A Stormy Weekend Brewing

Today I experienced my first summer thunderstorm on the East Coast, but more on that later. My apple eating streak is now at 5, but I'm afraid that that will quickly come to an end, since we have to leave for Newport almost immediately tomorrow morning as part of a Summer at Brown-wide event. We had yet another interesting day in Macroeconomics, and I've been amazed at how quickly this week has already passed. 

The beautiful John Carter Brown Library.

Today we changed things up yet again in class, this time discussing just what went wrong with the U.S economy, and going over all of the little factors that led to one terrible crisis. While I had heard of many of the different factors Nick told us about, I never really grasped the idea of what exactly each of them were, and why they managed to disrupt the economy so severely. It was also nice to hear about why bailing out the banks, despite the less than shrewd investments on their part, was a good thing, since that's the only way money could trickle down to a lot of the people who were hit hard by the recession. Overall, it was a fascinating lecture, and 2 hours later we reviewed the homework that surprisingly (since I had absolutely no background in economics while many of these other students have already taken specifically Macroeconomics classes before) I fully understood and rarely struggled with. Then it was back to lunch and the gym, which has actually had me more energized than ever (I just assumed any type of workout would make me too tired to function for the rest of the day), and before I knew it, it was already 4 PM. 

One of the many quads at Brown, with
 an ominous gray cloud looming over it.

All day long, people had been telling me that a thunderstorm was supposed to hit Providence, but the whole afternoon the sky just remained peacefully gray. That changed instantly at around 6, when I glanced out my window only to find it absolutely pouring, with the temperature still hovering around 80 something degrees. The thunder and lightning quickly followed, and I found the rain when it wasn't coming down in torrents to be quite a refreshing break from the sweltering heat and humidity we've had to deal with the last two days. I'm looking forward to Newport tomorrow, although supposedly there will be thunderstorms there tomorrow as well.