Finished off "Fall" term yesterday. Roomie had a grand plan to go skiing, and I certainly wasn't going to get in the way, so I finished off my papers Sunday night/Monday morning and handed them in well before the 5pm deadline. We checked the weather report and the rain at the mountain was supposed to stop around noon (and certainly before 1pm), so we adjusted our schedule to get there around midday. As we neared Pennsylvania, the rain turned into a drizzle, and while we had lunch at a quaint Italian restaurant the rain stopped and things were looking good. But then, as luck would have it, as we pulled into the ski area parking lot around 1pm, it started to rain again, hard. Darn weather forecasters....grumble.
Not to waste the hour-plus drive to our neighboring state, roomie and I headed to the outlet malls nearby, where I experienced the awesome wonder of "power shopping." We must have been hitting stores at a rate of about a dozen an hour. Good stuff. Roomie bought more items than I did, but I'm pretty picky person when it comes to clothes. If I'm paying 20-some-odd bucks for some fabric, there better be lots of fabric to keep me warm.
Next, we headed over to the "Delaware Water Gap," a national recreational area. We couldn't find the information center (it turned out that the center had been flooded and was closed), so we forged our own trail up the side of rocky hill/mountain. Good scrambling times. The snow made the conditions a bit slippery, but nothing too dangerous (perhaps just dangeresque).
Later that night it was off to game night with the Woody Woo folk. I avenged my previous scrabble loss, but my Taboo team faltered in the end and lost 76-72. I cost us two points late in the game for not knowing the definition of bigamist. Not my fault...that word definitely wasn't on my GRE study list.
Continued to celebrate the end of term by staying up late and watching the much-celebrated flick Garden State. To be honest, I'm not sure what all the hullabaloo was about. First, the movie had a very slow start; there was way too much front-matter that lacked Braff-Portman interaction. (Their dialogue was the highlight for me.) Second, the existentialist overtones were at some points overdone (the infinite abyss!), but most of the time, the characters didn't speak to (of?) the philosophy. What I'm attempting to say (and probably failing), is that Garden State didn't do anything for me that Fight Club didn't do better. After watching the deleted scenes, I think that the editors could have produced a much better film by including some of those cuts (especially the extended bath tub scene and the one with Andrew and his father). The movie is currently well under 2 hours and has room to grow. (Also, as a side note, 4-day romances do not convince me that "this is it." They convince me that Hollywood tries to distract people from "it.")
Lastly, the tentative intersession schedule is: New York, this Friday to Tuesday. Then Boston on next Wednesday, and probably New Haven next Thursday.
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