Greetings from Washington, D.C.!

Hi y'all! Hope everyone has been having a great summer so far. Things are going really well with me. As you know, I've had the pleasure of entertaining Carly, Monica, and Rebecca and her parents at my house, although I did not see any of them there. But my mom and sister say they are all lovely, which is of course true. My June was spent at my beloved summer camp, Strong River, in Pinola, Mississippi (aka totally the middle of nowhere). I had great cabins of boys aged ten to thirteen, and spent my mornings blueberry picking and working at the high ropes course, and my afternoons on the river, plus eating lots of good Southern cooking to top it off. I could write about it all night, but I'll move on.
I came up here to D.C. on July 8th, and moved into the sweet apartment Steve picked out for us. Our apartment is slowly starting to look like home, but I'm still waiting for some furniture, so it's a little sparse right now. I started work with IBM on July 13th with a week of orientation with my fellow new hires, who are smart and interesting and nice young people, which is really good. For the past week and a half I've been doing some proposal work and waiting for my security clearance to go through, which it did today. So I'll probably be getting to work for real starting next Monday on a project with the TSA. I'm pretty excited about that, and being a big kid in general.
DC has been outstanding so far. I've seen a lot of friends from school, like Homer and Carly, and friends from outside of the band. One of those friends is from camp, and I got to have lunch last week with the her and her dad, who just happens to be Obama's new Secretary of the Navy, in his private dining hall, which was one of the coolest things I've done in a real long time. I did feel that it was a slightly hilarious scene, though, because she's only seventeen and a rising high school senior. So despite now wanting to date her, and having not canoodled with her ever, it kind of felt like I was meeting one of the parents in that important first meeting. But Ray Mabus is a really cool guy, so I just laughed on the inside.
Seems from the posts like most of y'all are doing well. I miss you all, and think about fun times with the YPMB a lot. I look forward to keeping y'all in the loop about my life and seeing everyone at The Game come November. Take care!
Ned