First Snow and Fighting Through

            Welcome to November, everyone! It’s finally gotten cold – we had our first snowfall this past Sunday, one I walked through on my way to church. It wasn’t much, but it was definitely snow, and I finally broke out the winter coat and boots. They served me well. It’s been pretty cold this week in general – it got down to freezing a couple of times. We’ve all taken to wearing our heavy-duty coats outside even when it’s not precipitating.

            Church itself was nice as well – the sermon was on Luke 2, which meant it was both a fresh look at a passage one normally only hears at Christmas time, and it brought back some pleasant memories, as does the Christmas music that has begun to float around campus. And for me, cold weather means Christmas must be close, so it’s almost time to start getting excited.

            Speaking of excitement, the main thing that happened this past weekend was my UC a cappella concert. Hopefully the recordings we made will be put together more quickly than they were last year, and I’ll be able to post the link. The concert went well, everyone did great on their solos and in the block, and we had a lot of fun. We also came together as a group, especially at the last few rehearsals.

            The last rehearsal before a concert is always a little special. We rehearse for as long as it takes, which usually means around 4-5 hours, and in the middle we stop when some of our alumni (read “old friends”) show up with pizza to help us celebrate. At the end of our time, we do “reconciliation”, when people can get together and work out any problems that might have built up over the years, so that we can go into the concert unified. I didn’t get to bed until around one-thirty Friday morning, and I had to sleep over with a friend from UC, since I had ROTC, but it was the happiest I’d been in a while.

            So that was the weekend; it was pretty busy, but it came between two particularly calm weeks, relatively speaking, so everything worked out. I have things scheduled for practically every weekend between now and Thanksgiving, but thankfully (no pun intended) there aren’t that many weeks left. I wake myself up nearly every morning by counting down the days. This has been a particularly difficult semester for me – not overwhelming, most of the time, but definitely draining. I’m burning out.

            Not in a dramatic sense, though. It’s like the battery in my laptop, that still lets me work without a problem, but drains power more and more quickly every time I use it and nearly constantly needs to be charged. Eventually it’s going to be used up. Eventually I’m going to be used up. But I’m fairly certain we both have enough juice left to get us through the rest of this semester.

            Yesterday things came to a head around 5:00. I was sitting in Widener stacks trying to do Arabic. The lights in the stacks are on motion sensors, so if you sit for long enough they all turn off, and that combined with time change left me sitting in relative darkness by 4:30. I couldn’t work. I’m not sure how many things caused the feeling in me, but after a while I found that, even having done very little, I just couldn’t bring myself to keep working. It’s hard to describe the feeling – I just had to get out of there.

            The dining halls open around five, so I headed down to get dinner en lou of finishing my work. On the way, though, I allowed myself to be sidetracked into a bookstore. It was a very good decision. I went from the cold white walls and metal shelves of the stacks to wooden bookshelves in a warm basement with jazz playing softly in the background, and I could feel myself physically and mentally thawing, regrouping, unbending.

            I browsed for a while and bought a five-dollar action novel, the first fiction I’ve read in quite a while just for the sake of reading, and then went to the dining hall, had dinner and a hot cup of tea, and just read for a while. It was much better than trying to cheer myself up with comfort food, and afterwards I found a comfy, wood-paneled, living-room resembling study room to finish my Arabic in. The assignment was much easier than it had looked.

            So that’s my life right now – I’m tired, and I’m losing motivation, but last night I snuggled under the covers with a novel, the way I haven’t in a long time, and I’ll make it through the rest of the semester. I’m worn out but still functional. And in three weeks, I’m going home!

Rest and Recovery

            In philosophy we’re discussing what you do with a relative judgment that happens to be shared by everyone. One such judgment seems to be this: last week at Harvard was just bad. Obviously, this isn’t objectively true, but almost everyone I talk to had a fairly horrid week, including me. Because teachers like to give multiple midterms throughout the semester, I suppose because people study more for “midterms” than for “tests” or “quizzes”, once midterms start, they never actually stop; I have friends who have their last midterm and their first final only about a week apart. And of course, essays and projects have to be added in to all this.

            So pretty much everyone is feeling a little better this week, but we’re still all at least partially counting down until the holidays. If you saw me every day, maybe you would notice the change. At the beginning of the year, perhaps partially because of carryover from the summer, I dressed nicer; I wore skirts, I put on jewelry and makeup, I did my hair. That has eventually drained, and I now head to class in jeans, a t-shirt and a hoodie, spending thirty seconds or so to make my hair publicly presentable. My work, fortunately, has not taken the same hit in effort, and I do feel much more energized than last week, but still – a break will be very welcome.

