hooray armadilloâ„¢

Parliament is on recess this week. So this week I’m up in Scotland in my MPs constituency office. Along with a light spot of working, getting to spend time with all the family up here is great!

I’ve been given a car to use when I’m up here to get to work as I’m staying with family in Stirling (which is about a 20 minute drive from the office). I couldn’t believe it when I was told, “Oh, you’ll be staying with your family, right? Okay, well we’ll put you on the insurance for a car that you can use up there.” I still find it hard to believe sometimes all the great perks of this internship. Perks aren’t supposed to come until you’re high up in your job…not when you’re an intern! Let’s just say, I took advantage of the business class lounge at the airport before I flew up.

Driving on the other side of the car and road and shifting with your left hand (lucky I can drive a manual!!!) wasn’t as hard to get used to as I thought. As long as I’m not driving late at night on some back road where I could pull out and completely forget what side to be on, by just following the traffic it’s hard to go wrong. The gear shifter doesn’t have the numbers on it so it was a guess on where reverse was. So far that was the only issue!

At the end of the month for my “birthday” my mum, dad, sister, cousin, aunt, and uncle are coming over, up, and down, respectively, to London. It will be a grand time. That’s the end of next week! At the beginning of March I’m working at BBH for two weeks. I’ll be away from Parliament for that time. I worked briefly with their New York office when I was working at thelab® last summer so it should be fun. And I’m trying to find flights for sometime in March to see Melissssa. I tend to think of things way far out in the future, but time is flying so far and I just have so much to look forward to.

Now that I’m thinking I don’t want to graduate in December ‘09 I was wondering what to do about this summer. If I take classes then I really wouldn’t have a reason not to finish up at the end of the fall semester. If I don’t take them then I could spread out my class load over both semesters. What to do???

Also, I missed a delivery deadline on the online game Trukz. No big deal, it’s happened before. But I have such a terrible driver rating and being late or getting speeding tickets just doesn’t help.  I’d like to see my driver rating get just a little higher. You know, something I could be proud of.

This past weekend was so wonderful. It was so great to see Melissa after a long long month. We are so lucky to be so (relatively) close to each other when we’re both so far away from “home.” Although time seemed to fly, we packed a lot into a few days and I think London did a good job. We couldn’t have asked for better weather either. It’s back to its rainy self now. I hope to get down to Spain in March sometime to see what this tapas nonsense is all about. I already can’t wait to see her again!

I’ve started using Twitter. I was on the Parliament’s Intranet the other day and one of the new “Going On” stories was that Parliament is on Twitter. It is kind of amazing to think that the UK Government is using a social networking site as a medium to communicate with people. I kind of like that, though. I’ve already found out a few things going on in Parliament because of UKParliament’s tweets. So, I guess their goal of getting in touch with the electorate is working. Recently I’ve been aware of just how connected everything is through Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, Blogs, etc. and just how everyone is moving toward it…I mean Parliament? For real?! I don’t know how I feel about this near constant sharing, but for now I’ll do my part. 

Woah. I just blogged about Twittering. Is your mind still functioning?