It is blazingly, profoundly hot in Bartlett right now. (Bartlett, for those not at UMass, is the English building: the place I spend the most on-campus time.) For whatever reason, the heat has not been shut off - I think this reason has to do with the fact that the heating facility is not on campus, hence difficult to contact - and so, though the outside temperature is expected to reach 79 today, the heaters still pump out hot air.

Gross.

An excellent weekend, mostly spent bumming around town (literally just bumming: walking aimlessly, looking in shop windows, dawdling) and doing spring-like things. A few games of basketball, an ice cream cone, some watermelon, some time spent tanning. It's weird: I don't have much experience tanning, and I don't yet have much patience for it. This is not to say that I dislike the practice - I, of anyone, could certainly use more sun. It's just that I get restless when I sit/lay outside too long without doing anything. A few times I tried reading for class, but that got old quick when the sun's glare made the pages ultra-white and abrasive to the eyes. Perhaps my mild discomfort tanning will be assuaged once the school year is over and I don't have to worry about things I should be doing?

Sunday night, there was a mouse in Eric's house(!) (I'm not sure why I put that exclamation point: just seeing the mouse freaked me the hell out.) We were watching "The Deer Hunter" (really good) and out of the corner of our eyes, we noticed a dark furry form scooting along the far wall. I screamed; Eric looked worried. We set out immediately to get a mousetrap. But once we got to the store, the traditional mousetraps, their boxes emblazoned with the claim "KILLS!" in several languages, seemed so barbaric. So we got a few "mouse cubes" - cruelty-free traps that allow one to release the caught mouse into its natural habitat. We set the trap near the stove (where the mouse had evidently been seen before, though not by us) and went to bed. The next morning, there was the mouse. It was tiny! And scared-looking. The mouse cube was steamed with its breath. We took it out to the yard behind E's building and set it free. For a moment, it curled into a ball, but a few taps on the cube sent it hopping toward the railroad tracks (and hopefully toward a good life in someone else's house).