some news from the page school...and work yesterday

Once again I find myself with a free sitting in the computer lab where I get internet but my classes seem to be all worked out now so starting tomorrow everything should be set. The other Sara who was in my french class was moved down to intermediate so I was going to be the only one, however a friend of mine Sacha was kicked out of French Advanced due to scheduling and since I need Physics he's moving the French class to first and there will now be two people. Then I have British Literature, PreCalc with Trigonomety, Physics (which I'm really excited about, the teacher seems really great!), and then last Psychology. I think it will all work out not taking U.S. Gov't and Politics here, since I took Con Law over the summer so I know a bit about the bases of government and now I'm here working so I don't think it'll be a problem. Today we had a fire drill around 7:45 and we evacuated the building. We went down a ton a ton of stairs, past the main reading room and a lot a lot of books, it's incredible. This is the most amazing school in the most incredible building.

I'm currently in the process of trying to memorize all the Democratic members of Congress for a test on Friday to try and become a Cloakroom page. Those are the pages who stay on the phones in the Cloakroom and if asked try and find Congressmen and Congresswomen on the floor to pass notes, etc. So since there are twelve of us who are trying to memorize the members we didn't have to go on any runs yesterday or deliver any flags, we just sat there with our books and studied. I now know about twenty different members, some of them including; Robert E. (Bud) Cramer, Artur Davis, Lois Capps, Kathy Castor, Keith Ellison, Henry Cuellar, Rahm Emmanuel, Steve Israel, Chris Carney, Jim Costa, and a few other newly learned members, plus of course Rush Holt and Dennis Kucinich.

I have British Lit in just a few minutes however I'll try to describe what I've seen in the Capitol. Yesterday we went over to work from school and checked in at 11:55. Next we were all taken by Ms. Keating the Democratic Page Work Supervisor to the ID room which is in Canon on the third floor. The girls still haven't received ties (which I'm not at all complaining about), so for the photo we borrow them from other guys further in the line. From the ID office she sent us to lunch as a group and told us to return by 2:15 (we had a little more than an hour for lunch). After that we returned to the House floor in groups and sat and waited for Ms. Keating to give us further instructions. While we were waiting on the floor there were a few Republican Congressman giving a presentation on Energy and a new act they want to bring to the floor for a vote. This is the Act that was rejected by the Speaker of the House, Honorable Nancy Pelosi about a month ago when she turned the power on the Floor. They kept stressing that they (the Republican Congressman) were there to talk about it and that the people (from the public) who were watching them should call her office and request that she allow discussion of the Act. They said "WE'RE HERE NOW, WHERE ARE YOU?" They fissiled out after a while and the twelve of us either studied or pretended to study till she dismissed us at 4:15.

From there we stopped at the only dining room open late called Capitol Market, got a few things and headed back to the dorm.

Once exciting stuff starts happening in my classes (which should be soon) I'll post more.