Five weeks of freedom

This is a picture from an unremarkable run, but I'm putting it here so it's the preview image on Facebook, instead of a cat that doesn't belong to me.

Over the last few months, I've been watching some of Food Network's seasonal cooking shows: Halloween Wars, Halloween Baking Championship, Holiday Wars, and Holiday Baking Championship. On these shows, the contestants have a designated time to complete their projects, and when the time is up, the host says, "Hands off your display!" and they all clap. No matter how well they think they did, they clap because they made it through and it's over.

That's how I'm feeling. I made it through my first semester of grad school! I finished up my last projects on Friday, a day before the final deadline. I have five weeks of freedom before spring semester, though I probably will get started on some of my readings ahead of time. I got a list of books I can choose from for my Utah History class, and one of them is The Annals of the Southern Mission, which is what I spent the summer of 2014 working on. 

I don't have my own Twitter account, but sometimes I look at a few others' Twitter feeds, including that of Mormon history blogger Ardis Parshall of Keepapitchinin. She likes posting pictures of linens and cats, but I was surprised to see my book A Historian in Zion on her stack in this one:

Aren't cats the best things in the world?

But I don't want you to confuse her cat for mine. Here's Jimmy sitting on the bathroom scale.

I've been wanting now to go to the rest of North Salt Lake's parks, so this week I ran down to the Eaglewood Village Fishing Pond, right by the Eaglewood Lofts apartments. Just a random pond I didn't know was there! It wasn't special. There's a ramp that goes down to the pond, but it was closed (semi-permanently, it looked like).

In the next five weeks, I'll have plenty of time for running, baking, decorating, undecorating, shopping, and celebrating. Just like it was this summer. I'm looking forward to it.