And so it begins...

Midterm season. For you see, I have kind professors who don't like to give their midterms during the designated week. Some assign projects before. Some assign projects after. While I appreciate their thoughtfulness, the result of these adjustments include 20 pages that I just completed for Anthro and Sociology of Ed. I also read the Laramie Project for my Oral Histories class AND checked out the Fales archive in our library as a prelude to my next big research project. I might love old books, but there's too much work due for me to enjoy them just yet.

Shall I blitz you with a summary of the past however long?

Last week:
Lots of homework.
Grocery shopping and cleaning.
More homework.
snow

Last Friday:
more snow (I thought the buses would be cancelled...)
CHUCK ARRIVES!
more snow
Ribollita, candied pecans, cabbage-potato pirozghis
Discussion of the million-and-one ways to spell pirozghi
more snow
Teresa, Cass, Camille, Hillary, and a whole delightful troupe stumble in
Teasing because OF COURSE I haven't finished getting food ready yet!
Teasing because of course there is too much food.
snow
Lovely friends.
snowsnowsnowsnow
A subway uptown to visit a friend.
A subway ride home.
Sprawling sleepover? I'm certainly not supposed to have this many guests in a dorm...

Saturday (as defined by sleeping patterns more than by times):
Breakfast with friends!
Chelsea Street Market and T Salon
Meeting Camille's friend Lisa
Gallery hopping with Cass and Chuck (24th-25th streets and 10th ave ish...)
Book store!!!!!!!!!!
Yummy dinner at Cafe Habana (We had to go while Cass was up...)
Fat Cat jazz bar
Chuck attempting to develop tin types in our bathroom-turned-darkroom
A slightly less sprawling slumber party

Sunday (see above note):
Brunch
Strand
Camille makes it safely to her bus
Fancy antique store
Photo gallery
Singers on the street
Cobbled streets of Soho
Tin type developing attempt #2; conclusion that Cass cannot be photographed
Delightfully messy sandwiches
Chuck makes it safely to his bus
Sit in a park
Talk
Sit in a park
Cass makes it safely to his bus
I walk home to an empty dorm

Tired of the list form yet? I just needed to get that out of my system for the moment. It was a wonderfully busy weekend. I hadn't known about the row of galleries in Chelsea. Some of the work we saw was brilliant. Of course, having Chuck there makes any photo gallery a learning experience. I'm looking at how the pieces are arranged in the gallery; he's looking at how the pieces were made. Having his perspective on such things always makes such trips particularly enjoyable.

I'm sure I'm going out of order, but can I just tell you that I made waaayyy too much soup. And because it's a bean soup, the broth had all been absorbed the next day. I'm not about to feed guests left-overs, but I've been living off beans for a week now. After a few days, I've had to resort to dining hall trips just to diversify my diet and give my poor body a break. The pecans were easy and yummy though.

We had Hudson Valley Chocolate Milk with breakfast on Saturday. It's a shame you can't see me smiling...

Camille rode dressage for awhile and her mom is an equestrian, so we got to talk about horses a bit. It's so strange to be in a city when I think about riding. This time last year, I was riding at night through snowy fields and missing Mary. Now I would have to travel over an hour to find a barn where there's no way they would let me ride out in a field by myself. I'm so grateful to have had that community as such a constant in my life. I almost cried laughing about how Bundy's tongue used to hang out. He was this big chestnut with an extraordinarily long neck. I really loved riding Bundy; he was massive but steady. And his tongue always stuck out because his jaw had been broken years ago and healed crooked. I used to worry that the tip would freeze off when it got cold out.

If you have never been to the Strand, you need to come visit so I can take you. Really.

Dropping everyone off at their buses on Sunday made me incredibly sad. The weekend had been so much fun and so...loud! Bowery seemed almost too quiet as I walked home. Can I just tell you how eerie it is to realize that a NYC street is too quiet? Try getting up very early sometime or grabbing a friend and heading out very late. It's unreal.

Anyway, Monday came and I went to a panel discussion on the Social Responsibility of Educators. I met some professors from Steinhardt who gave me a list of people to talk to about graduating with my initial certificate. Apparently I could submit my transcript to the city for resume review and they would consider certifying me to teach high school English or Social Studies, depending. I have a bunch of meetings to set up first, but if I could graduate from Gallatin with some kind of official certificate it would be wonderful. And fairly groundbreaking, from what the one gentleman said.

I hope professors don't mind that I approach them for general conversation and advice. Tuesday I stopped in to see a professor who chairs the writing program at Gallatin. She was wonderfully sweet and more than willing to sit with me for a while. She pulled up websites for graduate programs in education and mapped out roughly what kinds of classes I would need to get into them. She suggested two excellent service learning classes that I'll take junior year. She paused to remind me that I should really take advantage of the professors and programs in Gallatin instead of planning my undergrad with the specific goal of going to grad school. It was refreshing to speak to someone who was so excited about everything. I really appreciate that she let me just come hang out. I miss adult conversation sometimes...even just listening to it.

The reason I'll be taking those classes she mentioned junior year is that today I received official notification that I've been accepted into the study abroad program for next year. I just have to fill out some forms and drop off a check before enough other students do that the spots get filled. Guess what I'll be doing tomorrow!

I'll also be meeting with my research seminar professor tomorrow. On top of turning in the two papers I finished tonight, I have to meet with her to plan my next paper for her class. At this point it looks as if I'll be continuing to research Roald Dahl's treatment of women in his books. I really wanted to look at the statistics for the ALA's challenged books over the past few decades to see if the trends in censorship corresponded at all to trends in changing national values...but that kind of information isn't widely available. There just isn't time to do that kind of research...yet.

My head is spinning from my academic to do list. Good thing Sir Charles is coming up again this coming weekend to help me stay sane! In the meantime, I've been writing crazy papers and drooling over food blogs whenever I need a break.