Today's highlight was -- well, there are a couple, but the first one was the library book sale. I work for the library on campus and every year they have a book sale. I volunteered to help set up this morning (at 10am, which I sort of regretted after having stayed up past 2am). But it was worth it. The book sale wasn't especially big, and was mostly a weeding of the business and social sciences sections, but there were some good "miscellaneous" books and a bit of literature.

Now since moving here to Baltimore in August I've acquired well over 80 new (used) books. Between The Book Thing and the book festival in September, it's been easy to get good books for cheap. But being an English major, I can't help but acquire more when the opportunity arises. Today was an opportunity. By volunteering with setup, I got to have first dibs on the books I wanted even before the sale opened to the public. And I found this ridiculously interesting book published in 1927 by General Electric titled Electric Refrigerator Recipes and Menus. I don't even know why I find it so fascinating. It has little color pictures and talks about food prep and storage and why every house should have an electric refrigerator. It's quite charming.

I found some other good things too: a book by Roddy Doyle (the guy who wrote "The Commitments"), Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath and Hemingway's Farewell to Arms, among others. I got a stir fry cookbook too, though the one other cook book I have I think I used all of once...

Anyway, the other highlight was talking to a new classmate on Facebook chat. I don't know him especially well but we got to talking about big things going on in our lives, and it seems that we've both made some pretty big changes recently. He's just moved out of his comfort zone, out of a long relationship and a life that he wasn't completely happy in, and is in essence starting over. And you know, it's really... encouraging, or refreshing, maybe, to talk to someone else who had the courage to go after what he wanted, to leave his comfort zone and risk the unknown because he wanted more out of life. Too many people I know, even among my friends, have allowed themselves to settle for lives that aren't quite what they want and I don't understand why. I couldn't do it.