Delicious brains!

I visited my neuroscience girls in class today because they were dissecting sheep brains and I was totally psyched about it. It was super awesome, and I was really proud of myself because I was actually able to answer the questions the kids were asking and help out the TA. And during the middle of the lab, a CNN camera crew showed up! Apparently they're doing a story on CTY and wanted some footage of the kids being smart, and thought sheep brains would be a good place to start. I'll let you know if I hear anything about when the story will air...

I didn't realize this before, but the girls are using the same introductory neuroscience text book that 9.01 uses. I told them that the author was my professor last year, and they thought I was just about the coolest person ever. A couple even asked if I could get his autograph for them! I love my little nerdlets.

So, when I'm on scheduled presence I like to make small talk with the kids as they walk by. At the end of one such mini-conversation with a male student leaving the cafeteria today, he asked "Will you be here tomorrow?" I said that I'd be in a different spot and he left, but then he came back five minutes later and asked if he could "keep me company" for the rest of my shift. He then sat down and started asking me all about my day and my week and my job, and actually stayed there for the remaining fifteen minutes. When my replacement arrived and I bid my new friend farewell, he said, "So, where will you be stationed for breakfast tomorrow?" Somehow I knew this would happen...

Sheep brains and young nerd love weren't the only thing that made today awesome. I think the camp has finally settled into a routine, and the kids have had two days of sun to run around outside and burn their excess energy. Best of all, my girls and I are starting to really bond. Today when I left my room door open to go to the bathroom, I came back to find they had left candy on my desk. And when I put a white board on my door for them to write down any questions or suggestions they had for me, they covered it with "Caroline is the coolest RA ever!" and "I love Caroline!" A few of them had been complaining about not getting any mail, so when they were at study hall I made them all "postcards" with little notes on them and left them on their doors. When they got back they were so excited, and all it took was some construction paper and markers. Talk about a gratifying job!

CIMRs today: 2
Thought of the day: I have the best girls at CTY!

Shenanigans

Top ten reasons kids give for not wearing their lanyards:

10. I don't want to
9. It doesn't go with my outfit
8. My RA said I don't have to (this is complete BS, all the RAs are very strict on the lanyard policy)
7. This one time last year at a different camp they didn't make me wear it
6. "Wearing it" in my pocket should count
5. Ummm...I'm not actually with this program (spoken while surrounded by kids in CTY lanyards)
4. It gives me a rash
3. It could damage my trachea
2. It slows me down
1. It oppresses my individuality

The highlight of my day was a memo we got from the site director saying we shouldn't let kids throw balls around as they walk places, because it contained the following sentences:

"I have seen the throwing and catching skills of this group and to be perfectly honest, I am not impressed. Some have skills while others...don't."

Also, during tonight's hall meeting, I found out I am known to all the kids as "the hyper RA." Sweet.

CIMRs today: 2
Thought of the day: I hope no one finds out I ate a peanut butter cookie in my room.

It was the worst of times, it was the best of times

Today started off like normal but quickly went downhill. This was our second day of rain, meaning our second day of indoor-only activities, meaning all of the kids have gone insane. I had "Silent Reading/Board Games" for both activity periods, but it quickly turned into "Horseplay Police/Mob Suppression." The other RAs and I ended up having to call in adult reinforcements to keep the kids under control, they were that nuts. The worst part about smart kids is that "because I say so" or "because it's the rule" won't fly as a reason for doing something, and after two nights of very little sleep it's pretty difficult to come up with a reason to put your lanyard on besides "BECAUSE I WILL WRING YOUR SCRAWNY LITTLE NECK IF YOU DON'T!!"

By dinner time we had a pretty nice recreation of the Stanford Prison Experiment going on. All the RAs were sitting around a table and scheming about the horrible things we had wanted to say to the kids during activities and how we were going to lay down the law during social time and hall meetings tonight. The phrase "I'm going to CIMR his/her ass" was used about fifty times in the whole discussion, which was pretty impressive since we only have half and hour for dinner.

