adventures in candle-burning

...By which I mean, burning the candle at both ends. It's realllllly an adventure.

Which must mean that it's That Time of Year!

You know. That Time of Year when I disappear off the face of the planet because of all my essays (Apologies in advance!). When I start getting up early to write papers and work till late every night, then roll straight into a week of plowing through The Vision of Piers Plowman (if you're a big fat nerd, you'll know what a feat this was)-- plus have a visit from Greg, in which we mostly walked around town looking for good places to study. (At one point, he left me to pick up some takeout for dinner, and by the time he came back, I'd turned my hair into a frizzy ball on the top of my head in my stress. so cute!)

Luckily, we had class on Thursday, so the madness calmed down a little bit after that-- which, obviously, was a good excuse to attend a ball, right? It was faerie themed, so there were a lot of tiaras and flowers and flowy dresses (none of which I managed to bring here. awesome.)

There were gorgeous friends:

There was a ceilidh (you know how I feel about ceilidh...)

There were dance cards....

And dance lessons...

And so-

Much-

Tango.

(Yes, we were just posing for the camera--these are less than half of the tango-photos. and YES, we did take off through the line of dance because we couldn't stand not being able to tango for real...)

All in all, it was a great night, and I went home with sore feet and tired legs and a happy heart.

Unfortunately, I spent the rest of the weekend paying for it, as I had an essay (still writing it, actually) and a couple shifts at work. But it was all made up for the fact that I met a bunch of people from South Carolina who just looooooooove my hometown (Actually, they did that thing where they were like "Oh, you're from ___? Do you know ___?"--which pretty much never works...but this time it did! It was bizarre.)  So that kinda made everything a little more bearable :)

Now, off I go to write about nonsense words some more!

(photos taken from my excellent friend Caitlin's diligent Facebook tagging. Thank goodness for friends with cameras.)