duck-shaped pain

The GRE was anticlimactic. Four hours spent in a tiny room in the Community College of Denver building: not fun. The heater and the air conditioning were battling it out for control of the room, so I kept having to take my jacket off and then put it back on, activities which made the test proctor very nervous.

I did both better and worse than I wanted. I got a 680 on the verbal section, although I was shooting for at least 700. I then got a 510 on the math part, which is much better than I ever expected to get. I still have to wait a few weeks before I get my writing-section score, but I'm fairly confident that I did well on it. These aren't the greatest GRE scores, but they're enough to get me into the schools that I'm interested in, if I choose to go to them, and they're higher than those of the other people who were taking it at the same time, so, hey.

After the test, I wanted to do something that was the exact opposite of studying and/or thinking, so I suggested that we go to the mall and shop for/look at shiny things. I got to introduce my shoe-loving friend G. to both Nordstrom and Nordstrom Rack, neither of which she had visited before. Unfortunately, I was unable to partake in any shoe love, due to a combination of no money, planned future travel, and because I had just bought new shoes a few days before.

Ate gyros. Ate Indian food. Went to Whole Foods. Bought books. Drove home. We encountered a couple of intense rainstorms on the way back -- the sort that start and end suddenly, but that, in the time between, make you think that you were going to get blown off the road. In one of them, the wind was blowing so hard that the rain was falling horizontally. Our rental car (a half-baked 2003 Dodge Stratus) was light and underpowered, so I had a hard time keeping it under control in the rain. As soon as I got home, I turned on the news and found that a stretch of the interstate that I had driven not 45 minutes before had been closed due to mudslides.

It was odd being in Denver without S. being around to call up and hang out with. G. was pretty amenable to doing whatever I wanted to do and was good company, so we drove around a lot, and I took her to all the places I usually go to when I drive over there, but I missed having someone around to bitch and wheedle with in the usual manner. (I did get email from him while I was gone, indicating that he got to his destination in Japan okay.) But I did run into some other old-time Denver people while I was in town, though, which was more pleasant than scary. And I got a new sketchbook/journal, one with grey pages, so it, in short, was mostly a good trip.

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