Long day today - early start, followed by a 1.5 hour bus ride, followed by a few hours rafting on the river, followed by another bus ride... So now I'm going to crash. Hopefully my body will let me sleep longer for 6 hours tonight.

Public service announcement: I have way too many clothes. This message brought to you by the lack of closet space in my new room.

I'm back at Swat after a week at home. RA training starts tomorrow, and right now I'm working on unpacking. My new room is nice - the bed is comfy (I tested it by napping this afternoon - in my defense, I got up at 6 am today, which is unheard of for me), I have my own bathroom, and the room itself is rather large. And it's not in the basement, which is saying something, since I lived in the basement for 2 full years - calendar years, too, not just academic, since I spent 2 summers down there as well. Having to climb stairs is kind of weird, and I miss having the water fountain fairly close by. More exercise for me, I guess.

Time to unpack a bit more before my brain shuts down completely.

Because I'm doing just about anything instead of the work I should be doing, I bring you this tidbit of information from a CNN.com article on the horrible heat: "...zookeepers are feeding lions frozen blood to cool off." That's right, the lions at the Franklin Park Zoo in Boston are getting treated to blood smoothies. No word on whether the polar bears are getting the same sorts of perks.

Okay, back to procrastination.

I have procured myself a pretty boy.

There's a heat advisory for the area for the next few days. Today - high in lower 90s with heat index in upper 90s. Tuesday and Wednesday? High around 100 with heat index around 110. Whee!

At least I'll be in the air conditioned library for most of those 2 days...

I have really amazing and intricate henna on me entire left arm, stretching from my shoulder to my hand and covering my ring finger; I also have a smaller pattern on the top/side of my right foot. It's nifty - yay for Allison! Of course, now I have to let it sit and not pick at it, which gets hard as it dries, since it starts itching.

Right now I'm the best kind of tired - happy tired from swinging, sliding, laughing, climbing, running... Yay for friends and acting like a kid.

Food for a barbecue for 40+ people = expensive. And leads to a very, very full grocery cart. Whee.

A rather up and down day, overall. Get to work early - up. Feel crappy and leave after an hour - down. Sleep - up. Still feel nauseous - down. Deal with people - down, then up. Boo to stupid people, but yay for friends. Especially friends who cheer me up by staying up late with me and making brownies.

The downside of no longer having a niche: when I'm bored, there's no one I can go to and say "I'm bored, let's do something." Actually, there are more downsides than that, but that's the one that's currently bugging me. The boredom and desire for people to do things with is heightened by the fact that I actually have been doing things the past few nights - hanging out and talking until the wee hours, playing a board game here and there, etc. But the people I'm closest to this summer have all gone away for the weekend, and while there are people still here that I'm getting to know better, they're not yet the sort of friends I feel comfortable bothering uninvited. Even with close friends I've always preferred to be the one that got called, rather than the one that does the inviting. I don't know - I have rejection issues or something, I guess.

I could (and should) do research stuff and whatnot. But it's Saturday night! And also, I just don't feel like it. I'd consider wandering outside and into the woods or over to the playground to swing, but it's still raining. And while walking and moping is something I'm fine with doing, walking and moping in the rain is a bit too much.

Bush vetoed a bill to increase funding for embryonic stem cell research. I'm doing research for my internship and reading about lovely things like people publishing white supremacist newspapers and defacing tombstones in a Jewish cemetery by painting them with swastikas. I don't even want to glance at the headlines of the NYTimes. All in all, I'm just swimming in happy, uplifting news. Excuse me while I attempt to distract myself by... oh, hell, I don't even know. Grr to the world.

I think I may be a horrible person. I am, at the very least, a very large chicken. *mope*

And now to deal with the leak in the bathroom ceiling.

