Coming Home from College

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Dear Friends,

I am sitting at the dining room table at my house in the Czech Republic. My parents are going to bed. My mother is fixing a snack of microwaved prunes to eat in bed. No comment. Actually...there is no way to not comment on this. Mom, that sounds disgusting. Your husband must love you a whole lot to fall asleep next to a woman chewing stewed prunes. 

My littlest brother is sleeping and my other little brother is at an all-night Star Wars marathon. I am severely jet-lagged. That is why I suddenly got hungry at 9 PM and am eating a small meal consisting of jelly beans, half a Belgian sugar waffle and half a wrinkly apple (Apples are best when wrinkly and brown, in my opinion. That is not a joke. I actually think that.) 

I got here on Saturday. It took the usual 24 hours of travel. Three flights and two hour long car trips. I left the day after finals. Speaking of which, if you have been wondering where I went the answer is that I disappeared to The Land of Finals From Which Few Return Alive. I wanted to stay on track with blogging, but I just couldn't do both finals and my blog justice at the same time. I needed to choose to focus on finals, rather than attempt to do a shoddy job on both. But, don't worry. I am here now and my hope is to continue my commitment to blog every Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday without any more interruptions. 

Now we are back to our regularly scheduled program the question is: What should I talk about today?  How about I get you a little caught up on things that happened during finals. 

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The first big piece of news is that I quite Improv. I have been a part of my college Improv troupe for a year and a half. I auditioned at the end of my Freshman year, without any prior experience. I was thrilled to get in. Although it took me a long time to feel comfortable with the other members of my team, al of whom were complete strangers at first, I gradually began to really care for them. We have become a better and better group of players the longer that we are together. We named ourselves The Secret Menu. I have loved the way the doing Improv gives me a burst of energy. It allows me to exercise my brain, my interpersonal communication skills and my performing skills. (Also my computer hacking skills.)

So why did I quit? Well, there are a number of reasons:

1) This blog. I really want to give time and energy into making my blog worthwhile.

2) My job at the school paper. I also want to give my skills to making my job at the paper brilliant, without feeling like I am too stretched.

3) My schoolwork. Because of my blog, The Record and Improv, schoolwork always falls to the bottom of the stack. That is not good.

4) Joy. Improv has recently been more of a burden than a joy, because of the reasons I just said. Also, it takes a lot of energy out of me, while it doesn't always give me back as much.

5) My wedding. I know that planning our wedding is going to be hard and take up a lot of time. I want to feel like I can put some time into that without feeling like butter scraped over too much bread.

As a goodbye to my fellow team members I made a small book for each person. the book were cartoons of each one of us as we are in normal life and as we are when we are playing our most common character. For instance I drew a cartoon of my alter ego, whom my teammates call The Duchess. This is an elderly woman with a snooty British accent.

The next bit of news is that Sheldon and I will be apart for Christmas. Now this isn't huge news: we have never been together for Christmas. But this is our first Christmas as engaged people Hopefully it is the only Christmas we will spend as engaged people. This makes it somehow different--more sad to be apart. We were talking about it over Skype yesterday and decided that every other time we have been apart for a long itme like when Sheldon went to Italy for five months or when I was in England and Czech for 16 weeks, we have felt that the separation was good. Us being apart meant that we could focus on things that were, for the time, more important than us being together.

But this time it feels weird to be away. I wish I was with him. He is staying in Wheaton so that he can be available in case of a snowstorm on Christmas day. Although he might get to go home to Kansas City after all, now that it appears there will be no snow. But we decided that it is better if we try to treat our time apart as something valuable and good rather than something that we just have to put up with. We shall see how we do in that regard.

Well, that concludes my news for today. I will be back with you tomorrow and perhaps tell you a bit about my time at home. Have a lovely night.

Love,
Lucy Rose