Home (Away From) Sweet Home

I was off from work Monday through Wednesday so I decided to go up to Bing to visit some of my old haunts on Tuesday. When I arrived in town, my first stop was to see Andrew, Matt's old roommate and one of my remaining non-RA friends up there. We hung out for a little bit but I was so exhausted from having driven a whole three hours that I stretched out on his bed and took a nap, instructing him to wake me at 5pm-- I was going to attend a class led by my favorite teacher from last year. 5 o'clock came faster than I'd have cared for and I put on my sneakers and was off driving down to campus. When I walked into the classroom in the Decker building, Maureen did a double take and screamed out "My Emily!" with arms open, clearly ignoring and abandoning the student she'd just been meeting with. I got a giant hug and some quick instructions to wash fruit that she'd bought for the class that night.

When I was back from the kitchen, arms laden with apples, oranges, grapes and cheese, she had me come up to the front of the class and tell all of the nursing students where I was working and a little bit about the transition from Decker to Real Life. I was honest and I swear I could see fear in the eyes of some of the students... but I wasn't going to hide the fact that it had been really hard for me. Whatever though, Maureen was just happy I was up for a visit.

Three hours later, I went back up to the apartments to hang out with Andre and some of the other RAs during duty and a Hillside Council meeting. After that, I followed Tim back to the apartment for a little chat, but returned to the Hillside Commons for some more quality time with Dre and surprisingly I got wrangled into attending a self-defense class led by a university police lieutenant. When duty was over, Dre picked up my bags and escorted me back to Tim and Andrew's apartment where I was planning to take over the couch for my nighttime accommodations... but when we got there, there were about a thousand rowdy Turkish kids with statistics textbooks in the living room screaming about equations and word problems. We took one look around and promptly left for Dre's place. He was leaving that night to drive down home, so he gave me his keys and I promised to leave them in his mailbox so he could let himself back in when he returned to school. A big hug later he was on his way down state and I was back at Tim and Andrew's apartment hanging out with Andrew until 2:30am or something.

When Andrew got tired, I went back to Dre's place and hung out with his roommate Rich, watching television programs about racing cars and southern cooking until after 3 in the morning. Sheesh. When I woke up the next day (well, really the same day, but you know) and walked out of Dre's room, his other roommate Jamar did a double take and was like "You're not Dre..." which was highly observant since I'm clearly a chunky white chick and Andre is a tall, skinny, black man. Heh.

Before I went home Wednesday afternoon I hung out with Pat the secretary at the Commons office for a few minutes, and I spent almost two hours chatting with my Telefund boss, Kim, and friend Emily. And of course I stopped at the craft store and Weg's. It wouldn't be a trip to Bing without going to the awesome craft stores and to my most favorite grocery store in the world.

So, it was a good trip. I had a blast and really can't wait to go up again. Hopefully next time I'll have the foresight to tell my girlfriends that I'm coming up... it wasn't so much spur of the moment as I wasn't sure who would be around to hang out, so it ended up being mostly a guy's weekend (plus me, clearly not a guy). Oh well, there really is always next time. Anyway, I'm off this weekend but I don't think I'm going to go anywhere... it'll be the first weekend I'm off in ages where I don't travel to see a friend. Perhaps I'll finally be able to get some cleaning done! We'll just have to see....