Hilarious

Obviously this is a bad translation gone wrong, but in this economy, it's hilarious

Washington, D.C.

Oh, hello; I didn't see you there. I was just updating this here blog of mine. What's that? You're interested? Well give me a second and I'll fill you in on what's been going on lately on my end.
So Sunday morning I caught a train to Washington, D.C. for the Results International Conference and 30th anniversary.

 In sum: it was pretty sweet. We had Sunday and Monday to attend a few workshops and get briefed on what we were going to lobby for on Tuesday. Oh yeah, and Monday night I met up with a recent Stetson grad in Georgetown and checked out that amazing, classic town and university. So cool.

So yeah, I said lobby. Now, I wasn't 100% sure what this entailed, but come Monday night I was pretty clear on what was happening the next morning. Our team was to go over to the U.S. Senate and House office buildings and actually meet with aides, Senators, and House Reps and lobby to them in person.
The morning began in the same room that the Titanic Investigation and McCarthy Trials happened with a speech from Dick Durbin - who, if you don't know the name, is the second most powerful person in the U.S. Senate.

That's Dick Durbin in the photo right above. He's a pretty cool dude!
Ok so we broke off into lobby teams for our states..I went with Florida and was with four people who were prepared beyond anyone at the conference in my opinion. This was clearly not their first time at the rodeo. So we started in the Senate building and met with Senator Lemieux's aide. After that we were attempting to get to the House office building but got lost, told some people we were "lobbyists", got some awesome "Official House Business" tag and got access to the Representative's subway between the office buildings (which is like an awesome, glorified mining car that the senators will ride with you)

Some of the lobby team^^

This is the sweet subway car
The next photo is when I was walking in the tunnel between the buildings to meet with Tampa Bay Rep Kathy Castor ya know, no big deal. (?!?!?!!!!)

The rest of the photos are just cool things I came across. The iPhone camera isn't too bad during the day!

The Capitol building

This is right outside of Union Station

We went to the Lincoln Memorial at 3:25am and we were the only people there. Well, we were the only people there after some guy with this group of three people crossed the boundary and touched Lincoln..to which a Federal Police Officer told the guy he'd throw him in jail for years for it, but that "tonight's your lucky night". Pretty crazy being around this thing and the reflection pond without a single person around. It's enormous.

Anyway. We lobbied on Tuesday which was insanely fun and interesting. Wednesday we were at the Results HQ debriefing and having a strategy session. It was a pretty useful meeting.
Here's where things get a little more interesting. So we're planned to leave at 10:25am on a train on Thursday morning. Pretty standard right? Go to train, get on, come home. Well, not for me!  It has been forever since I've ridden a train for actual state-to-state travel so I forgot that in order to get back on a train one needs to bring one of those tickets you got originally back to the station. I get to the train station about 30 minutes before my train and realize I have no way of getting on this thing; so I run to the Amtrak counter and get stuck in an enormous line. Luckily I aggravated an already overly-aggravated Amtrak worker enough that he skipped me to this grreeat Amtrak dude who was like "OMG LET'S GET YOU ON THAT TRAIN!!" so I bought a new ticket, and sprinted through the station Mission Impossible style - like, if things were blowing up around me I totally would have lived - but regardless, I get to the gate, and the train taking off, and my travel partner pissseedd off. So, I walk back through the, luckily not blown up from my sprinting, Union Station and the Amtrak guy just goes "Didn't make it didja?" "Nope". Luckily we had a friend driving back to Durty Jersey from the conference so we called him and he gave us a ride back...which we probably should have done from step one; we didn't even need a train back. Anyway, now I'm back in NJ and pretty much ready for this weekend. I took a few photos on my real camera which I traipsed along with me all week for like 10 photos ha. Anyway, I'll upload those later. Hope all is well in your neck of the woods, readers! If you read this...comment! Let me know how you are doing. This feel like such a one sided conversation!
-Jack

Ok so good morning and week everyone! I'm updating this from the browser on my phone so I don't know how good looking this post will be by I figured I should post something about what i'm doing right now. Yesterday I caught a train to Washington DC for the Results conference and 30th anniversary. Results is an organization dedicated to ending poverty and hunger and they definitely get results from their work. Were going to be on Capitol Hill tomorrow lobbying for...something and it should be pretty interesting. Were here til Thursday so I'll definitely get some photos and what not once I'm on a real computer. Finally, Australian accents are awesome. I want one!

This Town Is Crazy

Princeton is such a gorgeous place - it's ridiculous.
I walked by this on the way to work today:

I feel like I'm stuck in some kind of movie walking around here...people keep saying it looks like Harry Potter..I'll admit, I know nothing about Harry Potter.
Ever seen this before?

I walked into a coffee shop here and these were on the counter. It's apparently called "latte art". I don't even know what a latte is! Anyway, super duper slow day here at the office. New Jersey Americore workers get these things called "energy days" now on Fridays which basically means they're not really allowed to work. So it's kind of like interns running the ship today - which means we've been multitasking between work and watching USA tie their second World Cup game. Also, I stumbled upon this yesterday: 75% of New Jerseyans Don't Like NJ. Take that NJ!
Anyway, Jared Smith and I are off to D.C. Sunday morning (at 7:30am??!!!!) for the Results conference. We've got to make a bunch of videos about it, so I'll definitely post one up here once we make/edit them. Hope you're all doing well!

