Over winter break my classmates and I went to London for ten days, which was a tremendous amount of fun. Among other places, I went to Kew Gardens, St. Paul's Cathedral, Westminster Abbey, the British Museum, Stonehenge and Uffington, Bath and Oxford, the Victoria and Albert Museum, Harrod's, and Les Miserables at Queen's Theatre.

Unfortunately, this was probably the high point of winter quarter for me. The excitement of starting college was wearing off and though my classes were still fun, I was quickly realizing that all of the "friends" I had made really didn't know me well at all. A lot of the freshmen I've talked to in years since have reported the same sort of experience. Fall quarter everyone is running around meeting people, but by winter quarter people are less interested in hanging out except with their more select group of friends. I did not manage to settle in with new friends as well as others, and my old friends from high school seemed to largely disappear, even the ones who were at OSU too. I don't blame them for this, it just sort of happened, but it did seem to usher in a low period in personal life.

My classes, on the other hand, were not bad. For the first two years I slaved away through the galleys of general and organic chemistry and entry-level physics, so not much interesting happened there, but I did get started on my English major courses. Winter 2006 I took English 265, which was beginning creative fiction writing. The class gave me the opportunity to explore some personal issues through writing and revealed things I didn't even know had been brewing under the surface. Writing has always been therapeutic for me and there wasn't any pressure to write a masterpiece, so it was a good choice.

On a lighter note, I also discovered very quickly the fastest ways to get across campus to avoid the biting cold, and the importance of warm fuzzy boots.