After the kids left for study hall we had to report to an "RA social" to meet the RAs from JHU's pre-college program, which is starting in a few days. We were all pretty annoyed by this since we had wanted to take naps/showers/drugs during our few precious preteen-free hours, not meet a bunch of people who have way more free time than us and we will never interact with again. And when we got there and realized that it wasn't just a mill around and chat event, but an actual sit in a circle, introduce ourselves and play icebreakers event, we were all at the point the kids were during activities today. So as a small act of rebellion we all introduced ourselves as the CTY RA to our right, which among other things resulted in our 6'8" Nigerian RA introducing himself as "Stephanie," our tiny little porcelain doll RA being "Andrew," and me being "Mel." I know this doesn't sound that funny, but in our sleep-deprived and incredibly frustrated state it was pretty much the most amusing thing ever. We were all falling out of our chairs laughing while the pre-college RAs, who just arrived this afternoon and were still bright-eyed and bushy-tailed about being here, just looked really confused. Needless to say, the mingling was not a huge success.

At about 8:20 a big group of us snuck out from the social and went up to one of the girl RA's rooms to play Apples to Apples. We only had half an hour before the the kids got back from study hall and and we were still high off our introduction prank, and I have to say that half hour was the most fun I've had in a long time. We were trying to play as fast as we could since we had limited time, and we were simultaneously screaming and hollering at each other about the judging and falling all over each other laughing. To see us you would have thought we were all incredibly drunk, but really we were just releasing all the stress of another twelve hours of getting attitude from twelve year olds, filling out CIMRs, planning activities and dances and game shows, visiting classes, and yelling about lanyards in one glorious half-hour time period.

I think we're going to get a talking to about our behavior during our residential staff meeting tomorrow, but I am unremorseful. In fact, I'm glad we did what we did, because when my girls got back on hall I was in a great mood and happy to see them instead of scowling and wanting to slap anyone under eighteen. Social time was fun, the hall meeting went great, and lights out went smoothly. Once again, I love my job!

CIMRs today: 3 (including my first two-pager!)
Thought of the day: I might go meet the other RAs later for a little late night Apples to Apples...

Addendum

11:30 Go to patrol hall one last time before bed and realize I've locked myself out of my room. Shoeless, I go to the housing office (in the boys' dorm, ewww!) to get a lockout key, return, retrieve my keys, return the lockout key, and return again.
12:00 Bedtime. For real, this time.

I am a genius.

Busy, busy, busy

In honor of the first full day of session I thought I'd give a breakdown of just what exactly a CTY RA does all day. To start with, here is the official CTY daily schedule:

7:30-8:30 Breakfast
8:45 Class handoffs to TAs
9-11:45/12:15 Class time (there are two different lunch shifts)
9:15 Residential Staff Meeting (RAs + SRAs + Residential Dean)
11:45-1:15 Lunch
12:40/1:10 Class handoffs to TAs
12:45/1:15-3:00 Class time
3:20 Students meet RAs for activity period 1
3:30-4:30 Activity period 1
4:30-5:30 Activity period 2
5:30-6:30 Dinner
6:45 Class handoff to TAs
7:00-9:00 Class time (study hall)
9-9:45 Social time
9:45 Hall meetings
10:30 Lights Out

In addition, each RA has several shifts of "scheduled presence" throughout the day, typically about 45 minutes during each meal time. This is to make sure no kids are going places they shouldn't, and that kids who are in appropriate places are wearing their lanyards and playing nice. The times and locations of everyone's scheduled presence rotates through each week.

Now here is the schedule of how I actually spent my day:

6:45 Wake up after six hours of sleep

7:00 Pound on doors and drag sleepy preadolescents out of bed

7:30 Drag sleepy preadolescents to breakfast

8:45 Hand off sleepy preadolescents to their TAs

9:15-10:30 Residential staff meeting. This is when we ask any questions we have and find out if there's any important information we need to know. For instance, apparently yesterday some of the male students found a bottle of vodka hidden in their ceiling, so today the maintenance crew will be coming through all the halls and checking for hidden ceiling booze.

10:30-11:45 Meet with the other RAs on the Friday dance committee to start planning the first dance. We decided the theme will be "Tropical Island Getaway" and we'll play lots of reggae and other theme music. We spent a long time filling out all the supply requisition forms and working on the playlist, since it's sort of hard to find songs that young nerds will be comfortable dancing to.

11:45-12:30 Lunch! Mmmm...cafeteria pizza.

12:30-1:15 Scheduled presence on the steps outside the gym (or "auxiliary dining facility," as JHU calls it). This was basically 45 minutes of me yelling at kids to put on their lanyards.

