A mug of ale in my hand, putting my feet up on a settle after a hard day's work.

Yesterday I wore gloves on a run for the first time this school year. Last night I wore socks to bed for the first time this school year. Brace yourselves. Winter is coming.

Seven days ago I took the team bus to Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine. On the way up, we watched "Avengers", which I thought was kinda lame, and "Miracle", which is one of my all-time favorite movies. That night, those of us who were there not to race but to watch and support, meaning those of us who could afford to stay up late, watched "The Two Towers" in our hotel room. Extended version. Dark have been nobody's dreams of late.

Find me! Find me!

Six days ago I watched (and screamed at) the 2012 NESCAC Championships. New England Small College Athletic Conference, that is. It's the toughest conference in DIII cross country, and we placed second, missing out on the title by only three points. Not that the blog contributor who attends Bates cares, but we beat your school's team, which was generally favored to beat us. Just letting you know.

This guy.

And the rest of the week was, well, an ordinary school week. I really don't have anything exciting to tell you guys. I guess I can fill you in on some Russian lit. We read Dostoevsky's Notes From Underground, which I found quite frustrating. The protagonist is completely unreasonable, and even though that's part of the whole point he's trying to make, I found it, well, frustrating. That's the best word I can think of to describe it right now. I did give a presentation about it, though. The assignment was to translate the book into a different medium that would be more applicable to a 21st century American audience, and I chose to adapt it into a TV miniseries. Got an A on that. Sweet.

We're doing some crazy GIS stuff in my intro geography class. And we're currently working on three labs at the same time. One of them is due this upcoming Monday, one is due two days after that, and the other is a longer term project, but we've got a piece of it due Monday. So between those three labs and the first couple hundred pages of Crime and Punishment that I've got to read, I have plenty to look forward to this weekend. And that's to speak nothing of all the reading I'm not going to do for my other two classes. I can just feel my participation grade in my Qur'an class declining faster than the popularity of Ali's caliphate.

I bet there's something interesting I can say about my history of cartography course. Hmmm. Okay, how about this? Since arguably the most powerful sponsor of cartographic innovation over the last century has been the U.S. federal government, it follows that obscure, out of the way places are only mapped once the U.S. government feels a need to map them. Take, for instance, the ocean floor. The first ever comprehensive mapping of any ocean floor was carried out at the height of the Cold War. We needed a thorough knowledge of the ins and outs of the Atlantic so we could figure where best to hide our subs, and where to find their subs that were hiding from us.

J-term registration is coming up on Monday. Hopefully I can get into this first person writing course, but it's only got twelve spots. Don't keep your fingers crossed, because that will accomplish very little. Instead, eagerly await my next post, in which you will learn whether or not I got into the class. And if I don't my two backups are pretty awesome. One is entitled "Fictions of the Far North". My understanding of this class is that it consists of books written by very cold people. Sounds cool. That was a pun. Like it. And my other backup is called "The Past and Present Influence of the Silk Road on the Economics of Europe, China, and Central Asia". Yeah, I kinda wish I could take all three. Just not at the same time. No, God no. Other cool J-term classes that I saw on the list:
    Adventure Writing and Digital Storytelling
    The Death Penalty in the United States, in Theory and Practice
    British Popular Culture
    HIV/AIDS: Science, Society, Myth, and Morality
    Cultural Studies of Sports
    Hollywood’s West: The American West on Film
    Geology of National Parks
And the coolest class of all time:
    Lego Robot Design Studio. Yeah. I thought about trying to take this, but I decided I'd rather take a writing class. Still, this is probably, as I just said, the Coolest Class of All Time.

Whaddaya know, I remembered something else I did this week. Or rather, something else I started to do. I began compiling a To-Do List. It's quite long term; actually, you would recognize it as a bucket list. Well, close to a bucket list. It's not a list of things I want to do before I die, but rather of places I want to visit. Although they do have verbs in front of them, so I guess it's a little of both. For instance, "Hike the Torres del Paine Circuit" or "Ski Innsbruck" (sorry for bringing that up, Ms. T) or "Reenact the last scene of "Fellowship" on the shore of North Mavora Lake". It's still a work in progress; maybe I'll share it when I've finished writing it. Then again, I'll probably never really finish writing it.

EDIT: Forgot to say a word about Hurricane Sandy. The school shut down for one afternoon, preparing for bad weather, which never came. Well, that's not right. The weather was bad, but that had more to do with the fact that we're in Vermont in the last week of October than anything. Actually, we got a lot more rain the week before than we did this week.

And a note concerning Sandy: A couple days ago (or was it yesterday?) I got a text from Dylan Tran. I'll transcribe the relevant part of our conversation verbatim:

DT: Yo I'm in middlebury lol

DS: What? Really?

DT:Yeah lol, we were escaping from NYC cause of the power outtages
I woke up and I guess we're in middlebury

DS: Middlebury, Vermont or Middlebury, Connecticut?

DT: Wait I think im in middlebury Connecticut

Yep. So that happened.