So this week has been pretty uneventful, but for a huge amount of 'West Wing' action. I'm slightly wistful about this time last year, when I was working on my favourite TV project ever - the Stephen Fry documentary - and everything was crazy busy and dynamic, but really really fun and excellent. Ho hum. A few daytime trips to the park will stamp that out!
A while ago, one of the partners at the TV company I was working for before we left London employed me to do half a day's work every week between now and November, monitoring the online activity in the US election. Partner man usually makes the Lib Dems' party political broadcast for them, but this time around would like to consult them on what would work best on the internet. So I have to check out Obama and McCain's websites as well as keeping tabs on any 527 groups doing anything significant (527s are the groups that are associated with a candidate but can campaign more aggressively and negatively than the candidates themselves can).
So this all sounded fine - keep my brain ticking over and get me money for our summer holiday (of which MUCH more later! 'citing!), but unfortunately it's proved such a small amount of work that every week since I was set the assignment, I've found it's fallen a bit by the way. So this week I've been catching up on about three weeks (1 1/2 days) worth of that work.
Obama's website is so impressive that by the time I finished analysing and describing it in great detail, I was inspired to donate to the campaign, so ordered a bunch of stuff from the online store (non-US citizens aren't allowed to directly contribute to any campaigns, but you can buy merchandise and get your money to them that way).
McCain's site on the other hand is just the most chaotic, boring turgid mess ever and - no word of a lie - every day I've been scrutinising it, I've found myself having to go for a nap! Every single time, no matter how much Dr Pepper I have beforehand or how awake I've felt for the rest of the day. McCain's site is a soporific mess. Ugh.
On Monday we walked down to Georgetown to see 'WALL-E'. We took a detour along the waterfront, which of course i've seen from a kayak but never the landlubber's view! It's really nice and has a big bit of grass right by the water, which must be nice for picnics and the like.
WALL-E is a triumph - I absolutely loved loved loved it and am so pleased that there are people out there with the kinds of souls the Pixar people must have - it's imbued with such a wonderful way of looking at the world and is really funny, touching and moving. 
The children of Pixar people must be very lucky - they have very cool parents and probably get to screentest all the movies in advance, too.
I thought I was going to be bothered by how much WALL-E looks like the robot from 'Short Circuit' crossed with ET, but I wasn't at all. I just chuckled at how the object of his affection - as so many of us - was basically a beautiful sleek iPod that looked like what aliens would look like if made by Apple. In fact Max told me that Steve Jobs (CEO of Apple) is somehow involved with Pixar, so perhaps this is no coincidence.
I had to keep reminding both Max and myself that it was animation, as all the textures and landscapes looked incredibly realistic - it was amazing. And I'd like to see 'Hello Dolly' now, too.
We've been trying to work out where to go on our annual two week summer holiday for ages. Max has got 1 - 14 August off work, but we couldn't decide where to go. Until this week! It had long been between Trinidad and Tobago (Max wants to get back to his steel drumming roots) and Costa Rica, because we're planning a big coast-to-coast roadtrip over 4 weeks at the end of our time here, so wanted to go somewhere outside the US that would make the most of us being on this side of the Atlantic already.
This week we finally decided on Costa Rica and I've spent most of the week earning my travel agent's qualifications! Unfortunately I contacted Patrick for advice, as his sister's best friend lives in Costa and Patrick told me that Leanna miscarried a few days ago. What's worse is that he is out of town until the middle of this month. It's just awful. They had been really cautious about getting excited (I only know she was pregnant because I guessed that was the reason Leanna has been poorly for ages) and were only too aware of how many first-time pregnancies often end in miscarriage, so hopefully they're taking a lot of strength from that. But it must be really hard to be apart and they also lost the house they were going for a couple of weeks ago, so they've gone from being about to own a house and have a baby to having none of that.
Umm, so we're going to Costa Rica! We decided there'd be more to do there than on T&T and are going to spend the first week travelling around the greatest hits of the country - a caribbean beach where turtles lay eggs, taking a boat through the rainforest, hiking up an active volcano, visiting hot springs with waterfalls (it'll be like in 'Cocktail'!) and going on a tour of a national park on the Pacific coast.