1:30-3:00 Meeting with the rest of the Game Show Marathon committee. We decided we will have 12 groups of 30 kids each rotating through 6 game shows (two stations of each): The Price is Right, Jeopardy, Family Feud (with data from surveys filled out by the RAs), Figure it Out, Whose Line is it Anyway? and Wheel of Fortune. We start prepping the games and assign RAs to various duties. I'm going to be the host of one of the Family Feud stations!

3:00 Girls get back from class. Things are a little confusing at this point because it has started to rain so the outdoor activities won't be possible, but we don't have the rain plan yet.

3:20 Rain plan is posted. Instead of the activities the kids signed up for last night, they can choose from one of about five indoor activities. Instead of Theater Games and Charades, I'm now running Internet Time and Board Games. This thrills me to no end.

3:30-4:30 Run internet time in the computer lab. But from the way the kids were acting, it seems they accidentally listed it as "free and unlimited crack cocaine time." I enact a 15 minute time limit per computer so everyone can have a turn, and instantly become the most hated person in all of existence.

4:30-5:30 Run board games. These kids were pretty tame, so I spent this hour sitting in the hallway watching another RA blow bubbles.

5:30-6:15 Dinner time! In between eating yet more lukewarm pizza, I yell at kids to wear their lanyards. I'm going to make myself a tshirt that says "Lanyard Police."

6:15-7:00 Scheduled presence in the basement of the boys' dorm. This is to make sure no one sneaks into the TV room down there when they should be at dinner. I didn't see one kid the whole time, so I took a nap in the hallway.

7:00-9:00 The kids are at study hall! This is the best part of the whole day! I hang out with a bunch of the other RAs and we have two whole preteen-free hours to do whatever we want! Today that consisted of playing board games and gossipping about our least favorite kids.

9:00 Girls return from study hall and hang out on hall for awhile. I start working on this blog entry, and am intermittently interrupted by girls with mail for me to send tomorrow, requests to fix broken things in their rooms, and stories about their first day. I love hearing the stories, but the rest I could do without...

9:55 Hall meeting. Apparently when I told the girls "hall meeting at 9:45" they interpreted it as "take showers and shave your legs at 9:45," so we ended up starting late. I read them the daily announcements and give them the activities sign up list, and they try to figure out which activities will have cute boys at them.

10:25 I do my lights out dance down the hall (since I still don't really have a song).

10:29 Lots of frantic preadolescents running around with toothbrushes and attempting to simultaneously change into their pajamas.

10:32 Lights out!

10:33 I pass out on the bed.

10:34 I go to the office to turn in my second CIMR and input my girls' activity choices into the computer (after waiting in line for 10 minutes, since there's only one computer).

10:50 Get back on hall, answer emails, finish this entry, and enjoy the first responsibility-free alone time I've had all day!

Starting tomorrow I'll also have scheduled presence during breakfast every day (tomorrow I've got the gym entrance at 7:30, woo!), and also sometimes I have it outside during the 9-9:45 free time. Other jobs I'll sometimes have include water duty (filling up big jugs of water and lugging them outside before activities start so the kids don't dehydrate) and night duty (patrolling the outside of the building at 11:00 to make sure all the light are off, and acting accordingly if any of them aren't). I also have to make two classroom visits a week for each class I have girls in, which is another reason having the last minute addition girl sort of stresses me out: I have to make six classroom visits every week, and they can't be during study hall. Lastly, any time a student does something inappropriate or I see something concerning, I have to fill out a CIMR (Concern/Incident/Medical Report, pronounced "simmer") form and turn it into the office ASAP. Each staff member is supposed to average 2-3 CIMRs a day, today I had two (a girl who sassed me about wearing her lanyard during internet time, and the girls who made the hall meeting late). It was a very hectic day, and from now on I have to find time for class visits too. Aarrrrrgh!

CIMRs Today: 2
Closing Thought: I love my job!

Okay, the timer on this thing is somehow messed up. It's set to Eastern Standard Time, but I just posted at 10:18 and for some reason it says 8:38. It's not a big deal, I'm just confused...I wonder what time it will say this was posted (it's actually 10:41).

I'm a real RA now!

My kids are here! I was considerably less excited about this fact when I was woken up by my phone ringing at 8:00 am this morning to tell me my first kid was here and I had to come get her. Our staff meeting wasn't until 9:00 and the kids weren't supposed to start arriving until 10:00, so I was looking forward to sleeping in a little for once...oh well.

