Oh good gracious. Today was probably the most interesting day I've had here in DC so far. We just had plans to go shopping and all, but then that kinda got shoved in with other stuff once we turned on the news. When we turned on Fox News around noon, we saw that there was a HUGE Tea Party rally at the west front of the Capitol, so we hurried up and went over there.

As we walked over, we could hear Jon Voight talking, but we didn't really get to see him. The crowd was enormous. So we kinda worked our way into the crowd... a little here, a little there. Ten feet at a time, inching closer. The people in the crowd were generally nice, since they were all united in one cause and all, so they kept letting us get in front of them. Suddenly, I realized that we were only about 5 people back from being in the front, so we finally worked our way up and popped out in front. There was a big semi-circle around the podium, with about 25 feet or so clear between the podium and the crowd... but there were press in there, and random other people, so we just though "oh heck, why not." So we just went up there too. After about 10, maybe 15 minutes, this random guy comes up to us and goes "oh you're not press are you?" And I was like, "well no, we're not... why?" And he went "Well this is a press only area." (this guy didn't look like press at all), and he said "the police told me to go around and tell people that." So I looked at him and said, "Sir, we work here. We have badges." And he just kinda stood there... I'm pretty sure he didn't have a badge. And he was like "oh, oh I see. I'm sorry..." and walked off. It was pretty funny.

So the Tea Partiers allllll went over to the House Office Buildings to go talk to their congressmen and crash their offices, so we thought we'd go over there too. Another nice thing about badges is that you never wait in lines, you just walk to the front and cut. So we passed up the half mile line and just went straight into the door and were like "Excuse me, ma'am... excuse me... pardon me..." while flashing our badges. When we squeezed through the door, someone yelled "hey! what do you have that let's you through?!?" And I just turned square around with a smile and said "Excuse me, I work here." and kept on cutting haha.

So I got to my office eventually, and it was PACKED with people. So I offered to stick around with my roomie and answer phones and quell chaos, and so we did for about an hour. I'm going tomorrow too. It was nuts. Down the hall, one of the undecided congressmen had a mob of about a hundred people outside his door banging on it because his staffers had locked themselves in. They had to call the police because they were afraid they would knock it down. It was crazy! So we kindly offered notes and pens for them to write notes and push them under the door.

Then we shopped. I got cute shoes and spring clothes.

Then we came back and decided to go around to the Capitol to see what was going on. We saw a candle light vigil of about a hundred middle aged people singing "This Little Light of Mine" off-key. So we kept walking. We went to the West Front of the Capitol and just sat there at the base and talked for a couple of hours and chatted with the police there. It was so peaceful and nice and quiet and beauuuuutiful outside. We're gonna do that about once a week or so. This was the best Saturday EVER.