Finally, a “normal” school day for me!  My chapter was being critiqued in workshop that morning, but since it was the “romance” genre workshop, with only six other students and Barb, I knew we’d have a ball—and we did, especially since we got to critique Kim Metzgar’s West Virginia Space Odyssey piece . . . then got to hear stories of when she had the UFO/Bigfoot beat for the newspaper where she used to work.  

We finished about 45 minutes early and went on down to the cafeteria, since we’d been warned the cafeteria would be full because of Freshman Orientation going on that day.  And it was a good thing we had gotten there early!  That was the lunch period set aside for continuing students to meet with their critique partners and most of them had to do it huddled around the corner of a table.  And those unfortunate enough to get there after the orientation crowd never even had a chance to get anything to eat.  In fact, the students in Mike Arnzen’s ARS (Advanced Reading Seminar) ended up ordering pizza, since most of them hadn’t been able to get lunch in the cafeteria.

I was in “The Info Dump & How to Manage It” that afternoon and had a lot of fun writing a Tom Clancy-esque piece about an experimental submarine—I do have a tendency to “dump” info on my reader in a first draft, just to get it all in there—then pare it down later.

After class, I drove Analisa down to Baskin Robbins for ice cream, then dropped her off at school for Kathryn Lambrecht’s thesis presentation while I ran to Wal-Mart to pick up a few items like batteries for my MP3 player and an umbrella for Analisa.

I stopped at Starbucks for a grande Toffee Nut Latte with whipped cream, then went back to school for Kim Metzgar’s thesis presentation, which was, of course, funny and entertaining.  Afterward, Analisa, Melissa, and I went to Red Robin for burgers, and Lainey Ervin met us there (oh, and our waiter looked just like Elijah Wood!).

On our way back to the Comfort Inn, we stopped at Barnes & Noble and caught the tail end of the book signing, then went back to the room.  Melanie came down and showed us the stuff she’d found at Victoria’s Secret and Spencer’s to go in our care package to Jill Henry and then we all crashed for the night.