No me Gustav

So I never wrote about my evacuation, or my classes, but now I want to write about my birthday! So first, quick recap:

Thursday: Decided to evacuate, called home

Friday: Got on a plane at 4:30 PM to Dallas. They told us that all flights in and out of Dallas were being delayed an hour, so our flight was delayed an hour, but all the connecting flights would be delayed, too. So I got to Dallas and, of course, my flight had left an hour ago. I couldn’t get on the last flight to Boston so I spent the night in the airport, after befriending a young Loyola student named Ray. We camped out at Gate A37. I got eaten by fire ants in the night. Ray was spared.

Saturday: Got home around one, did some shopping and some laundry, took a shower, and drove to Connecticut to spend a few days with Jim and all the other UConners. Très relaxing. While I was there I went through the painful process of getting my flight home changed from Wednesday to Sunday… they weren’t even letting people back into the city until Thursday, but of course since my flight was booked by American Airlines but carried by US Airways, nobody could cancel it. Until they could. Funny, that.

Wednesday through Saturday I was in Lexington, bumming around, doing work for the classes I was missing. Sunday I flew back to NOLA, though it took me most of the day, because at one point I gave up my seat for a free travel voucher and then they said they couldn’t get me on the next flight and I would have to wait. But since they gave me a first class ticket when I gave up my seat, when I got on standby for the next flight and all they had open were first class seats, I took preference over the other passengers! So I flew back to NOLA first class. I met up with a friend at the airport, we shared a cab home, went to the grocery store (which was mostly empty) and I made dinner for another friend that evening, to help me relax.

Then I started classes on Monday. My Monday schedule:

9AM: Intro to Historical Linguistics
10 AM: Beginning with Minds
11 AM: Linguistic Field Methods
12 PM: Intermediate Italian

and then my French Senior Seminar (on French national identity) is from 4:30 to 7 PM. Long day. Especially once I started work as the “administrative assistant” of the department of Cell and Molecular Biology (they were hiring!) and I work from 1:30-4 on Mondays.

Tuesday I have an 8 AM Italian class and then a 5:30 PM Astronomy class followed by observation, and on Thursday I have just Astronomy. I’m also writing an Honors thesis. This adds up to 22 credit hours. To the intense relief of all of my advisers and loved ones, I dropped Italian yesterday. It’s the only one I don’t need to graduate. The Linguistic Field Methods class is the one I am taking for my Masters. Exciting!

I’ve been meeting with all sorts of advisers trying to figure this year out. It’s going to be complicated. But I’m done talking about all that now! I want to talk about my birthday!