Finally, finally I have gotten back into the habit of swimming laps several times a week! I love swimming- was on summer swim team for seven years, but didn’t have the time to dedicate to being on the swim team here at McDaniel. I still love swimming, so when I first visited McDaniel, I thought I’d check out the pool, and so asked the logical question of: where is the pool?

Now, you have to understand that I was in the gym, Gill, when I asked this, assuming like most people that the gym would naturally house all athletic activities. Athletic activities including swimming. A normal assumption, right? To my extreme confusion, they responded that the pool wasn’t in the gym. Not in the beautiful new gym? Where then, I asked? “Underneath the dining hall.”

For surely, beneath dining halls is the typical location for all college pools. Naturally, one would investigate the glass windows beneath Glar, the dining hall for signs of water and other aquatic equipment. But there it lay, the swimming pool at McDaniel, snugly entrenched beneath Glar. It’s visible only by standing outside, facing the cafeteria- then you will notice the glass windows beneath the dinning hall porch (which used to say “Go Terror Swimming!” in bright green paint, now you have far fewer clues). But, once you learn how to get downstairs to the corridors beneath Glar in Decker Student Center, you’ll find the door by following the lingering smell of chlorine…

Welcome to the pool! Now every Tuesday and Thursday after lifeguarding I go swim laps for an hour, alongside other students (sometimes) and community members that can pay $1 to come swim. There are lap swim hours in the morning from 10:15am until 2pm and then recreational swim hours in the evening. While lap swim is purely for swimming laps, at evening rec swim (7-10pm) you can just come in and do whatever you want, take out the lane lines, play water polo, or mess around with friends.

So, if you’re looking for the pool at McDaniel, don’t look in the obvious places. Check downstairs instead to fulfill all your swimming needs!

This evening I attended a Smart Talk. We host these several times every year, and the basic premise is that we bring a graduate from the school, someone who did something remarkable, and they come give a lecture for students. This time we invited a General in Intelligence who graduated from our ROTC program in the 70′s.

He told some great stories  about his days in college but what resonated most was what he listed as things he learned at McDaniel. As a senior I am extremely concerned about what to do with my liberal arts degree, and his list made me proud to soon be a graduate here. Some of them I probably could have found elsewhere (humor, for instance) but a few were things that are part of what make McDaniel so wonderful.

The first thing he listed was being taught how to think. This is incredibly valuable, the small classes and engagement of the teachers encourages this understanding of how to think problems through. As a favorite teacher tells me, college is NOT a series of answers but teaching one how to ask questions and how to think. He also emphasized McDaniel teaching him how to work hard, which I relate to given that I have three jobs and five classes. I have learned from him that these are valuable qualities, and that though I do not want to be an army General they are useful skills. This talk made me appreciate my McDaniel education and feel better about graduation.

So, I have been back on campus for a few days since my surgery and I am still shocked and wonderfully surprised by how supportive everyone has been. I am sore a lot of the time and need a lot of rest, but I did manage to go to my classes today, for which I was glad. Both of the professors I had classes with today checked in on me to see how I was feeling and assured me that if I needed to miss class in the next week or so they would understand. Professor Lau actually seemed quite surprised I had come to class at all. I hate missing classes, however, so I am doing my best not to miss any more than I already did last week.

I also had to meet with my Arabic professor to find out what I had missed on Thursday. We have a test tomorrow and she was really understanding about the fact that I simply do not feel ready for it having spent half of the last week in the hospital. We scheduled a time later in the week for me to take it and she went over all the stuff they covered in class with me. It made me feel much more comfortable about not falling behind just to meet with her and have a plan of action for the next week. A lot of what they covered was vocabulary based, which thankfully is something I can definitely get down pretty quickly.

All I know for sure is I am really thankful how understanding my professors are being about making sure I get enough rest and do not work to hard as I am trying to recover from my surgery. I am starting to feel better and the pain is not as bad as it was, but I am still getting worn out really quickly. It is good to know that if I run into an issue I can just go talk to my professors and find a solution. I have my other three classes tomorrow, but I expect my professors will react basically the same. I am not feeling nearly as stressed about staying on top of my work as I was when I first returned to campus from the hospital.

This weekend, Maryland settled into the perfect fall weather: low 70s and beautiful blue skies with the leaves turning brilliant shades of red and orange. And what better way to enjoy the weather than to go camping? That’s just what we did. Eight of us left campus packed into two cars along with our various tents, sleeping bags (or lack thereof), clothing layers galore, and of course: the essential items for making s’mores!

This was an Outdoors Club adventure! So far this semester we’ve gone hiking, geo-caching, white-water tubing, apple-picking and more, but this was our very first camping trip of the year. Perfect timing before it gets entirely too cold to sleep outside. We drove about 45mintues to Catoctin Mountain State Park, home of Cunningham Falls, a pretty sweet waterfall down the rocks. We drove down on Saturday afternoon around 3pm and got back today at 1pm, which is a pretty large chunk to take out of your weekend, so I brought homework to do in the car.

After managing to successfully set up the giant 10-person tent after only one person getting stabbed in the eye with a tent pole, we admired our handiwork and got on with one of the most necessary and continuous jobs of camping: collecting firewood! It felt like we had to do this every hour, but we were happy to have the fire going against the chill later that night. Since we still had some time before it got dark, we decided to drive down to the lake and walk around a bit before dusk and dinner time. It was absolutely gorgeous down at the lake. The water was perfectly still, reflecting the flame-colored trees and bright blue sky like a mirror. I got a little carried away with my photo-taking:

Setting up the tarp for the tent

Tent Success!

The woods around our campsite

 

There was a playground nearby, and the mature college-students that we are couldn’t stand not playing on it a bit- realizing that we’re all a bit tall now for the monkey bars. There as even a mini beach by the dock, where we overheard a little girl burying something in the sand and then telling her father, “Nobody is going to find it for a thousand years!!!” We all chuckled, but who knows, maybe she’s right! A little ways off the path, the girls and I found an excellent philosophical rock to sit on and enjoy the beauty of nature. Check out our view:

View from our Philosophical rock

Heading back to camp, we struck up a fire and had hotdogs or tacos in a bowl for dinner, cooking the meat over the fire and adding fun toppings. Dessert was exciting as it can only be while camping, full of roasting marshmallows and making s’mores and roasting apples covered with cinnamon. It was all delicious! And what’s a campfire without stories? We had fun creating a ridiculous story where everybody had to contribute a sentence and the story progressed, growing more and more absurd by the minute. The stars were incredible that night, and after drinking in our fill we bundled up and cozied on up together in the tent, laying rather like sardines to fit everybody in and attempted to sleep for the night.

Outdoors Club, clustered around the campfire

Today, we failed horribly at our breakfast pancake attempt, forgetting the oil to prevent the pancakes from sticking, but had delicious hot chocolate, peanut-butter sandwiches, cereal and apples instead. Our last activity after packing up the campsite was a beautiful hike down to the Cunningham Falls and back before heading back for campus. A lovely outing to enjoy Maryland’s fall while it lasts!