Giving to the Peace Corps...

As we begin to celebrate the upcoming holiday season (a season of giving), here is a reminder to share with those who are far away and not always at the center of our thoughts.


This is a website where you can read up on various Peace Corps projects that are currently in need of funding. I'd recommend you scroll down to the country of Mali because I still have friends there, but the Peace Corps overall is a good organization. Any project from any country that you could choose to donate to will benefit people for years to come because the Peace Corps has a focus on sustainability at a local level.

https://www.peacecorps.gov/resources/donors/contribute/regioncontrib.cfm?region=africa&

Apartment pictures!

This is Michele and my new apartment in NW DC:

The kitchen isn't a separate room, it actually makes up the back of the living room (I love that).

And its a pretty sweet kitchen too. Granite counters, stained concrete floors...

We haven't hung anything on the walls yet, but we've got some awesome stuff from Africa to hang up, plus we plan on printing and framing some of our photos from Mali.

Our window out onto the world of Giant the supermarket with our dinky yet lovable Christmas tree.

Snow Pictures!

Yes, Michele in the snow is still Michele.

Laying in the snow with nothing but sweat pants and a sweatshirt - no gloves or anything someone should bring to a snowball fight.

Yep. To those in Africa: the snow is the white stuff in case you forgot.

And the wonderful thing about our apartment complex: all of this took place on the rooftop patio. Don't tell anyone, but we spent part of the time lobbing snowballs off the roof onto unsuspecting cars and pedestrians 6 floors below. Shh!

Snow Day DC

Ok, to start out with, I am a very bad person for not updating more frequently. I deserve your harsh words - especially those of you who might still read this living in Africa - that is, if any of you even bother anymore.
I continue to delay posting anything because I want to include pictures of everything and so far I've been very bad at carrying a camera with me. I've got some big events to inform everyone of and I am finally going to set aside some time to properly do it. Upcoming posts will include my sister's wedding that took place in November - then Michele's and my new apartment (with photos) since we finally cleaned up the boxes and arranged the furniture.


But the reason I got on today is this: it is snowing in Washington DC right now. True, yesterday was the first actual snow, but it was nothing more than maybe 20 flakes I saw between my apartment and the office. Today however is marked by the 2-3 inches on the ground and the little flurries I could see from the 9th floor of my office in the city. This morning my car had a nice blanket of white across the hood, roof and windshield.

I don't have a winter coat. Good thing it is warm in the metro. I spend 75% of my 25 minute commute everyday in the metro. I only have to walk a total of 3 blocks outdoors so life isn't that frigid yet. Who knows how I'll feel deeper into the winter as the temperature drops though. Odd thing is, even though it is 32 degrees or colder outside, Michele and I have not turned on the heat to our apartment - for some odd reason, it has remained 67 degrees inside our new home...


Interesting tidbit of the day: false-consensus effect:
a form of assimilation - the tendency to overestimate the extent to which others share one's beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors - people tend to assume their own beliefs are more common than they may be. The most famous experiment of this involved asking college students to carry a sandwich board with the word 'REPENT' on it for a half hour around their campus. Those who agreed to carry the sign also believed 63.5% of their fellow experimentees would also agree to carry the sign. Those who refused believed that 76% of their fellow experimentees would also refuse.
This explains why madmen like Bill O'Reilly believe in their 'War on Christmas'...