            Why was last week so hard? Mainly because of my physics take-home exam. It took forever – longer than it took me to do all my philosophy reading for last week and write a Philosophy and a Hebrew essay. At five till five, all those of us scrambling to finish in the lab submitted and then finally looked up and around, a little shell-shocked. And then I and a friend went out to get shakes to celebrate. And after that, my day went much better.

            Not that I got much rest this weekend. All the time that I’d spent on physics instead of everything else now had to be compensated for, and it took me until yesterday to finish that. On Saturday afternoon we had our ROTC Pass in Review. We looked sharp, and the Deputy Commander of the US Special Warfare Command came out and spoke. This semester I’ve gotten a lot closer to the ROTC community; we spend more time together, and I feel like I know my way around the battalion more. The Pass in Review was a good opportunity to just sit and talk with people. Still, that left me less-than-ample time to catch up on work.

            And this week? This week has so far been nice, but it’s about to get really busy. Under Construction* is having its fall concert on November the 1^st, and there’s lots of prep to be done as treasurer and as part of the group in general. Our practice time is doubled, but we’re all excited to be performing – and to have six hours of extra free time a week afterwards. I’ll let you know how the concert goes!

            Luckily, this week has been good so far. For one thing, I slept until 9 this morning, which was very nice. For another, yes, you heard me right – I’m wearing a t-shirt, a hoodie, and jeans. The weather is cool, but a pleasant kind of cool that doesn’t extend to the point of discomfort, excluding the sub-45 temperatures before sunrise. And Physics this week is like shooting fish in a barrel. As in, we’re talking about diffraction angles, and one of the problems involves trying to shoot a fish in a barrel of water. And then the fish shooting back at you. My physics teachers cannot be faulted for lack of creativity.

            To finish, a few fun facts about my dorm room: it’s one of about only three rooms on the floor that’s carpeted, it’s less than half the size of the adjoining single, and whenever they turn the heater on, it sounds like there’s an angry chainsaw ghost banging away at the piping. The walls are also extremely thin – you can walk down the hallway and know who’s on the phone, who’s playing video games, who’s watching TV, etc. You have to be kind of careful.

            Well, that’s this week’s news. I’ve attached pictures of the pumpkin-carving contest results (I didn’t participate). Happy Halloween!

*my a cappella group

Work and Co.

            The majority of the last few weeks and, I expect, the majority of the weeks to come, can be summarized with one word: work. Or, as thesaurus.com informs me, with the words struggle, trial, drudgery, exertion, grind, pains, slogging, stress, striving, sweat, toil, travail, and trouble. All of them seem pretty accurate; from here on out I’ll be calling them Work and Co.

            I’m not entirely sure what happened: whether I’m somehow wasting my time more than I used to, or whether I’ve just hit rush hour. From what I can tell, though, I haven’t really wasted any more time than usual, so I’m going with the rush hour theory, in combination with a little less time efficiency caused by lack of energy.

            Over the last couple of weeks, I haven’t felt that stressed or depressed; it just felt like everything was falling apart, not going the way it was supposed to, not in a major way, but in a cumulative way, from banging my toe to not finishing a p-set before turning it in. At the same time, I wasn’t that worried. It felt like I was tumbling down a hill without really caring. Well, this week, the emergency thrusters came back online. Now I’m stressed – not overwhelmed, crying, hyperventilating stress, just the normal kind – and all my time is consumed with Work and Co.

            I do well under pressure; in a way, I’m in my element. At the same time, this isn’t a lot of hard work on a project I’m interested in; it’s work doing a hundred different things, most of which have to be done but aren’t that interesting or pleasant. And of course, while I’m taking care of immediate concerns, I’m neglecting all the other things I want/need to get done – reviewing concepts, exercising, and etc.

            Alright, enough already. For a short interlude, let me throw in a random fact about life at Harvard. I may start throwing these in every couple of weeks, so be on the lookout. Here it is: if you didn’t know, the outdoor steps up to Widener Library are some of the most awkward on campus; they are just high enough, and just wide enough, that you can’t run, jog, or walk up or down them without stretching your legs in a way that’s just – well, awkward – and falling into a sort of lopsided gait, sometimes subtle, sometimes not.  If you ever want to test that out, come visit!

