Nature in its many forms

Well, it's only been an obnoxiously long time since I posted anything here. I'm sorry about that; I had probably 3/4 of a post ready, but by now, it's full of random stories that happened weeks ago, so it's a little out of date. Let me see if I can sum it up in one sentence:

It snowed a little bit after I procrastinated on an essay, and then I got a purple plaid cape(/poncho, I guess) when my grandparents came for Family Weekend, which was really fun, and then I played with clay, drew a comic of myself procrastinating on my essay, got an umbrella in the mail, and started learning to sing a song in Japanese.

Yeah, that was basically it. Just... not nearly that concise.

But now, we'll pick up with this weekend. On Saturday, I went to a performance of the local symphony as an assignment for Music 101 (pretty awesome assignment, huh?). The theater in this town is actually surprisingly pretty, considering the population and isolation. Small, but pretty. And the symphony was good, too. They had a guest soloist, a 15-year-old viola prodigy girl who's apparently toured abroad and earned a lot of respect for her playing. My friend from my class and I both thought she had a few iffy moments in the piece she played with the symphony (not that either of us is particularly knowledgeable about viola playing), but she came back afterwards and played a solo that she composed herself, and I thought it was really good. Overall, a fun evening.

Then the next morning, I got up early and headed north for a few hours on a trip with the Japanese Club to a Japanese Garden a little ways outside of Chicago. It's apparently one of the best Japanese Gardens in the US, and it was definitely super beautiful (I took almost 400 pictures while we were there). First, we got to watch a reenactment of a traditional Japanese Tea Ceremony, which was cool, and then we ate a disappointingly-non-Japanese (and pricey) brunch at the garden's restaurant. However, we did get delicious Jasmine tea, and I got one of my friends to do me a favor and take this picture for me:

This is me drinking tea in a Japanese garden while wearing a plaid cape. OMGDUDELIFEISWIN. Behold your new Queen's Chair...

But no, seriously, it was a super fun trip. Here are a few of the pictures I took, so you can see how pretty it was:

Gorgeous, huh? We've been having really nice weather these past few days, which made it even better. And I can't tell you how happy I was to get off this campus and out of this town for a little while. Even if it meant driving past three hours of corn to get there (I guess we drove through some towns at the end, but really, I mean it...). Plus, three of my friends went, too, so we got to spend a day hanging out and enjoying the stunning scenery at the garden. A day well spent, in my opinion!

But now it's back to normal life for the week. I have my second FP essay due Friday (way to ruin the week, there), and either this week or next week (hopefully this week) I pre-register for Winter classes. Problem is, I have no idea what I'm going to take. I had a schedule sort of in mind, but then I realized that the three classes were all basically at the same time. What?! I think I can make two of the work, in theory, but I don't know what I'll take for my third class. Please, please, advisor, don't tell me to fill that slot with my math requirement class. I'm still hoping that if I ignore it for long enough, it'll go away.

The only other interesting thing I can think of to talk about is ladybugs. I'd always kind of liked ladybugs; at the very least, they seemed like about the least bothersome of all bugs back home. But over here, they've gone through some freaky population explosion over the past week or so, and then another huge burst in the past day. These things are everywhere. Swarms of them. Inside, outside, ladybugs. For some reason, I had it in my head that they were a Spring sort of bug, not an Autumn bug, but I'm telling you, the cold weather hit, and they started springing up from the ground like the armies of the undead. Is that normal around here? Because it's weirding me out just a little bit.

That was an unusually short update, but I can't think of anything else to say right now. Aside from my exciting weekend and the insect infestation, things are pretty much just plodding along here. I'll try and stay on the lookout for other exciting things so I can keep you better updated. Until next time!

Sick and decorating

It's been a while since I've gotten a chance to post a blog update. I kind of wish I could say, "Oh yeah, you didn't miss much," because that would mean I'd have less to type now, but unfortunately, it's been a busy week. Fortunately, though, my laziness means that I have to pick and choose the stories I tell, meaning that you don't have to listen to all the random little stories-of-the-day. We'll try and stick to the interesting stuff, k?

First of all, I have been ill. Supposedly, according to the doctor at the health center, with bronchitis, but he said he couldn't be sure. Whatever this illness happened to be, though, he put me on antibiotics, which seem to be helping. Still, though, I'm coughing a lot, and I'm constantly a little tired. Hopefully it goes away soon. And since most people in my suite are sick with something, hopefully I won't just catch something else right away. That would be horrible. I would cry.

