Blooming-ton!

My April posts, at least the recent ones, are not happy. Because I wasn't. However, May is already an improvement--I've laughed more in the past three days than I did for probably the last three weeks. Being done with finals has a lot to do with it, as is the fact that I am going home in a few days for all of May. I found out yesterday (after a lot of funding craziness surrounding the Fulbright, FLAS, and Congress) that I got admitted to one of our intensive language classes this summer. I'll be taking Arabic 1 from mid-June to mid-August, for four hours a day. We went bowling on Wednesday (I LOVE bowling, despite being genuinely terrible at it) and last night went to our usual (before we got so busy) Thursday hangout for $3 margaritas and cheese fries in honor of it being both cinco de mayo and Karl Marx's birthday. I've done a weeks worth of dishes and have to do about four loads of laundry tomorrow, but I am DONE being intellectual for a little while--I got a cozy mystery at the library and am going to a friend's in a bit for movie watching and pie eating, so those are all good things too.

I got my hair done this morning, and wandered around downtown a bit, and then on to campus to run some errands. It is graduation weekend and it is mental. I had 500ish in my graduating class, but it's obviously a much different ballgame here. I think the graduate graduations were today and most of the undergraduate ones are tomorrow, but there were people all over. It has finally stopped raining, and the plus side is that the grass is very very green. IU's flower budget is really big (I don't know how true that is, but multiple people have told me that) and today it showed! Here is what I saw today:Downtown, man selling art on the street. He's there a lot. It's nothing to write home about, art-wise, but not bad either.


Now, I should mention that my undergrad institution is stunningly pretty. However, it is not too shabby here either! There is no quad substitute, though (nor a substitute for the people I sat on the quad with).
Limestone and towers, and creeks and bridges.The fountain outside the art building--you're looking at the rare books library. The auditorium is to the left, which all these graduation-people were leaving.
And flowers! There are a lot of red and white hanging baskets, but all the graduation people were getting their pictures taken with those, so I went to the ground plants.

And looking at other things that are brightly colored:
My dinner last night--strawberry fool. It should be strawberry-rhubarb fool, but I didn't see any rhubarb (and would rather just pick it from my grandmother's garden when I'm home), so I just doubled the strawberries. Mmmm.
....and my hair is a little purple now.