Week 9: Food, food and more food!

This was my second to last week of my internship. I've spent 90,720 minutes or 5,443,200 seconds as an SPS intern. This past week we didn't have very many exciting, blog worthy, work-related things happen (i.e. there weren't very many good picture opportunities). Our website is up and running, we've been uploading all of our existing lesson plans onto it and asking the web design people to tweak things here and there. They've been super responsive and great to work with (shout out to Tom, Nathan and Jenny) and we're very lucky to work with such talented people. I'll post screen shots of the website when it's actually finished. Otherwise, Victoria and I have been working on our final presentation, which is also almost done. Very exciting.

So, since I don't have very many good work related pictures this week, I figured I'd post some pictures of really good food I ate and tell you about my weekend adventure to visit my boyfriend's family for his grandfather's 80th birthday.

Here is a milkshake I drank and the hamburger that accompanied it:

Dark Chocolate Shake

Dark Chocolate Shake Close-Up

Burger

We got this to eat last Thursday for lunch. If the pictures didn't convince you, it was really good. That is one of the best shakes I've ever had. Ever.

Also on Thursday we went to Tracy's house, where he and his husband fed us pizza and the SPS staff asked us questions about helping SPS National stay connected to current students. (Essentially they bribed us to pay attention and actually give answers with free food ;-) While we were there, we also got a tour of their lovely house and grounds.

Nature Walk at Tracy's House

Here's one of the flowers they had by their front door:

Pink flower

And some yellow flowers:

Yellow flowers

Here's a picture of my wrap from Spice 6, which we went to for lunch on Friday. Also some of the best Indian food I've had in D.C.

Spice 6 Wrap

Friday evening I went up to NJ with my boyfriend, James, to visit his family as they were all gathering to celebrate his grandfather Pat's 80th birthday. Here we are on the train:

James and Sam

We spent the night at his Aunt Deidre's house. The next morning we drove down to his other Aunt Nadine's (he's got a lot of aunts) beach house. I appreciated this sign that they had over one of the doors leading to the deck:

Eat. Beach. Sleep. Repeat.

Here's the whole Flynn family gathered before the cake gets eaten:

Entire Flynn Family

And here's Pat (James's grandfather) with just his daughters:

Pat and Daughters

And here's the cake:

Pat's Cake

I think it's cool that they decided to celebrate their Irish heritage by putting the Chi Ro page from the Book of Kells on the cake (James's mom's idea). If you don't know what the Book of Kells is, go look it up. It's amazing and gorgeous and worth the 30 seconds it will take you.

Here's my piece of the cake:

My Cake piece

On Sunday we stopped for ice cream before they dropped me off at the train station. The ice cream place had this cool stained glass window decoration inside:

Stained Glass Ice Cream Window

All in all, it was a good weekend, despite our encounter with some swans. I am not a huge fans of swans due to a rather traumatic childhood experience that involved a PB&J sandwhich and some black swans who don't know the definition of 'sharing'. Anyway, these swans weren't so bad. We were hanging around on the dock, and this is what we saw:

Swans 1