Rooms! Yeah! For fall quarter, Molly and I are in a double on the third floor overlooking the yard and woods, next door to Tory and Betsy... at night we can hear the crickets' thrumming.

The meeting went really, really smoothly and finished in less than four hours; in fact, it was almost inert at first because everyone was so accomodating and open that we needed some proactive facilitation on Orion's part to get it going. There was a lot of enthusiasm for a commune, in which a huge bunch of people take over a cluster of rooms and divvy them up by purpose (sleep/study/socialize) rather than by people. That seemed like a must-try-at-least-once experience; some other cool-sounding options at that point were a quad or mini-commune with my draw group, or triples with either Daisy and her friend Thea or Anna from USingers and a guy named Denali. The biggest draws of the commune and the latter two options were that it would dispel any seeming cliqueyness, but with rooms and pairings falling the way they were, it seemed easiest for the four of us to work something out. Anyway, rooming situations here are only for a quarter at a time, which makes it much easier to try new things or deal with less-than-prime real estate—which, relative to the rest of campus, is still pretty darn nice.

We were both on cook crew today (Brazilian stuffed peppers, yams, grilled portobello mushrooms, salad, and apple crisp), and there was a complicated backlog of people moving in and out of rooms, so although housing meeting was over before, furniture configuration didn't happen until 9 or so. In that process, we had two wide dressers barricading the door; of course that was when a couple of bunches of visitors would choose to come... so we felt like the POPULAR KIDS and had a few breaks filled with fun chitchat. Molly's all done, but I'm still being indecisive about how I want to store some things; at any rate, enough drivel.

I think it's because I've a bit too much on my mind to truly get a handle on my thoughts and transcribe them here for a permanent record; I'm too busy living in Syn—from moving to retreat to lawn frisbee to house meeting to cook crew to fresh cinnamon raisin bread at midnight, to wax poetic about it. But I'm kind of ashamed of the methodical litanies I've been posting in the past week because they don't nearly reflect how very, very happy I am to live here.