Back in Salem!

Yes, I have made my return to Salem, which means I've moved into my apartment! If you don't know, I'm living with Annie in Haseldorf, which is one of the university apartment buildings. So, I pay everything through my tuition/room and board and don't have to worry about monthly bills. However, despite it being university housing, Haseldorf is pretty sweet. It was an apartment building in the 20s that the university bought some number of years ago, so it has really cool architecture and high ceilings and hardwood floors. Unfortunately, it also has some problems, what with the age. Today, for example, we had no hot water. And I was not pleased.

Anyway, to your left, you have a picture of half my room, and below to the right is the other half. I have the smaller room, which doesn't have built-in closets, so I also have the huge closet in the hall. Because this apartment used to be issued to four people (even though the bedroom I'm in is not big enough for two people to share comfortably), each bedroom has two beds. I was annoyed by this initially, but then just decided to get a cheap comforter and turn the second bed into a makeshift couch. So it has a big pillow and a couple of blankets and is actually kind of nice to have. Annie, in the bigger room, pushed the two beds together and got a mattress topper to make a king size bed.

The one really weird thing about this apartment is the hall light that doesn't work. Well, that's a little unfair to the light, which might very well work. The problem is that there's no switch. At all. A bit of exploration and investigation led me and Nikki to the conclusion that this apartment is actually the combination of a one-bedroom apartment (101) and half of apartment 102 (the other half of which was merged into apartment 103). So, apparently, sometime in the past, the light switch was lost. This also explains why Annie's room is so freaking huge - it was probably a living room once upon a time.

In other news, classes have started, along with my job as a Writing Center consultant. I am the consultant for one freshman colloquium (this Willamette thing that freshmen have, a class that eases them into college). The one I'm working for is about interpreting visual culture, with a fairly new professor. So, I have 14 freshmen to work with on their three papers. They're required to meet with me three times each, so that's a decent bit of money. Otherwise, I have two regular WC hours a week. It's a small job, but a little bit of extra income is still pretty cool.

This semester, I'm taking math, biology, Victorian poetry and (hopefully) Japanese 430. Annie and I almost went to the first day of Japanese 430 hung-over, but then the class was canceled, so we went back to bed instead. Probably for the best, that. But, as evidenced by Facebook, we hosted the greatest unplanned party ever, so it was totally worth it.

Tomorrow I'll find out if I can take 430 or not. I really hope so, because it would make me very sad not to have any Japanese this year. Fingers crossed.