Last night, there was a layer of ice covering all of the grass on the NIU campus. The ice was thin and rested on the stiff blades of grass (sometimes, somehow, just above the grass) so that if you stepped on it, it made a loud, satisfying cracking noise and your foot fell through to the ground. Stepping on it was satisfying in the same way that popping bubble wrap is. So, when my friend Melissa and I went for a walk last night, we couldn't resist stepping on it. A lot. For about twenty minutes, because we found a huge, untouched patch of it between the two towers of Stevenson that we live in. There was something settling and good about it that made us both step back and smile. It was loud. We knew we were being obnoxoius, but it didn't bother us. Someone poked their head into the screen of their dorm room window and yelled at us for the terrible racket we were making, and normally we would have stopped, but as luck would have it, it was Melissa's next door neighbor Mitul. So, we kept it up for a few minutes. Until we were really cold and we went inside.

One of the best parts about our destroying the ice last night was that this morning, the sun melted it all. We both agreed that we felt strangely lucky for having the accidental foresight to trample that ice for as long as we did before it disappeared.

Nothing that good happened today. But there's always tomorrow. And Ben Folds.