Hey guys.

My life is pretty boring for now.  This is my first week back to full-time work.  It’s kind of nice when school is out, because I just work a day and have no homework to worry about afterward.  At the same time, though, I have to adjust to my new schedule.  I decided that over Interim I’d work four 10-hour days instead of five 8-hour days, since I need to do Christmas shopping and stuff and wanted the extra time (though I admit that I could have just taken the last day off completely, but I need the money to buy presents, you know?).  I gotta say, 10 hours is a long time in front of a computer screen.  Oh well, I’ll get used to it.

However, reading industry magazines at work have turned me on to Amazon’s new gizmo, the Kindle, which is pretty much the coolest thing since sliced bread.  It’s basically a book in electronic form that uses electronic paper instead of a screen.  Pretty nifty for a geek and literature nerd.  Plus, having all kinds of e-books at your fingertips could be really awesome for a college student.  If only it wasn’t so expensive… the price will come down, I’m sure, but not in time for the holidays.

Anyway, this weekend is the Christmas Walk back in my hometown of fabulous La Grange, which is a lovely little affair they put on once a year and which I will be attending with my family.  My town is about halfway between Naperville and Chicago on the train line with a station right downtown, so it might be a fun thing to do for any North Central student.  Other than that, I’m just busy being grateful that I have no more homework.

Well, I made it through finals alive, and everything else seems to be settling down, so things are looking up.

Seriously, the last two weeks were probably the toughest in my academic career.  I had to wade through three big papers, two whole books, a huge project and two exams.  Thankfully, that’s all over, and I have a week to recover before interim really starts.  Whew.

I’ll be on campus tomorrow even though I don’t have any finals so that I can go on our trip to Colonial.  It’s a tradition for the loungers (the commuters who hang out in the Cardinal Lounge) that has been going on as long as I’ve been going to NCC.  All finals are over by noon, so we usually get a crowd of about 20 people to go out and grab some lunch and ice cream to celebrate.  I’ll try to remember to bring a camera so I can post photos of the merriment.

Thanksgiving will be pretty low-key for me.  I’ll just be staying home with my mom and a few family members, so there won’t be a huge to-do.  We have a lot of people who love to cook in my house (including me) so just making the dinner will be fun.

Later on this week (probably Saturday) some friends and I are going to try to get together to play Warhammer 40k, which is a tabletop strategy game for those who aren’t geeky enough to know.  We’ve all been dying to play this term, but since it takes kind of a long time to play and everyone is busy, we haven’t had a chance.  I will hopefully be able to post photos from there as well.

It’ll be a relaxing and fun week, which I really need after this term.  Feel free to comment with your own Thanksgiving week plans.

I don’t have any fun events to talk about this time… just sort of an update on my existence.

You might notice, if you were watching closely, that I am currently blogging and not in a court in the city [the city = Chicago, for those of you who didn't grow up in the Chicago suburbs], which means that I mercifully escaped jury duty. So instead of sitting on a jury, I have been writing papers, building websites, reading books, and otherwise expanding my worldly knowledge at a rate that should be illegal for human beings.

There have been few times in my life that I have been as overwhelmed as I am right now. Everything coalesced at the last minute for all of my classes, so this last weekend I had to spend every spare waking moment doing homework, forcing me to cut some corners that I wish I didn’t have to. I also have a cold that came on the heels of a different cold. And, by far the worst, a series of family emergencies have struck in the past few weeks, including an aunt and an uncle on different sides of my family passing away.  It’s been total hell, and since I’m being pulled in so many directions I can’t really do anything for the people who are grieving and I can barely think long enough to wrap my mind around everything that has happened.

At this point, I think the worst is over, at least in terms of schoolwork, and I need to soldier on so I can help my mom with funeral arrangements and try to reach out to my cousins and all manner of other things. With any luck, the insanity will be over soon, and then I can spend time with my family.

This Wednesday was Halloween (of course), which means that it was time for COW’s annual Trick or Treat for the Homeless event. As usual, it was TONS of fun, and a huge success in general.

COW co-hosts the event every year with Cardinals in Action (CIA), which is a service organization who hosts pretty much every kind of community service-type activity you could think of. We go trick-or-treating to the houses around campus, in costume and all, except instead of candy we ask people to donate non-perishable food items that we then deliver to Loaves and Fishes food pantry. It’s ridiculously fun, since most of us haven’t been trick-or-treating for a few years, and we get to do good things for the community while we’re at it.

This year was particularly fun because we had so many people come in costume. Dressing up is encouraged but not required, and in previous years I’d say we’d have about half or less of the people in costume. This year it was pretty much everyone, and the whole crowd looked amazing:

If you’re looking, I’m in the bottom row all the way on the right side. (And because I know it’s not very clear, my costume was a Valkyrie, who were warrior women in Norse mythology who carried dead soldiers off to Valhalla. I also had a helmet with wings on it and a sword slung on my back.) You may also notice Chris, also of North Central blogging fame, leaning on the door on the right.

We’re getting closer and closer to the end of term, which means that everybody’s stress level is on the rise. Trick-or-Treat for the Homeless was a nice break, but now it’s time to get serious. I, for one, have a million papers, projects, and readings to do before finals, not to mention studying for the finals themselves, working on organizing more events for COW next term, and working at my internship… AND, to add insult to injury, I might have to do jury duty next week. What horrible timing!

Anyway, happy belated Halloween, and please feel free to share any of your own Halloween antics in the comments!