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!

I'm back at Houghton

10:15, Saturday night:

Yeah, here I am, at Houghton again; I've been back for a week, I just haven't blogged at all. This was a semi-busy week for me, at least compared to how the rest of the semester has been. I had a geology test Thursday that I was studying for and freaking out about all week. When I actually had to take the test, though, I knew almost everything and went through it really fast, so it was way better than I expected. I also had two short soc. papers due on Friday, which I put off until Thursday night. That was a bad choice, but I got them written.

And then yesterday was Friday, and I was finally done with everything, and I watched Ratatouille with Adam and Eri after work at the dining hall. Today I went to the college play, Jake's Women, which was really good. Right now I'm watching The Italian Job with some girls on my floor, which is several of their favorite movies, although I've never heard of it. The main characters are in Venice right now, which is where I'm going in June! On Monday Nora and I are meeting for dinner to plan a little more about where we're going and how we're getting there.

2:55, Sunday afternoon:

I stopped writing last night because I got into the movie. It was pretty good, a fun, action/adventure movie. After that Jaela, Alexa, and I watched half of Harry Potter 6. Also this week, on Thursday after my geology test, I watched Where the Wild Things are, which the school showed in the chapel. It really wasn't what I expected; it was sad and kind of dark and even disturbing at times. I think it was good, though.

I also started a new job this week, vacuuming the fourth floor. I do that Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday while my other cleaning job is MWF, so now I'm working every day. It's good; I have the time for it, and I'm making more money.

The weather's been really nice here, which is great. And I guess that's it for now.

An away-from-Houghton adventure

Yesterday Adam, Steve, and I borrowed Alexa's car and drove to Rochester to see Avatar in 3D. I drove, and no, we did not get lost. There was a lot of traffic as we got close to the city, and there were pretty strong winds, but everything went fine. We got to the theater and watched the movie, which was almost 3 hours long. The story was really cliché, but the effects and the 3D were really cool, so it was worth seeing.

Afterward we went to Adam's house for dinner. His mom made us calzones, which were amazing, and we had real salad, so much fresher than Houghton's, and brownies and ice cream for dessert. It was a delicious meal.

Then it was time to drive back, which was when it really became an adventure. Steve drove, since I'd driven the whole way there. It was snowing a little, and it was dark since it was about 9:30 by the time we left. We made it onto the highway and back off fine and continued to follow the directions I'd gotten from Mapquest. But the directions must have been wrong, because we'd been going for a while and hadn't seen the road we were supposed to turn onto.

Then I suddenly recognized where we were--the tiny town of Short Tract, which was really ironic because Eri and I and some other people had been lost there on the way back from church a few weeks ago. We'd called Dan and he had looked up directions and told us how to get back, so I was pretty sure I remembered. But we'd driven past the road we needed to take, so we had to turn around, and the inside of the car was getting really fogged up and the defrost wasn't working very well, so Steve pulled over so we could clear it up. But he'd pulled onto a side road with a good amount of snow on it, and it turned out to be deeper than it looked. We opened a window and wiped the fog off the windshield, and then Steve tried to pull back onto the road. But we couldn't get out--we were stuck in a ditch.

I definitely had a moment of panic, wondering what we were going to do. Adam and I got out of the car and Steve drove forward, able to move in that direction but still not able to get back on the road. It really looked like we were stuck there. Then Steve tried backing up, and as Adam and I watched the back end of the car pulled up and out of the ditch, and the front end followed. After jumping up and down in celebration, Adam and I got back in the car. Steve turned it around, very careful not to go back in the ditch, and we drove back the way we'd come. We had to turn around several more times because I was confused about whether the road we needed was on the left or right, but we found it, and it was the right one.

It was about 15 or 20 minutes back to Houghton from there. The only other problem we had was that Steve's window wouldn't close--Alexa's car is pretty old and beat up, and the driver's side window gets stuck. There's a special way you have to close it, but I didn't remember what that was, so we had to drive the rest of the way with the cold wind blowing right into the car. I felt really bad for poor Steve!

But we did make it back, finally; it was almost midnight and I'd expected to get back around 11. It was definitely an adventure, with its scary moments, but it ended well and makes a good story. It was great to get away from Houghton for 9 hours and see a movie in a theater and eat a real meal in a house with a family.

***

Right now I'm half-watching the Olympics. The biathlon is on, which is a weird sport. Before that was ski jumping, which was pretty cool. Hopefully I'll be able to catch some of the figure skating tonight.

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!

Another e-mail excerpt

I have my first long paper due on the 2nd; it's for Literary Nonfiction and is to be on a writer or piece of writing and basically your interactions with them/it. I have to know what I'm going to write about by tomorrow, and I still have no idea . . .

We got our group project for that class back (the end result was a several-page document) and we did kind of badly. It hadn't been proofread very well and some people had had bad grammar and used sentence fragments, and he said it wasn't put together well. That made me more annoyed about it because if I had done it myself I wouldn't have had any of those problems.

This past weekend Jaela and I went to the Civil War weekend in Angelica, which was fun. It was kind of like heritage days with lots of tents set up and people at them showing/selling different things. It was nice to get off campus. Also this weekend I watched a movie with a bunch of people outside at night; the movie was Signs, and there's a creepy cornfield in it, so we watched it right next to a cornfield. It was scary and fun, and freezing cold.

The writing festival was last week; they had writing festival chapels which I went to, and I went to one of the other events. The one I wanted to go to was the readings, but I couldn't because I had class. The thing is it's so dependent on what writers they have and what genres they write, and I wasn't super interested in any of them, so although it was good it wasn't that relevant to me personally. For Literary Nonfiction we were assigned to go to some of the events, so I would have gone to the readings if I could, because out of all the events that was the one I was most interested in; my professor for that class was reading (he writes poetry).

I got one of my papers back today (from the fantasy class), just a short one-page one, and I got an A. I didn't think it was that good, so I was happy.

We're reading John Muir for bio; I remember learning about him in homeschooling a long time ago. I like his writing; it's usually pretty interesting, although sometimes his descriptions of trees and plants get a little long.

On Friday there's the first Lanthorn meeting. The current editor is a senior, so next year I might apply to be editor. I think it would be really fun.

Adam wrote an article for the school paper on the new 4-credit system and quoted me in it. It's going to come out on Friday. It's not that big a deal, but I think it's cool.

Today was rock climbing class again. I've definitely retained some of my skills, because I can still figure things out and do most of the routes fairly easily.

This is really random and snippety. I'm curious--does anyone actually read this anymore besides my immediate family? Let me know if you do, please, so I know that it's worth it to post!