April 6th, 2011
Today is the start of what will ultimately encompass a majority of my time this quarter: the beginning of my sustainability internship at the Sustainability Resource Center. I woke up, went straight to a meeting with the student in charge (Mandy), as well as the two other communication interns I will be working with: Sylvia & Yu-Ting. It was exciting meeting them and establishing a gameplan for the rest of the quarter, as we made a trek to the Communications Department to get filing paperwork finished. First official day on the job: Monday, but meeting tomorrow with Mandy for some more technical details. Anyway, I snapped a picture of an amazing social-justice mural inside the Communications building, cropping into the picture simply the UCSD parts, and cropping out the more radical elements of the mural.
Afterwards, I went to EH&S for work. I already know how hard it’s going to be to balance an internship, a job, school, and a vast variety of clubs, but I think I’ll eventually adjust. Afterwards I headed to Mimi’s place all the way in ERC to hang out. We tried going to the Bistro, the new Village dining hall, but it was closed :(. We ultimately went to place and market, which was huge and had shopping carts, before I headed to her place. She cooked me some chicken Alfredo, I watched some terrible show on Disney Channel, and we played Scrabble together, her efforts eventually beating out mine. Afterwards, I met up with Geetha and Rashika at the ICRA office as we started Disneyland posters and listened to a wonderful assortment of music from my Ipod. We then went to the ICRA meeting, with an amazing funding request (which I wanted to fund in full, but everybody disagreed), and then were confronted by our advisor on how to effectively tackle the problem of going to Disneyland. After that confrontation me, Bee-John and Amul went to Goodies to eat dinner (I was still hungry), Rashika and Geetha joined us as we all went to the library, complained about Disneyland and ICRA, then we all ultimately departed to get on with our very busy lives in our respective apartments.
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| On April 6th, 1896, The Olympic Games, are reborn in Athens 1,500 years after being banned by Roman Emperor Theodosius I. YAY 🙂 |
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| The potential shutdown of the federal government this week will have the greatest effect on federal employees, of course. All of those deemed non-essential will be furloughed – perhaps more than 800,000 – though there is not, as yet, a precise definition of who or what is essential. A secretary for the Small Business Administration certainly would not be considered essential in this context. But what about the technicians who operate the SBA website? Agencies have been grappling with those decisions in recent weeks. Each agency is coming up with its own plan on how to deal with a shutdown and who needs to remain working. Those plans have not been made public. The last shutdowns, in 1995 and 1996, give some guidance but not a complete template, as they pre-dated much of the technology that is now taken for granted, as well as one entire agency – the Department of Homeland Security. Exciting. |
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