Why, hello again! It seems that I'm entering my fourth and final year of blogging (along with everything else at Carleton, I guess, but the blogging is particularly notable because Collin and I are the only ones who've been doing it for that long). I hope my posts this year stand up to those I made as a wee excited freshman.

So, I spent the summer in Northfield, which is a pretty popular thing to do, for good reason. People aren't swamped with work all the time, so that leaves open a lot of time for long, involved conversations unlimited by time pressure. It also lets you meet people you wouldn't during the year, because social groups mix easily when there are fewer people around. For me it was a great experience because I got to get a little taste of what "real life" might be like – working a pretty laid-back job in the SOAN office, learning to support myself on what little money I made, finding good recipes that can be reliably made by someone with as little cooking experience as myself (chicken curry, burritos and homemade marinara sauce were favorites), and just generally coming to feel less purely like a student and more like an independent person. Another quite positive part of the experience was living with my housemates, a group of seniors and recent graduates who could be described with complete lack of irony or exaggeration as "fun-loving". I was always coming home to things like this:

This is half an infant-sized gummi bear in a cake pan.

Infant-sized gummi bears can be difficult to cut.

We were also always finding things previous residents had left in the house. Among them:

• Three bags of tiny firecrackers
• A list of house rules, including "No nudity when guests are over"
• A fencing foil
• Dried kelp, which is apparently a food
• A full bottle of "Old Granddad" brand whiskey
• A notebook belonging to someone who's not listed as a Carleton alum, which alternated between notes to self like "buy goat to grill", "heirloom tomatoes" and "call your mother", and rap lyrics: "Peep my style, it's so novel / Flava like a Belgian waffle". This book became almost a religious relic among the people in the house.
• An absentee ballot for Seattle, on which one of the candidates was Michael "Goodspaceguy" Nelson.

I also, sort of on a whim, decided to act in a production of Much Ado About Nothing, put on by some theater kids who wanted to keep acting over the summer. There were no auditions, and for some reason I was cast as Beatrice, even though I hadn't acted since grade school, when I played a kid who really liked junk food in my 3rd grade nutrition-themed play. This is the poster (design credit to Jon Kittaka, photo credit to Andrew Bacon):

Things I learned by doing this play are 1) I am not very naturally good at acting; 2) I really like acting. So I'm going to try to act more this year. Which is a nice segue into what I plan to do for my next post, which is SENIOR YEAR PLANS/GOALS/INTERESTING FACTS. Keep an eye out for it!