Friday, December 31, 2010

Goodbye, 2010! Hello, 2011!

Location: Couch
Listening to: This British movie about a lady who works at a retirement home
Today's Odd Holiday(s): Make Up Your Mind Day; Unlucky Day; New Years Eve
Welcome to my last blog post of 2010! I know this is pretty much what everyone is doing, but I'd like to recap some of my favorite things of this past year. Thank you all for being so supportive of me and just wonderful people in general. I hope you all have a fantastic 2011!!

Also, I'm thinking of changing up my opening list-y things again. Location is going to stay. "Listening to" might get switched to "Mood", and I have no clue what to do to take place of "Odd Holidays". I'm thinking maybe "Current Obsession". Thoughts? If you have any ideas or any input for me, leave it in the comments. :)

Things I Loved About 2010:

-Starting a blog and meeting all kinds of awesome people.
-Graduating high school.
-Going off to college.
-Meeting a wonderful, wonderful boy.
-This song:
-Singing for a crowd: 
-Huge snowstorms
-Reading great books
-Being alive. :)

What were your favorite things of 2010? Leave them in the comments! I hope you all have a great New Years Eve and a wonderful year-to-come!

Saturday, December 25, 2010

Merry Christmas!

Location: Bedroom floor
Listening to: My computer make noises
Today's Odd Holiday(s): Christmas; National Pumpkin Pie Day




Hey everybody! Happy holidays!

I honestly considered going on a huge rant about how commercialized Christmas and the holiday season in general has become, but I figure there are enough people out there doing that. I don't need to be negative. Especially because, at heart, I am a 5-year-old when it comes to Christmas. I love everything about it. The surprise of opening presents, the excitement of seeing peoples' reactions to what you got them, spending so much time with family and loved ones. It's fantastic.

I hope all of you who celebrate Christmas out there had a wonderful time with it. And I hope all of you who celebrate Hanukkah/Kwanzaa/Festivus/Winter Solstice/etc. had/will have a great time with your celebrations.

I am currently up trying to decorate a paper star for the Christmas celebrations my dad's side of the family has. We always do a gift exchange where you get someone's wish list without their name, so you don't know who you're buying for. Then, we take turns opening a gift at random and everyone has to try to guess who's gift it is. The person who guesses the fewest gifts correctly has to host Christmas the next year.

This year my Aunt also decided to have a different contest. We each have to decorate a paper star however we choose, and then everyone gets to vote on their two favorites. Whoever's star gets the most votes gets a prize. I'm completely stumped about what to do for mine. I have a bag full of cloth scraps, so I'm thinking of cutting them up and pasting them on the star in a mosaic sort of way.

We'll see how that works. Maybe I'll post a picture in my next entry.

Thank you all for the kind thoughts about my boyfriend's surgery. It went really well and he was able to get out of the hospital the next day. He's been home and recovering and doing great. I'm going to visit him next weekend. I'm really excited about it.

I was really amused by your holiday celebrations. TS - your Christmas taco plans made me laugh. I hope they went well, and I hope you got the snow you were looking for! Kal - Thanks for the positive thoughts. And thanks for always giving me a positive word or two. I hope this mention fulfills your "Christmas wish"! (Although, I hardly believe that me mentioning you in my blog was what you wanted for Christmas!)

I hope you all are having a wonderful holiday season, and I hope all of your wishes come true!

Tuesday, December 21, 2010

I Survived!

Location: Home
Listening to: The Proposal
Today's Odd Holiday(s): Humbug Day; National Flashlight Day; Look On The Bright Side Day



I find it ironic that it is both "Humbug Day" and "Look on the Bright Side Day". Funny stuff, right there.

So, I'm home now. Finally. I survived finals, and I'm pretty happy with how I've done on my exams so far. I think I might pull out of this semester with all A's and a B in my least favorite class.

None of my exams were too challenging, thankfully. The only one I studied for was Global Perspectives (the class I ranted about ad nauseam in my last post). I was kind of annoyed because I was really looking forward to filling out a class evaluation for that professor so I could tell her just how much her teaching methods failed me, but she was the one professor I had who didn't offer an evaluation.

