Swing, swing, swing

This is the time of the semester where I am incredibly busy. I've spent the last several weekends engrossed in papers and projects and will spent another one this weekend, but realize that by Thursday next, it will all be over. We'll have finals to worry about then, but I'm not overly concerned. I'm doing well in all of my classes and don't feel as if the material is slipping me by. Even though I'm staying busy, I don't have any obnoxious classes like last year's "Marriage and the Family", where we were routinely tested on things the professor had forgotten to go over in class.

I had a respite this past Saturday: on my invitation, my family came up to Montevallo and we spent the day together, which was really quite nice. My parents, sister, brother-in-law, niece, and nephew came up. They arrived late morning and we walked down to the town park. They have swingsets there that are big enough for adults to sit in, and so I started swinging along with my sister and neice. We must have been a sight to people driving by, but I didn't care. An adult swinging on a swing would look pecuilar alone, but with others it was fine. We walked through the park, admiring the wooden bridge and brook. On the top of a hill was a jungle gym, and my neice, nephew, and father cavorted around there for a bit. I just enjoyed watching them. It was a gorgeous day -- simply perfect.

For lunch, we went back down to the swings. There was a little covered dining area tucked into the woods. We thought we were getting out of the wind there, but as it turns out the building just focused the wind. We spent the rest of the day on the swings, playing frisbee, and just talking. It was nice.

I'm staying busy with a number of items:

• An English paper about the importance of England's alliance with Burgundy during the Hundred Years' War.
• A European history paper about how Wilson's Fourteen Points can be used to find the causes of the Great War.
• A "content analysis" for socology, where I'm analyzing three hours of prime-time commercials for their gender content. Turns out female narrarators are used a lot.
• An "annontated bibliography" for sociology. I'm reading six sociology articles and then writing a paper comparing and contrasting them. Mine appears to be on gender and its relation to values. I don't have a good feeling about this one.
• Also, as a hobby, I'm "working" on a fanstasy novel on and off. It's one I've had in my mind since high school, set in a world that is like Earth, but not earth. It features humans, so it's basically a bit like Asimov's "Nightfall" or LOTR -- it's a familar setting, but not Earth. It's a political-historical drama, set in a world with a technology that's quasi-Roman, quasi-late medieval. When I was younger, the story was much simpler: it was romanticized and rather unworkable. A I have matured, so has the feel of the story. One of the most fun things about this hobby is creating a religion and the symbols that go around it. Creating the various societies competing in this drama is incredibly fun. I'm thinking it's set on another planet, but in creating the world I keep running into problems, like seasons. Earth has seasons because of the moon. Do I give my world a moon? I don't want to. I want them to have seasons, but not a large moon -- but I don't think I can have a planet with a stable tilted axis unless I have a moon-thing. This is annoying, because the religion began with a fertility goddess, and if they have seasons I damn well have to have seasonal holidays.

I'm also reading and doing my book commentaries as well as various philosophical and political essays. Recently I discovered Pandora.com. I now have a number of stations:

• "Enya Radio"
• "Bubbly Radio"
• "Contemporary Jazz" (Joshua Redman search)
• "Classical" (Berlin Philharmonic search)
• "Big Band" (Miller Brothers search)
  
• "Crooners"( Frank Sinatra search)