Patrick at Work and Play

Well, I know it's been a while since I rapped at y'all but I'm back and I've got some good news.
As some of you know, all my classes are in the evening because the school expects that students will hold jobs and find internships during the day. I've devoted a lot of time this fall to applying for different positions at a lot of places around the city.
In the last couple of weeks I secured two different internships for next semester.
The first is a 15 hour per week research position at the Hudson Institute. I'll be helping the director of the political/military section with several research projects that he has going on. Most of them focus on Russia or central Asia. It's an unpaid position but is extremely flexible. I can work from home or come in to the office. Also, research work is great to have on my resume. Ask me in mid-January how it's going.
The other is a congressional internship (paid!) with Adam Smith from District 9 in Washington. He serves on the House Foreign Affairs Committee so I'm looking forward to being involved in that in some way. There will a fair amount of phone answering and mail opening but that's life. Again, I'll let you know how that's going in January.
For now I only have a couple weeks left in my first semester. I have finals in two out of three classes and big papers in two out of three as well. Classes on the whole have been very good. My European Union class is fantastic and I've learned way more than I expected to. I also have an intro to Europe, Eurasia, and Russia. That class has been up and down but I'll be happy to be done with it. My last class is a history of Eastern Europe class which has been good, but I would have liked more lecture. The professor seems to think we understand things better than we do and continually looks for in-depth discussion among the students. The only problem is that we usually don't know what we're talking about. Kim here, real quick Patrick is doing really well in his classes and I am very proud of him.

Enough about work and school, on to other subjects!

Kim's family is coming this week which promises to be a great week. We're really excited to have visitors again and Kim has the whole week scheduled out for them. Kim? Making a detailed schedule? Shocking.

We also bought our tickets home. We get in on the 18th and head straight to Walla Walla. We'll get back to Tacoma on the 24th and be at the First Pres. Christmas Eve service. Then we'll be in Tacoma until the morning of the 1st. Kim is using all her vacation days to be gone for that long. Yikes. No trips home in our future after Christmas for a long time.