and then in the sunshine I couldn't stop exploring so I ran on

Today I escaped the lab and went for a late morning run, that turned into an adventure as soon as I decided to go down a trail instead of turning around and then ended up in the middle of nowhere on a farm...

But I made it back to the baby Arboretum at Penn State, which I've been meaning to explore for a while.  The botanical gardens are going to be gorgeous in a few months (right now everything is much more brown than my digitally enhanced photos), but I'd give the arboretum, oh, a couple of decades. Right now it is just an empty field with random little saplings planted in the middle of the grass.

I love this weather. But it is destroying my school focus. C'est la vie.

daylight

Is anyone else being completely smashed by this time change??

You wouldn't think that one hour could make much of a difference, but my body and brain don't know how to handle it!!

It is super exciting to see light till 6:30 pm though, and I LOVE hearing the birds chirping in the mornings.

It's been rainy and dark here the past few days, which hasn't helped my post-spring break slump, but it's supposed to clear up this week.   

Green shoots are starting to poke out of the ground; spring is definitely here and I am sooo ready for it now.

Not as ready to dive back into the chaos of my busy weeks...but here we go!

winter has hit

Well after a couple weeks of practically balmy weather in the 30's and 40's and lots of pouring rain, winter has come to central PA.  With wind. 

It's still not as bad as the midwest though...the good thing about growing up in the bipolar climate of the Great Lakes states is that you will be prepared to survive ANYWHERE else.  Blazing humidity and 100+ degrees? check.  Ten below and an inch of ice everywhere? it sucks, but I have seen it happen. 

A very strange thing about living in the mountains is that they don't really have thunderstorms here.  It is so weird. There was one thunderstorm last fall that lasted about 10 minutes and the next day everyone was freaking out. [wimps.]

All this being said, I still can't wait until I can go out and run in the sunshine in the morning.  I'm starting to feel a little cooped up and sun-deprived.

But if it's going to be winter, I would rather have it feel like winter, and not this weird nebulous half-springish stuff that messes with my brain and makes me feel that spring is on the way.