First Cornerstone: Success!

Currently reading: Coming of Age in Mississippi, by Anne Moody

We had our first trip down to Cornerstone tonight, and it went great! Seventeen of us went down, and we rounded up 18 kids to play with us. All the new things that Karissa got us over the summer were a hit: a new checkers board, card games of "go fish" and "crazy eights", even a miniature "connect four"! It was a great night, and the kids were outrageously well-behaved. Hopefully the weather stays good and we'll go to the playground next week. It's nice to be back in the swing of things - I feel like Cornerstone is the last piece into my weekly puzzle for things to feel like a routine again.

This week has been pretty crazy, what with papers and presentations, catching up on homework that I didn't do because I was at the UMin leadership retreat over the weekend... but the last few days have been VERY productive. Thursday I gave a presentation on Aztec agriculture and the importance of corn. I started a little slow, but then something clicked and I went into Bodie interp-mode. I sat back and listened to myself and thought, "Wow, I've gotten a lot better at this over the summer." I was telling them all these stories, sounding all knowledgeable, pointing things out on the slides behind me, and even playing off the audience to see what jokes and stories I should or shouldn't tell! So things you learn in a ghost town really can be made applicable to daily life. :)

Otherwise, I've just been very productive: running around, getting stuff done. I've been making to-do lists and actually crossing all but one or two things off of them by the end of the day, and it's because I actually wasn't able to do them, not that I just didn't get them done. So that's encouraging, but I have to say that I am ready for the weekend. I've got a fair amount of work to tackle this weekend, from reading, to writing, to researching, to creating the preliminary bibliography for my capstone paper... it's going to be a doozy! But at least I'll be around and able to get things done.

Tomorrow morning my plan is to get up, do some reading, bike over to the Farmer's Market, maybe do some homework/reading at Dell's (which I still haven't seen yet!), come back for lunch and maybe go swimming at Northeastern (another thing I haven't done yet!), do some more homework, and in the evening I'll work the security shift at Hanson. Should be a good, laid back day.

But enough on that: I have to get going. I wasn't able to fold my laundry before going to Cornerstone, and my room is a mess!