Thanksgiving was nice. Actually it was really nice because I dodged all the snow that the North got while I was down South. I flew back up here on Sunday and was greeted by snow everywhere on the ground in Hartford. But it was all melted by the time I got south enough into New Haven.

I got some GREAT news yesterday: my Danish language fellowship has been renewed for another semester! This basically means Yale will fork out another few thousand bucks for me to keep learning Danish. I'm so happy about this...I'm having such a great time learning Danish.

I got some more GREAT news today: I got a job at the Manuscripts Unit at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library here at Yale. Basically, the Beinecke (as we call it) is one of the largest, if not the largest, buildings in the world dedicated solely to rare materials. We have everything from ancient Egyptian papyrus scrolls, first edition Shakespeare first folios, Gutenberg Bible, first edition Dante's Divine Comedy, James Madison's diary of the Constitutional Convention, and so so so much more. And I now get to work with all of the Western European manuscripts that are in the library, which are mostly from the pre-printing press era (pre-1450). This is my thing...if any subject I study 'gets me out of bed in the morning,' it would be medieval Western European history. So this is definitely a dream job for me. It requires an extensive background check since I'll be handling some materials worth well upwards of $10,000,000. I really can't express how happy I am to get this job, even it is my 3rd job I'll have (like third job as in I am now working three different jobs at the same time). I'll be busy next semester, but it'll be worth it.

I had my Italian oral exam, which is a part of my final exam, today and it went really well. It was with a grad student from Italy and it went much more like a fun conversation than an oral exam, which is the point.

Tonight I came back to my room from Rite Aid to find everyone evacuated from my building where I live and firemen everywhere rushing up the stairs of my entryway as smoke billowed out all windows in huge white plumes. As luck would have it, two girls who live a floor below me were doing an art project and set the room on fire. This wasn't a small fire; it was a big fire...like their rooms are basically destroyed. But everybody is okay. The sprinklers went off everywhere, but luckily not in my suite. There was so much smoke in my room when I was able to come up here again, and I had to sneak back in through an old attic crawlspace that spans the entire building since firemen were still trying to get the sprinklers off in my entryway. So I've been airing out my suite for the past hour. Like, since when do residential fires actually happen? I know we always prepare for them, but it's kind of strange when it actually happens.