1:39 AM

Hello everyone.

"If there was no way into God, I would never have laid in this grave of a body for so long." (look it up)

It's late (early) and this is what I'm doing with my time. Sarah is sleeping because she has to work at Target tomorrow. I am not sleeping because I can't stop watching the House Hunters marathon on HGTV. One of us clearly has their priorities straight.

The students all left yesterday for their four day Thanksgiving break and the building is wonderfully silent tonight. I'm never quite comfortable or settled during the first couple of days after my residents are gone. Living in a residence hall feels kind of lonely when you have 120 neighbors move out, you know? I'm sort of required to be always on the ready during the year when students are in the building, too, so their absence is unsettling in that it puts me in a place where I have absolutely no need to be thinking about what is happening elsewhere in the hall. Shifting my thought processes in this way will take a few days, but it will happen eventually. And by the time Sunday afternoon rolls around and the students start returning from their breaks, I'll just be getting adjusted to the fact that they were gone at all. And then I'll just be more disappointed than usual that Monday morning means working again. So it goes.

Today was Thanksgiving day and we took it fairly easy. Sarah cleaned the house. A lot. I helped out a little bit, but mostly tried to stay out of the way. She gets into this mode of operation where she becomes singly focused on organizing, wiping down, and cleaning virtually everything in sight. We have a small apartment, luckily, so these fits of cleanliness generally only last a few hours. My inability to understand her need to "just get it done" in order to "feel relaxed" can be like a match into the powder keg of those hours, though, so I've learned to smile and try my best not to say "let's just do that later." But the apartment looks wicked nice tonight after she worked all day, so I suppose I can't complain too much. You've gotta go for the ride if you want to get to the endpoint, right?

We had our Thanksgiving dinner with some Hall Director friends who also stayed on campus this weekend. Afterward, Sarah put up the Christmas tree while I watched football. The extent of my help with the tree was untangling ornaments and pointing from the couch where I thought some should go. I like having the tree up and shining, I just generally don't enjoy actually being a part of the setting-up process.

There are currently four presents beneath the tree. We haven't yet figured out where to hang our stockings. Mine is blue and is adorned with snowflakes.

I am going to sleep on the couch tonight because I do that sometimes but I haven't done it in awhile. It'll give Sarah a chance to have the whole bed to herself and me the opportunity to wake up tomorrow morning thinking "man, I really should have slept in the bed last night."

Back on the topic of hall directing for a moment -- I really like the three RAs I supervise this year. They're awesome people who compliment each other very well. They're engaged in each others lives and the lives of their residents, and they actually care about spending time with the people who live in this community. I'm sure it doesn't really matter to most of you, but I thought I'd put it out there anyway. A lot of RAs say that they're "people" people when they're saying why they want the job, but get really wrapped up in their own junk once they actually get into the job. My RAs this year haven't been that way at all. I just think it's a really nice and refreshing thing to see them being true to themselves in that way.

Oh man! How have I written this much tonight and not yet mentioned Norah?!

Did you know that velcro is, like, the most humorous thing in the world? It's true. I was changing Norah's cloth diaper the other night whence I captured this velcro-driven chuckle-fest:



I really want to go eat leftover Pumpkin Pie Cake out of the 'fridge, but I won't because I probably shouldn't.

Alright. Bedtime. AKA Couchtime.

Hope you all had a good holiday! Boycott Black Friday today. That whole affair is a ridiculous, greedy, empty mess.

Stay Gold!

MMK