Day 99: "Time is not a higher power."

First things first -- a hugely happy birthday to the wonderful Quintus Horatius Katherine Jessie Hattemer Flaccus.

I started this National Kate Day at Starbucks, where I wrote my daily letter to Laura. I then also sent Laura a rather strange request, which quite closely epitomizes the majority of our interactions.

Next, I headed to Sasha Bruce, where I continued to help Vera assemble the application for renewal of CPA licensure. After a few hours of this, I went downtown for a very special lunch date.

Debra (Auntie?) is a very close friend of Papa's, about whom I had heard a ton before today. On this December the eighth, two thousand and eleven, I finally got to meet her in person. The reason I put a question mark after "auntie" is because Debra totally acts like she is my age! It was like we didn't need introductions at all: five minutes into our conversation, I was completely comfortable and formalities flew out of the room! We had an awesome talk about a variety of topics, including comparing different aspects of her four-year-old daughter's personality to those of Priya and me. (I also learned that Auntie is thinking of enrolling Jaya in a bilingual school while she is young -- an awesome idea, in my opinion!) We closed by discussing Brasil (of course) and my internship at Sasha Bruce Youthwork.

After lunch, I attended a webinar called "Supporting Unaccompanied Homeless Youth in Accessing Higher Education." This topic was especially interesting for me, having just gone through the college admissions process myself, and the webinar was very informative and well-run.

Just as the session ended, I dashed out of the office and to the metro, eager to arrive at Flint Hill on time to take the bus home. In my hurry, I made the rookie mistake of taking the train in the wrong direction -- away from Vienna instead of towards it -- and did not notice my error for 20 minutes. Luckily, I still managed to make it to my high school by 4pm, too late for the bus, but perfectly in time for the middle school Saturnalia party I found out was today! It's always a treat to get to see the middle schoolers, from Alex Smith's exclamation, "finally someone awesome is here!" to watching Mr. Williams kindly chide Priya for the silly grammar errors she made on a recent Latin test.

Back home, I flicked open a novel when I received a surprise phone call from one of my favorite people of all time -- Jessie Conradi! We didn't overlap in the office at all today, and Jess was just calling to say "hi," but it was funny how my first response when I saw that it was her and picked up was to ask "are you ok?" It's so unusual for us in our busy lives to just call people to see how they're doing! We had a nice chat, and Jess mentioned she'd just heard the original of the Katy Perry song I covered with Melvin recently. All my love to the Conradi Clan, who is visiting from California this weekend!

Now that I'm done with the two shows I just watched on Disney channel and the 99th sonnet I just read of Shakespeare, I'm ready to prepare for the song I'll be working on with Melvin this weekend!