8.48 pm

So exhausted I can barely keep my eyes open and so wired I can barely sit still. I feel as though I haven't stopped moving since Tuesday? Wednesday? last week when I got pulled to be on the team working the Secretary of State's visit. This past week has been a frantic rush to check out the site of the Afghanistan conference, hammer out the details, and get all that info back to Washington. Not an easy task. Every step of every movement needs to be discussed, walked through, written up, in triplicate, sent to the processing department, lost in the mail, resent, and rubber stamped. The upside about 12 or 13 or 14 hour days is that if you're busy enough to be working that much, you're busy enough that it flies by.

And fly it does. Here I am on a Tuesday night, a week after we began to pull the visit together, and I can say that I witnessed diplomacy in action, took notes for the Secretary, and had a chance to shake her hand. I am keeping my fingers and toes crossed that our official photographer got a wide angle shot of the meeting where I took notes, so that there's a photo with me and the Secretary at the same table. Perhaps a little silly or celebrity struck - but you already know that I'm a geek like that.

*edit* There is such a picture, although I found it on the Hillary Clinton Blog. All credit to the anonymous photographer.

2:00 pm

I have a theory that the Dutch are always cheerful and good-natured because they spend so little time in their cars. Think about it. It’s a Saturday afternoon, warm out, so you load up the car for a trip to the beach. Of course, once you get on the road you realize that everyone else had the same idea . You end up sitting in traffic for an hour, the beach a ten minute walk away, all the while getting angrier and angrier that you’re in your car instead of on the sand. The Dutch neatly avoid this problem by bicycling or using public transportation to get everywhere.

This theory occurred to me as I was bicycling home from the beach yesterday afternoon. I went down to fly my kite (because truly, nothing gives you wings like watching that frail nylon bird sailing across the sky) on a beach that wasn’t quite jam packed but was still pretty crowded. By the time I left, almost everyone else was leaving for the day. I zipped out of there in five minutes, as the line of cars waiting to exit got longer and longer. I rode home with the wind at my back, enjoying the fresh air and the feeling of being alive!, aside from one brief bit across the cobblestones that rattled all my bones against each other.

Try it, if you don’t believe me. The next time you plan on taking a little trip, see if you can ride your bike or take the BART. And tell me if you don’t have a much nicer time without the hassle of road stress and idiot drivers.

10.18 am

A hazy sky spread outside the office window, sun fighting its way through the clouds and losing. The light filters through the two small glass jars with water on my desk. One holds an avocado seed, propped up with toothpicks. There is a small protrusion in the bottom that was not there yesterday. The other holds a hyacinth, inherited from the former inhabitant of this office. The water in this jar is cloudy, almost obscuring the white roots that look like the arms of a sea anemone. The hyacinth has been taking its time in the blooming. When I came into the office yesterday, the tight green leaves had opened a little further, almost enough to reveal the tightly concealed flower.

4.32 pm

A whirlwind day of Court hearings and briefing papers, interspersed with discussions of legal nuances. I’m happiest when I’m struggling to understand what these Courts have decided and why. It’s more than simply the intellectual exercise. These courts are so new, their jurisprudence still so unsettled, that there’s much more room for legitimate disagreement than with the U.S. courts. The Supreme Court has to stick with the precedent it created 200 years ago. These courts struggle to find a balance between following good precedent and disregarding bad. It’s the struggle that makes it so interesting.

9.38 am
The rain streaking down my windows has turned the outside world into an Escher-like blur of mis-matched corners and impossible angles. I sit in front of the glowing monitor, hands cupped around a steaming mug of tea, watching the raindrops hurl themselves violently against the glass. Days like this it is almost impossible to believe in the crocuses and daffodils pushing up out of the soft spring soil.

11.12 am
My days fall into a pattern. I get into the office and spend the first hour checking websites, news articles, correspondence from Washington for anything relevant. A few hours of work and then my hour in the gym. Lunch. A few more hours of work in the afternoon, sometimes broken by a conference call or a meeting. It surprises me how tightly I cling to this pattern, how I feel as though I am unraveling when part of it falls out of place. Mornings especially – days when the computer system is down I am uncertain how to start my day without having first checked the news.

4.07 pm
Tuesdays pass so slowly, the ticking of the second hand scarcely muffled by the documents piled around my desk.