Maybe the rain will finally stop. It's not that I mind the rain -- rain is lovely. But it's not fun when you have to be out all day walking to class over brick paths that allow for no drainage. The cool thing is that now that I wear the sandals I stole from Michele (thanks, Michele!!), I can splash through the puddles on the way to class. Fun stuff. :o)

I just want the humidity to break. You walk outside and it feels like you're simply swimming through the air. It's hot, muggy, wet, soggy, close... The air is hard to breathe and causes you to break out in a sweat the moment you venture outside. Not to mention being inside, since Stina and I don't have air conditioning. As a result, everything in our room is soggy. Stina had to return a book for a class she dropped, and they wouldn't give her full price back because the humidity had warped the cover. It looked like she'd spilled water all over it, but it was just from being in the room.

The rain is ok -- this is where it always rains. :o) I am prepared with my large umbrella and my sandals and life is good!!! :o)

Here's an amusing tidbit... somehow I ended up on Mattel's mailing list; I don't precisely recall how. I think it had something to do with Furbys. Anyhow, so I finally got off my lazy ass and deleted myself from the list. This is the message I got: "You will receive no more email from Mattel Interactive. A confirmation email will be sent to your email account."

Does anyone else see the irony in that?!?! Telling me that I'd get no more emails, but then directly contradicting themselves by sending me yet ANOTHER email confirming that I was deleted from the list. Ahhh, technology. :o)

School is cool. Did I mention that?? I'm pretty stoked about most of my classes. It feels weird because I work in the middle of the day between classes, so it's like I don't have free time till the evening.

I went in to work today. I walked in, and my boss (the old, crotchety one who chainsmokes) saw me and said, "It's your first day back and I'm sorry to put you to work right away, but we have a lot of things to get done." They're apologizing to me because I have work to do. Isn't that what I get paid (barely above minimum wage) to do?!?! Hehe.

I love my job. I have very little supervision; they basically leave me alone most of the time. I work in the Manuscripts and Rare Books Department of our library (thanks to my roommate Cristina), and my job is to (a) xerox lots of letters and rare books for folks out of state and out of the country so they can do their research and (b) to read various family collections of letters and write up a summary of each. The second part of my job is the most fascinating -- I read the Dorsey-Coupland family papers, starting in 1840 and going up through the 1870s. I learned a lot about the Civil War from the southerner's point of view and about battles fought right around my college. Pretty nifty stuff, let me tell ya. Especially since I'm reading first-hand accounts, in the person's own hand -- it's the past talking to me directly. I'm holding a letter that someone took the time to write over a hundred years ago... I'm reading love letters from an enamoured suitor to his rather disinterested beloved, and the pain they went through when they had to be separated later in their marriage during the War. It's eerie to be forcing myself into their private lives -- I just have to remember that they've all passed on, and that they left their letters for posterity. And I'm part of that posterity.

I leave you with thoughts of those who came before, the struggles of coming to America, the joy of newborns born on the frontier, the pain of losing ones dear to their hearts in times of war, of how important family and roots are to all of us.