On the Hill

So this is actually my third week of work. Not that anyone cares that much, but I’ll give you a little rundown of what I have been up to.

I have been organizing a baseball game for clients – it’s the Hudson Valley Renegades – I think they’re like class A ball and they are in the Devil Rays farm system. Apparently they are quite popular though, like the second largest draw after the Buffalo Bisons in the country. So I have been coordinating the 400 people that we are inviting – putting together goodie bags of free stuff that companies like Fidelity and Van Kampen send us and doing a bunch of other little things.

Also, the other big news today was that other than them ordering us all a pizza for lunch, I managed to convince my Uncle’s father (who also works for us) to take the other interns and myself to his winery which is about 10 miles from the office, on Friday for lunch. It should be a pretty good time he makes Italian wines with grapes he imports from Napa Valley. Hopefully we can turn the lunch into a full day excursion and miss coming back to work in time to do anything…

I’ll keep you posted.

So, I had a pretty good weekend.

To give a little background, since I got back from OCS I have been living with my Aunt and Uncle in Poughkeepsie, NY which is in the Hudson Valley about 2 hours outside of New York City. My mom, brothers, and sister currently live in an apartment on Park Slope in Brooklyn – essentially my parents have gone through the process of a divorce in the past year and my father stayed in Weymouth, Massachusetts. Anyway, I live with my Uncle since I work for him during the week. He is an Ameriprise Financial Advisor so I get to sit in on his meetings during the day, talk to him about writing financial plans and allocating people’s money and then do a bunch of data entry during the evening. It has been going pretty well and he has been paying me well also

So, back to my weekend. The president of our house, Chris, was having a 22^nd birthday celebration on Friday night at a bar called Joshua Tree in Manhattan. I drove home after work on Friday, ate dinner with my Mom and then took the subway over to Manhattan. It was a pretty good time – mostly just for the fact that I hadn’t seen any of the guys from my house all summer. I would say about 20 or so guys showed up, so that was nice. In addition, I got to see some of the recent alums who live in Manhattan that came out to see everyone as well. As I have said before, we are a pretty tight knit group so pretty much any time a bunch of Psi U guys get together in the city it ends up being 20-30 guys stretching a span of 7 or so years of graduation. After Joshua Tree a bunch of guys who are interning at investment banks went home since they work on Saturdays and I split off with a smaller group of guys. We actually ended up at an 80’s party, which was somewhat bizarre, but the highlight of the night was running into a buddy of mine John, who attended the same camp as the one I did for ten years (http://www.camppathfinder.com). I hadn’t seen him in nearly four years so that was really cool. I am not a big fan of Manhattan, or NYC in general for numerous reasons, but I have to admit it seems like every time I am there I run into someone unexpected.

I drove back to Poughkeepsie Saturday morning for my Uncle’s annual clam bake. He has been throwing this party for I think 6 years now and it is a combination of family, friends, and clients from work. Basically, he gets a lot of good food including three bushels of freshly dug clams and we sit around all afternoon and cook. Unfortunately, the weather was not good, lots of rain, so it put a bit of a damper on the day. It was still great seeing all of my cousins, aunts, and uncles. I got to hang out with my cousin Sam quite a bit, and he is an incoming Cornell freshman, so we talked Cornell stuff most of the day. I gave him my customized, inside guide to Orientation Week as well.

Sunday we pretty much just cleaned up after the party, and said our goodbyes to everyone. All in all, it was a pretty fun weekend.