It's Official!

So I started out the week getting some things taken care of around the U of O campus, starting with the very important and official student I.D.!!

I meandered around campus for a good while, getting lost and found and lost again. It really isn’t so complicated; I just didn’t want to be the one kid holding her campus map upside-down trying to orient herself while walking off the path into some bushes. Oh wait, that was me.

I explored the library and it was very large and nice. I’ll be having my classes there this summer. I also found that the student life center was enormous and there are lots of nice little pockets to settle into for studying. At Warren Wilson, our student life center was a tiny basically basement room. I think so, anyways, I never went in there.

Monday was kind of my get-lost day, I tooled around the city just getting an idea of where everything was which was fun. There are so many cute little restaurants and cafes! I’m also figuring out bike routes through the city, like which streets are one-way and which don’t have a bike lane. I am glad that I’ve already become old hat at city riding in DC. I liked riding there but here, there’s less traffic, more bike lanes, people are nicer and actually stop to let you pass when they aren’t required to, and the trees, parks and phenomenally tended residential gardens are just the icing!  

I ended up going onto the river trail and followed it for several miles, crossing from one side to another on the pedestrian/bike bridges. Violet green swallows nest under them and you can peer over the rail and see them zoom in and out. There was a pair of mouthy ospreys meanwhile soaring high above.

Cathy and I watched a movie before bed. She can project it up onto one wall so it’s like we’re in the theatre. Now that’s just classy!

Oh bicycle, love of my life how I adore you...

Today I met a kid at the coffee shop who had a frisbee in his bag and I asked him if he played with a group of any kind (I’m desperate to find a leisurely, non-competitive pickup group) well turned out he didn’t but we got to talking and turns out he’s an aspiring writer! He just finished grad school for creative writing and went to U of O for undergrad, we ended up chatting for a long while about cool places to see around town. How could that not, you ask, lead to a frisbee tossing session? How not indeed! We threw it back and forth under the cloudy turned sunny day at a park around the corner for an hour or so. My first official Eugene friend!

On my way home I stopped by to pick up my Eugene Local Food share that I ordered last week..I can’t describe how happy it made me: a HUGE bag of frozen blueberries, kale, fresh eggs, snap peas that were so crispy and sweet, chives and carrots right out of the ground, and shitake mushrooms that brought memories of my college days inoculating logs and harvesting those tasty little forest dwellers. Ahhh. This is how life should be. And each thing was from one happy farm or another just a stone’s throw from Eugene! Well, perfect timing that my pannier, a sturdy bag that fits off one side of my rear rack had just arrived in the mail that morning! I piled in my produce and road happily home, the green carrot tops waving in the wind.