Too Good To be True?

This seems to hilarious to be true, but I don't doubt it.

"Student Throws Puppy at Hells Angels - Escapes on Bulldozer"
http://jalopnik.com/5564966/student-throws-puppy-at-hells-angels-escapes-on-bulldozer

No Road To Follow

So everyone had a hard time getting to work this morning because they decided today was the day to close the road, and then tear it completely out once we got into our parking lot. So about 2 hours into our day we were faced with this:

Yeah, that's about a 7 inch drop from our driveway to the dirt under the concrete. Needless to say, none of us could leave work. Luckily, Wayne invited the foreman into the Foundation around 10ish and told him he and his crew could use our bathroom and get water from our place whenever they wanted..in turn, they built us a ramp so we could all leave at the end of the day! It was pretty sweet.
One more photo for tonight: This is one of the dogs that lives in the house I'm in. She looked so sad!

Finally, I'm pretty sure I met my arch-nemesis driving home today. The only detail I can remember through my blind rage fury was a plastic fake license plate and the words "Nina Love". I hope I never see this human being again

We'll Always Win, England!

If you know me, you know that I have a completely irrational (fake) hatred of the British and more so of the Canadians. This soccer game that is currently happening is the perfect fodder for other people like myself to come together and hate the British. I don't care who wins or loses this game (because I know we'll win), but it's making some great talk. So, I didn't write this article - but I wish I did..It's pretty much verbatim how I would have written a "How to Hate England" guide. So, from Gawker.com I give you the guide on "How to Hate England":

Gawker's Guide on How to Hate England

A Couple Photos from SLI

Hey everyone..so a couple photos from SLI have been posted so I'm going to vainly post a couple that I'm in and maybe some others that look interesting! Click "read more"!

A Few Photos

So, Here are just a few photos from today:

What doesn't fit? Found this putting my lunch in the fridge.

Found this in the store room..along with some other goodies. Hilarious at 10am hahaha

Day three of my internship found me gardening...luckily all of these are still alive

Finally, apparently if I like Texts From Last Night I like Obama. I mean, it's true, but funny Facebook knows.
-Jack

Some Photos

So today was the day of rest after SLI so I snapped some photos of Princeton. For ease, I put them on Facebook...here's the link:

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=242262&id=607389965&l=3d825c1654

Kentuckalicious

So here I am in Kentucky for Bonner's 20th "Bonnerversary" and Summer Leadership Institute. It's, I think 5 of our adventure, and day 3 of the actual conference and, seemingly, it's going really well. We're at Berea College in Berea, Kentucky at which is a pretty small town but contains a lot of...hmm...character. I'm trying to figure out the best way to portray some of the aspect of this place but doing so correctly in a way that would give you, the reader, and accurate experience of what is happening here is tough. Maybe through a mix of stories and pictures I can do so. Let's start with the ride here:
We left Princeton on Monday morning and drove to West Virginia where we decided to stay the night before finishing up the ride to Berea. Now, that may seem straight forward enough but at some point we stopped off to stretch, or eat, or dance, or something, and our GPS decided it was time for some back road action. And by back road action I mean legitimate mountain driving with no cell phones or civilization. We new it was bad when we saw a hand painted "He's not my President" sign staked in the ground next to the road. I'm 96% sure that the idea of  'internet' in this area was best served by carrier pigeons.

So, after about an hour or so of being totally lost we ended up somehow on an on ramp for the highway that seemed to mythically appear out of thin...country side.
Fast forward to Kentucky where we got to Berea to begin setting this conference up around 4ish. So, we're carrying supplies and whatnot across the streets to and fro where they needed to go and we get a call from..someone..in Berea saying that we were jay-walking too much. We're in this town like 20 minutes and already on their blacklist. At this point we decided it would be a good idea to use the crosswalks as none of us wanted to meet what is invariably the one "sheriff" of this town (Bad movies start like that!). As the lights changed from don't walk to walk I heard something that is still making me laugh/taking me aback and it sounded like this: "Ya cun nowa cross KENTukI Avenew". Hard to read? Yeah, the cross walks here have a THICK southern accent and compel you to cross the road when the lights change. It's a little creepy.

I'm happy this conference is going so well. We've been meeting at 8am and working until about 12am every day so it's definitely been some work. It's weird to have come into this job a week before the conference and like, literally, hit the ground running. It feels like we planned this conference in two weeks when obviously it's been months of planning. Anyway, here are some photos from Kentucky and SLI

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 Pretty much without a doubt the most manly shirt ever. New band uniform? I think so.

This would be us, being lost in the mountains:

Really Kentucky? Jean diapers? Wouldn't that be kinda chaffy? 

This was one of the opening morning ceremonies. Wayne Meisel, the President of Bonner, is retiring so there's been a lot of closing ceremony type things for him and his 20 years of dedication.

I saw a broken down car at a gas station and was going to get out an ask the guy if he needed any help when I saw this:

Yup, that'd be a Ford Ranger with the "R" taken off to spell out "anger". Needless to say, I stayed in the van as this man gave me a cold hard stare while we made what felt like an 83 point turn.

This is Alfredo Escobar's mural painting for the Bonner Foundation for the 20th Anniversary...he let anyone work on it.