for all that is good and "right"...

I HAVE BEEN TO THE MOTHERSHIP. 

I am especially blessed to have a roommate who works at the Republican National Committee, and this past Thursday, Clara gave us a tour!  I'm pretty sure I spent half my time there with my mouth wide open and muttering, "I can't believe I'm here."  I grew up listening to Rush Limbaugh and Neil Boortz (admittedly Libertarians, but you know, close enough), and I lived in Tallahassee when Gore and Bush were fighting over Florida for wayyyy too long back in 2000, so it's still hard for me to believe I've been inside this building!

Clara works in a special room called the War Room, which is set up with a bunch of monitors and computers, and basically she watches the news all day (including the Colbert Report and the Daily Show, which are not really news but create waves nonetheless) as the first line of defense (and offense) against the liberal machine.  She's responsible for making sure the Republican congressmen and their staff members are up to date on all relevant political news so that no one is caught off-guard.  It's a stressful and tiring job, but she does it so well!  Here she is in front of her office:

The reason I was able to see it was because Molly and I decided to meet her on Capitol Hill for dinner one night.  So, of course, we didn't leave without taking a decent number of pictures.

And for some reason, they have a LOT of posters of Justin Bieber all over the walls.  I'm going to go ahead and admit that Molly and I know more of his songs than we should, so this picture happened:

Yeah, he's 15.  But his songs are so irresistibly catchy. Some of them feature Ludacris, and we've established how I feel about hip hop music.

After the tour, we went to dinner at The Good Stuff, which is run by one of the chefs on Top Chef DC!  It was SO good, and I definitely recommend their rosemary fries.  After that, we went to Sweetgreen for some frozen yogurt (I know, I definitely had a food baby afterward), but that was delicious, too! 

I'm keeping this sticker forever.  I still can't believe this is my life.