It's a long one.

Today was the last time for a long while (we hope) that we have to say goodbye to each other at the airport. As you may remember from last week, Karl had to drop Angela off at the Baltimore airport on Monday, and then we spent much of the week apart from each other. It was Karl's last week of his internship in D.C., but Angela had to get back to work to take care of month-end reports.

Let's start with the non-work part of the week. Besides spending a few hours each night video conferencing on MSN, Karl and Angela had a few social events to distract them from missing each other. Wednesday night, Angela hung out with our friends, Tina and Ruston. They talked a lot (she hadn't seen them since their wedding), and watched the new Johnny Lingo movie. They were very Newlyweddish, which, had Angela been single might have made her sick of cheesiness, but being Newlywed herself, made Angela wish Karl was there so we could out-Newlywed them. It's funny how being a newlywed changes the way you look at things so quickly.

Thursday night, Angela hung out with our friend, Amber, who just returned from her first year at Creighton law school. They had a good time talking. Meanwhile, Karl went with several of the attorneys and interns to a tour of various art galleries on 7th Street and at the Canadian Embassy. It was pretty insightful, especially at one of the galleries where the director talked to them for half an hour about how galleries are run and what the history of the gallery was. The art was pretty decent, as well. One of the galleries went a little too far, though. Case in point: an exhibit that consisted of 30 rolls of colored duct tape stacked on top of each other in a tower. Nothing else. Now, in certain settings, it can be fun to look at such a think and think, "huh, that actually does feel like art." So Karl didn't have any problems with the aesthetics. The problem was that each duct tape tower was priced at $5,000. And despite how hard the group laughed, the director at that gallery didn't think it was funny. Afterwards, the group went to a Spanish restaurant called Jaleo's. It was fantastic. Everybody ordered two or three small dishes called tapas (there were about 100 tapas on the menu, featuring dishes like shark, mushrooms, lamb, whole wheat, and much more) and then the whole table shared them. Seeing how he ate duck and asparagus for lunch on Friday, Karl had some very interesting food this week.

[Since some of you may be wondering what Karl thought about his internship, he's written the following very long paragraph, which you can skip if you'd rather just hear about our weekend.] He had a lot of interesting assignments, and then he had a lot of obvious grunt work. On the more interesting side, he did some research into the legality of some advertisements a client wanted to run for some online poker sites. You can't advertise gambling services, and one of the advertisements was very clearly a gambling service, but another advertisement advertised a free "educational" sister poker website that, try as hard as he could, Karl couldn't find any statutes against. It was very reprehensible—because odds are that most people using the web and trying to find the educational website (a .org address) will instead stumble upon the gambling service (a .com address). It made Karl feel a little helpless, because it wasn't technically illegal, and lawyers can only do stuff about things that are technically illegal. These online sites are a real problem with a lot of younger people and college students, who spend up to 12 hours a day gambling on them. It made him wonder if maybe he should be pursuing lawmaking instead. On a more positive note, Karl got to do a lot of research on issues like cell phone use on airplanes, foreign language captioning requirements for BYU TV, E911 VoIP services, FCC legislative history, and FCC spectrum licensing issues. Some of the more "grunt"-ish work was fun at first, because he was learning about how things are regulated, but after a while he didn't enjoy those assignments so much. A trained money could have done them. For one of them, he decided that since the database he was pulling information from was on the web, a computer program could do his job faster than he could. So in 30 minutes, he wrote a computer program to do 6 hours of work. The attorney who gave him the assignment was flabbergasted. At any rate, the internship was a good opportunity for Karl. He got raving reviews from the firm, and while he's not sure he'd want to work for them or even in D.C. (they put in way too many hours there), it sure will look good on a resume.

[Just so Angela's work is not left out, we've written a smaller paragraph on her work. You can, of course, skip it too. We give you permission. But Angela will be sad.] Angela came back to a very changing workplace. There have been a lot of changes in her department recently, like the co-worker who backs her up moving to a new department and her boss quitting his job. This has created many questions regarding who's in charge and what the future of her department is.

On to the weekend. Friday, Angela flew into Austin, where Karl's grandparents kindly picked her up. She almost didn't make it though. The Denver airport closed because of a thunderstorm, and she was supposed to transfer there. After 2 hours of worrying that she was stuck in Salt Lake, they found a Delta flight that actually got her to Austin 15 minutes earlier than the other flight would have. She's had horrible luck with flights lately—they oversold her flight from DC and she almost didn't get to go on that flight either. Meanwhile, Karl packed late into the night, and then got up Saturday morning at 3 so his nice dad could take him to the Baltimore airport. His flight, of course, was also delayed—he spent an hour on the ground in Houston, by which time Angela was already at the Austin airport. Angela hates airports now, by the way.

We were very happy to see each other. And then we went straight to Pfluger Park for Karl's high school reunion. Not many people came to the park, and the few that did Karl didn't recognize. But we had a little fun just walking around the creek and throwing a Frisbee. Then we drove around to a lot of the places where Karl spent time as a kid, and Karl bored Angela to death telling her about the way things used to be before Austin got too big. But Angela was a good girl and pretended to enjoy it. What she didn't like at all was the heat and humidity. She even eventually got Karl to admit that it was hot. But, Karl claims, you get used to it.

After spending the afternoon napping at Karl's grandparent's house, we went to the main part of the reunion at a hotel in downtown Austin. There were definitely more people there, and it was really cool to relive memories from high school and middle school and elementary school. It was also interesting to see where people ended up—so many people stayed in Austin. So many people were married. So many people looked like semi-responsible adults. The really odd thing was to watch people interact that really didn't interact very much in high school—yeah, some people congregated into groups, but for the most part it was a little like meeting people again for the first time. Karl's main disappointment was that still not that many people came—only like an eight of the class. Some of the people who had RSVP'd and who Karl was really looking forward to seeing again didn't make it. But it was still good. It made me think about where I came from, what my dreams used to be, how much I'd achieved, and how much I'd changed my perspective on life.

Sunday, we went to stake conference with Karl's grandparents. We've got incredible timing—that's our fourth conference of the year. It was good to see a lot of old faces from the ward Karl grew up in, but it was too bad there were so many people there (1300), because it meant it was hard to find a lot of people. The conference was interesting—the entire state of Texas was having "stake" conference together, with a broadcast from Salt Lake. For the most part, we thought it didn't seem as personable as a normal stake conference (especially the first few minutes, when they were on the wrong channel). But Elder Holland gave a remarkable talk about the need to love our "neighbor"—i.e. not only the poor and needy people we usually associate with "neighbor," but those who are closest to us; friends and family we sometimes take for granted. But, of course, it's good to serve the poor and needy too, as evidenced by an almost tear-jerking video of the church's tsunami relief program that they ended with. Karl thought it was very touching when a small girl behind them who had been kind of noisy suddenly said, "Mommy, I'm glad the tsunami didn't happen here." It's cool that little kids are able to comprehend things like that.

In the afternoon, we celebrated Karl's sister Amy's birthday with her and Michael and his girlfriend Cassie at Grandma and Grandpa's house with a yummy meal of pot roast, potatoes, and broccoli. And then we had an even yummier buttercream cake. Then we talked and napped and ate more until it was time to take Angela to the airport again. And so now, Angela is back in Utah, and Karl won't return until Tuesday (because tickets were cheaper and he doesn't have to be back at work). So yet a sorrowful goodbye. But not for long. And it was a fun weekend.

Posted June 06, 2005 (05:34 PM) | Comments (1)