Thanks to everyone who shared their awful teacher memories. CSmith, your tech professor sounds terribly boring. I'm glad I didn't have to suffer through anyone like that this semester. And TS, your story about a teacher you never had constantly creeping on you was hilarious (and mildly disturbing).

Anyway, my last final was yesterday, and I drove back home today amidst some crazy fog and some other interesting weather conditions. It was snowing and raining and windy and just overall ridiculous when I started out. I survived, thankfully.

Tomorrow I have big plans. My boyfriend is getting some pretty scary surgery - he's having a piece of his skull removed because his cerebellum is pressing against it and giving him really awful headaches and other problems. To distract myself from worrying, my friend Danye and I are going to spend the day watching whatever is on ABC Family's 25 Days of Christmas, and then go to Walmart and Taco Bell in prom dresses.

I'm sure there will be photos. I might share some.

This week is crazy busy with holiday festivities for me. What are you guys doing? What are some of the traditions you celebrate for the holidays? I'd love to know!

As always, thanks for reading and I hope you have a wonderful week.

Friday, December 17, 2010

Holy Finals!

Location: Dorm Desk
Listening to: 'Benny's Dispatch' from In The Heights
Today's Odd Holidays: National Maple Syrup Day




Hey Blog! So, I've officially made it through over half of my finals. I just have to wait out the weekend to take one more on Monday, and then I'm off to home and a glorious month off of school. Of course, the one I have on Monday is the one final I'm kind of dreading.

At my college, we are required to take some specific General Education classes. For one requirement, we have the option to take Historical Perspectives, which is kind of an analysis of how views have changed over the course of American history, or Global Perspectives, which is an analysis of how views are different from around the world.

I opted to take Global, because I figured it would teach me some information on cultures from around the world that might be helpful in my future career as a journalist. Due to some weird quirk of fate, I was landed with the worst professor on campus. She's crazy. She started our first class off by coming into the room five minutes late, plunking her stuff on the table up front, and saying, "You don't want to be here, I don't want to be here, let's just get through this."

Things did not improve through the rest of the semester. Map quizzes are a standard in every Global class, no matter who your professor is. Unlike other professors, though, ours did not give us a word bank, multiple choice, or any kind of help. In fact, she purposefully tested us on at least one place every quiz that was not on the list we had to study from.

Our professor doesn't really teach. She reads off powerpoints and talks about her experiences working with UNICEF in Sri Lanka or being a tourist in China. She offered extra credit for kids who brought her Starbucks coffee cups from parts of the world she hadn't yet collected them from. It was a total joke. She always tests us on stupid, ridiculous things that we never learned and asks questions with more than one correct answer.

Needless to say, I am not looking forward to this final. Especially because it's my last one. I already wish I was done. Making me stay an extra weekend is only going to make it worse.

Ranting just now has made me curious: What was the worst teacher you ever had like? I want to hear your stories.

I hope you all have a great weekend! And for anyone else taking finals right now, good luck!!!

Monday, December 13, 2010

Snow = Love

Location: Desk
Listening to: ABC Family
Today's Odd Holiday(s): Ice Cream Day; Violin Day




This is currently the view from my window at school. I know I've posted pictures of this view before, so if you have time, you should try to look at them all in sequence. Somewhere under all of that white powdery stuff, there is quite a lot of concrete, including a hill, a curb, and a road. Try to spot where they are! I bet you can't.

I love snow. So much. It makes the world seem so sparkley and magical. Like, everything seems fresh and clean and new. It makes me want to sit inside and be cozy and run outside and play like a small child all at once.

Finals are upon us. I have two tomorrow during my regular class times, then a study day Wednesday, then one final each day on Thursday, Friday, and Monday. Then I finally get to go back home! I'm so excited. I don't think any of my tests will be terribly hard, so that should be nice. I'm hardly even stressing. Hardly.

I hope you all are having a marvelous winter so far. Have any of you seen your first snowfall of the year yet? What do you think of it?

Friday, December 10, 2010

Finalsfinalsfinals

Location: Dorm desk
Listening to: Commercials on TV
Today's Odd Holiday(s): Human Rights Day.




Hello, Blog! I am so, so sorry to have been neglecting you lately. It rips me apart that it's been nine days since I last wrote! Especially because I have some sweet and entertaining stories for you.

