in my small group and feel so blessed to have found them. They are so much fun! They get together every Wednesday night, but they often get together on other days/weekends for impromptu things like to go out to dinner and a movie or to have a potluck and play boardgames. Over the past couple of years almost all of my friends have been from work, so it is fun to find girls outside of work but also single and with careers to hang out with.

Anyways, here are the pictures from the zoo:

Does this not look like the worlds largest Guinea Pig?