Little things...

Life is a lot nicer since I decided not to freak out about maintaining - rather, obtaining - a 3.3 GPA. Instead I do fun things like read a lot, watch nice movies, decorate my room, and write short stories. It's also nicer since I'm no longer broke; today I went to the grocery store and have stocked my "pantry" with bread, honing drop (honey licorice), digestive cookies with chocolate, sugar (very important for hot chocolate), canned tomatoes, milk, caramel-honey cake, and individually wrapped crackers to eat during class breaks for a cheaper and healthier alternative to white Twix.

Yesterday in psycholinguistics we got out tests back. I got a C, which made me, of all things, extremely happy! I was going to be ecstatic if I had a D, so the C was a really nice surprise. My friend Eva did a presentation on sign language and revealed the fact that she speaks (signs?) Cantonese Sign Language. Now we are all very curious to know what other secrets she's hiding from us, and I'm wondering why I never thought to take sign language in high school. I know they offered it...

After class I went to the library and almost caught up on both psycholinguistics and human geography readings. I checked out "Northanger Abbey" and "The Jane Austen Book Club". We'll see if I manage to read both of them and "Sense and Sensibility" before they are due back at the library in three or four weeks. Shouldn't be too hard.

After dinner, and washing the dishes (Tuesday is my dish-washing night, with Maurits this week), I went to visit Jeanine on the 4th floor at Roggeveen. It's always very nice; she's one of those people who is so different from me and yet we have everything in common. For example, our love of linguistics, books, and Jane Austen. Kind of like Laura and I, I suppose, but in a very different way.

And after visiting with Jeanine, I went down to the 2nd floor to Anne's place, and we watched "Roman Holiday". I haven't seen that movie in years.

Life is also nice since I have been discovering all of the cafes and getting back into the habit of reading, writing and studying with a cup of coffee. Monday I went to St. John's for the first time and found they make delicious mocha whipped cream... and de Vriendschap is becoming friendlier and friendlier!

Today was also nice; I woke up at 830 on my own, no alarm. There is no school on Wednesday, so I spend the day going to the grocery store, reading for school, and reading for pleasure. Later, Laura came over and we went out to buy sticky stuff to hang posters on our walls. What started as a simple errand turned into a mass shopping trip, but I am proud to say I only spent a few euros: on a rubber ducky I couldn't resist for my window sill, a stapler (very useful and practical), and the sticky stuff to hang up the rest of my postcards, print-outs, and any posters that might come my way. (None of the books at de Drukkery were enough to persuade me to drop 10 euros on a book. Coming from Portland, it's hard to spend more than 5 bucks on a book, especially if it's paperback.)

And now I will read another chapter of Sense and Sensibility before I go have dinner with Anne: she's making apple compote for dessert as well as meatballs, I'm making polenta, and the two of us will make the tomato sauce together.