just a few short days left..

...that is to say, just a few more days before the excitingly scary world of grad school actually begins, a two-year (at least) commitment to drastically limiting my life to the activities of reading, writing, and gtf'ing. Yes, orientation is, from what I hear, a fairly intense week of meeting, meeting, greeting, and meeting. After that week, it's GER 311 and then the lecture portion of HIST 104, the course I'm GTF'ing for. Tuesday finds me in my seminar on methods and writing...HIST 612. Wednesday is Monday again (both of which days are my office hours...9-10:30), and thursday...dreaded thursday...is the first day of leading the discussion section. Who knows how that will go. Apparently they will mostly be Freshmen, so it's their first time too. I don't really remember if I was scared during my first classes in college. I'll have to come up with an intimidating entrance.

But living in Eugene has been great. The town is fun and beautiful, there are tons of bike trails, great concerts and restaurants, and a lively community in general. Since being in Eugene, I have:

• bought a bike
• seen the Ducks win twice at Autzen, and once on tv in West Lafayette
• picked up keys to my office, the mailroom, and history grad student lounge
• seen the Old 97's at W.O.W. Hall and Sarah Borges and the Broken Singles at Eugene Celebration
• read a bit of historiography
• gotten the idea for a more focused, topical blog
• not started that blog
• become slightly more liberal
• moved in to my first big boy apartment
• setup my new computer to dualboot Vista and Ubuntu
  

All of these things have been fun and exciting. But, this wonderful freedom is soon ending, as mentioned above. Hopefully this will be exciting too, and I'm sure it will. The problem is, it will also be very very very very busy, and probably difficult and perhaps even overwhelming.

Oh, and in addition to my list above (I guess I could just add to it, but why?), I have also experience the high price of West Coast commodities, though some new California friends tell me I ain't seen nothing yet... Hence, my diet has been pretty sparse i.e. ramen, totino's ...mm tasty, and lots of sandwiches, tap water, and pasta roni.

Something else I forgot but definitely deserves its own paragraph is my trip to the coast. Technically it was in celebration of Clayton's birthday, but this is my blog. We went down a super cool trail through old growth forest that ended at a huge secluded beach. Then we left to explore the super cool tidal pools where I saw real life starfish for the first time in my life. For some reason, I was thinking they would be soft, but they are still hard when living. Maybe it's because of Patrick. Who knew?

Anyways, it's taken me about an hour to write this...mostly because I am very easily distracted. I'll have to get some pictures of all these wonderful, new things up here at some point. Of course that will involved a combination of buying a new camera and taking Ali's.

Until next time....listen to the everybodyfields (I'll let you find that one w/o my help of linkage)!!!

http://history.uoregon.edu/faculty/profiles/index.php?name=jarnigan