Spring Break

I'm home for spring break, and it feels nice to not be in school. Saturday night I stayed in Baltimore and hung out with my best friends Paula and Marjorie. Paula is a 3rd-year at University of Maryland so she lives in Baltimore, and Marjorie, who is a 2nd-year at Drexel, was down for the weekend for the Medical Students for Choice conference. That aspect made for some interesting, um, conversation, with two Catholic seminary students sitting next to us at the bar Saturday night. The one guy was trying to be nice, he said he understood why it was a difficult issue, that women who are raped, etc, need to have choices. His friend just wanted to get into a philosophical discussion about why abortion can be justified but not war, and all sorts of other craziness we didn't want to discuss at a bar. Paula was sitting there uncomfortably and Marjorie was enjoying the fight, but I managed to excuse ourselves politely and wish them well in their future careers. I could never become a priest (not that they would let me!), but I have to admire those guys for doing it. Very noble, and they are going to find themselves dealing with their own sticky moral issues that I hope they can handle.

Sunday my mom and sister Laurel and I drove to Monticello, home of Thomas Jefferson. It was about a 3-hour drive, so I did a lot of driving that day. Monday I drove Laurel back up to College Park and browsed around IKEA for a little bit and then cleaned the house. Well, I attempted to clean it. With two dogs who like to shed and destroy things, it's rather difficult.

Yesterday I took the dogs out for an hour romp in the woods and then played with them in the backyard and finished reading Mirror Mirror, the Gregory Maguire book I got for Christmas. If you haven't read any of his stuff, I highly recommend it. Wicked was great (it was made into a musical, for goodness sakes!) and I've also read Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister. Maguire has a really interesting writing style -- it's actually a little flowery and convoluted for me, but the plot keeps me going. With the Snow White and Cinderella stories, he did a good job of telling the stories in historically and culturally believable settings, which make them less like fairy tales and more like human tales. He also does a good job of telling stories from a different point of view, not necessarily the heroine's. I highly recommend them.

Today I ran a couple errands, including getting my eyebrows waxed, which I haven't done in an embarrasingly long time. I took the dogs out on another walk, this time to some undeveloped land in our development, and Duchess, our 4-year-old beagle, went nuts digging for something underground. She never did find it, but she dug up a good-sized tract of land. Dozer, our gigantic 1-year-old shepherd mutt, joined her in digging, but only to be a copycat -- or dog. He's actually really funny, because he's totally dependent on others. He won't go to the bathroom outside unless Duchess is out there with him; this morning he wanted to nap, but he kept following me from room to room so he wouldn't be napping alone. However, he's also got the shepherding instinct, so that when the two of them go on walks, Dozer will take Duchess's leash in his mouth so he can walk her. Ridiculous dogs, both of them. My parents are building a fence in the backyard so they can go out without being tethered and get some real exercise when no one's around. That will be nice, because right now they are fat, lazy dogs who satisfy their energy requirements by destroying the house.

Anyway, it's nice to be home and not have a real agenda, although I do need to do some studying. I get home Saturday night, and my sister Laurel is going to come visit next week while she's on her break, so I need to get some studying out of the way now, before my next round of tests on the 31st. But the TV and couch are so comfy, I might take just a small nap instead...