Now Dawn the yellow-robed scattered all over the earth.

There shouldn't have been anything particularly surprising about the alarm going off at 5:00; after all, I did set it to do exactly that, but then that's never stopped me from being surprised. No matter how much you want to accomplish something that necessitates an early wake-up, you never really want to actually do the waking up. But you all know this. What you do not know, however, are the specific circumstances surrounding this particular Saturday morning, and I am here to rectify that deplorable situation.

Bowdoin displays their Zamboni where we display our trophies

The Division III regional meet took place on the twelfth of this November, and as such our eight strongest men and our eight strongest women boarded a rather comfortable bus late in the morning of the eleventh and embarked on a drive of approximately five hours, the destination of which was none other than Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, the site of the meet of which I speak. I, as you may or may not know depending on the level of attention that you have devoted to reading what I have written over the past several weeks, cannot with integrity count myself among the eight strongest runners on our team, and thus I joined the caravan leaving a day after those sixteen left so as to arrive at Bowdoin just in time to watch and necessarily scream at the race and those partaking in it. Of course, a five-hour drive begun the morning of a race that begins before noon necessitates an early wake-up, and now we can return to the subject with which I began this account.

We, and by "we" I mean those of us on the team who were not competing, left Middlebury early Saturday morning with three cars and an amount of people that quite possibly may have been greater than the amount of people that wisdom or perhaps the law would dictate should fit into three such cars, but if that isn't beside the point then the point must be much larger than I think it is, in which case it would cease to be a point, and seeing as I have now lost interest in pursuing this literal interpretation of an idiom I will move on.

Ernest Hemingway was the order of the day in the car that I happened to be riding in. To clarify, our driver played a books-on-tape recording of The Old Man and the Sea, narrated by none other than the great Canadian actor Donald Sutherland, whose voice, combined with Hemingway's distinctive prose, made for excellent sleeping conditions. By that I do not mean that it was boring, but rather that it was mellow and soft and none too overbearing, much like a marshmallow that has been roasted adequately but modestly, browned but not blackened.

I have now made reference to four separate facts; namely the time of our departure, the length of our journey, the location from which we embarked, and the destination that we sought; which, if you manage to put them together the right way, lead you to realize that we were driving eastward during the hour between six and seven in the morning. Yes, I thought about taking out my phone and snapping a quick picture, but I never did; I knew that even had I possessed a camera of ridiculous monetary value and the rapturous image quality that ought to come with it, I could never have recorded that event in any way that would come close to conveying what I actually saw. And now I have considered trying to describe it to you in my own words, but I realize that that exercise is in at least as much folly as the first one I considered. So I shall leave you with nothing more than Homer's version of events, which comfortably resides atop this chronicle.

What better way to pass the time between the two races?

As for the meet itself, we did really well. The women's team placed first overall and the men's team placed an extremely close second, and by that I mean Williams beat us by ONE point. Frustrating. Austin was also a spectator, so I talked to him there. Schmidty won again, and by a lot. But we all knew that was gonna happen. Both our men's and women's teams will head off to Wisconsin next weekend to compete at Nationals. I, however, will be home by then, and in fact I will find myself at Mt. SAC on Saturday morning to watch our XC team compete at CIF Finals. Unfortunately, our team isn't as competitive as they were last year, but senior captain Blake Myers is having a season for the ages on the individual level, so I definitely need to watch him race. He's broken 15 minutes twice this season, a feat that nobody I can think of from CdM has accomplished even once.

Winkler's now moved on to talking about really cool things, like stellar and galactic evolution. He showed us a picture from Hubble of a big cloud, and we were all like, "That's a big cloud," and he was like, "It's a hundred parsecs across," and we were like, ". . ."
In case you were wondering, that's the distance from the Earth to the sun multiplied by 5.8*10^28. And you're flat out lying if you say you can even imagine that kind of scale. At the very bottom of this blog is one helluva picture I found online, not one that Winkler showed us, but it's pretty damn cool. And I'm gonna have to delete it for now and post it when I finish, 'cause it's taking me forever to type with this lag. You'll see it at then end. Or, in other words, it opens at the close.

Nunc morere. Bitch.

I guess what I can do here is supply a less extraordinary but still somewhat meaningful picture. We've moved on to the Aeneid, and what I've found is that every few hundred lines I recognize a sentence that we translated back in Coe's class. At first I thought it was weird that I only recognized lines every so often; I assumed I would either recognize most of it or almost none of it. Then I realized that I probably have been recognizing every line that we actually translated. Right . . .

I deactivated my Facebook account today. I came to realize that the only reason I was checking it was to see if anyone contacted me, and from there I realized that if that was the case, it's no more useful than e-mail or text messaging.
I am, of course, aware that everybody reading this (that I know of) has an account, so to be clear, this isn't me saying Facebook is a waste of time for everyone, merely that it's something I don't care to use.

I think I might have mentioned something like this in weeks past, but I'd like to make it unequivocally clear: People judge my eating habits here. It's like nobody's ever heard of six waffles with peanut butter, blueberry jam, maple syrup, sausage, and a healthy dose of bacon all at the same time. I always thought that was a pretty pedestrian breakfast, or any other meal for that matter. That's the glory of breakfast; it's the only meal you can eat at any hour of the (sidereal?) day, and it always hits the spot, provided it's not from Denny's. And then there's the white rice with BBQ sauce combo. Classic. But no, we're all elitist New Englanders and we have to stare at you eating while we think you're not looking.

On a completely unrelated note, I think I popped a blood vessel in my left eye few days ago. I'm pretty sure everyone thinks I'm a huge pothead now, 'cause I've got this great big pool of redness. But it's receding, so no biggie.

When I post next week, I'll be doing it from home. That'll be nice. I'd like to make one request before I sign off. Would everyone please mention, either in a comment to this or in their own post, when they get home for the break? I'll start us off. My flight is scheduled to land at John Wayne at 10:41 pm this Friday. And I have every intention of having a burrito in my hands before midnight.