Problem guy outdid himself this morning. Around 3:30 am, I hear a knock on my door. Still half-asleep, I don't respond right away, hoping I'm dreaming or something. More knocking. I stumble out of bed, open the door. And there's problem guy. He asks me where he can find a vending machine. Yes, he woke me up (when my door sign said "Sleeping - disturb for emergencies only") to ask me where he could get a snack. Sadly, I was too bewildered and groggy to make any sort of witty retort about how having the munchies is really only an emergency if a) you haven't eaten in days and are quite literally starving or b) you're diabetic and going into shock. Instead, I just asked him to repeat himself and then mumbled that there were vending machines in the bike room... I didn't add that the dorm isn't that big and that he could have found them by wandering around for about 15 minutes, tops.

I don't think he even apologized for waking me up. Usually people apologize profusely for waking me during a nap or even just knocking when my door says "busy" - and they generally have real issues, like being locked out or having a smoke detector going off or something. I like those people so much more.

Swimming didn't happen, because the pool wasn't open. Then I was supposed to go to the gym on Monday, but didn't - I couldn't convince myself to go back out after walking home from work in the pouring rain. The weather has been sucky for the past 3 or so days - rain off and on, humidity, greyness, etc. It was sunny for a bit this afternoon, I think, but I only saw it through the window as I was shifting books. Whee.

Good news: the Dunkin Donuts/Baskin Robbins in the Ville is now open, so I can procure ice cream. Yay ice cream. Also, in about 20 minutes I'm getting my hair chopped off - not all of it but still more than a trim.

This evening has actually been pretty nice. I had a good, balanced meal for once - salad and ravioli - and then hung out with people, only a few of which I actually know well. But they were all very nice, and we played Apples to Apples, and I did well and acquired adjectives that basically added up to being a sexy secret agent. I also got to eat lots of fresh butterscotch cookies. Too many, I think, but they just kept appearing.

Tomorrow: swimming. Now: lazy lounging.

Today was the trip to the Mütter Museum. The museum was interesting enough - though Body Worlds was much cooler - and I learned why Legionnaire's Disease is called that (It first appeared among people staying at a Philadelphia hotel; many of the guests were there for an American Legion convention, hence the disease was named for that). The boy was nice, and I will probably see him again at some point, even if it is just as friends. Because friends are good things to have.

I got back to Swat around 5:50, and it was starting to drizzle. I was torn between going home and picking up groceries; the groceries won, mostly because I'm running low on things to eat. By the time I was done at the store, the drizzle had become actually rain. So I got to make my way back to ML with my messenger bag on one side, two paper bags of groceries in one hand, and my umbrella held in the other. It was not a fun trip, but at least the bags didn't fall apart in the middle of the walk.

Now to cook dinner using my newly purchased food. Yum.

Today I woke up feeling horrible, so after emailing in sick to work, I went back to bed. I didn't go grocery shopping like I needed to; I didn't even make it over to Mary's for dinner and a movie. No, I just slept and loafed, ate grilled cheese for dinner, and have begun to read Eats, Shoots & Leaves (which is now making me rather paranoid about my punctuation, I must admit). Blarg to sickness. Grr to summer sickness, especially. Things like soup and snuggling in bed are not the same when it's massively humid out.

Today has not been a good day. It hasn't exactly been a bad day, either... just... blah, for the most part. I don't know. I think I need to take a break from reading plays for work; most of them aren't exactly happy. The last one I read was really good, but also really sad.

I need to go buy groceries (though it's too late today, unless I want to hike over to Geunardi's). I need to get a hair cut. I need to do research/dramaturgy stuff. I need to make phone calls.

I don't want to do any of it.

Today I took a crowbar to a ceiling.

My main summer jobs don't seem like they should be very heavy when it comes to manual labor. And yet... Yesterday I spent most of my morning hauling metal shelves around at the library; today at the theatre we began the process of refurbishing the room next door that we're taking over. This involved moving things and tearing out the old ceiling. It was kind of fun, though getting coated with plaster and dust wasn't great - especially because it didn't want to come off very easily, which meant I got to remain partially dust-coated on my walk back to the train. Fun fun.

At this point, I don't feel very guilty about not making it to the gym. Between the ceiling destroying, shelf moving, book shifting, and all the walking I'm doing, I feel like I'm getting plenty of exercise. It's exhausting, at the very least.