home(?) again.

Well, I've been back in Vermont for almost a week now and it already feels like I never left. It's amazing how quickly I can get back into my routine and feel the comfort of living here. It scares me but I'm pretty sure that's a signifier for when a place has finally become "home." And what a strange realization, especially when the end of my lease is dawning on me and my roommates and I are trying to plan our lives outside of the magic bubble that is Burlington in just four months from now. I will be so sad to leave but knowing how positive my experience here has been gives me faith that whatever comes next has a lot of promising potential.

I am so excited to start making more concrete plans. I am still confused about grad school: if Hunter is the best choice, how I can afford it, whether to attend in fall 2009 or 2010, etc. But something else has come into view that I am super excited about. Nick's aunt works for the New York State Department of Education and when she heard what I was interested in doing, she sent me all sorts of links about NY education information. I finally have a little more direction in how to go about making my decisions and where to look. It is the little things such as these that make me appreciate and believe in some sort of special force, whether you want to call it fate, destiny, luck, or something else. Either way, I am highly grateful.

On a less serious note, the STRANGEST thing happened the night I got back into town. Animal lovers beware: this story is as funny and bizarre as it is extremely sad.

So, when I first got home, Nick and I were hanging out in the bedroom, talking about how my flight went, etc., when I noticed a few small white spots on the carpet. Nick had stayed in town a few days longer than me so I assumed he would know what they were. When I asked him though, he concluded he didn't know what it was. We then found similar spots in two other locations in the bedroom, one on the desk and one on our table. Before we left town, our landlord had been having roofers come to the house to fix various structural problems in our building, so we wondered if maybe they had come by while we were all out of town to....paint something? The fact that the TV was on when Nick back into town further convinced us that roofers had indeed come to our apartment and furthermore, had turned on our tv! We were pissed. Jesse said he would call our landlord the next day to ask if roofers had come.

So, fast forward a couple of hours later. I went to go see Grace Potter and the Nocturnals perform (sidenote: Grace Potter is the most badass female I know and I am highly obsessed with her and everything she represents!). After the show, I get into my car with Risa and check my phone which I did not bring inside the venue. On it, I have three text messages which I will display below verbatim.

#1, from Mary: "Jhani. I found a dead bird in my bed. It pooped all over my bed and all over the house!"

#2, from Nick: "You have no idea what is going on right now."

#3, from Nick: "Mary found a dead bird in her bed. And that white stuff ain't paint, it's bird shit!"

APPARENTLY, Mary was relaxing in her bed, checking her email and whatnot before going to sleep, when she felt something with her foot. Thinking it was an article of clothing, she reached down to pull it out, but when she felt something hard and feathery, she freaked out, jumped out of bed, pulled back the covers, and there it was. A dead bird. In her bed. She screamed to Jesse and Nick who came in and became just as perplexed as she was. Upon further examination, they discovered bird poop on the living room couch, on the window sill, ALL OVER the guest room, the kitchen sink, the pantry, and the wall below the skylight in Nick's and my room. This bird got into our apartment SOMEHOW, and since we were all out of town, it spent some amount of time trying to get out of all the windows in our house until it crawled into Mary and Jesse's bed to take its last breath. When I first read the texts from Mary and Nick, I burst out laughing from the bizarreness of it all, but the more I realized the reality of the situation, I was overwhelmed with how sad it was! That poor little bird.

Anyway... I hope you all had a wonderful New Year's. Here's to a great new year, hopefully filled with lots of opportunities and exciting changes, but also with the same old, always comforting, always necessary, family and friends. Happy 2009.