"Every leaf speaks bliss to me/ Fluttering from the autumn tree."

Today's quote is really two lines of poetry from Emily Bronte, the British novelist and poet from the 1800s and one of the famous Bronte Sisters - all of whom were successful writers and published under male pseudonyms at the time. Emily is remembered for Wuthering Heights. (For those interested, Charlotte wrote Jane Eyre and Ann wrote Agnes Grey) Both Charlotte and Ann published additional works - Charlotte published the most but all of the Bronte Sisters would die young before their talents could be fully developed. [Despite my background in literature, I haven't read any of these. This is probably a tragedy in and of itself.]




It's that lovely time of year when fall is really setting in - weather starts to cool off, leaves start changing colors, I start wearing socks again, and then my building goes absolutely nuts.

Maybe I should say that students in general start to go crazy. I'm sure that it isn't isolated to my building or even my quad of campus. My usually quiet building has suddenly gone topsy-turvy and things are happening all over the place. Roommate situations are moving from a slow simmer to a rolling boil, beer pong becomes an acceptable weekend activity (ha!), and people run around all crazy because they simply can. I stand in the midst of it all wondering what's going on and thinking that it must be time for fall break and that's why people have suspended all views of reality.

Other than all of that, there hasn't been much interesting stuff going on. Students are studying for midterms and I'm preparing to start my first round of meetings with those students whose academic attempts have come up a little short. We're preparing for homecoming festivities and Halloween and programming within the hall is starting to pick up a bit. My staff seems stressed out - from their own coursework and also because they are starting to realize that there are two very short months left of the semester and most of them still have a lot of programming left to do. I know that it's probably time to do a little staff development, but no one seems like they want to do anything fun together that isn't thrown together a mere 10 minutes prior. Or maybe they just don't want to do anything that involves me - either way, it's not giving me very much to work on.

It's a beautiful Sunday afternoon and I am choosing to spend it on my couch in front of the TV. One of the very best parts of being a professional is not having homework to do on the weekends and being able to be as lazy as I want to be :)