summer winding down

maryland's state flower-- the black-eyed susan-- in timmy's garden in our backyard:

delicious summer treats (i love cool whip more than anything!)

one of the many thunderstorms we've received recently. no photoshopping, just intense natural light!


so, things are winding down for the summer. the exciting news is that i wrapped up my internship last week + yesterday. the past few weeks i have felt pretty bogged down preparing for the policy presentation-- not my favorite part of the internship program, but a valuable learning experience-- on august 7. we decided to run our ideas about alternative structures for land preservation programs by the dept. of natural resources about a week before the presentation, for practice. we decided to present the final product to them instead of ask them for help along the way. well, we got into some trouble as they strongly disagreed with our proposal to shift funds from their programs to the dept. of agriculture's (for cost-effectiveness-- ag easements are 60% the cost of buying parkland). this led to a lot of tense discussion, one of my group members withdrawing from the internship program and the rest of us scrambling to revise our proposal in a more gentle way. to my surprise, when we got up to present it to the governor, he knew of us as the kids who "ruffled some feathers" at DNR. yikes! i'm not sure if that's good or bad that our reputation preceded us, but at least it got some attention for the issue. i am much better at behind the scenes work than presenting or answering questions on the spot, so i felt rather uneasy when in front of the governor. all in all i think it went pretty well, though. the internship was a really realistic, eye-opening introduction to state government, and i loved pretty much every moment at the arts council. this summer worked out just swimmingly!

photos from the presentation to governor o'malley:



other than that, i've just been doing more baltimore-exploring, going to baseball games, braving summer storms, baking, taking too many pictures, trying to think about the GREs, and getting annoyed with my hundreds of bug bites. i am looking forward to the next few weeks of volunteering, working, and getting everything in order for school to begin!