What a binary year! Though I do believe that this is the last of the bunch. It seems as if Roger's issuing a challenge by promising to update four times a week. Well, bring it! Too bad my life isn't interesting right now... or ever. I'm finishing up the midterm stuff, which was going to be done by the end of last week until extensions intervened. Boo and yay at the same time.

Yesterday, our advising group went hiking at Henry Coe State Park, about an hour south of here. It's so big that you can go backpacking and everything there; along the outer portions of the park, there are also some dirt roads suitable for bikes and horses. We passed a group of bikers whizzing along, bringing back those fun, masochistic Acadia memories of racing around Eagle Lake.

The distinguishing factor of the west coast is elevation. Any given point in that state park full of so-called "foothills" was, I think, twice as high as any point in New Jersey. Steepness of terrain is really cool, too. The trails we took, switchbacking up and down creek canyons, were topographically reminiscent of our turf in the Olympics—the weird difference was in color. At a casual distance, the dead, thirsty brown is pretty unsightly. But both closer scrutiny, revealing the glossy red bark of manzanita trees, and the distant expanses of bulging foothills, are amazing. It was so nice to be out, though a whole weekend out would have been the real fix. Without my own car, though, I guess you gotta take what you've got.

We got back around 5, at which point I resolved to finish my medieval women paper. Astonishingly, I did get a good third of it done before being distracted by flying gummy worms. That's right. One of the guys next door has a homemade mother of a water balloon launcher constructed from webbing and surgical tubing, which takes three people to operate. They'd been using it to shoot water balloons into the street, but were sternly admonished by the residential fellow for being menaces to society. Now they've restricted themselves to thwacking dining-hall-stolen gummy worms 150 feet down the hallway and marveling at their adhesion to walls and windowpanes. My attitude toward all that tomfoolery sounds derisive, but it's not. I joined in, of course.