gezelligheid

(n.) the coziness, warmth and comfort of being at home, or being together with friends or loved ones sharing time in a pleasant and nice atmosphere.

I kept saying to myself  "tonight I'll blog, I'll do it tonight, today, this morning, during lunch...." Sadly my dear friends, it just never happened. The fall semester is long gone, as is my winter break. Spring semester is about to start and my homework will start to pile up again.  Can you believe my Physical Geology book was over 300 dollars? That is just absurd. smh. college. egh.

Fall semester - what I am now calling my "Semester of Loneliness"- ended nicely for the most part. I decided to call it the "Semester of Loneliness" because I attended classes at the downtown campus by myself. I have 10+ friends at the same college as me but they all chose a different campus, and the downtown campus while beautiful, is not a good area to try and make new friends or socialize, if you know what I mean.  To top that off my friends and I all had completely different schedules so even when one of us had time to hang out, the other didn't.  Hence "Semester of Loneliness." The downtown campus truly is lovely though, right in the heart of downtown Norfolk. Red brick sidewalks line the streets next to tall regal looking office buildings, hipster coffee shops, and old theaters with vintage marquees. If i didn't miss my friends so much, and if the sketchy people at that campus didn't bother me so much, I would never have considered switching campuses.

Winter break finally came and my lonely semester came to a fast close. First party on the list was the Chick-fil-A Christmas party. We started the night off right with a ugly sweater contest, and then a white elephant gift exchange where our store's owner/operator bought all the gifts instead of all the team members. It was a lot of fun seeing people's faces light up when they opened the bag that held their gift, then see that same face turn angry when someone stole it from them. After that was birthday party, after birthday party, after birthday party. For some reason a good half of my friends have birthdays in December. Every weekend I had a different birthday party to go to, or parties I should say because sometimes I had more than one. (if you ever saw my tweet "my dad says I party to much" now you know why) It was refreshing to see everyone. I hadn't been around people or friends really, all semester... It was like my internal battery had died and I needed a spark of energy to wake me up again.   I never realized how extroverted I was until the end of this semester. When I'm not around friendly people I kind of just die.

Christmas day was nice. I think we all gave eachother some pretty cool (some strange) gifts. I received a shower curtain! My mom got a butter dish; My dad, a vacuum cleaner. Tyler somehow ended up with a huge amount of shoes, and my sister got an infinity scarf. Now you might think an infinity scarf isn't really a strange gift but to her, it was. You should have seen her face when she pulled it out of its box. She was really confused; She had no clue what it was. *laughs* My bad.

Anyhoo...

Happy belated Christmas and New Year's to you all!

-H