I'm excited about life.

I see a lot of beautiful sunsets out my bedroom window and out the balcony off my kitchen. My photos never seem to turn out, but I love looking out my window and seeing how the trees' silhouettes have changed as we move deeper into fall. Somehow, there are leaves all over the ground beneath my building, although I thought we would have run out by now.
I took this picture while I was waiting for my train in Frankfurt, on the way home from visiting my aunt. That train was full of people headed to Basel and if I hadn't had a seat reservation, I would have stood for two hours. As it was, I was stuck in a corner with my purse, dictionary, and articles on ethnicity and the situation of minorities in Europa. All I wanted to do was go to sleep.
On the way to Aschaffenburg the Thursday before, I let myself read a book. It's the first German novel I've read, and I picked it out with no prior knowledge, but it's perfect. I can understand almost everything that happens, even understand what the woman with the East Berlin accent says. I'm exaggerating now, because her accent isn't that strange. But sitting down on the S-Bahn and reading several pages in the ten or fifteen minutes home is one of the best feelings.
Last night, I was almost late for the S-Bahn I needed, and forgot my book in the rush. After the movie I saw with my language tandem partner and her friends, all I had to do was think on the way home. About how lucky I am to have such a friendly tandem partner and how surprised I was that I understood a French comedy dubbed into German, with a large part of the humor based on the dialect. About whether or not I should compare the performance of Frühlings Erwachen to the original text in my essay, and how cool it would be to make more sense of the adaptation we saw on Monday.
When I got home, I started IMing my friends in German. Unfortunately, only one of them could understand me. For a few minutes, I struggled to stick to English for Ali, and German for Maraia. In the end it was all English, of course. Today I mainly concerned myself with money and cute bunny pictures and avoiding my homework, and when I skyped with my mom and she asked if I'm speaking a lot of German, I had to admit that I'm not. But I'm pretty sure that will come.