            So, what’s happening around campus? Things are really beginning to pick up; I have Pass in Review for ROTC this Saturday, and then our a cappella concert, and then the ROTC Birthday Ball, and then Harvard-Yale (which involves another, joint, concert), and then it’s Thanksgiving. The good news it, time should really fly by between now and then. There’s so much to do!

            Sophomores are also declaring concentrations around now. At the moment, though this could change, I’m planning on doing a joint concentration (aka double major – don’t ask me why we call it something else; no one knows) in Near Eastern Languages and Civilization (NELC) and Philosophy. I’ve already gotten quite a few of my NELC classes out of the way, so I’ll be done with those requirements pretty soon, and then I’ll have more time for Philosophy. And no, no more math or science classes at Harvard after this, as far as I know.

            So that’s where things stand right now. It’s not just me; most everyone I talk to, including professors, has the feeling that we’re all just powering through until Thanksgiving. Midterms took us by surprise, and we all thought, “Wow! We’ve only got half a semester to go!” And a week or so later, we all thought, “Wow. We’ve still got half a semester to go.” But after Thanksgiving, everything is really just preparation for finals (I have two this semester), and then yet another semester is by. Just the thought of which reminds me to cherish what time I do have. The whole undergraduate experience will be over in a flash.

            And on that (optimistic?) thought, I’ve got more things to do, so I need to say goodbye. Have a great week, enjoy the fall weather if you have it, and if you’re like me and keeping company with Work and Co., keep powering through!

PS – I almost forgot to mention – I did get a care package from my parents yesterday that made me very happy!

Three Days... We're Halfway!

            The reverberations and aftershocks echoed through the room as the young warriors, still reeling from the recent onslaught slowly raised themselves, looked around them, and tried to make sense of what was happening. Finally, one turned to his friend and, hardly daring to breathe, whispered furtively, “do you think it’s over?”

            “For now,” the other replied. “I think that was the last one.”

            Suddenly one of the others seemed to realize something for the first time. Leaning forward, brow creased, he half-whispered, half-shouted – “but – but that means we’re halfway through!”

            The students stared at one another in growing amazement. It was true. Midterms had ended. And so had half the semester. There was only a month-and-a-half to go…

            I’m not quite sure where to go from there, but yes! The year is halfway through. Surprised? So were we. I think most of us are still settling in; there are weekly appointments I’m supposed to be having that we haven’t found a regular time for; there are friends I haven’t had the time to catch up with; I’m still trying to get an idea of how my professors grade and where I stand in my classes. And yet – and yet half the semester’s gone, and I have to hurry up and get everything done before it’s all over.

            The long weekend was very nice, despite all the anti-Columbus posters taped on various doors and message boards asking me if I know what I’m celebrating. I know what I’m celebrating: I’m celebrating having finished my midterms and enjoying my only three-day weekend this semester. At the risk of sounding callous and ignorant, that my three-day weekend happens to be connected to Columbus makes absolutely no difference to me.

            Anyway, what did I do this weekend? Because I was touring a ship with ROTC last weekend, I was behind on work all week, besides having three essays to write. So Saturday was a work day; I got up early and tried to knock as many things off of my to-do list as possible. I also helped ROTC pass out free programs at a Harvard football game; you may remember that I did this last year as well. It’s a lot less fun in a cold rain, let me tell you, but it went fine, and we passed them all out. It was a pretty productive day. Once the sun went down, though, my motivation flagged, and I ended up on Netflix once I’d determined that I’d done enough to get myself back on track.

            On Sunday I got up and went to Church, and on my way back I caught the annual Oktoberfest parade. After church I went jogging down by the Charles – (okay, I should stop to acknowledge this. I went jogging for the first time since I sprained my ankle, and except for slight twinges of discomfort, my ankle was fine, so that’s a prayer answered.) – and quite by accident discovered an entire festival happening down in Harvard Square. I just wanted to get to the river, but I did stop to snap a few photos. Sunday evening I mainly tried to relax.

            On Monday I slept in – I had a lot of sleep to catch up on – and then headed into Boston; I haven’t been to the MFA this semester, and I’ve missed it. However, I must remind myself in the future to show up earlier and not go on holidays; the line extended out to the street. So there was a change of plans, and I instead wandered over to the little duck pond behind the museum and spent a while just sitting against a tree and musing, away from school for a little while. It was pretty nice. When I got back to school I had a cappella rehearsal; our concert is coming up pretty quickly. And afterwards I had dinner and finished the rest of the work that had to be done this weekend. All-in-all, this weekend wasn’t as restful as I would have liked, but it was productive, and it’s the semester half-way point; nothing except Christmas break is going to be as restful as I want it to be.

