seriously, why didn't I go to a nice university in, say, Oregon? Reed is very good!

And I have tickets to return to New Orleans! I faffed around for two months trying to decide whether or not to go back early to help with move-in again, or just go back on time, and finally had the decision taken out of my hands today when I roused myself to try and sign up to go back early, only to find that the volunteer sign up form was down. Thus, I find myself now in posession of one (cheap! only $133 + fees!) ticket from Seattle to New Orleans via Denver on a Continental flight operated by United.

Naturally, my mother and I went through three separate credit cards before Continental's website finally accepted the fourth one, probably reluctantly. I am still not entirely certain how New York and I are going to get our boxes out of storage, since Chicago and, more importantly, her car won't be here this semester to drive us around, but I suppose New York and I will manage somehow. Will taxis take boxes out of storage? But that's a lot of money if one is paying by the minute... *sighs*

Well, at least now I know that I am getting back to NOLA somehow. And I have never flown through Denver before! I usually fly through Houston, since that's Continental's hub, and I have also flown through Dallas-Fort Worth and Atlanta, but never Denver. And the flight times kind of excite me, because it's not six hours sitting on one plane; it's three hours on each plane (well, two and three-quarters) and three hours on stopover, which sounds much easier. No food, but the food is not all that great anyway.

Now to go and buy my textbooks.

ETA: Naturally, in what is probably a cruel joke by the universe, the price of all my textbooks has gone up. Screw you too, universe.

(no subject)

Having received a letter from my university that firmly instructed that as a rising junior, I must start thinking about life after graduation RIGHT NOW, I am looking at graduate schools again, just trying to build up a general list of universities that I can take to my departmental advisors and winnow down to an applicable list. Of course, the slightly difficult part is that I still have decided exactly what period I want to focus on, which becomes something of a problem as that happens to be the difference between a Ph.D program in Classical Studies and a Ph.D program in History. I'm looking specifically at schools that have programs in ancient history, which kind of bridges the gap by loosely covering Late Antiquity. I am favoring the programs where the classics department and the history department actually talk to each other.

General thoughts: I would prefer not to be in a major city (I am definitely not applying anywhere in New York City or Los Angeles), I don't really want to go to the Northeast because of the weather (although I could probably handle it; I am definitely going nowhere near the Midwest; my ancestors left Minnesota for a reason), I would kind of like to be closer to home, I don't really want to go abroad (just about the only place I would go would be the UK, but I want to be closer to home because of the travel time), I'd prefer a smaller school, but I'm not sure how likely that is.

So far on the list:
University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill
Brown University (Providence, Rhode Island)
University of Washington - Seattle (I don't want to go to Seattle, but it's close to home)
Stanford University (Palo Alto, California)
University of British Columbia (Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada)
Harvard University (Cambridge, Massachusetts -- man, for some reason I really don't want to go to Harvard, though I doubt I'd get in)

*gloomily* Well, at least I chose a field that really narrows down the schools I can look at.

Huh. I appear to have picked up a slight shiver of distaste in regards to the Ivies, which is probably a result of going to a university where the students compare rejection letters from the Ivies. And we have more fun down in the South, anyway. I wish it wasn't frowned upon to do all your degrees at the same school, I wouldn't mind staying at Tulane another five or seven years.