We'd love to be those intrepid travellers who fly into San Jose and then just wing it, doing all this under our own steam and going off the beaten track, but found our 5 weeks in Mexico/Guatemala/Belize a few years ago really hard, as we have no Spanish and just found it really difficult to move around, be understood and even book hotel rooms. So we're coming clean with ourselves, admitting that we're not as intrepid as we'd like to think (though I should imagine if Max was by himself, he'd happily go where the wind takes him) and sought the help of a tour company who've put the whole itinerary together for us. So we're paying them a lump sum and they're booking all our hotels, arranging private transport between all places and booking bilingual guides to take us on daily tours of wherever we are.
It's taken about 3 days of toing and froing to get all this in place (not helped by them having an internet outage due to rain and wind knocking trees onto the phone lines!), but the lady we're dealing with is super-efficient and nice and now we're just massively excited about our trip!
It took us ages to work out where to spend the second week, which we wanted to spend just staying put on one beach. But after extensive research, we've found a fantastic place on the Pacific coast, and are booked to stay in a bungalow on stilts right on the beach, with two private hammocks and a barbecue underneath!! It's going to be aaaaawwesome. I'm going to learn to surf. I just feel like something of a fraud, because I really don't feel strung out enough to deserve a holiday and am having quite a nice little break here in DC as it is, thank you very much! The flights were a nightmare (long story to do with countless malfunctioning websites), but we've finally found better ones than we thought we could ever get - less than $400 (£200) each!
While in travel agent mode, I also booked myself flights to Denver, so I can join Maxy at the Democrats' convention and hopefully get to see Obama speak when he does his final night speech in a football stadium, rather than the convention centre. It was only once I'd booked those flights that I realised that Max is going straight on to St Paul for the Republicans directly after Denver, so I cancelled my return flight and have booked myself on a flight from Denver to LA and then back to DC a week later! I'm going to visit my friends Tom and Nina and Tom and Bambi and am really excited as I've been hoping for ages to make the most of being this bit closer to them all.
So in the month of August, because every flight I'm taking involves a change, I'll be on 10 planes! I feel this is most appropriate of one with no job or steady income, but every day hail the weak dollar, as it's costing less than a cheap return to New York from London. All these plans have the added bonus of ensuring we're hardly in DC in August, which is when the weather gets so hideous that people just stay inside all the time - it's a humidity-orama. We're back for just a week in between Costa Rica and Denver, when Max's parents are coming to stay for 5 days.
Last night we discovered a whole new park near our flat and sat and watched baseball for ages - it was really cool. Then tonight we went to Ailsa's leaving do at overrated 'concept' restaurant and venue of choice for all BBC leaving dos, Vapiano. It was fairly lame and Max is really sad Ailsa's leaving, because she's by far the most fun person at the Bureau. We saw Geoff and Sarah for the first time in ages, as they've been on honeymoon fishing in Alaska for the last couple of weeks. But they're nowhere near as fun as that first night we met them. I also met an obnoxious colleague of Max's who everyone loves, but I find annoying and arrogant and had my dislike of him confirmed when he balked at our raving about 'The Soup'. It's a show on E! that's a bit like 'Harry Hill's TV Burp' - a sardonic (and quite handsome) host just takes the mickey out of clips from that week's TV. It's freaking hilarious and the greatest thing on TV. But fathead flamboyant man doesn't like it. Whatever.
Unfortunately I made a glaring booboo while talking to one of Max's more earnest colleagues when she was talking about her time in Jakarta and I made some reference to, "well that's how it is in India", only to have her pointedly correct me with "Indonesia, actually". Whoops. Yeah, I don't know how I got an A in Geography A-level either, so stop wondering!
In good news (Indonesia lady obviously hadn't talked to her yet), Ailsa's replacement nobbled me to say that they're desperate for freelance producers to do 'shifts' at the Bureau and she's really really keen to use me. They'd pay me to shadow someone for a couple of shifts (I have NO idea what a shift involves) and then if I liked it, they'd put me on some kind of casual rota. Sounds good to me, after all I am Little Miss Ten Flights. I just hope the shifts don't require a firm grasp of geography...
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