Friday
Of course if something can go wrong ahead of a move, it will. It turned out Pete had broken a bone in the middle of his foot when he came down funny in a game of touch football Thursday afternoon, and so I had to take him to the hospital (which was two minutes from the house) to get a temporary cast to wear until he came home from the family trip to take me to school. He was pissed off because at first nobody believed he was that hurt, and I was pissed because I was stressed out about leaving and he was throwing a monkey wrench in the plans. As it was, we didn't leave until Dad got home from work, and then it took two hours to get through Chicagoland traffic and finally be on the open road. Thankfully, we didn't try to make it all the way to Columbus that night.
Pete was supposed to keep his foot elevated, which in an Aerostar filled with five people and a whole lot of boxes meant putting his foot on the console between the front seats -- where his foot kept getting elbowed.
Saturday
We arrived in Columbus on a cool, grey day. My dorm was the Stadium Scholarship Dormitory, located under the west stands of Ohio Stadium. I was excited to be in it, because it was hyped as being a cool community, with its own newsletter and cafeteria. My grandfather had also stayed in the Stadium Dorm, and spoke fondly of it.
Once I got there, though, the reality of the situation settled in. Since it was under the stands, there were only windows on one exterior wall. If you weren't in one of those rooms -- which were all "quads," or quadruple occupancy -- you had no windows. My room was a near-square of drywall and tile, with a wooden door. As we discovered later on, the walls were built to meet minimum fire codes and nothing more, so they were basically two layers of drywall with a little flame-retardant insulation in between. That meant the doors, which were solid wood, were the most sound-proof thing in the room. And since my room wasn't on the outside wall, when you turned off the lights, it was pitch black except for a little light leaking in from under the door.
Anyway, after I loaded everything into my room and said goodbye to my family, I was basically alone. I had arrived on the early end of move-in -- most kids, including my roommate, would be arriving Sunday -- so I did a little unpacking and then wandered the campus. I ended up buying dinner at a fast food place on High Street (I think I went to the "all in one," which was a Taco Bell, Pizza Hut and KFC all in the same restaurant) and took it to the Oval (the central green). For whatever reason, I climbed a smallish tree and ate it sitting a few feet off the ground, watching the smattering of other students walk by. It was a very lonely first night.
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