this is me on the night before classes start... printing up syllabi, the shortest of which is ten pages long, checking the amazon.com delivery date for the textbooks i'll need, looking around my desk trying to find where last semester's papers, notebooks, and texts are so i can shove them to one side, scavaging what notebook pages are left as recompense for the inordinate amount of printing i'll do in the coming months, scrawling due dates i already dread in my planner, digging my messenger bag out from the accrued pile on top of it, finishing the last chapter of
interpreter of maladies, deciding which dvds i should rush to watch before i enter the long dark of school, and tiring already.
a lot's gone on since i last posted. i felt a lot better through about new year's day... and then my health went down a severe decline. but first, the fun.
x-out at church is the youth group's year-end event (generally on new year's adam, but this year on new year's adam's eve so we could go to a wizards game). it's an all-nighter that goes from 5pm to 7am the next day, and boy is it a kicker if you've not prepared adequately by, say, getting sleep. but even when you're already in need at 5pm, it's still loads of fun (aside from the boring wizards game and the worry that you'll lose one of the 25 kids on the overcrowded metro). we played capture the flag again this year, and since x-out 2005 was my first youth group event, memories of first knowing where i fit when we played came back to me. last year i didn't even understand what they were talking about when they said 'the field' and 'the upper & lower buildings', so this year was even better. i got some entertainment playing ddr, trying not to whack people or full cups with pool cues, deciding how to handle the suggestion that we give a fifth youth group kid a ride to church by putting him in my trunk, and having several conversations about who likes whom and other middle and high school stuff.
new year's eve was just ridiculous. it started with a trip to bethesda, md, in the morning for church with trisha, immanuel, and his clan, plus a touch of hannah. then it was off to somewhere close to the middle of nowhere, md, for some olive garden and a visit with ha(u)nnah and jonfen. good times. but then i had to say bye to t-bird and iggy, which was very sad, but i was slightly consoled b/c i was heading toward va to meet up with diane (who was in from philly) and amy. so we hung out for a bit trying to figure out what to do the rest of the night... we made one restaurant choice which, after we had some people already heading there, turned out to be booked for parties our size (no fat jokes!). then we sat around amy's apt trying to think of good food but no too good (and therefore expensive) food, trying to come up with places nearbyish but convenient and not already packed... lemme tell ya, it's not that easy, even in nova! so then we figured it out, lost a few people who'd lost interest along the way, but eventually got to dine with david and trina, and eventually john g.! oh, the laughter. for you who know that crew, you might be able to imagine. it was a seriously good time, and hopefully we'll do it more often. long after our dinners were eaten, we parted ways, with amy and diane taking me back to my car in mclean (with poor john trying desperately to follow us!), and me scurrying off to ashburn. so, i got to michael and kellan's house, and we were like, 'waddaya wanna do?' leave it to michael to break out his latest toy, a gamecube. so we rang in the new year by playing mario kart double dash. then we stayed up a good piece later and finally drifted up to bed. i got to wake up lateish on new year's day and hang out with the sibs, which was excellent, and then later mom and pop done joined us. good stuff. anyway, even though i had a GREAT time at each "event", the day wore me out... i was late getting everywhere. the kfc clan was running late for church, so i didn't go in until they got there, then lunch started late-ish 'cause we hung around church 'cause there were people trisha and immanuel hadn't seen in a long time, then heading back to va took longer than i'd thought it would 'cause i had been calculating from a different part of md, then figuring out what we were doing took way longer than we'd expected, then we all enjoyed dinner so much that we stuck around for a long time, then i hadn't thought about how much closer the restaurant was to m&k's than amy's place, so it took me a long time to go all the way back and then forth again. anyway, it was... a delayed day. what the heck...
HAPPY NEW YEAR!
