In Adriane Crouse's first year as the state Senate's new secretary, a forced end to a filibuster resulted in a three-day shutdown where only one bill was passed in the last three days of a General Assembly session.
And the Senate's president pro tem resigned more than a year before his term ended.
It was an historic beginning to Crouse's new job, which she took after veteran Terry Spieler announced a year ago that she was retiring after being the Senate's secretary for 32 years.
"I love the process," Crouse told the News Tribune. "I really didn't know all the inner-workings of it."
Crouse, an attorney, had worked for Senate Research for a decade, helping lawmakers draft their bills and amendments. And Spieler, during the transition period before she retired, told Crouse: "You know more than you think you know."
She noted: "I only know what I've experienced; but, as we know, things can happen that haven't happened in 20, 30 or 40 years," a reference to several legislative twists and turns that occurred throughout the 2015 General Assembly and its Sept. 16 veto session.
She's read the Senate's rules and became "pretty familiar with the day-to-day ones," Crouse said. "Whenever I get a chance, I read them over just to familiarize myself with them."
And, as with many others new to the chamber, there also are those "unwritten rules" and traditions that have to be learned, and can be cause for embarrassment if not learned correctly.
Crouse learned to be flexible as she was growing up in the state of California.
"I lived in various places in southern and northern California," she recalled. "We moved, like, every two years (because) my dad would get bored (in one job) and he would have to move on."
When she was 8, she lived for a year in Puebla, Mexico, her mother's hometown (and the site of a famous military battle between outmanned Mexican forces and French troops on May 5, 1862 - a battle where the smaller forces won the day, leading to today's "Cinco de Mayo" celebrations of today).
"That's where I got fluent in Spanish," Crouse noted, calling her "half-Mexican" ancestry a "fun fact about me."
She graduated from Huntington Beach High School in 1988, then joined her family in moving to St. Louis when her father took a job in the state her grandfather had been raised in.
She didn't go to college right away, but "took some time and meandered around."
Living in Kirkwood, she got a job at Target, where she met Brian Crouse, "my future husband," and later they "did one trip to California, (where) he was sold, and I said, "Let's bust out.'"
Eventually, they returned to Missouri, and Crouse went to Webster University - graduating, getting married and having her first son all in 1995.
"That was a banner year," she said.
A year later, Crouse started at St. Louis University because "I always wanted to go to law school," she said, and graduated in 1999. And the Crouses moved to Jefferson City because she was hired to work at the attorney general's office.
"I interned the year before I graduated," she recalled, noting she met and worked with future state Sens. Kurt Schaefer, R-Columbia, and Scott Sifton, D-Affton.
She worked in the attorney general's criminal division, doing criminal appeals.
"It was a great experience," she recalled. "I did five capital cases in front of the Missouri Supreme Court - and you don't get that chance (very often)."
She also used some of her income to help her husband go through college.
"He put me through school - he worked, like, three jobs," she explained. "So I thought, now it's my turn to put him (through school).
"Now he works for the (state) Chamber of Commerce," where he's vice president of education.
Five years later, she was attracted to a job in Senate Research - where she helped write laws, including those similar to ones she had defended in the attorney general's office.
"Research is a great job," Crouse said. "It's just a fascinating place to be - to be that fly on the wall because you're in these meetings and you hear their strategy."
But throughout her career, she said, she's been intrigued by the history and traditions of the law-making process.
During last spring break, she said, she and now-retired Enrolling Director Carol Newton spent some time at the State Archives, looking at copies of old bills and journals.
"You look at the verbiage, and it's the same language (we use today) - and that really just hits you," she said. "It made me really think about the importance of what we do - I don't take it carelessly."
During each legislative session, Crouse spends most of her time in the chamber, with her staff, keeping track of bills being introduced, debated, amended and voted on.
All that record-keeping results in the information placed in each day's journal - and in keeping regular communications with the House.
Because she's an attorney, Crouse said, her approach to the Senate secretary's job may be different from Spieler's - but it will take a long time to catch up to Spieler's knowledge of the rules, procedures and traditions.
One thing she's already discovered, Crouse said: "Every day is, truly, going to be different. There's no ho-hum monotony to this job, at all.
"Every day - you don't know what awaits you. You can't predict how your day's going to be, at all."