Hello from D.C. :)

My friends! I miss you! And this blog is wonderful. Marth, you always have the most fantastic ideas. Maybe, under your guidance (benevolent obsession?), my morose claim of a few weeks ago - that the Family of Joe will continue to stay in semi-contact but will only come together physically for funerals, and maybe marriages - will indeed be proven false. Actually, since I said that we've talked about it - I hope we'll all talk about how to stay in touch post-graduation over the course of the year, because...it matters. :)

So the big news for me today is that this bill that I've spent all summer working on, the one that prevents credit card companies from exploiting consumers too badly, went to markup yesterday - that's where the Committee debates and changes the bill - and passed! So it's on its way to the House floor. It's unlikely to become law, but it's still incredibly important. Due to this bill, the Fed has proposed new rules about unfair and deceptive acts and practices (UDAP - D.C. is obsessed with acronyms) that will accomplish a lot of what the bill would have, assuming the army of lobbyists employed by the banking industry doesn't convince them to back down. Anyway - the bill got out of committee, which wasn't expected, so I was excited. :)

In other news, my life is a little nuts at the moment. Lots of emotional stuff latedly - the big one was that my grandfather passed away last week, which was confusing and sad - and also, this is my last weekend in DC. After this I am off to Colorado, where I will hopefully do lots of outdoors things (although I just sprained my ankle, so we'll see - it's been a heck of a week). Then I'll be back in Kansas for two weeks. I'm actually scheming to find a way to go to the Democratic Convention - so that might happen too. And then....drumroll please.....YALE!!! I can't wait.

I don't know if this is what a blog post is supposed to be, exactly - I've never written one before, and I'm used to operating in the personal-email form rather than the broadcast-for-everyone form, but yes. I'm done now. I'm going to go wade through a crate of insurance papers for one of my bosses. Woohoo....

Lots of love,

April