The Weekend is here, finally

Today was pretty busy for a Friday. While I worked on summarizing the testimony, the phone rang, people came for meetings and the mail came four or five times. While I was able to get my testimony summary done by the end of the day, all the little things I do really add up to the time taken away from doing the original, usually bigger, tasks. While that part of the day was normal, we were able to attend an orientation class from the Congressional Research Service. This is, to me, a really interesting organization after all. Yet, there were still at least three kids in the nap club by the end of the 45 minute session. What I was able to get out of it was useful: starting Tuesday we will be able to use all the functions of CRS. That is, CRS has no public motivation at all, it's only research is for Congress and their staff. They do a large amount of research, from 1 page papers to 300 page reports. They have a staff of over 700 people, who are experts in basically every field there is. While I was thinking, this would be great to have for college, she came right out and said it. Because you are staff, you are able to do research. They don't care who its for, why, or what its about, they just want the details so you can get the best answer. Most of the time when you need CRS you can call the hotline, because you will be looking for a fact or a quote. They also have the reports, as I mentioned earlier, which can take up to six months to compile. There are two resource rooms for CRS, one in both a House Office Building and a Senate Office Building, as well as the whole Library of Congress. This is of course the largest library in the world, and something I need to do some exploring in. Back to the resource rooms, the instructor said that we, as college kids, can stockpile all we want. I hope to, over the next six months, pull out the drawer on agriculture, and empty it. We really have a lot of access with this new license, but we still have limitations. We cannot check out any of the resources, and we cannot demand deadlines, but our staff (and the members) can do both. So now research becomes even more fun, other people can get quick answers for you, and you can take all the credit. Hopefully, by the end of this I have enough to get A's on the rest of my papers through college.

Speaking of college brings me to this weekend: I plan to study, as much as humanly possible (MacroEconomics, it's not boring, but it's not fun), and go explore the rest of the time. Have a good weekend everyone!