Mid Semester Break

Last week, and even now on my long weekend break, I’ve been utterly swamped by the sheer amount of homework I have had to do. On Wednesday, I had two papers due, one on the Waksal and ImClone insider trading case and the other on the philosophy involved in law interpretation. Since I was at the comic convention and disc tourney last weekend, I was left to finish those two papers (along with the plethora of reading I have to do every day) on Monday and Tuesday. Luckily, I finished them both, but in doing so I put off much of my other reading.

That other reading has occupied almost the entire evening and afternoon yesterday. I had nearly 250 pages of philosophy text to read, one article review to write and one paper on Leibniz and Spinoza to write. I finished almost all of the reading, but I haven’t started the paper yet. I’ll probably work on that some tonight after my volleyball game. It’s amazing how much time my reading for classes actually takes up. I suppose it also doesn’t help that I’m also in a reading group studying Thomas Khun’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. It’s an interesting take on how we should view science, but I don’t think it is nearly as revolutionary as many modern philosophers have said it to be.

Anyhow, now that I’ve finished my complaining about how much I have to do (yes, I do realize that many of you out there probably have it worse than me, but I definitely know there are also some of you out there who don’t have nearly as much as I do to do), I can talk about the fun stuff! This has been SJU’s long weekend—we get Thursday and Friday off as a mid-semester break. It’s hard to believe that half of this semester is already over, and with it, half of my final semester of college experience. Eek! Scary! I don’t really want to talk about that anymore…

So Kristin came home with me for Wednesday night through Saturday morning. We had a wonderful couple of lazy days. We also managed to get a lot of stuff accomplished. We watched a couple of movies, read a bunch of comic books (she’s now starting the X-Men series that debuted in the early 90’s while I’m still reading New X-Men and Weapon X). We went for some walks, tried to play frisbee in the wind, and even took the 4-wheeler out for a spin. It was so dry out that when we got in, we were covered in dust and our hair felt like it was straw.

When we took the 4-wheeler out, I wanted to take Kristin to see how harvest works, but we’d finished the field close to our place and moved about 6 miles away. She got lucky, however, in that when we went to pick up my car from the shop (it was having all of its filters changed), we stopped at Grandma and Grandpa Gebhardt’s place (which is also the home farm) and caught dad while he was in between loads. Since he was on his way back out to the field, we hopped a ride with him so that we could show Kristin the harvest equipment. Now that she has seen the farm life, she can no longer be thought of as 100% city girl—she’s down to 97.2%.

The only downer about being home for those few days is that I didn’t get to see my family a whole lot. Dad was busy with harvest, Ryan was in school, and Mom had to work 11 hours both days. Since they weren’t around, I thought I’d make their days a little easier and I cooked every meal that we were home. One time we had chicken stuffing, corn, and onion rings. Another meal we had chicken stir fry and garlic bread. Another we had pork chops, stuffing, bread sticks. The last meal I made was hamburgers, green beans, and bread sticks. I can honestly say that I don’t mind cooking at all, in fact, I quite enjoy it. If only I could be a stay at home dad in the future, that would be the life for me……

Now break is over and I have to return to the grind. It was nice to have a couple of lazy days off, but I think I needed a couple more. I suppose I should finish off my homework now this morning because I have to go get a haircut this afternoon and then I’m going to Kristin’s place for supper before my volleyball game.