new arrival

My new 2nd cousin was born at 3 am this morning. This is Melanie Autumn Grace France.

A very tired mommy.

and Daddy.

school's out!

This week my Social Welfare Issues and Policies class went to DC with the main intention of talking to our senators about state policies we felt needed some work...

I looked at my stuff ready to head out the door and decided I needed to branch out.

Yeah my camera's pop out screen makes these pictures easier but well...they look like this. This is Lisa and Kaitlin.

Playing Rook

Candi nonchalantly tells me she's my partner.
The other van. Yes we are getting passed by a truck going up a hill. It took us twelve hours to get there, for various reasons.

But then we finally got unleashed in DC and well the results were fantastic.
China Town!

Our hostel

Monday Morning

Me, Candi, and Kaitlin
We were always a force to be reckoned with, especially on Tuesday when we were all in business suits walking as a mass.
This guy picked this flower from the bed by which we were standing and then proceeded to try to get Julie to pay 2 dollars for it. He almost started crying when she wouldn't... hmmmm new business strategies anyone?

Me and Marie on the Metro

The National Association of Social Workers or NASW is the big cheese in our field that can take your career away if you move the wrong muscle... You know what I mean. We get daily lectures about this. So being that we are Social Workers and each profession has it's own jokes that are only funny to you and dumb to the rest of the world, the following pictures became necessary.

The men...they may be small in number but they still think they're pretty cool and we don't tend to disagree.

The ginormous board room. I wish you could see the size of this table. It had a window looking out on the Capital Building.


When visiting the monuments there's just something wrong about only smiling next to it. You have to get creative. I very much enjoyed watching others find crazy ways of taking pictures of them. Here are a few of my entries.

Playing with the shadows

My new classic...

gotta love the unnecessary play-by-play

I found this on the war monument. Never seen that before but it's cute!

mmmm north cackilacky

Nothing interesting. Just a cool picture I took. Or at least I thought so.

The big day. Tuesday meeting in the worship room before going and meeting with our Senators.

Our fearless leader, Mrs. Baker.

After Tennessee Tuesday Breakfast with Senators Corker and Alexander and their staff, we went to go present our cases to some of their aides. This was my group and it was incredibly fun to be able to be a voice for our clients. Some of the issues we brought out, they were having to vote on that day and were really glad to hear our opinions.

We thought we were hot stuff.

And well it's pretty clear that we weren't far off lol.

Tickets to the Senate

in between appointments, off came the heels.

Last day was the Holocaust Museum and a service project but I don't have pictures of the first because they weren't allowed. Sorry.

Caught in a sand storm on the mall. Enlarge this one. I find it rather funny.


We responded to letters from prisoners in which they asked for books and then wrote them back. It was a lot of fun.

Yeah so Mrs. Baker apparently LOVED it. ha ha