I live!

Just barely.

One foot injury and subsequent trip to the hospital, two Chem exams, one Bio exam, one enormous final project and final choreography later, I return! (Come on, I'm a Smithie; it's my job to complain about how much I have to do.) Don't know if I mentioned, but I injured my foot in some mysterious way that kept me from dancing for the last two weeks of ballet... and it's still not better! This is infuriating particularly because I was (indirectly) accused of faking it. Clearly you don't know dancers if you think a dancer would fake an injury to miss out on a performance.

Physical damage aside, I've had a rough finals period. Yesterday I took my Chem final, and this morning was the Bio exam. Now I'm completely done, and I have a day and a half in which to pack and hang out with Alice before she embarks on her fabulous adventures abroad. After the exam I had so much pent-up anxiety and stress and exhaustion (seriously, I haven't had a decent night's sleep in a good week and a half. Too many stress dreams about oversleeping and not studying enough and missing my exams, plus my window faces east so I wake up with the sunrise.) that I climbed up the many flights of stairs and collapsed facedown on the bed without even taking off my glasses.

Today my friends and I had a picnic to celebrate the end of the year and the good ol' summertime. Unfortunately, none of us checked the weather before picking a date, so we had our picnic on the Baldwin porch, sheltering ourselves from the rain. It was still really fun, and between the five of us we assembled quite a spread. Alice and I made my mother's summer salad: avocado, corn, tomato, and lime juice (we also added cumin, though I'm pretty sure my mother doesn't use it). Squeezing the limes was fun, specifically the part where my hands were covered in lime juice so I licked it all off. Mmm, delicious limes. We ate the salad as a salsa, scooping it with blue corn chips. Erika and Steve each contributed pasta salad, although Erika bought hers. Now that I think about it, I consumed three different pasta salads today. It is a warm weather favorite. Steve also made fried zucchini, and Adriane made chocolate chip cookies. We sat on the porch, drinking sparkling pomegranate flavored juice beverage, munching, and goofing around. I love my friends so much. That picnic was really great, rain, ants and all.

This evening, I packed all the things. Life lesson: never trust storage material found in the free box. I have a kind of staggering amount of stuff, exacerbated by the fact that I'm not storing anything in Baldwin. I've given a lot of stuff away, but it still looks like moving out on Friday will feature a pretty hardcore game of Tetris.

I'm still kind of wound up, but I'm looking at my almost completely packed-up room and listening to She & Him's new album, and it feels like I'm coming down from a very bad trip. (Not that I would know what that feels like.) I'm going to miss my friends a lot, but I'm ready to go home. I'm ready for Farmer's Market Saturdays with dogs and that awesome fiddle player, Mum's homemade yogurt, reading the paper in the backyard, big bikes with Dad, biking to Allentown by myself to browse in Rust Belt Books, Buffalo Pride, Thursdays on the Waterfront, family beach trips and birthday parties, Mass at St. Joe's, Anouk and the kittens and the allergic reactions they give me, weeding in the backyard, Garden Walk, volunteering at Buffalo ReUse, picking every kind of fruit, helping Aunt Grace make jam, long evenings with my parents watching movies, making dinner, goofing around with Marty and Joe, dance classes at Miss Lisa's, milkshakes from Louie's, picking basil from the backyard, Alison Krauss and the Allentown Arts Festival. There's so much to love about Buffalo in the summer, and these are the happy thoughts that have been keeping me going through all this mayhem.