            I am now going to indulge in a bit of mid-year musing, despite the fact that this post is already plenty long. What have I learned thus far? Well, as far as book-knowledge goes, I’ve learned a lot, though there’s as always the age-old problem of learning vs. education. I have more responsibility than I did last semester, and although I’m still not doing as much leadership-wise as I did my last couple years of high school, I feel I’m still progressing.

            One of the main challenges this semester has been balancing work and relaxation. I’ve tried to do that through my Sabbaths, but the further into the semester we get, the more my free time wants to encroach on my work time. I started this year ready to go, but the first couple of weeks were so crazy, they drained all my excess enthusiasm. I’m not quite in ‘survival mode’, like I was my first semester freshman year, but I don’t feel like I’ve got everything together, either.

            So I’m still experimenting with ways to recharge my energy. The best way I’ve found, in my little experience, is a ‘detox’ period, a time completely separate from responsibility, where I can wind down and de-stress, until I’m charged up and bored and ready to get something done – it’s not in my nature to do nothing for too long. Unfortunately, those times don’t come very often. And when I don’t get enough time, when I start to detox but don’t finish, it’s like waking up in the middle of a sleep cycle: I’m more tired than I was before. There’s such a thing as too much rest.

            Yes, that’s how I feel now. The whole weekend was a mix of wanting to throw all responsibility to the dogs and wanting to make sure everything was done and together. It was a mix of watching Netflix and sending business emails, of staying in bed and making to-do lists. It was strange, and I’m still not quite sure how good or bad it was, but hopefully it gave me enough energy to get back to work.

            It’s not that I don’t do well with stress; I work best under pressure. I love learning, and it’s awesome to be here. All the same though – I’ll be counting the days until Thanksgiving Break!

PS - If you recognize some of the places in these photographs, it's because I had pictures of them last semester - except that back then, they were covered in snow.

Exams, Essays, and Everything Else

            Well, we’re well on our way through October. The leaves are still just beginning to change, the tourists are everywhere, and the weather is getting nippy. Once again there are moments I am in my dorm room and my toes are numb from cold (there’s a vent in my room that looks like it should be a heater, but they’ve never turned it on). Still, I’m comfortable here. The other day I was walking back after a long day of classes to find that, for a few blissful seconds just as I reached the corner of the Quad, everything was completely silent. I just stopped and stood there a few seconds to soak it in. And then, of course, the shuttle came wheezing and rumbling by, and the moment was gone. But it was nice while it lasted.

            October also means midterm season. It’s not really that we all have a wave of midterms in the middle of the semester and then again during finals period. Some classes don’t have midterms at all; they have essays or projects. Other classes have three or four ‘midterms’ – that is, tests in the middle of the term – so there’s usually a starting point for the midterm wave, but not really an ending point until reading period starts.

            On my end there isn’t really a wave of midterms. Physics has three take-home exams, the first of which we’ve already done. (As a side note, I and a couple friends are starting a study group in Physics, which should prove very helpful.) Philosophy has three papers, one of which we’ve already done and are now editing to turn in again (they give feedback and then average the two grades to help us figure out how to write a philosophy paper). ROTC has tests and essays, one of each of which we’ve already turned in. In Arabic we have a test every two weeks, so I took the second one last Friday. Finally, in Hebrew, we have an essay due next week – an extended paper – that I think everyone forgot about until I remembered something about a midterm assignment and looked it up yesterday.

            It was kind of scary to notice that we had an essay due next week, but luckily, I’ve already read two novels in Hebrew for fun, so I’m planning on just writing my essay on one of those. If everything goes well, and I can use the outline I planned out yesterday, I think it will be a good paper, one I’m interested in. I’ll let you know how it goes.

            The only worry is that writing this paper will take up a good chunk of the three-day-weekend I recently found out I had. Of all the non-controversial holidays Harvard could choose from, they decided to let us out of classes for Columbus Day. I suspect this is solely so that a large portion of the student body can protest that we celebrate this holiday at all, but I’m not complaining; we all need a break. Perhaps they just thought we needed a holiday on this particular week of the year. 

