Want some more.

If there's anything that can be said about life, it's that it moves on. Last night was bad because, as my father pointed out this morning, I'd lost confidence this would turn out okay. I'm usually pretty good with that - deelaundry can attest to it when we were lost in Baltimore - but last night it was late, I was tired and frustrated, and I needed to get a lot of frustration out of me. I'm still frustrated at Windows 7, but I've pretty much broken through it to the point where I can turn it on and not want to throw something.

I overslept today, and didn't get much of anything done, and I'm not all that worried. The projects I have left for this semester will be much, much easier to do now that I've got a working computer that has wireless access, and I've done more work on outstanding projects during this vacation than I did during the rest of the semester. Discounting the beginning job search, of course - which is a project on a completely different scale.

After the slow morning where I somehow pulled a nerve on the left side of my neck making it impossible for me to look left or tilt my head back, I went out for lunch with my older brother to a local crepe restaurant where he had a crepe and I had most of a giant salad. Then I went biking out to the edge of campus, out past the edge of town where they keep a lot of their big animals.

The campus' sheep runs weren't very full, but the sheep barn was, amazingly, open - I parked my bike and went inside, and did my usual call-and-response with the sheep, cooing over the lambs, watching the birds fly back and forth, listening to the radio that someone'd put in there ages ago and still playing just fine.

I learned that lambs are less likely to run away if you call to them from their eye level, crouching down and looking at them from between the slats of pen gates; I learned that hoggets will look up over the hay troughs if you call out 'Sheep!' in what looks exactly like surprise; I learned that rams are perfectly all right with sniffing weird human faces. There was a single pen of a few rams, horns removed but still emphatically male, who came up to me when I called, and not thinking anything of it I leaned over and stuck my face over the hay trough right up to their noses. So they sniffed me, and I chuffed back at them. It was very close to the smell of old, wet grass, which makes quite a bit of sense given what they'd been eating - not in a bad way, just a sheepish way. And after that, they didn't mind me rubbing my fingers into their wool or scratching their faces.

After that, I went biking out to the very South edge of town, down the arboretum and past the little ruins of what used to be a two-room house where I saw a little lizard, and saw some mares from the Equestrian center running around with their foals. I went out farther, past the veterinary genetics laboratory, where I looked up and saw there was a sundog - a rainbow around the sun - and had to stop and look at it for a while. They don't happen too often, especially not in Pittsburgh, because the sun and the clouds have to be just right with each other.

I came home after that, and then went out on another bike ride to the North Ponds, in part because I could and in part because I've been going once a day for so many days. It was well worth it, because when I stopped to look at the flowers in an untended field, I got to watch geese fly in to settle down for the night.

As Calvin said, the world's not so bad if you can just get out in it.

Now I'm in my room, nearly all packed, and I just need to shower and get the last bits put away before bed. And as much as I don't want to - can't sleep, future will eat me - I know I haven't got much choice in the matter.

I guess I just need to be confident it'll turn out okay.