I was the only person to show up to the 12:00 yoga class today, so I got an hour of private instruction! It was a teacher I hadn't had before, and I could tell she wasn't quite sure how to deal with a one-person class; she said, "You get to decide if you want to be the only person in the class," basically meaning she wouldn't complain if I decided to chuck it altogether. I was thinking, well, it may be a bit awkward, but why on earth would I turn down a private lesson? She wasn't the best teacher, and I don't think she ever really got comfortable with the one-on-oneness of the whole thing, but it was still good. I always like hearing how different people describe the same poses and try to help you deepen them, and she definitely had some good insights and ways of breaking down the poses. And, of course, she was pulling and pushing me and correcting me all over the place, which doesn't happen too often with an entire class full of people that need attention. So it was good, but my lower body is definitely going to be sore tomorrow -- she was definitely a legs and hips person rather than an upper-body person. But that's good, since my upper body got its workout with the snow shoveling last weekend. :)

I went to the library today and checked out a bunch of French language books, dictionaries, etc., including a "Visual Language Guide" with pictures of carrots and aeroplanes and teapots and things in it. It's cute. I'm frantically ruminating (are those words contradictory?) about a bunch of academic stuff at the moment, and have some more changes in the works for myself coming up pretty quick. It's fun! But I'll tell you about those when the time is right. I should get back to school work now.

Guess what -- I changed my major! Yes, after all that expounding and all those justifications for sticking with Environmental Studies, I've changed my mind. I'm an anthropology major now! Well, I haven't done anything official, but my mindset has shifted, which is the important bit. I did sign up for Anth 103: Introduction to Social and Cultural Anthropology, and I'm going to drop my Environmental Impact Assessment class. And fortunately, what with the storm closing campus Tuesday through Friday last week, and the anth class meeting on Tuesdays and Thursdays, I hadn't missed any classes! I signed up last night, and literally got the very last spot in the class. The teacher is awesome -- the only downside is, she's a visiting professor and will only be here one more quarter. It's a one and a half hour class, but doesn't feel like it. The professor is very engaging, loves to talk, and has tons of cool stories about her field work and projects and things. The other interesting thing about the class is the location. It's held in -- and I'm not kidding -- one of the theaters of the 5th Avenue Cinema. Apparently the cinema has been transformed into classrooms, so we're getting a lecture in a movie theater! It's funny.

So I basically have to start from ground zero in anthropology, but even with that, I can still graduate in less time than I would with ESR -- the major has half as many required credits, and I don't have to do a minor (I was going to minor in anth anyway, so I figured why not major in it and cut out the chemistry?) I do have to have foreign language proficiency at the 2+ year level, which will take a while, but I'm actually looking forward to that bit as well -- I'm going to learn French! And I'm going to go to France! I got all my passport stuff taken care of and sent off today, so I should have my passport by March -- hooray!

Anyway, the basic point I'm trying to get across here is that, finally, after all this time, I'm actually really excited about school! Wow! I never thought that would happen. I think most of this stems from the fact that, somewhere in the last couple of months, I made the decision that I was going to make things work for myself -- that I would be proactive in finding and pursuing things that spark my interest, and to turn possibilities to opportunities for myself, and make some changes in my attitudes to allow and encourage good things to come my way. And, what do you know -- it's working! So thanks to everybody who's been with me through this process -- especially to Mom and Hugo for letting me bounce all sorts of ideas off of them and giving me encouraging insights. Where would I be without people that love me?

