Five days after I graduated from Stanford and here I am again back on campus for a week of waltzing. Doubtless waltz week will be fun. I'm particularly looking forward to being able to dance with Shanah's Red Knight and Red Lady, by which I mean take classes from them since I just don't feel comfortable asking the Red Lady to actually dance, even though I'm sure she'd think that was silly. Still, I like seeing them teach and dance together. It's so cute - and it's one of those things that gives you hope for the future. Of course lots of things give me hope for the future, including watching Alexa Davalos in Chronicles of Riddick. Well, better that than being able to draw hope from very few sources.

Still and all, it feels odd to be back on a campus with no Blue Rose, no Shanah Van, no Archimedes (yet), no Cloud, no Chariessa, and no Esther Selene. Of course Cythereia is here, and right next door, and Archimedes will be on campus soon enough. But it's still odd ... I was ready to come back to campus and go forward with my new law school existence, meeting new folks and making new friends. I wasn't ready to come back to a campus which was in between times. It's the sort of thing that makes you want to listen to Vienna Teng, except that I forgot the AC adapter for my CD player so I'm husbanding my battery power. Or it makes you want to read the stories you loved when you were a kid, the kind that get stuck in your heart ... and I could do that since I brought the Jade Phoenix trilogy up with me, but I'm trying to husband my reading material too, just in case. Well, I'll just have to think about Phoenix Earth, I suppose, which we will return to when I get back from campus.

Speaking of home, there's been a new addition to the family, as it were. She's a three-year old silver Honda Civic LX with a stick shift. From the moment I saw her I knew her name was Meilissa (you can call her Melissa if you want, but her name is Meilissa, with the first syllable pronounced like the month of May). Melkor apparently thinks I should name her something racier, but I can't do that because her name is Meilissa. It comes from the verb meilisso: to soothe, to make calm. Now personally I happen to think that Meilissa is a plenty attractive name for such a pretty young lady, but the primary function of a car, in my opinion, is to be a singing space. Which means her name is Meilissa.