            I am certainly looking forward to the holiday; I’ll need to do some planning to put it to good use doing all the things I’ve wanted to do all semester but haven’t had time for. My Sabbath’s have been a great help in that respect, though. Last Saturday I managed to finish a short story, read quite a bit on the history of Europe, and of course, catch up on Bones. It amazes me, when I think about it, that I could not do any work for an entire day every week and not be any more stressed out than I am. In any case, though, I would gladly trade an increased workload the rest of the week for the tension-draining effects of a day of rest.

            Speaking of rest, I think I’ve about rested my ankle long enough. Despite the physical trainer’s advice, I’ve found my ankle more stable recently – I’ve stopped wearing the brace, and I haven’t had any problems – and I had to jog across Harvard Yard to catch a shuttle the other night, and it didn’t cause me any discomfort. So hopefully I’ll be able to start jogging again soon. Now I just have to find the time.

            And speaking of time, I should get going. Oh – one more thing: the care package my mother sent me about two weeks ago finally arrived, full of everything from Arabic notes to Ramen! I hope everyone has a lovely week, and whether you celebrate it or not, happy Columbus Day!

Studying vs. Surviving

            If anyone ever wondered what state of matter to-do lists were, I have the answer: they’re gaseous. Why? Because they take the shape and volume of whatever container you put them in. The more space you make for them, the more space they will take up; you might think that if you work harder, you’ll be able to carve out some free time, but it’s no more use than trying to let air out of a balloon so that half of it is a vacuum; it doesn’t work. On the other hand, while these lists expand very easily, they don’t compress so well; if you’re trying to get more and more done in less and less time, good luck.

            And with that optimistic thought, on with my week. It’s been pretty good, actually; as you can guess from my opening, there’s been a lot to get done, but it’s mostly enjoyable, and I’m working along steadily. I’m behind where I want to be because on Saturday, I went with a group of people from my unit to tour the USS Cassin Young, a WWII/Cold War era destroyer that’s docked here in Boston.

            A Harvard Graduate who worked on the same class of ship gave us a behind-the-scenes tour that covered everything from the quarterdeck to the kitchen. We enjoyed listening to his stories, and he enjoyed telling them. We left at 0900 Saturday morning and got back around 1200. It was a good way to spend a morning, but I didn’t get much done.

            From noon Saturday until noon Sunday, I take my Sabbath, if possible. On Saturday evening I have my free time for the week (occasionally supplemented with breaks throughout the week, if I feel like I can manage that. Not that my feelings are always accurate, but it’ll be alright). This past week, a lot of that involved the season of Bones that just came out on Netflix, but I also had time to get some creative writing in. Also, I recently bought a book on European History that I’m working my way through over the weekends. Growing up in Texas, I had a year of State History and two years of US History, balanced by one year of World History. So World History is still kind of unexplored territory as far as I’m concerned, and fortunately for me, people love writing books about it.

            Speaking of History and books, anyone who was in my World History class will remember the infamous Ibn Battuta, whose travel account I very much doubt any of us read in its entirety. A word of warning: if you ever study Arabic or the Middle East, you will almost certainly run into him again, and this time you’ll be trying to read all of that in Arabic. Arabic is going alright, though; I need to work on my spelling, but that’s one of those things that comes from practice, and I don’t have that much time to practice outside of what’s required for my homework. That’s a problem in all my classes, though, and one I need to look into a remedy for.

            This past week I’ve been spending most of my extra time on philosophy, firstly because it’s interesting, and secondly because I have an essay due this Thursday, and while I know for a fact that my writing is better than it was when I wrote my first philosophy paper a year ago, I’m not sure my logic will hold up. For the first paper, though, the professor and TF provide comments and give you a chance to revise your paper, and then average the two grades.

            I’m not sure how I got better at Philosophy writing – just practice, I guess. I often find that I learn more than I thought I did when going through classes. Hopefully that will hold up, since I never feel like I’m learning as much as I would like to; the homework distracts me from thinking about the concepts a lot of the time. There’s been a lot of controversy lately about the clash between grades and learning. In my opinion, it’s a broken system, but I think it’s about the best we can come up with in a broken world. But of course, that’s just the opinion of an “excellent sheep”*.

            Overall, life is busy as usual, but pretty good. In a cappella we’re learning new songs now, instead of just teaching the old ones to the freshmen, and some of the parts are hard, but we’re coalescing as a group, so things are going well. It’s actually warmed up again, enough so that I open my window to get a breeze in my room, but the leaves are starting to change, and fall is slowly approaching. It’s almost October, and in my mind, ingrained from childhood, is the idea that October leads into “holiday season”: Halloween waterfalls into Thanksgiving, which cascades into Christmas. Once you can get to the end of October, you’re almost there.

