Leave the Leaves

I'm sitting in the Collegium with a cup of free coffee, curled up on a leather sofa in front of the fireplace basking in warmth and glow, taking a few minutes to be still and re-energize before I head off to the library to work on stuff.

Fall is absolutely beautiful here! So many yellows, oranges, reds and maroons - I love it. I'm finding it quite funny how the groundskeepers here at SPU are engaged in a daily battle to resist fall. Just leave the leaves!!! Why do you have to interrupt my quiet meditative walks across campus with the sounds of your rakes and blowers...GAH?

Actually, as much as it irritates me it also reminds me how far I've come. I know how hard it is to rake leaves all day (well sorta, wasn't really my job but I was in the same line of work, and have to do that every day - I'm sure those guys are miserable) ...so I guess it's good sometimes too.

Today we worked on rope bridges, fun stuff. Nothing like sliding across a rope between two trees at 0500. ROTC is going well, just very very very busy and intensive. Land Nav was good this past weekend, only got four hours of sleep between that and drill but I'm ok now.

Made a B on my Russian midterm yesterday!! Not bad for only being in class for a week ;) And I got an A on my homework....veddy nice, veddy nice.

So on my to-do list today:

-Chem review (midterm tomorrow...yikes)
-Presentation for Russian (I get to tell her about you guys, all in Russian!)
-Paper in PPHS about volunteering (snore)
-4 chapters of Asher Lev
-Russian oral practice (I hate calling it that, it sounds so dirty..)

Then I've got MSCI and tutoring. I should quite tutoring because it's actually becoming a bit of an annoyance in my sched, but I like it too much. I now tutor Andre and his brother Dmetry. They're "brothers" both the same age and adopted at the same time, but from different parts of Russia. They're funny. They had me dying last week.

 Last week during tutoring I helped them both with timelines they had to create for "Eastern Hemisphere" It was fun, Andre was in a good mood because he loves art. This is his strong man, one of the things he picked out for his timeline about Japan, I thought it was cute.

 This is Dmetry's time line. He had me rolling on the ground as he explained this to me..."So these are the Aryans invading India...see? I drew an acorn on his head. The liked acorns, it was part of their religion..so I made him wear it" ...HAHAHA! Awesome.

And here are the boys :) That's Dmetry on the left and Andre on the right. Andre is kinda striking looking, he's from an island between Russia and Japan, so he's looks kinda mixed. They're both 11. Dmetry is very sharp on his feet and is prone to be mischievous, he goes to school with Jordyn and I think he likes her but he won't admit it. He's scared of me since I'm in the Army lol. Andre is smart, but not in an academic way - he struggles with school. But he's really good at drawing and loves to create stuff, and it also very curious and likes to know why something is the way it is. He's pretty funny too - he likes to make voices for the characters when he reads. His Mom and I joke he should become an actor.