Washington, D.C.

That's right. The American people have made the fatal mistake of letting Mad and I into the capital. Don't know if it's reached the papers back home yet, but we've taken over. Am writing this from Obama's computer in the White House. He does not appear to be impressed.

In addition to our political exploits we've managed to conquer the National Art Gallery, the Natural History Museum and the National Portrait Gallery, and we,re also single handedly supporting Barnes & Noble (I managed to buy four books between galleries, and that was just today). We haven't seen a lot of museums and galleries so far, as we've found a lot of them really expensive, but most of the ones in Washington are FREE (more money for books buying)! Personally, I loved the modern art wing at the National Gallery, where I got to see a lot of the works we studied at school (they have an entire floor of Jasper Johns back-up work and heaps of Litchensteins), and original Picassos, Van Goghs, Degas, Toulouse Latrecs (appologies if these aren't spelt right) and truckloads more. So exciting!

The best thing about Washtington so far though (aside from taking over a global superpower, but that kind of goes without saying), has been staying with Lou an Harriet! They met us at the train station when we arrived and took us back to their lovely home in Laurel, where Mads and I each have our own rooms! Their backyard supports a population of squirrels and blue jays, which Lou feeds from the back door (I still squiel with delight everytime I see a squirrel). And last night we had a roast dinner with caramel flan for dessert (our first homecooked meal since we left Australia), and ohmigod it was delicious!

We have also seen snow for the first time (I'm not sure that it counts whne it's from an airplane window). Admittedly it's only been a few muddied clumps left over from the blizzards, but it's SNOW!!!

Ooh, this is totally random, but have to include it for all my fellow Twihards, and all those who take such joy in mocking us. I discovered a book today, titled Defining New Moon. It's a study guide to help students with the vocab. section of the SATs in which Edward, Bella and Jacob help you learn the meanings of all the oh-so-complicated adjectives and adverbs from the Twilight saga that might pop up in the SAT test. I mean, thank God someone's done it because I had to look up every second word in the OED. I'm tempted to go back and get a copy just to prove that such a thing exists.

While on the subject of all things literary (Ben, that's merely a segue, not an ooportunity for you to raise an eyebrow at me using 'literary' and 'Twilight' in such close proximity), I have finally almost finished Gone with the Wind (and about time too, seeing as we've moved up North and my head's stil in the South), and have absolutely loved it! More than that, I've had all these people coming up to me and telling me the stories of when they read it. The characters are fantastic (Scarlett is my new favourite heroine and the men! *swoon*), and I love the dialogue, learning about the history of Atlanta and the Civil War, and the descriptions of Tara and Twelve Oaks. In fact, my only criticism (and this has annoyed me quite a bit) is that everyone's eyes are always snapping and flashing with anger, malice, indignation, etc. How do eyes snap? It's like Edward with his crooked smiles. What does that even look like? Oh, and one more sardonic smile from Rhett and I will throw the book across the room. The rest of the writing is so good! But, I guess a couple of bad phrases in over 1000 pages is pretty damn good!

Before I start reviewing though, I should probably finish reading the book. So I bid you all farewell from the Empire of M & M, formerlly the United States of America.

Margs
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