I hope
everyone had a relaxing and joyful Thanksgiving break; I know I did. I finished
my classes and flew home on Tuesday night to be with my family. I got to the
airport early, but my first flight was nearly an hour late. I sat next to an
older man who informed me he had 72 descendants and told me his opinion of all
the Republican presidential candidates. I barely made my connecting flight, but
after a few more hours in the air and another hour in the car with my parents,
I made it home.
On
Wednesday I went with my mother to take her parents to the airport, redrafted
my final philosophy paper, and spent time with my parents. I also cut a rather
long novel I wrote over last Christmas break and the spring semester – I’ve cut
it down from 242 to 198 pages by means of ruthlessness and only a teensy bit of
doctoring.) On Thursday my parents and I had a quiet, cozy Thanksgiving dinner
(at least after we kicked the dogs out of the house). And on Friday we
decorated for Christmas.
Christmas
decorating at my house inevitably brings about a rise in tension between my
father and me. He generally just wants everything in working order as soon as possible, and
I generally want everything exactly the way it was when I was six. This used to
end with my annual storming off to my room, but over the years we’ve both
mellowed, and we’ve developed a division of labor (my mom does the china, I do
the nativity sets, he puts up the tree, and etc.) that manages to diffuse most
of the friction. There was a slight disagreement on whether my father should go
up on the roof in the rain to put up the lights, but it ended in compromise.
On
Saturday we headed up to see my dad’s family in Austin and arrived tardily to
have a home-cooked lunch, topped off by brownies and ice cream. One of my aunts
and one of my uncles (why isn’t there a joint plural for that?) also joined
us, and we talked for a while before heading to the hotel. I flew out of Austin
in the wee hours of Sunday morning, so it wasn’t really worth going all the way
back home in between.
On the
flight back I met an army veteran working in Santa Fe with a son who’d been
offered admission to Harvard. I’m not sure how I always end up meeting people
on planes – maybe it just comes from being on so many planes. In two weeks and
a couple of days I’ll be in the air again, flying back home. In any case,
Sunday I arrived back early in the afternoon and was able to finish my last bit
of work for the weekend before heading to bed at the heavenly hour of eight
o’clock (I had to wake up for class at 6 am Monday morning).
And now
classes have resumed as usual for the last week of school. That’s right – two
more days and classes are finished! I’ll still be here for a couple of weeks;
we have a week of reading period, and then I have two finals. Still, we’ve
reached the part of the semester when my to-do list is comprehensive;
everything is on it that’s going to be on it, as far as schoolwork goes. And
it’s not actually that bad. Normally I would be making analogies to the last
sprint of a marathon about now, but this semester’s been more of a moderate jog
– and I’ve liked it that way.
Next
semester I’ll be taking two ROTC classes, since I have to make up last spring,
so my blogs may go back to sounding sleep-deprived and stressed. But for now,
I’m enjoying a calm semester that I hope will coast to a smooth finish. I have
a few more exciting events planned down the line to tell you about, but I’ll
wait until they actually happen. For now, I’m hoping to finish all my major
assignments (outside of finals) before we meet again, so if you have a moment,
remember me typing away on a presentation, a project, a portfolio, two papers,
and two ROTC finals!
Pictures: Speaking of Thanksgiving, thanks be to my father, who has taken some of these pictures!
The front of our house: (The head of the reindeer on the right moves only due to my strenuous cajoling of the motor. You might remember the cross as a homemade prop from a Christmas Eve service.)
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