Winter at School

Okay, so this is my first major entry in a long time. I'll start with the basics of what's been happening here. Coming back to campus in late December and early January, I have seen for the first time what the campus looks like during the winter. The grass has faded from its healthy shade of green to a barren quilt of brown and grey patches. I guess the campus doesn't plan to water the grounds much this winter. This might sound environmentally friendly except that now I'm pretty sure we don't have any means of reusing our shower water as part of our grey water system. Apart from the grass, our sycamore trees have completely lost their leaves, though the jacaranda and olives look almost the same as they did during the summer. But of course, nobody can see the biggest change in the campus since winter set it: the change in temperature. The temperature here fluctuates just as dramatically as one would expect in a desert region. During the day the temperature can get as high as the low sixties, whereas it can drop to the low forties to the high thirties at night. I know that the temperature can get that low because we had nothing else to talk about at the beginning of the week when the heat still hadn't completely turned on. For most this week I had been sleeping in sweatpants and sweatshirt and praying every morning that the showers would dispense their reliably hot water instead of the luke warm rinse that it gave on the first morning. But the heat has finally turned on and I am now warm enough to live and work here.