And we're back:

I had intended to write something soon after my return from Denmark -- nearly a month and a half ago -- but home, J-Term, and my burgeoning alcoholism got the better of me. So here I am, a few solid weeks into my return to the mother country, and back home in Massachusetts on break from school. I've been off since 9:35 AM Thursday when my last class ended, and I'm a free man until Monday the 9th, when it's back to business as usual. In the intervening days, I'm hoping to pay a visit to some voices from the past, catch up on my reading and writing, and begin working off the accumulated weight from the past month.

The past month -- January for the unenlightened, but J-Term for Middlebury students -- was Middlebury's one month Winter Term, where students take one class, affording them the opportunity to "really get involved in one subject," which reads more accurately as, "do as little work as possible and spend most of their time skiing and drinking." Yes, J-Term is the time of the year when Middlebury students are finally afforded the opportunity to take advantage of all that their school and their region has to offer. And while the fact that the temperature did not rise above 28 degrees the entire month might have deterred some from enjoying the month to its fullest capacity, my friends and I took advantage of every free moment (and there were a lot of free moments) to destroy our bodies and college property as best we could.

What follows are some sweet pictures my friend Foster took of one of our more destructive J-Term endeavors, where we amassed an arsenal of Molotov cocktails and deployed them with gusto onto an icy-field-cum-bombing-range in the middle of bucolic Vermont.

Incidentally, we discovered that we'd make awful insurgents, as the vast majority of our explosives failed to shatter and create the fireball we hoped for. The pictures above represent our only truly successful attempt, which was still certifiably awesome. While we surely would have been crushed by the Israeli army in the event of a real insurgency, we can take solace in the fact that we got some good pictures, available both on Foster's blog -- www.arestlesstransplant.com -- and on his Picasa page, here.

Thankfully, not everything we did during J-Term was destructive to property, body, and mind, as a couple of my friends and I also decided on a whim to make the trip down to D.C. to watch Obama's inauguration. Our schedule was a little absurd: leave 5:00 PM Monday, arrive at my friend Mike's house in Maryland at 1:30 AM, sleep from 2:00 to 3:30, hit the Mall by 5:00 AM, watch the inauguration, and leave by 2:00 PM for the nine hour drive back to Middlebury. Regardless of the lack of sleep, it was a fun time, and I'm glad that I can say that I was there, albeit sleep deprived. Plus, the trip was not devoid of real highlights, like discovering that the friendly people behind Harold and Kumar pulled a fast one on us, and that White Castle is actually the worst food known to man. While we had to learn our lesson the hard way, the sidetrip to a White Castle in one of Newark's seediest neighborhoods was still totally worth it, just for the experience. Here are a couple of photos my friend Dan took of the inauguration, also available here.

Not that anyone needed any more proof that there were a lot of people there, but there were. Seeing that many people, the Washington Monument lit up at 5:00 in the morning, and the sun rise over the Capitol were just some of the moments that made all the driving worth it. Also, Aretha Franklin's hat.