SPRING!!!

FINALLY, it feels like spring in Illinois. It's good timing since today is the first day of spring. I guess that the whole Midwest around us is flooded--yikes! We got a lot of rain here over the last few days, and we were under a flood watch, but the biggest river close by is the Embarras, and it's not very big. So we haven't really had any flood problems. Everyone has been in a better mood today because of the nice weather. This morning we all had to get our pictures taken for the upcoming EIU graduate school newsletter because we were awarded a research and creative activities grant for our Tilford Dudley project. I got to have a very GQ-looking photo taken of myself at the library sitting on a chair in front of a big bookshelf. :-) Then Dan and I met with Kit, the director of the Tarble Arts Center, so she could look at the photos we've taken for the exhibit. She thought they were okay, but she's not very impressed. And she doesn't think that our class has incorporated the "built environment" into the exhibit narrative as much as we should have. That is not Dan's and my fault--and it's TOO LATE to change everything now! I'm afraid that Dan and I are going to have to drive all over the Illinois countryside at the last minute taking pictures of weird buildings. We do need to go looking for a random covered bridge over the Kaskaskia River on Saturday. And Alisha is making us all CRAZY!!! She is totally obsessed with being the BEST at everything, the FIRST to do anything, the LAST to say anything, and the LOUDEST at everything. No one can give any answers in class or anything without Alisha raising her hand and saying the same thing--because she must be remembered as the one who gave the right answer.

But, it's okay because it's spring. For the rest of the morning today I worked on the exhibit website which is almost done. It should look pretty cool. Then I went and spent the afternoon working for Dr. Hardeman. He was really sleepy today. He is supposed to write a review about a book about Dred Scott, so I was reading it to him today, and he wouldn't stay awake for more than two sentences. Then he'd be snoring. The only time he would wake up would be when I would stop reading, but if I just stopped in the middle of a sentence he would wake up, tell me to keep reading, and then fall asleep again, so I found that I had to make it to the end of a chapter and say, "That's the end of Chapter 7" before he would wake up enough to give me further instructions (where were usually, "Let's try the next chapter."). So, we flew through the book because I would start a chapter and just read the first couple of sentences of every few paragraphs. I figured that Dr. Hardeman wasn't getting anything out of it while he was asleep, and I was a little bored by all of the legal jargon, and Dr. Hardeman wouldn't actually focus writing his review until we had "finished" the book, so we made it through most of the book today :-) I kept telling Dr. Hardeman that he should get up and walk around, but he would never realize that he was sleeping until he woke up, so there wasn't much I could do about it. At one point he woke up talking about crabs biting someone in the water. I don't know what that was about.

I am currently watching the BYU vs. Texas A&M game on the internet (because they only show the Midwest games on TV here), and the Cougars are having kind of a rough time. I hope they can get their A-game on. I have been enjoying telling everyone that Lee Cummard on BYU was described by ESPN as "the best player you've never heard of." :-) Well, I've got to go write some papers--I'll try to keep my eye on the game too. Go Cougars!!!