In NZ

So, my laptop has died (just the computer and not the hard drive, fortunately), and with it all my plans of uploading photos, catching up on blogging, and getting homework done.  Right now Nora is kindly letting me use her computer, but I feel bad taking it from her to often, so I probably won't be getting nearly as much done as I intended.  On the plus side, I won't be staying up late online, either.  Anyway, all that to say that my posting schedule is not going to be as promised the other day.  Maybe I'll write some retrospective posts once I'm home, if anyone's interested in that?  (If you are, let me know...)

But for now, here's a little more on where I am now and what's been going on: Nora and I are staying with a family who live in a suburb of Auckland.  The dad is from New Zealand and the mom is American (from Michigan); she moved here with him after they got married less than 10 years ago.  They have three children, ages 2, 4, and 6.  The kids are all quite high-energy, and the youngest, especially, has been playing with us a lot.  She likes to make me pretend to go to sleep and then sing, yell, or hit me with a pillow to wake me up.  She's super cute; they all are.  We've been eating great home-cooked meals with them and we watched NCIS (an American crime show that I'd never heard of before we came here) with the mom the other night.  So it's been fun so far.

For the past two weeks we've had Gary Baxter, a Houghton art professor, with us to teach the Art and Film courses.  So for the past three days our classes have consisted of watching New Zealand films, which is fun.  The movies are, in case anyone's curious, Once Were Warriors, Whale Rider, and Boy.  All quite good, all dealing with some hard issues--Once Were Warriors is especially dark, very disturbing.  Boy had a good amount of humor in it, so that balance was good.

Today we visited a super nice public school and heard about it from one of the teachers and chatted with some of the students and then had a wonderful afternoon tea there (here and in AU they eat so many times in one day; breakfast, then morning tea, then lunch, then afternoon tea, then dinner [which they call tea--so many teas!  But it never means just tea, there's always food too], and sometimes supper, which is a light snack before bed).  Tomorrow we have a guest lecturer in the morning, and then we have a free afternoon.  Not sure what I'll do; maybe try to get into the city by ferry if it's not too expensive and if I can figure out the bus system to get there.

So yeah, I guess that's a pretty good overview of things right now.  Not sure when I'll post again, but I'll try to at least once or twice before I come back on the 18th!

Lanthorn craziness

So, I asked people if I should keep blogging, and my family and Hanna said yes, but I still haven't been.  Mostly that's because of time, but today I have lots of time for some reason, so I thought I would write a post (and I'm still being lazy, because most of this is copy and pasted from an email I wrote).

Adam and I are having the Lanthorn release party this Thursday.  It's been a crazy process.  First, we couldn't figure out what software we were supposed to use.  The college said they were going to get us new software, but they never did.  There was a layout/design program on the computer in our office, but it said it wasn't the full version and would put a watermark on all our pages.  So I emailed the former editor, and from her I found out that they'd never used that program, but had had access to a different program through the school newspaper.  So we ended up using Microsoft publisher, which worked fine but wasn't the best.

Putting the book together took a lot of time, and then we tried to email it to the print center, but it was too big of a file.  Because the print center lady was going to be going away for a few days, I had to leave a class to go back to my room to put The Lanthorn on a  blank CD and then bring it to her.  And then her color printer wasn't working, so we thought we were going to have to do it in black and white, but after printing 60 black and white copies she got the color to work.  So now they're all printed, but they needed to be folded and stapled, which Adam and I will be working on tomorrow.

We've also had issues with the party; we didn't hear back from the guy in charge of Java 101 (the campus coffee shop, where the party will be) that we actually had it until today, so we only just sent out the campus wide email, and there's some lecture going on at the same time, and everyone we've talked to is either going to that or has other plans already.  So we'll probably have only five people show up to the party.  It'll be okay; the book will still have been successfully published, and even if not many people get them at the party we'll still leave them around campus for people to pick up, but the whole thing has just been way more frustrating than I expected.  Having it done will be a big relief, and I'm sure I'll feel better about it then.  And at least next semester we'll know how to do things better.

Readers?

Should I post on this blog?  Does anyone read it?  I haven't been keeping up with it, but I could; it wouldn't really be worth it, though, if no one's reading.

10 million fireflies

So, now that I don't have Facebook I'm going to try to start blogging more regularly, provided people are actually reading this. So leave me a comment once in a while if you are, so that I know this isn't a waste of time. :)

I started another blog last month, mostly for myself, where I post pictures, poems, and songs/song lyrics that I really like. I wanted to have a place to "collect" all these things, so that I can find them quickly and easily. In case you're interested, it's http://alyshkalia.blogspot.com/. There are a lot of poems on there already, so if you just want to read the ones I like best, go to the right side where it says "labels" and click on "favorites." A lot of them are ones I read in my poetry class this semester.

I mostly mentioned that because I don't have much else to say right now. Today was an okay day; I went to class, cleaned in Gillette, watched half an episode of the sci-fi series Firefly (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefly_(TV_series)), worked as salad runner during dinner, and not much else. So yeah, pretty boring. Tonight Jaela, Alexa and I are going to watch the 4th Harry Potter movie, which is probably my favorite one (not sure though, because I've only seen it once).

So yeah, I guess that's it. Enjoy the weekend!