            Of course, that takes a while (though not as long as it seemed to take in elementary school), so I’ll still be blogging for a while. There is still a great deal of work to be done. But Fall is in the air, and before anyone knows it, I’ll be rereading this blog on the plane on my way home for Christmas!

*It really got started with this article, with the lovely picture accompanying it.

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/118747/ivy-league-schools-are-overrated-send-your-kids-elsewhere

And then there was this.

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/119321/harvard-ivy-league-should-judge-students-standardized-tests

Fall Flavor

                It’s been a fairly uneventful week, partly because I made it that way. I have a habit of getting sick every week around finals time, but I thought it was just a general end-of-semester process, that my body realized I finally had time to rest and forced me to do so. Being the Harvard student I am, it took me a full year to realize that being sick is a direct result of overwork.

                How did I discover this? Well, the first two weeks of this semester were like the end of the semester usually is – an all-out sprint. I wasn’t really sleeping; I wasn’t really eating; I was just trying to get everything done. And I did. It wasn’t until this past week, when I finally had time to rest, that I really got sick.

                Fortunately, after the craziness of the beginning of school, my workload dropped significantly, and I was able to get sleep and food, so after a few not-so-wonderful days of recovery, I am nearly back to normal. Speaking of which, I went to the Physical Therapist yesterday to see if my ankle injury had healed sufficiently to allow me to work out normally again. It didn’t hurt, but it’s apparently still swollen. In addition to not signing off my waiver, the therapist informed me of three-five other things that were wrong with me, and only half the exercises she gave me have nothing to do with my ankle. Oh, well. I’ll probably start working out again anyway, if it doesn’t hurt.

                Despite not doing PT (I still get up at five in the morning to watch everyone else), I am enjoying ROTC. The lab last week was war games, which can be very fun, if you have an idea what you’re doing and the stakes aren’t particularly high. I also met with one of my mentors, a veteran studying at Harvard, this past weekend, and she was great. I also have an upperclassman mentor in the battalion, and I myself am mentoring a freshman, who I took for ice cream last night. We had a good talk.

                Also last night, I managed to make it to LIFE group* for the first time. We are just starting Galatians, and there were homemade cookies, and we had a good time. I hadn’t planned on coming to the group until about an hour before, and I didn’t know who was in it, but as it turns out, I know everyone there, and it’s a small group, so it was a very comfortable space and a good way to end the day.

                Classes are plodding along as usual; papers are beginning to come due, and people have started worrying about midterms. (You don’t have just one midterm; some classes have three or four. I think the theory is that students take tests more seriously if they’re called midterms.) We had our first Arabic quiz/test on Friday, and I’m working on a Physics take-home exam this week. So we’ll see how that goes.

                Philosophy is very interesting. I end up doing my reading for it way too far in advance, since I consider it the most enjoyable of my readings, and then I don’t remember what’s it’s about, but the class notes are usually specific enough to remind me. The discussion is interesting – the class is undergrad and grad students – and section will hopefully shrink and become more conducive to discussion. However, even with our 50-60 person class, I’m able to comment and ask questions, and the professor knows my name.

                One of the nicest parts of my current schedule is my ability to take a Sabbath. I did manage to get all my work done the past weekend and spend noon Saturday to noon Sunday relaxing and then studying and praying. It was marvelous, but it’s still difficult to maintain focus all throughout the rest of the week. I get everything done, but I tend to get distracted – I spent an inordinate amount of time yesterday reading 1984 for the first time. The writing was superb, I hadn’t read a novel in forever, and I devoured it, but it drained a lot of my time. I have to remember not to start any more books on the side, unless I’m willing to wait until the weekend to pick them back up.

                Overall, it’s been a fairly good week. My schedule and workload are almost stabilized, and hopefully soon I’ll have worked out how to integrate them. The weather got pretty chilly, and then warmed up a while, and now it’s settled into a mix of nippy and almost-warm, depending on how much shade there is around. Pretty soon I should be posting pictures of a New England autumn, so stay posted! Until then, I hope everyone has a lovely first day of fall and a fabulous week!

*The small-group Bible studies held by Christian Impact (formerly known as Campus Crusade for Christ)