Volcano

Mini 1 came and went, woohoo. I can't really complain about the results -- they were frankly better than expected given how freaked out I was before the test itself. I felt like I didn't know a blasted thing. I'm now hooked on Dexter. We burned through True Blood, and now it looks like the same will occur with Dexter. I must say, though, that I'm amazed the creator isn't on a perpetual thorazine drip. No normal person would ever come up with some of these plot lines. Is it possible we had Ted Bundy and Jeffrey Dalmer write down all of their sinister thoughts so we could commercially exploit them when society had reached its limit of pathetic reality television and Sex and the City went off the air???

In other news the friendly Suffriere Hills volcano on the lovely little island of Montserrat is acting up again. For those not in the know, the volcano was dormant for hundreds of years, then in 1997 blew its up, burying the capital of Montserrat, Plymouth. Since then it's been erupting in an on-again-off-again fashion. Thursday, 11 February 2010 its dome collapsed sending volcanic ash nine (NINE!) miles into the sky. Since we are only about 100 miles away from Montserrat, some of the ash came raining down on Dominica. It looked like snow at times it was so heavy. I find that somewhat comical considering at home in Atlanta they had/have four inches of snow. It's very rare for us to have two winters in a row where we get a lot of snow. At the end of February last year we had seven inches in some places near Athens. I read yesterday that every state in the US had some snow on the ground. WOW!

Thankfully we didn't get ashed (is that even a word?) as badly as some neighboring islands like Guadeloupe and Antigua, which are more or less right next door to Montserrat. In fact, Montserrat had a lot of advertising in Antigua when I was there in August saying "Come visit, we're right next door!". A lot of LIAT flights in and around the area have been cancelled or grounded. I wonder how much of a shock this is to their regular customers considering LIAT has a horrible on-time record and all of my flights with them have been ordeals. Many people here (read students) had surgical masks on, which I couldn't help but laugh at. The ash didn't irritate my eyes directly but most definitely gave me a headache due to the dust and the haze. I seem to be particularly sensitive to strong sources of light. My sunglasses are omnipresent anyway, and I often wear them inside because my eyes don't seem to care too much for the double whammy of florescent lights and hours and hours and hours of reading from computer screens.When I flew to Dominica in January we actually flew around the volcano in question. It had been erupting on a much smaller scale than what we experienced this week, but it was still bizarre to see this giant cloud of dust and ash in the sky.

Some friends of mine had been planning to Guadeloupe for this long (three day) weekend, but the fact that everybody in Guadeloupe is running around with their own face masks, if they go outside at all, they had to cancel. On a not-so-funny note, they have been unable to contact their hotel to cancel their reservation. Note to self, never deal with expedia.com!

I'm tired, and also tired of being tired. I want this semester OVER!