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.

Hanging and wiving goes by destiny.

I don't know what I'm gonna blog about today. Let's see here. What happened last week? Hmmm. Well, I went to class a lot and did a lot of work. Okay, I just remembered something blog-worthy. While we (meaning the XC team) were doing our Thursday workout, it started snowing. Very exciting. I guess. Well, it's actually not that exciting, unless your Kevin Dales and have never spent time in the snow, which I am not. I suppose what's new for me is being in this sort of in-between state. I'm used to being in either a temperate climate with no snow whatsoever or being in a complete winter climate, and I've never really given thought to what a place looks like after only an inch of snow on the year. So that's what's up with the weather.

You step into the Road, and if you don't keep your feet, there is no knowing where you might be swept off to.

"It's funny 'cause it's true." - John Michael Gunn

 I saw this on a blackboard a little while ago. I don't know how well you can read it, so I'll spell it out for you. The y-axis is labeled "People's attraction to me" and the x-axis is "How well they know me." The rest should be self-explanatory. For most of you. And really funny. 'Cause think about it: you don't know this person at all and you love him already. (Sorry Rachael and Nicole for assuming that it was made by a guy. But seriously, there's no way that's not a guy.)

Saturday began as the worst day I can remember. We had a cross country meet in Albany. I thought the bus was leaving campus at 9:45 that morning. It actually left at 8:45. I missed it. I didn't race. Albany was the qualifying race to move on with the team into championship season. So, all things considered, it could have been worse. I could have woken up at 6:00 six days a week for the entire summer and ran obscenely long distances and then have it all not matter at all because I never got to compete in a meaningful race. Oh wait, that's exactly what happened.

Galileo Figaro Magnifico

It will come as no great shock to any of you that the first thing I think of when pressed to summarize the most recent seven days that I have lived through is work. Classes have really started to pick up and accordingly I have been spending a great deal of time studying. The nice thing about my workload is that it is mostly reading, so even if I have, say, five hours of work, as was the case yesterday, I'm spending four and a half of those hours attending to something written by someone other than me, which is considerably easier, I think, than attending to something written by me and by that I mean writing it myself.

Ubi Est Italia?

According to my usually reliable memory, nobody reading this (assuming my audience here is what I think it is) has been to Middlebury. This being the case, I'd like to devote a few words to a description of the campus.

Middlebury is rather hilly. There are few places to which you can walk and not undergo a noticeable elevation change. This creates an interesting dynamic for many of the buildings on campus. Very often, if you walk into a building on the ground floor and you cross to the other side of the building, you will find that you are no longer on the ground floor. For instance, if I want to exit my dormitory building from the west, I can walk directly out without using the stairs, but if I want to use the eastern exit, I must first ascend a flight of stairs. The larger the building, the bigger the elevation change tends to be from one end to the other.