Blogging on location in Washington, DC

Another professor and I have brought 24 students to Washington, DC, for three days of meeting with feminist organizations and government agencies and various elected officials. We chartered a bus--I only thought I was going to throw up three times in the nine-hour trip, so that was pretty good--and arrived tonight at our youth hostel. Although I had warned the other professor twice before we left that we'd be staying in a hostel, and that the accommodations would be dorm-style, she still seemed a bit shocked when we got here. But she quickly rallied, and as of a few minutes ago, seemed cheerful about the adventurousness of it all. She's staying in a room that's filled with our students. I lucked into a room that has a bunch of old people in it--a doctor from the Netherlands, an activist from Seattle, and another woman who looks like she might be German, although I didn't talk with her. It's very quiet. I'm actually in the lobby right now because the lights are out in my room, and the other old folks have already gone to sleep.

The sad news is, I left my camera--Biffle's camera, really--on the bus. This was after Biffle carefully instructed me in some of the finer points of the camera: "If you need to take a picture really quickly and don't want the flash to go off, use this setting." The bus is now parked at a Ramada in Maryland, where it will stay until Wednesday evening when the driver comes to pick us up again. The camera is safe, but I probably won't be able to post any pictures of our time in DC. Several students have volunteered to let me use their cameras, but we don't have any hardware to get the pictures onto my computer. I'll try to offer richly descriptive prose...as I sit here, computer nestled in the salmon-colored window box, listening to my students excitedly discuss the gay club they're off to visit. As is often the case at this point in my life, I'm relieved to be an old person. They invited me to come with them, but I feel no shame at all about preferring to play on the computer and read at 10:30 at night rather than going off into the streets of Washington, DC.