One of the many reasons (in addition to finals, work, my social life, and being a lazy bum) that I haven't written lately is that I've been sick. Last week, I had a bad cold, but it seemed to have gone away. Then Brad got a really bad cold. He was coughing like no other and had the chills so bad one day that he couldn't get out of bed because anything that wasn't buried under his blankets was too cold. So I went over and took care of him (I made him soup and got him medicine and just sat and hung out with him for a while).

But my attempt at being a good girlfriend eventually got me sick with whatever it was he had. So for the past week I've been blowing my nose left and right, coughing frequently, and overall just feeling like crap. Tuesday night, I went over to his apartment to watch a movie and ended up sleeping there because I started getting chills and he was worried I was coming down with what he had. I ended up spending all of Wednesday there, too, after coming down with what is probably the worst cold I've ever had. But he was so sweet. I had a low fever and he was ridiculously worried about it. He went to class and came back with soup for me, and that night he had to go to a concert for a class and went and got Culvers for dinner. We'd gone there once before with my friend Jess and I always get the same thing: a chicken tender kids meal with ketchup. I usually only use one side of ketchup, but he wanted to make sure I had enough, so he brought back four.

It was adorable. I like him a lot.

So I've been pretty busy with that.

The other day I had my first trip to our campus health center. It was unrelated to the cold, but I won't get into the messy details. It was kind of funny, though. The nurse/doctor lady was so sweet and made me feel really comfortable, which was nice because I hate going to the doctor and I was nervous because I'd never been there before and wasn't entirely sure what to expect.

So anyway, I got put on a short antibiotic kick and I keep worrying that I'm going to have a reaction to the medicine because I have reactions to other medicine and it's weird to take something that wasn't prescribed by my family doctor and not to have my mom around all the time in case something does happen.

(Oh, anxiety, how I've missed you...)

Finals start this coming week. I only have three that I have to take, which is nice. And two of them are bound to be really easy. There's one I'm a bit worried about, but I'll just be glad to have it over with. I'm so looking forward to being able to be home for a decent stretch of time.

I think that's most of the big updates of my life for now. I probably won't update again til after finals. I have a feeling things are going to be kind of crazy until then. It's supposed to be snowing like crazy this weekend, so I'll pretty much be on cloud nine.

What's new with you guys? I'm curious to know. How is your winter so far? Anything wonderful and exciting happen? I hope so. :)

Wednesday, December 1, 2010

Happy December!

Location: Dorm Desk
Listening to: Christmas Music
Today's Odd Holiday(s): Eat A Red Apple Day; World AIDS Awareness Day


Hello, Blog!! How are you all today? I hope you are as wonderful as I am. Today is the first REAL snowfall of the year in my college town. Above is the view from my window. I am so excited. I adore snow. I love it passionately and would probably marry it if you could marry a type of weather.

My roommate and I are sitting in our room listening to Christmas music and feeling cozy and happy. Last night, Brad made me some fantastic hot chocolate. This is for sure my favorite season of the year.

December brings many things that I both love and loathe. It's the time when everything becomes snowy and magical. It looks so beautiful and makes everything seem shiny and new and glorious. It brings Christmas and time with family and friends and winter vacation. It brings the season finale of America's Next Top Model (which I am highly anticipating after a brief consideration of boycotting because Kayla got kicked off).

Sadly, it also brings bitter cold, which makes it really difficult to motivate myself to get out of bed and go to class. It also brings finals.

I normally don't stress over testing. I retain knowledge pretty well and usually don't have problems spitting facts back for tests. But I don't know what to expect for college finals. I mean, thankfully, all of my finals are just the test for the last unit we covered in class. And three of my finals have been cancelled, so I only have three to go to.

But grades seem so much more important now. My major has a required GPA, so I need to keep my grades up so I can do what I want to do. I'm worried that I'll bomb a test or a project and totally kill my grade point average. It doesn't help that I've never been one for studying, and now that teachers don't actively try to get you to work on things outside of class, I hardly give my class work a second thought.

Ugh. Oh well. I'll survive. I still have a few weeks until finals actually roll around. And I'm sure when they do I'll be a huge ball of stress and anxiety (which will probably be super pleasant for everyone around me). But for now, I'm just going to cozy up in my dorm and enjoy this beautiful snow.