“When she had abandoned herself, a little whispered word escaped her slightly parted lips. She said it over and over under her breath: “free, free, free!” The vacant stare and the look of terror that had followed it went from her eyes.”

Exams are over! That was a bit of “The Story of an Hour” by Kate Chopin. We read it for American Lit and I ended up using it for my take-home essay. So I found it ironic that the passage perfectly expressed my feelings after finally finishing all my exams. Especially the part about the vacant stare and look of terror.

My Russian teacher showed us an old Soviet movie at lunch one day, a comedy about two college students studying for exams. This boy and girl are so absorbed in cramming that they do all sorts of crazy things without even noticing, and afterwards they can’t even remember meeting. So that’s how I felt. Bridget says she doesn’t mind exams that much, which is completely baffling to me.

The usually evil administration, which makes us go to school on all sorts of days no one else does, has taken pity on our frazzled brains and given us a four-day weekend. I have been enjoying it very much and have actually been fairly productive. Friday I went over to Christine’s and played video games with a friend of ours from the D&D after school. We made cookies and pizza and I spent the night there. Then we went down to the lake near her house and I got my hands very cold by fishing around in the lake for stones. I was trying to skip a stone across the lake, but it didn’t work too well because there was just ground gravel from the path. The most I got was three skips.

Then Mom came to pick me up, but she had to go straight to church, and I ended up staying there and helping her. There’s a program in Richmond where churches around town take a group of homeless people for a few weeks during the winter months. They get breakfast, dinner, and a place to spend the night. Then they’re bussed back downtown and spend the day looking for jobs, or something. So that’s how we ended up making chili for fifty people. Somehow my sister and I, the two vegetarians in the house, got enlisted to peel the Italian sausage out of its little casing. It was nasty, but blood has never bothered me much. Slicing six onions had me weeping, though.

So today has been nice. I changed the fish’s water, dusted the house, cleaned the bathroom, finished a shirt I had been sewing, and took out the compost. Then I felt like cooking, so I made potato pancakes, lime chiffon pie, and vanilla pudding. I let the gelatin for the pie sit too long, so it came out with little bits of gel in it, but that’s all right. So I’ve been very productive, which was just what I needed after a week of thinking about nothing but academics. Then I watched Willow, which is an awesome movie. I think Christine’s going to come over and watch it tomorrow.

Now I'm going to go plan my garden. Mom said I could have a plot of land to plant last spring, but I never got around to digging it up. So this year I'm going to. I want to have roses and bluebells and lavender and all sorts of things.

January 10
February 4