This week has been pretty nice since I only had one class! Fear not, loyal readers, this did not prevent me from having a boatload of reading concerning the Syrian conflict and spending almost all day Thursday in the library as well as a half day on Friday.

I'm excited because I went to talk to a professor about a class and he suggested that I research the German perspective on the situation for one of my short papers. I think this will finally be a way for me to feel less like a novice about the Middle East! I also got another book to read about Syria from him so I can better understand the situation.

The most exciting this this week was trying to set up our internet. Brettlyn and I battled our various modems and routers (this involved 3 trips to Wal-Mart and the returns guy remembering us since we returned two different things in an hour) before finally giving up and going to the Cox store, where they sold us an extremely overpriced modem/router combination. Then after buying the cord that connects that to the wall (which wasn't included), we thought we were in business. But of course, nothing is that easy when you're setting up your internet, so I tried calling Cox support. Our situation baffled the nice lady on the other end, so they're sending a guy out to help us. On Tuesday. So our internetless existence continues, and I'm at the library despite the dreary downpour in order to check my email and post my homework on our discussion page. I look forward to one day writing this blog from the comfort of my own room, but that seems like a pipe dream at this point....

(Can we take a moment to think about how I'm fine typing up my random thoughts and publishing them on the internet for anyone to read, but I'm terrified about putting my short reading response up on a course website for the other 6 people + the professor to read? It's odd.)

This is old, but still interesting - and in English!