Midterms and Fall Break

This past week started out being hectic and obnoxious, but ended up being great. I had 5 exams: 3 on Monday (Math, American History, Spanish), 1 on Tuesday (Advanced Comp.), and 1 on Wednesday (Bib Lit).They were stressful, especially the three on Monday, but I overall felt like I did pretty well on all 5. I know that my Math exam grade was an 85, and my History was a 90, and I was very happy with both grade.

Luckily, Wednesday was the last day of classes before break. Most of my friends, including Adam, left that night. I, however, wouldn't be leaving until Thursday afternoon. Wednesday was not productive at all. I did absolutely zero homework and I don't really feel too bad about it. After all, I had just gotten through 5 midterms, it was the first night of break, I could sleep in the next day, and I had the whole room to myself. Basically, I just did nothing. I went for a walk around the campus, which grew emptier and emptier each hour as more students went home. I watched some Looney Tunes. I did some laundry. I talked to Emily. I watched the Sabres game. I watched the most recent James Bond movie, which was better than I remember it being, but it's still not one of my favorite 007 flicks. The next one comes out in November, and it looks pretty good.

Thursday at Houghton was very surreal. It was like a ghost town. For those of you who have read the Harry Potter books, it was exactly like all the chapters where it's Christmas vacation at Hogwarts, and like 90% of the students leave, and there's only like 4 who stay. It felt just like that. Well, there was more than 4, but you get the drift. Actually, now that I mention it, there were only 4 guys on 3rd East other than me, so ha! We broke open a golf ball and it was just a really really long line of rubber band wound into a ball. So we wrapped it all the way around the kitchen area and the bathroom and taped it to the walls. Sadly, it wasn't there when we came back on Sunday.

Thursday afternoon, Emily and Maggie came! It was nice to see Maggie again, and a VERY huge relief to be back with Em, especially after such a harsh week. After some antics and Wendy's (yeah Baconator!) we went back to Maggie's dorm in Rochesterand watched Grey's Anatomy, which is their favorite TV show. I've never seen it before, and it was pretty good. Em looks exactly like one of the characters, and I guess a lot of people say that about her. I also got a crapload of food from the school store because Maggie has this sweet meal plan in which she needs to spend like 1600 bucks by the end of the semester. She said that she would never be able to spend that much on food, so they let me go on a mini shopping spree. I bought: 2 bottles of Cherry Coke, 1 bottle of Powerade, a Crunch bar, a Twix bar, Reese's Pieces, a Chocolate pudding snack pack, 5 bags of popcorn, a big carton of Goldfish, a box of Cheez-Its, a box of Double Stuff Oreos, 2 things of soup, some Nutter Butter cookies, and a can of Pringles. And it cost me nothing, and actually did Maggie a favor. Basically, she became my favorite non-Emily female in about 10 minutes time.

I spend the rest of Thursday and all of Friday and Saturday with my Em. It was very refreshing not only to be with her, but also to be back in civilization. Houghton is a perfect fit for me, but it definately helps me appreciate places like Williamsville and Penfield for being so close to cities like Buffalo and Rochester. Houghton is close to nothing, and that's nice. But I had a lot of fun in Penfield. We went to the mall and had Friendly's for lunch. Both of us bought a video game: she bought a Mario game for Game Boy Advance, and I bought a collection of 9 Sonic the Hedgehog games on one disc for Gamecube, which I'm very pumped about. We also went to Wegmans on several occasions, and it was very good to be reunited with thier BLT subs and bakery dept. I got 3 doughnuts, a crouissant, and a chocolate chip muffin. They tasted great, and made me think of Helping Hands and Dairy.

Other activities included dinner at Chili's with Maggie, trips to Taco Bell (good food, but not Mighty), Target, and Border's, watching the extended version of "The Two Towers" (LOTR=good movies), playing Wii and Garfield Monopoly (I won), and visiting Lollypop Farms, a local animal shelter that had a lot of cute dogs and cats. A long time ago, Emily got one of her cats, Tigger, there, so it had some nostalgic meaning for her. We also watched some Looney Tunes from some of my VHS tapes that I had given her when I went to college. At Houghton, I only brought my cartoons on DVD, so all my cartoons on videocassettes can't be watched. Luckily, I could watch the ones that I had left with Em, so that was good. Due to cold weather, we couldn't go to this one park, and due to confusion over dates, we couldn't go to the corn maze, but we'll definately do both sooner or later. We already did the corn maze with Jordan long before we started going out. That was a good, clean, awkward time.

Sunday morning, we met my mom in Batavia and said goodbye. I went with mom back to Williamsville, where we went to church. THAT was very nice to get back to. We got there a couple of hours before the service started (Mom had worship team rehersal), so I wandered around the church, and then I wandered around the neighborhood, going through the cemetary and visiting Mr. Masteller, going to the elementary school and playground and taking a picture of Will Edward's brick, and going through Jordan's neighborhood, tracing our route from his house to Sunset Park. Then I went to Tim Horton's, got some food, and went to church.

Those of you who read my post(s) about my first visit to Williamsville know what I discovered about home and what it meant. So I can't even tell you how relaxing and enjoyable it felt to be back at Harris Hill with the people there. It felt so right and good. There were some noticeable changes, such as a new nursery attendant (Mrs. Cummings gave up the job so she could attend services) and no Mr. Don Trautman at the door (he died shortly after I went to college), but everyone else was there, nice and unchanged. It was so comforting, just the way I expected my first visit to feel. I sat with my little buddy Shawn for the first part of the service and mom for th second part, and I felt so refreshed by it all. I was very sad to leave, but I'm even more excited to go back in 2 weeks.

After some much-missed Pizza Hut, mom and I went to the Bills game. I usually don't care too much about the Bills, but ironically, since I've left home, I've been missing and following them more. This game was a lot of fun. It was strange though, because when we got there, we found out that the stadium had no power! The vending areas were pitch black, and when we got to our seats, there was no music, no speakers, no scoreboard and no jumbotron. It was funny because the players kept on getting called on delay of game, because they had no way of knowing how much time they had to make a play. The power eventually came back on, then went away again, then came back to stay. Ironically, we were playing the Chargers, so that was weird. We ended up winning 23-14. Then mom brought me back to Houghton, swinging by Burger King on the way. Shortly after she left, Adam came back, and I unpacked a little, showered, read some Robinson Crusoe, and went to bed, ending a very nice and much needed breakThis is the unlit, unpowered scoreboard.

This is when the power came back on!

This is the pitch-black stadium.

Touchdown!