Just like tearing petals off a daisy, I have asked myself whether to participate in National Novel Writing Month ( NaNoWriMo ) or to forego it this year. If I participate, I’ll feel obligated to write 2,000 words a day. If I don’t, I’ll kick myself for not trying. Oh, why not? Onward with the novel-writing challenge! It’s not like it’s a big deal if I don’t write the 50,000 words by November 30. And after all, if I write more than I ponder, I could get an easy 2,000 words in a couple hours. 2,000*(30-5)=50,000, assuming the Thanksgiving holiday and one day a week are all that I spend not writing. This just means I won’t watch any movies for the next thirty days. (Also that I might take one of my extra vacation days just to spend on housework and such that I’m sure to put off in favor of writing….) Therefore, in honor of my second year participating in NaNoWriMo and with every hope of finishing again: I do declare that I have an excellent reason to slack off on blogging, e-mailing, F...

About six miles from my apartment, there’s a nature preserve, nearly all wooded. At night it could be freaky, but I find it fascinating. I said as much at a night hike that the local parks district held late last month. Just imagine—at night, the spiders are spinning, the crickets are chirping and the slugs… well, the slugs are doing whatever they do, I suppose. Sitting there and eating mushrooms. No joke, we found a bunch of slugs chowing down on some odd fungal growths on a log. Big critters too—the mushrooms must have been good for them. But the spiders—at night you shine your flashlight to the right and to the left as you slowly traverse the paths, and suddenly a thread of silk catches the light. Keep your beam shining upon it and you begin to see the entire web, in whatever shape the spider has found to fit the niche where it has made its home. Some of the webs are smaller than others. Most surprisingly, nearly all the spiders are themselves tiny, some of them too small to see ...

....has to be one of my favorite holidays, if not the favorite. It might possibly be second to Christmas, but it might not. So I got to see lots of cousins, aunts, uncles, and grandparents - family is half the reason to have any holiday. My grandma wasn't doing well, but I'm praying she'll recover some. The rest were doing just fine, and we had a ball playing together, especially on my dad's side of the family. There we played a million games of "up and down the river" (a game using a normal deck of cards) and not a few of something called "authors" (which closely resembles "go fish"). I also took lots of funny pictures (which are not online, since I just got back to college a bit ago!). One round of photos features five of us cousins crammed onto a three-seater couch. It was a bit of a tight squeeze. :-P

Amazing! I shall explain. I've been busy working on a paper that I've since turned in - a rather big paper, actually. So that's one reason I haven't posted lately. Also, I went home this weekend, and visited my grandparents' (the other ones, not the ones I just saw) on Saturday. And my cousins. Great fun!! It was trick-or-treat night in their neighborhood, so my cousins brough their costumes and got all decked out for the event. My one cousin especially looked chilling: Isn't that a cool costume? Thirdly, I had an exam at eight o'clock yesterday morning I had to study for. Not much studying, but still, some. And I found out today that I tied for highest score on that exam. That's good. (I don't know the exact score yet, just that I did that well.) Fourthly, I had to read a long chapter for history. (All the chapters are long....) And I spent Sunday afternoon doing that. Oh, the joys of reading a rather dry recitation of this world's ...

OK, so I had my friend take a photo of me the last time I was wearing my "Hermione cape" (or, rather, the fall cape which first caused her to say I looked like Hermione ). Compare with a web image of Emma Watson, actress who portrayed Hermione Granger in the Harry Potter movies: Granted, she's not smiling, and I am. Oh, and if you're more curious about this cape than about my supposed resemblance to a fictional character, there's a decent picture of it on my Flickr. I really like this cape. I even have a matching hat that I often wear with it. It's a marvelous cape for fall weather.

So the freshman retreat was last night and this afternoon. Last night consisted mainly of pool, euchre, foosball, and variants of volleyball, with a bonfire worship time thrown in for good measure. 'Twas fun. Met a guy who is related to my pastor's wife. (Small world, really.) And since he was the only other person I knew on the canoeing trip this afternoon, we paddled a canoe together, and travelled seven miles downriver in about an hour (maybe a little over). That was also fun, especially the last mile or two, in which we had a friendly competition with another canoe team to see who would make it to the landing first. (Our two canoes were the frontrunners, even though this wasn't a race.) Oh yeah, we got there a few seconds before they did. Definitely close. We amused ourselves during the succeeding wait by skipping rocks and trying to keep warm in the sun. A couple teams got overturned and so were freezing while we waited for the bus to get us. The wind was the w...