Diane Pettitt (Mark’s wife) arrived last night to help transition and to find a place for them to live. She and I spent all morning walking the halls of the Cannon and Longworth Office buildings looking at available offices. This is how office selection goes: All congressmen who want to change offices go into a lottery by seniority. As of yesterday, everyone except freshman have chosen an office. The remaining offices go to freshmen. The offices numbers, floor plans, and some information about them is posted on the House website. Rayburn is the most sought after building, so there are no offices left there. Tomorrow at 9 a.m. the freshmen will line up alphabetically and pick a number out of a hat. At 1 p.m. they will start to choose their offices, in order of their number. We have to be prepared with our preferences for whatever number we get! The offices where the congressman is moving or is not returning are generally very gracious in letting us look around and are very helpful in giving tips of things they like or don’t like. Mo and Bruce Tucker also joined us for a while.
At 4:00 Diane and I took the Metro to the Ford’s Theater for a tour and reception for spouses. Surprisingly few showed up, which was a shame because it was FABULOUS! There’s a new visitors’ center and museum which we went through. Then we went into the theater and stood on the stage while the historian regaled us with stories of Lincoln, the night he was shot, and the history of the theater. One thing that he said that I wasn’t aware of was that John Wilkes Booth was a very, very famous actor. He compared the assassination to Johnny Depp assassinating Barack Obama. People were very stunned! 
For about the last forty years it has been a working theater. They always have a production of “The Christmas Carol” and 2 or 3 other plays or musicals in a year. Then we went to their new reception room for hors d’oeuvres (delicious!). On the way out they gave us bags with, among other things, a book about finding John Wilkes Booth called Manhunt The 12-day Chase for Lincoln’s Killer by James L. Swanson.
We went back to the hotel and our men arrived shortly thereafter. We had a light dinner from the Hospitality Suite and sat around and devised an evaluation strategy for picking an office. I won’t bore you with the details, but suffice it to say it involves an Excel spreadsheet, 7 or 8 criteria, rankings, keen judgment, etc.
As for tomorrow, I have just one question for Mo – do you feel lucky?
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