One month down, three more to go

Yesterday was my one month anniversary of arriving in Rome, and tomorrow is the 3 month mark until I fly home (by the way, that is going to be odd - going back in time zones, what a long crappy day its gonna be!). It feels a little weird to think about going home, like this all just ends so suddenly after buying into it so much. But I'm totally psyched for one last glorious summer in Irondequoit!

From this point on out, I'm pretty much traveling every weekend but one, and I'm assuming the weeks will be pretty low key in order to rest up and save money! It sucks that it works like this, but it takes so much time to get fully acclimated to a new city; how to get around, where to eat, what to do for fun, local spots that arent filled with tourists. And now that I finally feel pretty well adjusted and even moreso knowledgeable about Rome, I wont be spending much time here, but I needed myself to feel like I learned it and now I'd say I have. One major bummer though, I found a blues bar last night online with awesome shows like 5 nights a week and you can get a year pass for 30 euro! Last night was a James Brown dedication, there were Beatles covers, and tons of down-home blues artists. It looked so awesome, but one last night was sold out and two I wont be around for many future shows :-/

So if I had to put a number on it, taking into account that it happens in binges, some days not at all, and only at home, I'd say I play about an hour of euchre a day. In Irondequoit, I think its probably the single thing my friends and I spend most of our time doing, in addition to darts. Therefore, it was always rough never being able to play it at Marquette because at home it makes it so there is always something to do, but I learned to not let it be my vice! Where I plan on going with this is here: why would I ever have expected that half of JFRC plays euchre? I've never been able to find euchre players away from home. Like some type of underground drug, I've been asking around, and found a group of four of us to play, which I was so psyched about. After discussing more, we decided to put up signs, and Thursday night about thirty people were present at our euchre party totally looking to form a semester long tournament!! How wild is that. One negative, we are not allowed to drink outside of our rooms, so when we play in common areas there can be no classic beer-in-hand-euchre-playing for hours on end. I'll take that tradeoff any day!

The beds here suck! You know when you just overall feel achy and like an 80 year old man, your back is slaying you and all? Its the worst, and I think its the beds here being too soft or something. I take it to mean though that I need to get out and have an adventure so I'm not lying down.

A friend and I discussed the idea of having an event on campus called Mensa Iron Chef. Mensa is our cafeteria, and while its not bad food, its always the same, so you gotta learn to make it your own. Thus, many kids enjoy forming elaborate dishes, with me and this buddy being two massive aficionados of the idea. We presented the idea to the SLAs as this - get about 5 people to do it, get a third party to judge, and have about twenty minutes for each contestant to use anything in Mensa to create their own personal dish. They dont have to cook anything extra and we dont need to know the menu in advance, but whatever is there is at your disposal. Administration jumped on it and we got it scheduled in a couple weeks, gonna be awesome! I'm gonna decide what I want to make in the moment, but what I made yesterday was definitely a possible entry - a roll with a piece of grilled chicken with a little cream cheese on it, topped with lots of tomato and mozzarella and a cut up hard boiled egg, all garnished with balsamic and olive oil which i soaked into the top bun so that it wouldnt fall off. So phenomenal.