Colin returns Sunday night from a trip he’s told me repeatedly that he wishes he hadn’t signed up for. The way he tells it, he hasn’t gained a single positive thing by going on this trip. Silver lining: he’ll be that much happier to come back to D.C.

I’m planning on going to the Chinese New Year parade on Sunday, which sounds like it’s going to be awesome. It’s the year of the dragon, so the Textile Museum will have an exhibit on dragons showing up in clothe from all over the world. Paleontologists speculate that all those different cultures were finding dinosaur bones and basing their concept of flying, fire-breathing, magical, terrifying dragons on those. Pretty neat.

Speaking of dragons, I’m about halfway through the third book of the Millennium series, aka The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo books. It’s not as action-packed as the first two books, and there’s really not the suspense that there was in the first two, but I’m still blazing through it. I don’t yet have anything lined up for my next read—suggestions are welcome!

I’ve done a fair bit of talking about my new internship at Casey Trees, so forgive me for being a bit over it. I really like it: co-workers, assignments, office culture all get the thumbs-up. Check out their website now, and then in about a month I’ll put it up again so you can see one of the big projects I’ve been included in already.

I have an insider tip for all of you dwelling outside the DC area: this town doesn’t handle snow well. We got less than an inch Friday night and nothing since, and all the area schools and government offices are opening two hours late today. I’m beginning to wonder if last year’s Snowpocalypse and the previous year’s Snowmageddon weren’t blown a little out of proportion…

It turns out I’m getting a two-hour-delayed start to my Monday too, thanks to a malfunctioning kitchen sink. No, Colin wouldn’t be any more capable of handling this situation than I am. Hopefully the complex’s fix-it person is.

NARAL Pro-Choice America, the national office of the Maryland affiliate that I just wrapped up an internship with, provided a prompt for today: What will I do to help elect pro-choice officials in 2012? I don’t promise to follow that prompt.

Today, by the way, isn’t really about blogging; it’s the 39th anniversary of the Roe vs. Wade decision, which outlawed state bans on abortion. Here’s the newscast reporting on the decision from ABC’s archives. The reporter didn’t know how right he was when he said, “The fight will go on.”

After this newscast, the Court went back to Roe and changed the regulations from being tied to the woman’s trimester to being tied to the fetus’ viability, around 24 weeks, which is how the law sits today. Basically, the ruling established a woman’s right to seek an abortion without the state interfering based on the Fourteenth Amendment’s implicit right to privacy.

Did everyone already know all those basics? That’s as deep as we’re going to go into the decision. There’s a wealth of information on the case all over the internet, but the National Abortion Foundation‘s write-up is nice and succinct.

Why is Roe still important? It’s almost 40 years old, definitely a full-grown law at this point, able to make adult decisions and never get carded (unlike spunky Planned Parenthood vs. Casey, only 20 years old this year). Despite being upheld a number of times in its 39 years, Roe continues to be challenged. Not (usually) big, showy, obvious challenges like the Mississippi personhood attempt, but more subtle challenges that chip away at our right to choice.

Regulations like waiting periods and counseling laws exist in 32 states to make it difficult for women to seek out this safe, legal medical procedure. If you need an abortion in one of those states, you have to take two days off work, find accommodations for two nights, and find child care for two days. Before you receive your safe, legal medical procedure, you might have to talk to someone who will try to convince you not to have the abortion; you might be forced to see an ultrasound or hear the heartbeat of the fetus you don’t want to be carrying. You will be told that you aren’t really capable of understanding the consequences of an abortion; you very likely will be lied to.

Then there are the regulations on abortion clinics themselves that were passed just last year in Virginia that make it more difficult for doctors to provide this safe, legal medical procedure. These new rules mandate that clinics must be so large, hallways must be so wide, window coverings be made of such specific fabric (I’m serious). Virginia’s are the worst, but 45 states and the District all impose regulations on abortion clinics that aren’t imposed on other medical practices. Rules like these have shuttered countless clinics around the country, making it significantly more difficult for women to access abortion services early in the pregnancy, when it is safer and easier.

There are whole states with only a single abortion clinic (I’m looking at you again, Mississippi, but also North Dakota and South Dakota), and it is my understanding that Mississippi has to fly their provider in from another state, and that they aren’t the only one that has to do so. If you click on that link, Rachel Maddow will spell out how it has come to be that 87% of counties in the United States don’t have access to abortion. That segment is over two years old now, and things have only gotten worse since.

If a woman can’t get to a clinic, it doesn’t matter if abortion is legal or not. It doesn’t matter if the pregnancy is the result of a rape, a busted condom, or a teenager who learned on the internet that you can’t get pregnant the first time. What matters is that woman is now in a situation she doesn’t want to be in, with a pregnancy she doesn’t want to carry, and she doesn’t have much of a choice. The anti-choice movement knows they don’t have to overturn Roe vs. Wade: impossible may as well be illegal.

So what do we do in 2012? We talk. A lot. We talk to our friends. We talk to our partners. We talk to our kids, our parents, our grandparents. We talk to our legislators (here, here, and here). There are a lot of important things going on in the world, but that doesn’t mean we let the issue of choice slip into the background. We can’t stop talking about choice, because when we do, choice gets chipped away.

I just got super excited thinking it was snowing again, but I think it’s just falling from the roof. The weather forecast says “Icy” for tomorrow, which I think sounds promising.

Anyway, I ventured out into that frozen mess to go to an early morning yoga class, which involves a short bus ride and a half-mile walk. In that half mile I learned a few things about the new galoshes I bought, which are the stinkiest, plainest, rubberiest galoshes I’ve ever owned. For instance, I learned that walking on anything metal is hazardous, including subway grates, storm drains, and manholes. I also learned that walking under the lips of overhangs can be frighteningly unpleasant in addition to sometimes hazardous.

