Only one more day until I return to Bucknell for my summer research, and I can’t wait! Partly I’m excited to see many of my friends again, but I’m also sick of being at home. It’s not an exciting time, and I’m going to be glad to get out of my house. Most of my evenings have been spent watching movies (the movies I’ve viewed while at home run the gamut from Animal House and First Kid to part of The Fellowship of the Ring) and walking around, searching for open wireless networks. Yes, that’s right—I’ve become so bored I’ve walked around my neighborhood (and neighboring neighborhoods) searching for wireless networks with my laptop. I don’t even do it because I want to use the Internet (I don’t, really); I just want something “exciting” to do. To be honest, I wouldn’t mind actually going out somewhere, but the number of friends I actually have at home seems to be countable on a single hand; I think I’ve hung out with two people (friends Noah and Matt, both from high school) since classes ended. I could add a third person to the list if my friend Will was back from Bath (England, not Pennsylvania), but that’s about the extent of my social-ness. Besides, Will is going to Arlington almost immediately, and won’t be back much this summer anyway; likewise, my friend Kennan isn’t even coming home from Colorado this summer. I don’t blame them; Lewisburg isn’t exactly The Place You Want to Be.™

I won’t be sorry to leave my “room” at home behind. It’s not exactly the most comfortable of quarters. My room is in the basement of my house. This was cool when I was in high school, when the basement a) was warm and b) had a modicum of privacy. But now, it’s not that pleasant. First of all, the basement is freezing, even this time of the year, since it hasn’t gotten that warm yet (and we don’t heat it this time of the year); it’s even worse in the winter, when we burn a coal/wood stove to stave off the chill, but that often goes out overnight. Secondly, the basement is a high-traffic area in my house, and I often get woken up very early, like around 8:00 or 8:30; on Monday, I got woken up at 6:30 in the morning!

More importantly, the room doesn’t really feel like it’s mine. My parents are doing perpetual renovations in the basement, and somewhere in the process they repainted my walls and put up a new ceiling, which means all my posters and even my model airplanes got removed. That happened months ago, before winter break, but my parents never got around to putting that stuff back up, so my room lacks the homey touches that make it mine. It’s also become a sort of collection area for odds and ends that aren’t really mine, and a lot of stuff is still in boxes. It pretty much just feels like a place I stay while I’m transitioning to where I’d really like to be.

But twenty-one hours from now, I’ll be back to my room at Bucknell, which couldn’t make me happier. I’ll be back in familiar quarters with familiar friends. I can’t imagine a better way to spend the summer, save for actually leaving Lewisburg. But that can wait until next summer, I guess.