Wow -- I feel special. I went away (up to Hugo's house) for three days, and I came home to find four packages waiting for me! One from each of Mom, Graham, and DeMara, and one from big bean music -- the Kris Delmhorst c.d.s I ordered last week. Thanks to everybody who sent me packagelets. Hooray for people that love me! :)

School ended up being cancelled for the entire rest of the week last week, so I went up to Hugo's house on Thursday night to spend the weekend, since I didn't have any homework to do. I ended up spending a few hours each day shoveling snow from the driveway in the hopes of making a passable route to get Roger (Hugo's dad) down to the van, which was stuck at the bottom of the driveway. Small tangent here to describe the geography of Hugo's house so my reader can understand what this means. It is a very long driveway that runs from the road uphill around to the back of the house where the back deck leads to the kitchen. (Key word here is uphill.) The front door does have steps down to a path that leads to the bottom of the driveway, but that route is even steeper, covered in even deeper snow, and extremely unconducive to wheelchair access. So we were trying to make it possible for the van to get up the driveway to the back of the house so we could get Roger into it (the van, not the house -- he'd been stuck there for four days.) Back to story. "The Big Thaw" was supposed to begin on Thursday, so we were hopeful that the ice would melt and allow the van up the drive. Unfortunately, it still hasn't happened, so we couldn't. Also as a direct result of this, they had to reschedule their flights again for Saturday, and we decided to skip the Portland airport altogether and just drive them up to Seattle instead. We spent Saturday breakfast brainstorming ways to get Roger down the driveway to the van, one of the most innovative (and the way we very nearly did it) being to sit him in an opened hard-case suitcase and pull him down with a strap. This was after discarding the stretcher idea and the carrying in a chair idea. We ended up being able to wheel him backwards all the way down (verrrrrry sloooooowwwly) in the wheelchair, but it was not a pleasant ride. Anyway, the upshot is, we got them to Seattle, their plane left, and we all got home safe and sound, if rather worn out and exhausted. I don't know why I felt the need to recount that entire story to you poor people reading this blog, but there you go. I think I was talking about shovelling.... In any case, I'm quite sore and I'm going to take a nice hot bath tonight. Mmmmmm......

That's about all I've got to say for now. I have to go to school tomorrow. It's almost like having to start all over again with the first day of school, since last week didn't really happen. Silly.

Oh, yeah. I forgot. I posted some pictures of the snow. Mostly of things up at Hugo's house before the storm, but a few of the last couple of days at my apartment. See them here.

Guess what I didn’t have today – you guessed it – school! It’s been another “inclement weather” day, though not nearly so actively inclement as yesterday was. I actually went outside today, and though I chose to jump over my front steps rather than try to find them beneath the snow, I did manage to make it to the post office and the grocery store, both of which were fortunately open. One woman I passed on the street remarked “It’s like walking on sand. This is our beach.” I would like to modify her statement somewhat to include the fact that, although it was like walking on sand, you had to crunch through a layer of ice on top, and even then it was very cold sand. All in all, it hasn’t been an unpleasant day out, but that’s probably because I wasn’t trying to do anything silly like drive in it.

Slightly further down the list of exciting things I’ve done today than my walk to the store include yoga this morning, hearing about the Portland storm on NPR, catching up on correspondence, making egg salad (but I forgot to buy tomatoes – bother), cleaning the toaster oven, and experimenting with baking tofu (I don’t want to hear a word, Graham). Not an earth-shatteringly exciting day, but a good day. Not much to blog about, though.

Okay, I'm not even going to apologise for not blogging for forever. I'll just go ahead and do it. But be warned -- it's going to be a long one!

Official News: I've transfered to PSU, so I'm finally a student again -- and after only one day of classes, I already have a snow day! We've had a massive snowstorm all last night and all day today, and just about every school in Portland is closed, along with most of the businesses, I believe. I've been a little house-mouse today, hiding in the apartment and only sticking my nose out occasionally to affirm that, yes, it's still snowing out there. Actually, it's turned to freezing rain now, so it's much louder, and much more unpleasant if you actually have to be out in it (which, fortunately, I don't -- yay!)

It's nice to stay home for a day, but it's kind of silly to have a day off right after 3 weeks of vacation -- couldn't it have waited until I had piles of homework and sleep to catch up on? Oh, well. I suppose storms come when they come. I've done a bit of reading today, and started knitting a hat -- it's coming together and looking pretty good, but it's also looking pretty small, so I am beginning to worry that I'm going to have to take it all out and start all over again.