After the staff meeting, I (and all the other RAs) spent 5 hours unloading cars and carrying luggage up to rooms in weather that alternated between short intense periods of really heavy rain and longer periods of really gross and humid heat. Woohoo! There was a pretty wide spectrum of families, some kids showed up by themselves from the airport with a backpack and a duffel bag, and others arrived with two generations of relatives and an SUV-full of bottled water, garment bags, instruments, sports equipment, and suitcases. The hardest part was the fact that about three-quarters of the families that came were non-native English speakers, and it was pretty difficult at times to give them directions and explain the check-in procedures. But there were no major disasters, unless you count all the times parents didn't believe I was an RA...

During my lunch break I went to check my mail box and found a little note addressed to me. At first I was really excited, but then I opened it up and read that they were adding an eleventh girl to my hall! Apparently they mistakenly had her down as a commuter when she was supposed to be living here, and I was the only RA with empty rooms on my hall. This doesn't sound like much of a tragedy, but I totally panicked. For one thing, I didn't have a door dec with her name on it for her. For another, her room is around the corner and down the hall from the rest of my girls, in a section of the hall I didn't even decorate at all. She's also the only girl without a roommate, and the only one not in the same classes as my other girls (she's in Mathematical Reasoning). So I was really worried about the fact that she and her family would go up to the hall and find that she had a blank door in a blank hallway, and think I'm a terrible RA. I did manage to decorate her door really quickly during my lunch, but she's still far away from everyone else and in an empty hallway. I'll try to decorate her walls tonight, and hopefully her being in a single and in a different class won't be too isolating...

Registration ended at 3:00, at which point parents are supposed to say goodbye and the RAs and students meet each other for the first time. I was really flustered from the new girl and all the luggage moving when I got to the hall, and then even more so when it seemed like none of my girls were in their rooms, but then I got to the last room in the hallway (besides the new girl's, that is) to find all my girls were in there sitting in a circle and talking like they'd known each other forever! I was so relieved, they were all participating in the conversation and getting along (even the new one!) and so happy! It looks like my fears about an annoying one or a clique were unfounded. After introductions and a few icebreakers, we played a rousing two hour game of Apples to Apples (which made me feel sort of old, since none of the girls knew who most of the famous people were). My favorite part was when in the middle of the game one of the girls raised her hand and asked if she could go to the bathroom, there was a moment of silence, and then everyone (including her) burst out laughing.

After bonding over board games we went to dinner together in the JHU "Auxiliary Dining Facility" (aka "gym") since the regular dining hall is being renovated. From there we went to the CTY opening ceremony, which was a lot of fun. All the RAs stood in the back of the auditorium, then the SRAs called us down one by one Price is Right style to run (or dance, in my case) down the aisle and introduce ourselves to all the kids (360 of them!). We then performed our wonderful skits about thrilling topics like "Lights Out at 10:30" and "Stay Within the CTY Boundaries." When I walked out onto the stage to start off our skit all my girls started cheering and clapping for me, and I was so touched it took me a second to remember I was supposed to be talking about lanyards. All in all, it was a very fun time. Unfortunately, as we were leaving the auditorium the skies opened up and it started raining the hardest it had all day. By the time we got back to our dorm everyone was totally soaked and muddy. And just as we were opening the door to go inside it stopped raining as suddenly as it started, just to spite us. Sigh.

At 9:00 pm we had our first official hall meeting. When I went to round all the girls up, they were already all in one room in their pajamas reading magazines and gossiping. The first thing they said when I came in the room was "can we have sleepovers??" I'm so happy they're all getting along so well! Too bad I had to spend most of the meeting going over all the boring administrative stuff instead of having girl talk with them...Hopefully all the future meetings will be more hanging out and less listing off rules and schedules.

I decided that I'm going to make up a "Lights Out Song" to run down the hallway singing every night at 10:30 instead of just knocking on everyone's doors and telling them to go to bed. I also want to make up some sort of signal for when it's time for hall meetings, too bad I didn't bring my trombone...Any ideas for either the song or an instrument/noisemaker I can make out of really basic art supplies?

What do you call a cow that researches brains?

A moo-roscientist!

