It's been an exciting few days!
Wednesday night, I was sitting here at my desk moping over some sort of work, and Brian popped his head in the door. "What's at Val tonight?"
Still annoyed from earlier, I checked and told him. Since it was gross, he proposed that we go out for dinner. We went to Arigato, which is ridiculously expensive by the way, but we were really happy to finally have sushi again. We shared udon and a butterfly roll, so I got to eat tuna. It was really sweet of him.

On Thursday, our history professor decided that she felt bad for making us write an essay while reading a ridiculous amount, and so she scheduled a day in our Rare Books/Special Collections room in the library where we spent a whole hour and a half playing with books from the 17th and 18th centuries. It was AMAZING!!! Her eyes were all aglow every time she touched any of them and she scampered around trying to see if we found anything new that she hadn't seen before. It was so... moving... to touch books that once belonged to people that we study today, that were made by people long gone, and read by those who are not so different from ourselves. We had all of Diderot's Encyclopadie, as well as parts of Newton's writings. I myself was very much taken by a translation of Ovid's "The Art of Love" and stood there reading it for quite some time.

Friday evening, Camille and I went to the Newport (Spanish and French House) open house, where we hope to live next year. The rooms are RIDICULOUSLY nice and HUGE, and they have a huge kitchen, a piano, two working fireplaces, and a lovely common room. I love it!! The only rather traumatic thing was when Benjamin, the French TA, charged down the stairs in nothing but his boxers. I'm really conflicted though, for as much as I'd like to live there, I feel bad leaving Shannon and Brian, especially because everyone else in our group is also going to various theme houses, and so they're the only ones left, since Brian didn't get RC. And I really still do want to live with Shannon, so I feel bad.. :( We'll see what happens. Acceptances haven't been issued for theme housing yet, so we'll see!!

After the open house, the Spanish and French TAs held a party for Carnaval, which was lots of fun. Javier and Blanca threatened that they would "cut us" if we didn't return for the party and if we didn't dress up. They all dressed up in togas, Camille wanted to go Grecian as well, but failed and became a "ninja in disguise." Shannon and I didn't know what to do, but she was brilliantly inspired when she realized she was wearing all gray and black, and so she was pepper and I was salt!
They had piñatas, streamers, and lots of awesome food. Blanca and Javier made it loads of fun by being the insane and awesome people they are, especially when they broke out the really loud tooty horns that little kids blow at parties. They had contests to see who could annoy each other more. Benjamin also took to the silly string way too well, spraying EVERYONE, EVERYWHERE!! I got to hit the piñata, which was slightly disastrous because I'm not very good with the bat. I also won the costume contest for WORST costume because Shannon left about 30 minutes in. Therefore, salt without pepper is just sad and gets an awesome medal as a result. I love this picture.



As you can see, LOTS of silly string. Once a lot of people left, we all started being more silly and started dancing and being fun. Yay for parties with minimal alcohol!