Mmmmm..... cheap champagne and cookie dough, that's my idea of dinner. :P Well, it's good as an appetizer. The leftover champagne I couldn't drink last night because I had schoolwork, and the makings of Valentine's Day cookies (Big Boy cookie recipe from Monee - yay!). Yum. Now the cookie dough is chilling in the fridge and I'm eating a quesadilla (with corn and tomatoes - my favorite!) and waiting until it's ready to be cookie-cutted and baked into cute little hearts and frosted. Hugo's out at BMM (Bridgetown Morris Men) practice tonight, so I have the apartment (and more importantly, the kitchen) to myself for another hour or so.

I've decided that I shouldn't even try to do homework at home anymore. I was struggling and fighting with concepts and problems last night and not getting anywhere on my diff eq problem set that was due today. I finally gave up and went to bed. Today I got out of physics lab early, sat outside in the sun (and wind), ate my lunch, and did the problem set in an hour! I suppose this teaches me that I focus better on academics when I'm not at home with all of the distractions of everything that needs to be done non-academically. I'm also learning that I really miss the library hours at Stanford - the public libraries here just can't compare. One of my main days for homework is Sunday, and the library downtown is only open from 12-5! The times that I'd much rather be out enjoying the gorgeous sunshine we've been having, or doing other things, leaving studying for morning and night. Sigh. I guess on-campus college libraries are a rather unique thing, and one I never would have expected to miss this much. I rarely studied in the libraries when I was at Stanford, but I find myself wishing several times a week that I had that study-area available to me here. Oh, well. I'll cope. But maybe I'll appreciate the libraries better when I come back to Stanford. :)

I think I might actually be getting into some sort of running routine here, which is really exciting. I'd love to do more exercising on a regular basis. Hugo and I have been jogging for the last two Saturdays, and we went yesterday afternoon. If I can keep that up, maybe with one more day a week thrown in, I think I'll start feeling really good (as long as my shins behave). I'm actually impressed at how well my body remembers how to run. I know it sounds silly when I put it that way, but that's what it is. Even after only a couple runs in two weeks, I could feel a significant difference in my stamina during yesterday's run. We did a shorter total distance, but ran the whole time rather than stopping to stretch in the middle like we've been doing. I was breathing hard, but I was still fine by the end of it, not dying like I was halfway through the first run we did a week and a half ago, and I felt like I could have gone farther. So that makes me hopeful.

I think it's time to go make some cookies now. Yum!