We started off today with a discussion of the rules governing PDAs amongst the little nerdlets. The highlight was definitely when the site director said, "There's nothing worse than dirty dancing when you're uncoordinated and awkward, but trust me you will see plenty of it." I feel this is one aspect of this summer that living in EC has prepared me for very nicely...

In the afternoon we signed up for what committees we'll be on for the session. We each have to be on the planning committee for one ongoing activity and one super special weekend activity. My ongoing activity is the Friday night dances (and awkward dancing therein) and my weekend activity is the "Game Show Marathon" we're having this Saturday afternoon. It will entail having the kids go from station to station participating in their favorite game shows, from "Jeopardy" to "The Price is Right" to "Family Feud," and competing for prizes. It looks like it will be a lot of work, but at least I'll get it out of the way early. We also had to sign up for our first week of daily activities. Each RA is responsible for holding two one-hour activities a day five days a week, so that's thirty activities per three week session! I had a pretty hard time coming up with enough for this week, I don't know what I'm going to do for the next two. Some of the activities I'll be running this week are charades, ridiculous pictionary (thanks, 5W!), bubble blowing, cloudwatching, and 60s music appreciation. Any ideas for the rest of the session would be really appreciated (as long as they're appropriate for 12-15 year olds)!

The last thing we did today was pick groups for the skits we have to perform for the kids at the opening ceremony tomorrow. Each skit is about some regulation, so it's basically a plot to teach the kids all the CTY rules while they think they're being entertained. My two groupmates and I will be performing a skit entitled "Lanyards Are My Everything" about the importance of always wearing your official CTY lanyard (with your ID and room key attached) and the dire consequences of swinging said lanyard. I don't want to give away too much of our inspired script, but lets just say it involves a CTY student named Charlie Brown and a Lanyard-Eating-Tree (since that's where the lanyards tend to end up when the kids swing them around). Hopefully the kids won't figure out that our skit title is also an acronym for something...

They gave us most of the night off to finish up our door decs and decorate our halls. I ended up putting each girl's name on a construction paper Erlenmeyer flask with little hole-punch "bubbles" in it, but I'm afraid they look a little more like dresses than glassware...

I also lined the hallway with a bunch of cheesey jokes about brains since I figured by the end of three weeks of neuroscience they'll be able to appreciate them. The biomedical science girls will just have to deal.

My last assignment was to make a spot with all the information the kids will need to know about being here (schedules, maps, daily activities, etc...). At first I was very ambitious and was going to make it some sort of crazy lab bench theme, but after it took two hours for me to cut out all the neuroscience jokes, back them with construction paper and put them on the walls, I ended up going with the lazy approach instead (if it looks a little funny it's because the wall is curved).

I'm really excited about the kids getting here tomorrow morning. We've spent the past 72 hours getting ready for them, and now I want them to be here to participate in my activities and laugh at my bad jokes! I'm a little nervous that I'll end up with a really annoying girl or a clique of mean girls on my hall, but I'm optimistic that the next six weeks are going to be really fun.

Anyways, I better wrap up because it's just about time for the SRA to inspect my hall. I hope my ambiguous door decs and bad puns pass muster!

On Scheduled Presence and Peanut-Eating

I spent fifteen hours today at various meetings and workshops to learn all about my responsibilities as an RA, and I really only learned one thing: these kids are *never* to be left alone. They want to go to the bathroom in class, their TA has to walk them there. They want to get a drink during an activity, either find another RA to take them or take all your kids. Even when they think they're alone, they're not. For instance, they are allowed to walk "unattended" to meals and hang out during "unsupervised social time" on the lawn outside the dorms, or so they think. But in reality all the RAs have "scheduled presence" during these times, during which they are supposed to look like they are casually going for a walk or reading on a bench nearby but actually be carefully watching the kids and ready to spring into action should any kid wander past the official CTY boundaries or call another kid a name. I was totally oblivious to this aspect of the camp when I went here as a young nerd, I thought I was being very adult and independent but in reality I guess I was still being babysat. I guess as long as the kids don't realize that while they're here it won't cramp their style too much...

Wait, actually, I learned two things today. The second thing being that while CTY is here, JHU is a peanut-free campus. I didn't even know such a thing existed, but apparently there are enough kids with severe peanut allergies to merit this policy. So any staff that brought peanut products has to eat them all in the next 24 hours or throw them out once the kids get here. At one point one of the administrators actually said, "Peanut-eating, like drinking and smoking, is to be engaged in by staff strictly off campus." Wow.