Naturally, coughing all the time and subsequently having a sore throat means I haven't been able to do much singing. So far, I've had two voice lessons, and I only sang a little at the first one, and that through a sore throat. When I went last week, right after I had talked to the health center, my teacher just let me go back and scheduled me a makeup lesson for this Friday. Hopefully I'll actually be ready to sing this Thursday. I couldn't tell you for sure yet. I have, however, been writing a few new songs, which I'll hopefully be well enough to work on better soon. I'm also still kind of hoping to find a band here, although I haven't figured out yet where to go to get one. I'll just have to keep my eyes open.

Here's some exciting news, though: My posters from China came today! And they are quite lovely. Haruhi and Shugo Chara... my wall is now complete. And I finally put my lanterns up today, too. Picture time:

I love my room. And I swear, my desk looks worse in the picture than it does in real life...

What next... Oh, I'll tell you about my shopping adventure. On Saturday, I finally decided that I was done with not having floss, fiber one pop-tarts, hanging hooks for my paper lanterns, and a whole list of other stuff, so I decided that it was shopping day. Unfortunately, I was the only one in the suite who needed to go shopping (or at least, who could at the moment--Laura was stuck here with laundry). So, I called myself a cab and set off. It was actually kind of fun. I think I now have everything I need in the room, at least for a while.

Out of the room, though... I'm going to need more warm clothes before long. The weather took another turn for the worse last night: The wind has appeared. It wasn't too cold today, but if this is any hint of what's to come, these t-shirts I've been wearing aren't going to serve me well much longer. And neither is this jacket. I don't like the cold. Illinois... why do you have to be like this... I'll never complain about the cold at home again...

I suppose I can just do one paragraph about clubs in general. I've gone to two clubs so far: Martial Arts Club and Japanese Club. I like them both. Laura was the one who first got me into the idea of Martial Arts Club, but she ended up disappointed after the first day (not structured enough for her). That was fun; we were expecting a sit-down-and-talk meeting where we would discuss what the club did last year and what it wanted to do this year, so we just wore our street clothes, but the guys running the club decided to jump right into a lesson. Front-kick, side-kick, roundhouse-kick drills are fuuuuun in skinny jeans, let me tell you... I went back to the second meeting, and I'm still debating whether to keep going - the downside is that without Laura, it seems like one other girl shows up each time, and then I'm still significantly the smallest, which makes some of the partner drills a little harder for me. Plus, most of the other people have some form of martial arts experience, and I've got one day of Kung-Fu for Writers at the Iowa Young Writers' Studio.

Never mind, I'll do clubs in two paragraphs, because I want to interject something quickly about IYWS: I found a girl in my FP class who went to IYWS 2009! She was apparently supposed to go in 2008, the year I went, in the session a few weeks before mine, which got cancelled because of the floods, so she ended up going this last year instead. I was pretty excited. Okay, back to clubs.

Conversely to Martial Arts Club, I was the one who convinced Laura to come with me to Japanese Club, and she only agreed to come because it was a sushi party, and she wanted sushi--even then, she felt guilty about coming because she was just going for the food. But it turned out that a) that was really all the meeting was about, anyway, and b) judging by how surprised the people running the club were at the number of attendees, Laura was not the only one. But it served the club well in at least one case, because the bribed Laura completely into loyalty, and she excitedly signed up for the e-mail list the next time we passed it in the hallway.

The club I was really excited for coming in was the Ballroom Dance Club (yes, I did just make a third paragraph for clubs--my fingers keep typing, and I can't stop them, you see), but I couldn't go to the meeting last week because I had just learned that morning that I had bronchitis. I found out yesterday at dinner, though, that a bunch of girls from my suite are in it, and they said it's really fun, so I think I'll go this week. I've always thought it would be fun to learn ballroom dancing. There's a chance that'll become my exercise club instead of martial arts club. Although ballroom dancing is less likely to help me fight back if I'm ever attacked by somebody...

...on second thought, those front kicks we were doing just seemed to me like violent développés, so maybe...dance can be used as a fighting technique...like the Queen's Waltz...hahahaha...*gazes up at Shugo Chara poster*

Yeah, that's it for the moment. If I forgot anything vitally important, I'll let you know when I remember.

Everything, belated

I keep having things to tell you, but no time to do it! Hopefully I can remember everything. I'll go look at my last post to make sure I don't get confused and tell you the same story twice.

Oh, right. Now I remember where we are. Monday evening. I think all I did between that blog post and going to bed was to check my e-mail and see that the club messages were starting to come. One was a message from the Japanese Club about a meeting the following evening. The other was from Gaelic Fire, the Irish dance club. I had actually completely forgotten that I'd signed up for that one - I joined it a) because I was so surprised that we had one, b) because it made me think of Aryn and the time she tried to teach me an Irish dance, and c) I was going around joining most of the exercise-related clubs. Unfortunately, their first practice was scheduled for the exact same time as the Japanese Club meeting, and Japanese won that battle. So, with that decision made, I went to sleep.

