Great night. In a good place.

I'm in a great mood. After what seemed to be a never ending two weeks, I've gotten through a really busy mid-term period. My sleeping is getting back on schedule and I'm making myself go to the gym tomorrow after taking a two week hiatus. I have lost all the weight I gained after 5 months at my parents house (I'm back to my Chile weight and my pants feel big again) and I'm secretly weaning Oscar off meat and starting a really healthy vegetarian-based diet again. As long as I make tasty things and let him have meat sometimes he doesn't seem to mind. I don't want to get rid of all meat in our diet, but I want to limit it since more and more people are linking meat-based diets to cancer and heart disease.

Tonight we got amazingly good pizza (thin crust Roma style) with a guy I used to live with at Cornell (we lived in the same cooperative house) and his girlfriend who also went to Cornell, who I had never met before. I have always really gotten along with this guy and I really liked his girlfriend a lot. Sometimes it's just so nice to talk about Cornell things with people who went there cause you can say a certain thing and they automatically know what you're talking about. Sometimes it's just nice.

Then we carved pumpkins with F., O.'s daughter, over the webcam. She designed the carvings and we did our best to execute them. It was so nice to be able to share that with her even if it was just through skype.

Then we chatted a bit on our balcony with our neighbors who are really nice. I think little by little we're feeling more comfortable here.

I also got some of my first grades back and have been doing well. I haven't gotten grades this high since high school. It feels really good because I've been putting forth a lot of effort. And the funny thing is that I probably put forth more effort at Cornell and my grades were never this high. Everyone says there's grade inflation in graduate school, maybe it's true. I'm not complaining. The funniest thing is that I got the highest grades from a certain professor who I was convinced was going to be such a hard grader. He's really "open" with his criticism in class which I'm really not used to. I guess at Cornell professors were really encouraging of discussion in the classroom and really came down hard on essays and exams. So it's kind of counter-intuitive for me right now. Since I haven't been doing that well in classroom discussions, I was really determined to do well on my graded things like essay exams and my presentation, so I guess it's probably like mental readiness, too.

Well, I'm exhausted... I'm going to write my post on Classism and Racism in Chile tomorrow.