Day 57/99: Back from DC!

I got back from Washington DC yesterday evening, with a ton of Deaf-related badges, shotglasses, t-shirts, bags, bookmarks and stress balls. As everyone who followed my Twitter will know, I really enjoyed it - the other eleven students were awesome, I got much better at ASL over the week, and Deaf culture and public policy issues are both really interesting. At some point, I'll dig out the trip schedule and talk about exactly what I did, because Twitter forced me to summarise a lot and I couldn't really get my mobile out when meeting with US Government officials.

In other news, I'm still writing for the Daily Princetonian, and I'm invited to a dinner with the Master and other officials of Butler College on Tuesday. I've also been made the Treasurer of the James S. Hall '34 Memorial Gallery's board, and have a pile of tax exemption and expenses claim forms somewhere - I'm also involved in organising one of our next exhibits, a collaboration with the Student Volunteers Council for Hunger and Homelessness week. I'm hoping that in return for subsidising it we can get to keep some of the art and make our lounge space look nicer, but we'll see.

I bought a new camera today! My old one kept failing miserably in DC, and after it was described as being "as old as England" I figured it was time for a new one. I looked on RadioShack's website and picked out a couple I liked, but they didn't stock one and the other was more expensive in-store than on the website. They had a Sony CyberShot, though - it seems like a pretty popular and good camera, it was reduced by $25 because the display camera was the last one in stock, and it was pink - so I grabbed that, and a 2GB memory card and nice case which brought the purchase up to $140 (£84 at current exchange rates). It fits my old mini-tripod, and it's also a lot slimmer than my old bulky camera, as the pictures below (low-quality ones taken from my webcam for obvious reasons) show.

It's charging at the moment, but I'll try some photography in the morning and show y'all* how it goes.

* Even though it's seen as a Southern thing, both in the UK and the US, I heard "y'all" a LOT when I was in DC. I also encountered the construction "Who all did you meet yesterday?" once.