But other than realizing that my first experience of independence was just a cruel sham and I can't publicly eat peanut butter for the next six weeks, today was pretty fun. All the other RAs and residential staff are really nice and everyone is really excited to be here, which makes me really excited about it too. And I think I'm going to need that excitement once the kids get here, since according to the RAs who have done this before once the actual camp starts you don't have any free time from when the kids get up at 7:30 to when they go to bed at 11:00. So we'll see how this whole blogging thing works out...

This afternoon I got the list of the ten girls who will be living on my hall for the first three weeks. The first thing I noticed was that they were all born in the nineties, which made me feel sort of old. But other than that, getting the list made me really eager to meet them and get started with the whole bonding and facilitating social interactions thing. The students live with their (same sex) classmates, and there are two classes of girls living on my hall: Introduction to Biomedical Science and Introduction to Neuroscience. I think they try to assign the classes to RAs with similar majors, but apparently it doesn't always work out because the male RA for the neuroscience class is an art major. Go figure. I'm really excited because this means I'll have some of the nerdiest nerds at nerd camp, which is exactly what I wanted. And maybe one day I'll be able to take a little credit for one of them growing up to be an MIT Course 9er! Well, assuming that's something to be proud of, that is.

Anyways, I have to come up with four activity plans and make "door decs" for all my girls before we start again tomorrow at 7:30, so I think that's it for blogging tonight. I think I'm going to go with a Mad Scientist theme when I decorate the hall, and if it works out maybe I'll post some pictures!

First Day!

I moved into nerd camp today! The nerd campers don't get here until Sunday so I don't know if it can fairly be called "nerd camp" yet, but I'm here and I'm a nerd so I guess that counts for something...

Let me just say that today was really bloody hot. As in, the-instant-you-step-outside-you're-covered-in-a-fine-layer-of-sweat hot. I was wearing flip-flops with black bottoms and my foot sort of slipped out of one as I was walking, and when I slipped it back on all of half a second later I actually yelped because it was already so hot it burned, and I am a wuss. So I had fun moving all my stuff up three flights of stairs and then walking all the way acrosss campus three times (to the place where you register for internet access, then back to my room because I needed to know the little number written by my ethernet jack, then back to the internet place), then realizing that I forgot my little shower caddy thing with all my showering stuff in it in my bathroom in Frederick. I did manage a sort of hobo shower anyway...I just used the hand soap from the bathroom. Fortunately JHU is only about 45 minutes from my house, so my lovely mother is going to drive back tomorrow with proper showering supplies, and also a bag of socks. Because I am so cool, I managed to forget to pack those too.

JHU is definitely very different from MIT. There are trees and green space everywhere and all the buildings are very traditional looking with brick with gables and other fancy architectural things I don't know the names of. I feel like I'm walking around in a college brochure, everything is so picturesque. For example, here is the dorm I am living in. It is pretty much identical to all the other buildings on campus.

The dorm's insides are also pretty different than what I'm used to. I think I've been spoiled by living in EC, my room here seems really small but I think it's an average size single for most schools. I was going to post a picture of it, but there's no place in it where I can stand far enough back to get more than one piece of furniture in the frame. And in case you're wondering why I don't just stand in the door, it's because the door can only open about a foot before hitting the dresser. Thankfully it has air conditioning, but I don't know how I'm going to function having to walk all the way to the bathroom just to use the sink... It was especially awkward tonight; there's some other camp that ends tomorrow sharing the building with us, so when I went to the bathroom to brush my teeth I was met by a bunch of half-naked high school girls showering and otherwise getting ready for some dance-type activity. They seemed as surprised to see me as I was to see them, we just kind of sized each other up for a moment before I headed to the sink and we proceeded to ignore each other for the rest of my time there.

The only official CTY activity planned for today was a barbecue dinner so all the staff could meet each other and mingle a little. I met a few interesting people, including one girl who's already been an RA here for three summers. That means it must be fun, right? I guess I'll meet more people tomorrow when we start all the RA-training activities in earnest. And since by "in earnest" I mean "at 7:30 in the morning," I think it's about time for me to go to bed. If the hub of hairstyling and gossipping that has sprung up outside my door ever quiets down, that is...

(This was actually written around midnight on 6/22, I just didn't get internet access until today).