Tuesday... Oh, right. I woke up the next morning with a mysterious pain in my shoulders. Like, I spent all day trying to massage away the extreme tension. That, and trying to figure out where the pain could possibly have come from. I hadn't done much with weights in the gym the day before, and what I had done didn't seem to involve my shoulders at all. And other than that, what had I done? It took me until the evening to figure it out: Can anyone say, "Carrying a printer box half your size across campus"? Gooooood.

Well, I had to get it back here somehow. ^^; Totally worth it.

And you want to see why? I finished my first notebook collage yesterday! As you'll probably be able to tell, it's my Japanese notebook. My logic is this: In Japanese 101, especially first term, it's perfectly acceptable to cover your notebook with pictures of anime characters. Enough of the people who take Japanese got into it because of anime that no one's really going to judge you for it. Maybe by the time you get to third term, and definitely by second year, you want your notebook to start showing a better depth of understanding - some cultural symbols or some of the kanji you've learned, for example. But if you're just starting out and it makes you obnoxiously excited to be able to flip your notebook closed and point to the character who said the new words and phrases you're learning, then by all means, go for it.

Plus, they're all so very pretty/cute/awesome. Observe:

Plus, I finally found a good use for some of the Hiragana stickers I bought before leaving home (they were so cute, I just had to). They add a nice little pop of glitter, as well as a good use for Itsuki's speech bubble. Itsuki and Nagihiko have each already had a minor peeling emergency, though, so I may have to find a better way to fix the pictures on, especially the ones on the bottom edge. I managed to disguise the cut-off top of Nagi's head, though...

But right, we were still on Tuesday. The only class I have on Tuesdays is the FP common experience, which is a meeting of all of the first-years to watch a film of to hear a lecture. This week we watched a German movie called The Lives of Others. Fabulous movie. It's about a Stasi officer in the GDR before the wall came down. It was all in German with English subtitles (luckily, I'm well-adjusted to subtitles). The idea is that we then incorporate the films into our discussions in class on Wednesday, which is cool. Especially if the movies keep being this good. We're watching Hotel Rwanda in a few weeks, which I hear is very good also, so I have high hopes.

After the movie, I went over to the fitness center again. I seriously love that place; it's like my new home-away-from-home-away-from-home. The times I've been there, at least, it hasn't been all that crowded, and it's nice and quiet for listening to music. Who'd have thunk that the gym would be my calming escape place? College is just full of surprises, I suppose.

Then I went back to the dorm, finished up my homework, and went to bed.

But something's missing, right?

When I signed out at the fitness center, writing "6:30" must have triggered something in my brain, because I suddenly remembered about the Japanese club meeting that was supposed to start at 6:00. Oops. Sumimasen, minna. Next time. I got the e-mail today about what they discussed at the meeting, and I saw posters for the welcome/sushi party, so I'll get there in time.

Now let's see, did anything interesting happen yesterday? Well, for those curious about what song I finally ended up turning in for Music 101 ('cause I'm sure you were all on the edges of your seats about that, there), I chose Imogen Heap's "The Walk". I do love that song, and it just seemed to work somehow. It could be in part because it's a ship song for the story I've been half-working on lately, but it's a good song nonetheless. Never mind the reasons, right? And on the subject of Music 101, have you ever listened to Medieval chant? It's pretty cool, actually. We just got to the part where they invented rhythm in class today.

I mean, like... that's kind of an odd way to put it, but it's kind of the truth at the same time...

Also, I had my first voice lesson today. I really don't know what I think yet; my teacher seems nice (actually, she used to live near UP - she's close friends with one of the music guys (I think) at PLU), which is cool, and it sounds like she knows things I can work on, and she told me she's had other students who've had vocal injuries before, so I guess that's all a good sign. It sounds like I'll be singing an Italian song first, though, and unfortunately, it sounds like there's no way out of the studio classes (basically, we have to sing for everyone else taking voice lessons from her - kill me now) or the concert, which sucks just a little. It also sounds like we will definitely be sticking to the classical music list, which is what I expected and not such a bad thing when you don't factor in the performing part. We'll have to see how it goes. I'm going to try and stay positive, but I'm a little skeptical.

I guess that might be about it. I learned that the convenience store in my building doesn't carry floss, although it does carry three kinds of deodorant, three kinds of fabric softener, and dish soap (which, admittedly, I also needed, and now have). I guess I need other stuff from a real store by this weekend, anyway. And it's already Thursday. I wish the stores were a bit closer. As it is, they're not quite within walking distance, so I need to find someone who has a car who can drive me somewhere.

It's getting a bit colder over here. Leaves falling, all that. I'm not ready for winter. I wouldn't mind a little bit more summer...