Hugo's parents have been in Portland since before Christmas. It was a bit rough meeting them at first, but we got used to each other and things worked out pretty well. They were supposed to fly home today, but all flights out of Portland were cancelled because they couldn't de-ice the planes due to extreme wind chill. So they're still here.

Okay, enough about the snow. Just in case any of you are actually interested, here's my course schedule for this term:
- Applied Environmental Systems: Preparation for Problem Solving
- Environmental Health
- Environmental Sociology
- Environmental Impact Assessment
I'm going really heavy on the fine arts this quarter, as you can tell. :) I'm also taking yoga at a studio not far from campus -- they've got lots of classes, and exactly one of them fits into my schedule every day, so I'm very excited. It will be nice to have yoga in my life again. The two PSU classes I've had so far were less than impressive, so I'm hoping the other two (that I should have had today) will be more inspiring. The Env. Impact Assessment class is mostly grad students (trust me to pick that one out for my first term) and the Problem Solving class is being taught by a civil and environmental engineering professor because the regular prof is on sabbatical this quarter. Both have terrible handwriting. :)

I probably have at least three more years of college before me still, but that's okay. The Environmental Studies program is pretty different than Stanford's Earth Systems program, so a bunch of my classes don't transfer. I also have to take a whole lot more chemistry and biology than I would have at Stanford. Ugh. Oh, yeah, and I have to do a minor as well, so that's going to take even longer. :) Interestingly, I have actually fulfilled all of the requirements for a BS at PSU .... I just haven't fulfilled the requirements for any particular major. :P

I'm kind of in an interesting emotional place with school now. I think I decided to take time off of school mainly because the opportunity was there, and then later justified it with reasons. I didn't hate Stanford at the time I left, but I think that's why I was able to leave, and why I'm okay with not going back. If I had left after freshman year when I really wanted to “get out of here” I think I would always have questioned whether that was the right choice. But leaving at a high point as I did left me with a more realistic view of what Stanford held for me, so I was fully aware of what I was giving up when I made the choice to transfer to PSU. I still don’t have any specific academic goals, and will readily admit that I am only continuing with Environmental Studies because it is the easiest thing to do, and I haven’t found anything else that grabs me. I think that was what I was waiting for all along – when I took a year off after high school, for two years at Stanford, and in coming to Portland – something to grab me and tell me “this is what I want to do with my life!” (or at least my education.) It hasn’t come, but I’m not worried about it anymore. I’m at the point where I need to finish college so I can complete that stage of my life and move on. It doesn’t really matter if my degree doesn’t drive my life; I’ve realized that it doesn’t have to, that it’s very possible that education will not be the way I find what I love. But I do need to finish, and I think I’m finally in a place with myself and my life that I can just push through and do it. And then I can move on to the next adventure.

But first this storm has to stop so I can get to school. :)

I got a nice fortune cookie today. Well, the cookies are usually pretty standard, but the fortune was actually quite sweet as well this time, instead of the proverbs and cliches that seem to come out of those things so often. (Oops, I think I'm diminishing the positive effect of the fortune as I type...) In any case, the fortune was: "You will bring sunshine into someone's life." I thought that was very nice.

I decided to finally update my little sidebar calendar, but discovered I didn't really have that much to put on it. Things just seem to happen sort of spontaneously around here, so I don't have the time or the forethought to post the dates on my blog. Like the Oregon Symphony concert in Waterfront Park last week. That was lovely.

Hugo was absolutely wonderful today, and took Sylvia (my truck) out for an oil change, a DEQ smog check, and a VIN inspection. Wow! Now all I have to do is take all those documents in to the DMV, along with my application for Oregon title and registration and a few rather hefty checks, and I'll be all set. My car will officially be an Oregonian, just like me. :P Of course, I'm probably just going to turn around and try to sell it, but all of this would have to happen either way, so it's good to be getting it done. I'm going to try to get up early tomorrow morning (groan) and take stuph to the DMV before work. Crossing my fingers for short lines.

That's about it for now. Time to get back to various emails, paperwork, etc.