Everyone in Massachusetts has spring break in mid-April to observe Patriot's Day. That's patriot in the Paul Revere/Lexington/Concord/Shot heard 'round the world sense, not in the football team that loses to the Giants sort of way.
Because so many people in his district visit Washington that week Congressman Ed Markey holds a constituent day in the Capitol. They even let a New Yorker in! We were met by the congressman's staff who led us down labyrinth-like corridors to the House chambers, where Mr. Markey talked to us and answered questions for a half-hour or more. Afterwards we went out to the Capitol steps for group pictures.
We could have gotten passes to the House gallery to see a floor debate later in the day, but Congressmen wake up early and we needed to get breakfast and see more sights.
Totally unrelated but I have to tell this story: I was driving across 125th Street yesterday when I got behind a car with vanity license plates. In itself that isn't unusual, but the license plate had punctuation (a period and a hyphen) added to further emphasize the vanity. It was pretentious enough to take a photo. At the Amsterdam Ave. traffic light the driver anticipated a green light about 20 seconds early by jumping past the crosswalk and part-way into the intersection. At the next stop light, Old Broadway, he swerved left and stopped in a nether region that's clearly marked (Google Map view) as not a traffic lane. Look at that link and you'll see that he was anticipating getting into the left turn lane on the next block even though he was the first car at the traffic light in the proper lane and nobody could have gotten to the left turn lane before he could. For no reason whatsoever he endangered other people by putting himself in harm's way at two consecutive intersections. I felt like getting out of my car and scolding him. I thought I should post the photo here. Then the vanity plate finally registered with me and I realized this person is probably a colleague of justenoughsalt or me (although I didn't recognize him when I drove by).
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