In some areas of town, it can take a lot of squinting to turn this into a winter wonderland, I admit. I’m happy we’re far enough away to have some lawn space in our neighborhood. I’m also happy I’m not responsible for any driveway-shoveling, windshield-scraping, or, for once, dog-walking.

Check back for another post tomorrow for Blog for Choice Day!

Living on my own these past few days have shown me one thing very clearly: living with other people makes me a better person. There are dishes that have been in the sink for days, my clothes are everywhere, personal hygiene is being carried out on a somewhat—ahem—abridged basis. I am still flossing though, because my super fancy paid internship is still just that, an internship, meaning benefits are limited to access to the coffee maker in the communal kitchen.

The internship is for an organization called Casey Tree, and they are charged with restoring and enhancing the tree canopy of the District. I’ll be their communication and marketing intern, so my responsibilities should all be somewhat familiar, even if urban forestry is a new concept for me. I’m expecting to work four 9-5 days a week, and you can go ahead and add almost an hour for commuting in both directions, even though the office is less than 4 miles away. Ahh, public transit. Maybe when the freezing weather stops, I’ll rethink cycling to work.

In between, Colin has been preparing for his trip to Tunisia, his internship that will begin immediately following his return, and for life after SAIS (what a life that might be). I go occasionally to NARAL but have been decidedly focused on what happens next. I will likely have another communications internship for the spring (this time, paid), though nothing is finalized. In other exciting news, my website is starting to come to fruition. It’s a marvel what a little advertising can do.

January 30 is going to be a rude, rude awakening, mostly for Colin, with entirely too early mornings and long, long weeks next semester.

Today, though, was even colder—down to 19 degrees F when I left the apartment this morning. But no snow. I’ve broken out all my cold-weather gear: new sets of long underwear, the warmest hat in the store, my sturdiest jacket, a fancy Zippo hand-warmer that no longer bursts into flames. If it gets colder that this, I will have to be that kid who can’t press her arms to her body for all the layers she’s wearing.

To inject some serious warmth into our night, I’m attempting for the first time to make tortilla soup. I’ve never really had tortilla soup before, and it has occurred to me that with some stuff like this, normal stuff like gingerbread cookies and avocados and Brussel sprouts, my exposure through childhood was limited because one or both of my parents don’t like it. I wonder if this isn’t one of those things…

The good fortune of living in DC instead of visiting DC is that there is no rush to see the treasures held in the halls of the museums here. Because all* of the museums are free, and because we have, you know, “all the time in the world,” we can visit the National Museum of American History one floor at a time and leave when we start to fade, before seeing Judy Garland’s ruby red slippers, because we’re only out the bus fare, and her slippers will be there when we go back in a couple weeks. (We went on this exact field trip just last week, in fact.)

The only time that doesn’t work is when something’s only in a temporary exhibit, like the “What’s Cooking, Uncle Sam?” exhibit in the National Archives that closed today after only seven short months in residence. Of course, Colin and I waited to go see it until yesterday, and we probably would have put it off even to today but for my fear of the different possible interpretations of “Closes January 3.”

The exhibit took visitors from farm to factory to kitchen to table, from a quote from Thomas Jefferson asserting “The greatest service which can be rendered a country is to add a useful plant to its agriculture” to advertisements for vitamin donuts to keep kids healthy to Lyndon B. Johnson’s barbeque diplomacy and Lady Bird’s recipe for barbeque sauce (previous link). There is a letter to a senator written by a Boy Scout asking him to somehow reduce to cost of sugar because “a nickel doesn’t buy too much candy,” and around the corner, the letter written by Upton Sinclair to President Teddy Roosevelt about how spies would have to infiltrate the slaughterhouses now because the owners were wise to the game after the publication of The Jungle, a book that Roosevelt had considered hogwash. TVs showed PSAs on pitching in for the war effort and praising the newly enacted school lunch program. I dawdled through all of it, thoroughly entertained.

I think Colin best liked seeing the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights, all housed in the Rotunda of the Archives.

Of course, the hazard of being a resident rather than a tourist is that you have “all the time in the world” to see something, but that time might never get made to do so. For example, we neglected to ever go to the top of Taipei 101, the then-tallest building in the world and easily the most touristy thing to do in the city, despite our living in the area for nine months and having plenty of spare time. It’s doubly disappointing because in all likelihood, we won’t be going back to Taiwan (plus, what’s so special about going to the top of the second-tallest building in the world?), so it’s a greater offense than our not seeing Dorothy’s slippers, since Washington DC is where it’s at for Colin.

All we can do is learn from our mistakes.

*The coolest sounding museum, the International Spy Museum, is unfortunately the only one I’ve come across that charges an entrance fee; it’s privately owned.

We read one of Colin’s new books, World War Z, the whole trip home. And now, for the second night in a row, we’ve been plagued by zombie creepies as soon as it gets dark.

It’s a fantastic book, though. Gripping. Set in the near future, it’s a collection of memories from the Zombie War that swept the globe. Colin suggested that the context could have been any catastrophe—aliens, widespread natural disasters, a regular plague—because the real strength of the book is how countries and individuals interact in the desperate situation. Cuba rises to power; North Korea goes underground; starving people take a cue from the Donner party. I highly recommend it.

It’s been a marvelously lazy existence since getting back; Colin’s forgotten how to do this and I have to remind him that it’s OK that our productivity is rather limited, because that’s what the holidays and not being a working stiff are all about.

Oceanside, your lows are my highs. And I mean that meteorologically and figuratively.