Returning and Reporting

For those few of you who somewhat faithfully keep tabs on my blog, I apologize. I have been remiss in reporting on my 31st birthday (the day of judgment...at least for my 30 firsts). But don't you worry! I did them all - every last one! And more! It has been a particularly eventful year!

What, you say, was my 30th first? If you have been reading carefully, you know already - it was going to be whale watching. Well, I am very sad to report that I was not able to fraternize with the whales. Surely both I and the whales are the worse for losing that opportunity. But the weather was not my friend that fateful Saturday, and the whale-watching cruise was canceled. This, after Sariah and I RAN down State Street for several blocks just to make sure we didn't miss the boat (pun intended). We didn't miss it. It never left the dock. Our tickets were refunded. It was a great disappointment.

But never fear! Boston holds a plethora of fun activities for a Saturday afternoon. Actually, this particular Saturday, we went to Concord. We strolled through beautiful Sleepy Hollow Cemetery (we being Marchelle, Sariah, Loni, and I - so wonderful to be with good friends!) and visited Authors Ridge - I had been there before, so it doesn't count for a first. And we drove around and admired the lovely historical homes. But the highlight came when we stumbled, so to speak, upon Louisa May Alcott's Orchard House. What a find! It was closed, so we explored the grounds around it, and took pictures. One picture was particularly memorable. Three of us sat/leaned on the short fence in front of the home for a picture, and just when we were giving our best grin, we heard a fateful "crack" beneath us. We had broken the fence of the Orchard House! We were completely dismayed! A woman in a car waiting for her husband to figure out something on a map saw our little defacing of this historical monument, and her face was one of complete horror. We felt so bad that we wrote a little note on a scrap paper, indicating that our chubby buns had broken their fence, and to call me for repairs, rolled it up, and put it inside the door frame for the historical society to find the next day. We certainly left and impression!

So, my 30th and final first turned out to be defacing a national historic monument. Three cheers for me! Or, should I say 30 cheers?

Other highlights of my time with friends included visiting the USS Constitution. If you have never visited, may I suggest you get there one day? It's quite fun. It's a naval post, so the tours are given by current sailors in the U.S. Navy, and they're fun to take pictures with. On the way out, the girls filled out comment cards all about how cute Jared (our sailor) was, and that "Utah loves Jared!" and such nonsense that one writes when one is certain that she won't ever have to face that person again. The next week my friend Patty came to visit, and I, as a good friend, dutifully took her to see the Constitution. Guess who our tour guide was. Yep, none other than "cute Jared." I tried to remain inconspicuous so he wouldn't notice me, but sure enough, about halfway through the tour, he began looking directly at me every few seconds. While we waited for people to file in after moving to another deck, before continuing the tour, he looked over at Patty and me and asked, "Where are you folks from?" I stood in embarrassed silence, but Patty brightly answered, "Utah." He looked away for a few seconds, then looked back and said to me, "Have you been on the tour before?" Now I couldn't ignore the situation. I said, "Yes. I wasn't sure if you would remember," to which he replied, "Oh, I remember." Great!

He continued with the tour, and at the end pointed out that we could fill out comment cards to let them know how they were doing. Then he looked directly at me and said, "And the Captain reads every one." This is when I would have crawled into one of the cannons to hide, if I could. I just looked away. If I were as flirtatious as my mom wishes I were, I would have come up with some clever retort, instead of the embarrassed smile, which was the only thing I could muster. As I departed the ship a few minutes later, he was there AGAIN! No escape! I muttered something about, "See ya later," and he said, "Be sure to tell your friends what I said about the Captain!" I assured him I would. I'm considering going back this Saturday to report that I indeed told them. We'll see. He is pretty cute.

Well, with my friends' visits behind me, it's time to fully focus on school. Fall is full fling here, and it is quite lovely. Or, I might say that if I had time to look up from my books to notice. Truly, this graduate school thing is one of the hardest, if not the hardest, things I've ever done. My Akkadian teacher (whose class has become my semi-weekly drudgery) told me today, as we were going over my recent midterm so she could help me understand why I received such a low grade, that if she had it to do again (meaning the MA of this program I'm in), she's not sure she could handle it again - that it is excruciatingly hard. Yep - I agree. So, it's back to the books. Well, for me, it's actually back to the train to study on my ride home. Toodles!