Episode VI: Fireworks

Contrary to the introduction to this blog. This past week was probably one of the most uneventful weeks this summer in terms of what I got done at work, as well as social outings during the week. The week at work was incredibly slow as it was the last week of my mentor being out of town. I had finished almost all of the work I was supposed to do while he was away by the end of the day Wednesday. Until I was told late Friday that I should have an informal presentation ready for him upon his return which ate up almost all of my Sunday. This is also most likely the last week when I’ll have a really short week. The past couple of weeks have been short in terms of the number of days I travel to NIST. Mainly because of other internship events but of course with holidays. I also started to plan my abstract by the end of the week because there was nothing else for me to do.

On the other hand, as I said in the introduction, the social events were not plentiful, but the ones that occurred will be memorable. The week’s social events started out with going to a Nationals baseball game on Monday. Though the Nationals were the home team I was pulling more for visiting team, the Cincinnati Reds. The first reason is that I looked up the rosters before the game and I didn’t recognize anyone on the Nationals but I recognized names on the Reds. And the second reason is that being from the Midwest, even if the other team is in the same division, I’d rather see the team from the Midwest win rather than the east or west coast teams. That being said the Reds did end up beating the Nationals which I was internally happy about at the time but didn’t express my feelings around the Nationals fans that were around. After the game the Nationals had a little firework show for the fans. We moved to where we thought we would be able to see the fireworks. When they started, however, we discovered that the videoboard in the outfield was still blocking our view from almost all the fireworks. Luckily, we didn’t have to move far to have our view not be obstructed, and the show was relatively decent.

Tuesday was the 4th. I did absolutely nothing during the morning and afternoon. A group of us left in the early evening to get a spot on the Mall for the firework show happening later that night. I believe we got to the Mall around 6:15, but the fireworks weren’t scheduled to start until 9:00. I was glad we got there that early because it really started to fill up by 7:30 and with the size of the group we had, we probably wouldn’t have found a spot if we had shown up at that time or later. The show itself was probably the best fireworks show I’ve seen in my life. There was a playlist of songs that played during the show that was probably 20 minutes long, and the fireworks matched the songs that were playing. My favorite part of the show was when they played the song from the Sandlot fireworks scene. We also got lucky because apparently we were in only of the only spots that could actually hear the music because we were close enough to the speakers.

The rest of the week was uneventful. The only other thing that I did was go out with some of the other interns Friday and Saturday nights.

That’s the gist of what happened during week 6 of my internship. I’ll be back in a week.