Michigan and coming home 2...

I had to cut the last one short so Jonathan and I could run some errands... and then get the flu, or something :( We both started feeling sick today, and I think he has a fever, but it is hard to tell when we are living in a fucking sauna.
More on the trip though...
We found out that Jonathan's niece does, in fact, have nonhodgkins lymphoma. Which is oddly good news. We knew that she had cancer, but found out that it is a very treatable type. She will have to go through 18 months of chemotherapy, and all the doctors seem to be hopeful so far that that will do it. She will have more tests done and know more later. It is good to have hope. But so incredibly sad that she will be spending her senior year of high school going through chemo. She is also a very pretty girl, and I can't imagine how hard it will be for her to lose her hair. Our prayers are with her and the whole family.


After all that driving, being cramped in one position for three hours, then another for three hours, was really hard on my back. I also neglected my exercises this week... oops! And now I'm paying for it. Back pain is one of those shitty things that never really goes away. Sure it may feel just fine for a day, a month, even a year... but then you bend down to pick up a piece of paper, or sit in a car for twelve hours, or just turn around and then you are out for months.
I was just thinking that I haven't been rock climbing or out playing volleyball for a very long time. After throwing out my back twice this summer, I have become somewhat of a wuss. I am always afraid that I will hurt it again. Even when snowboarding, I have less confidence to try new things, or even do things that I already know how to do. I have really taken it easy this year. I think that I need to start a regimented workout, do even more back exercises and strength training...
I am in a bit of a rambling mood because I feel too sick to go out, and I don't want to leave Jonathan alone when he is feeling this sick, but he is sleeping. We are camping out in the living room because there are two windows out here that the air kinda sorta comes in. Whereas our room only has one window and no air flow whatsoever. So, I gotta keep the noise down too. I can't wait until this damn heater gets fixed. We put it off for a little while because it started working normally again for awhile, and we thought that it would continue... we were wrong. Now we just have to wait for our wonderfully idiotic landlord...

I start my last semester of school on Tuesday. I am a little nervous. I was trying to get a head start on my reading during break. I have four Jane Austen novels and four George Elliot novels. And I only got about three quarters the way through Pride and Prejudice, which I have already read, and only a few chapters in to Middlemarch. My brain just cannot take any more information! I tried, but could not finish even a single book over a month! I am hoping that will change, (it probably will) and that I will snap back into school mode in the first week. Luckily, other than the eight novels, I don't have much to read. I think one of my classes has a thirty page a week reading load (which is ridiculously low) and I am not sure about the other ones, but one is an art class, and one is an art history class. So I think that the actual reading will be somewhat slim as well.
Oh, just a funny side note... I was all excited at the end of last semester that I never had to read poetry again, like really really excited... well guess what?! I bought Paradise Lost, a really long poem by Milton :) I also started reading that over break. I actually like Milton a lot, even though he was a sexist pig. He just didn't know any better, and his poetry doesn't reflect his views on women (mostly). I have read parts of Paradise Lost before, and enjoyed it. But I felt the need to read it in full for my own enjoyment and for the benefit of fully understanding the Victorian literature that I will be reading this semester. I figure out last semester that many Victorian writers were obsessed with Milton, but haven't yet figured out why. One of the characters in Middlemarch regards him as a great man, and Jane Austen had definitely read him. So that is my personal quest of the semester. Oh, and also to figure out how a woman novelist of that time could be so conservative! (the novelist of course being Jane Austen) and why so many remakes of her movies insist on making her lead characters seem so much stronger in character and more "feminist," for lack of a better term, rather than fitting within the norms of the society at the time...
Just some random thoughts :)