Its actually happening!

Well, before I left for school I thought to myself, "People keep asking me to keep in touch, let's be honest you're not going to do that, so how about we kill two birds with one stone (or feed two birds with one seed for a more PETA approved phrase) and start a blog thing like it's the early 2000s."

Well, here it is! Finishing my second week of classes and my third week of living in "The Big City TM", overall life here has been pretty straightforward. I have been blessed to receive a dorm view of a dumpster that gets picked up multiple times a night as well as a lovely 24-hr flood light so I can get confused when I wake up at 3 AM as to whether or not the rapture has decided to start right outside Simpson Hall.

This previously mentioned problem has been remedied pretty effectively by a sleep mask (thank you Hollie for the rec) complete with all the 21st-century perks of Bluetooth headphones so I am able to be lilted to sleep with the comforting sound of the modern family theme song (my choice), and my roommate laughing at either a TikTok she is watching or her boyfriend on facetime (not necessarily my choice). Overall my watch has been rating my sleep on a scale from 70-90, so I can glean a little boost of serotonin knowing my watch has validated my peaceful slumber.

As for the rapid-fire Q&A portion of this post here's a little sampler;

Q: How is the food?

A: Satisfactory, they always have beets, jello, and cantaloupe. All of which I have consumed daily to keep up my morale, (The jello eating has decreased after being peer pressured into looking up how it is made, thank you, friends)

Q: Are you meeting any people?

A: Yes, of the mass consumption of college advice TikToks I watched before coming none of them told me the way I would meet literally all the friends I have made so far was over a puzzle. I really am my mother's child. I am the puzzle, the puzzle is me. But to return to the question, I have met a lot of fantastic people on my floor whom I enjoy the activity of knitting while they do homework, Call it time management, or call it them all being stem majors, either way, they have homework in amounts I cannot even fathom.

Q: How are classes?

A: As good as they can be, I break into a cold sweat going into my math class despite it being either one or two levels behind me, (shout-out learning disability!). But the rest of my classes are going pretty well, people are not lying when they say that the higher you get the less professors care about formality, so applause for my professors, Peter, Roth, Angela, Cindy, and Prof. Law, (can you tell which one is the non-humanities?)

Q: Anything else?

A: Well given how this post is long enough I will go in a bulleted list.

- I have joined the Crochet and Knit Club, Swing Dancing Club, Women in Leadership, and re-picked up doing some old lady swim laps in the campus rec center. I have not done a whole lot in the city yet, but as the weather cools I intend to. Chicago sales tax is as bad as they say it is (10.25%, screaming, crying, sliding down the wall). There are way too many stairs on campus, and most of them are the scary 1900's stairs which means going down (or up for that matter) takes intense concentration to not trip over your own shoe. I am not particularly homesick, although I do miss a lot of things (sisters, family, good meat, cows, open spaces where there aren't 3 million people at any given time, etc. ) BUT I DIGRESS, things have been good!

Ok, wrapping this up, if you want to hear how I'm doing PLEASE REACH OUT, I have become a horrendous texter, so it might take a hot minute for me to respond in actual English sentences as opposed to emojis, but I promise I will. I'm committing myself to updating this every two weeks or so, but that frequency might change. Up next will probably be me complaining about the shuttle, the ice cream machine being broken (why God why), and other things on my mind.

Well that pretty much all from me at the moment, so signing off, see you all soon.

<3 Gretchen