Hello finally

So, I think that I have tried to post a blog 5-10 times now, but only just figured out how to. Yes, I am in college.
A couple of weeks ago I was walking down Main street to the train station in Worcester. The area of the city that my college is in is about comparable to the central district in Seattle, so students are cautioned about wandering about by ourselves, but it was the middle of the day on Sunday, so I figured it was ok. I did meet a couple of creepy people along the way, but there was this one guy who started walking right behind me, and then started talking about what a nice day it was for a walk, and how long a walk I was going for. I just nodded and smiled, and when I turned off Main st. to go to the train station, he waved and said goodbye, and continued on his way. I found the train station, and turned around to go back to school. when I was almost there, I heard this guy yell "Hey miss, are you following me?" I turned around, and it was the same guy, about 45 minutes and a mile and a half later, going in the opposite direction. It creeped me out a little, but he seemed pretty harmless so I just smiled and shook my head and kept going. I don't walk as much downtown anymore though.
Other than that, my college exploits are pretty boring. I tried out for the varsity soccer team, and am going to start practicing with them in the spring, but for now I am on a club soccer team made up almost entirely of international students, and I am the only girl. It's pretty fun though, at least until it starts snowing and getting super cold. I am also playing in the chamber orchestra here, which is about 100 times worse than Garfield's orchestra, but it works. The conductor is really nice, and now he wants me to be a music minor in his program, so that's cool. I also play a lot of taboo and trivial pursuit with my friends around 1:00 in the morning, which is lots of fun. All in all, college is pretty good, especially because there is soft serve ice cream in my dinning hall.

Ninjas, Car Hoods, and Gorillas

So my main group of friends here is a bunch of people in a seminar called "colonization of space" meaning they spend most of their time talking about how to get to mars. And they spend the rest of their time talking about ninjas. I actually believe we have not gotten through a meal without mentioning the word ninja. Most of them do martial arts, including one guy who is a black belt in japanese archery. This weekend we have plans to all buy nerf guns and have an epic battle. And the rumor is that we will have a battle next weekend which will somehow involve glow in the dark paint. We shall see the results.

In other news, when I was driving across the country my car hood started getting some air over hills in montana (yes, there are a few hills in montana). Anyways, we went to a gas station and fixed the latch with industrial duct tape. I figured: end of story. Apparently not. I was driving back from a trip to albany and there were some super slow people in front of me so I went in the left lane and increased my speed from 60 to 70 and WHAM! My windshield was introduced to my car hood. So I pulled over-ish (there was a guard rail, so I could only get half way out of the left lane). And I called 911, and they promptly forgot about me. And then I sat on the side of the road for an hour and a half while cars whizzed by me and one almost hit me and spun around into a ditch (haha). Anyways, eventually I got to meet a tow truck driver who has a bad hip so his wife clips his toenails for him, and now my silver car has a white hood.

I also take classes here (surprise) and my seminar is about game theory. We were talking about a hypothetical situation in which guerillas are fighting the police to try and take over the armories. So I (naturally) doodled a bunch of pictures of gorillas absentmindedly while listening to the lecture. And then we modeled the situation and did a statistical analysis and it turns out the gorillas had an advantage. Not thinking, I raised both fists in the air and yelled "YES!" The professor stopped and looked at me, puzzled and said "you like revolutionaries?" I was too embarrassed to explain myself.

So, that's college so far!

Climbing, checking and trying to stay sane

Well, Heidi may be going mountaineering (which is awesome), but my climbing class got to go to Idaho over our four-day weekend and practice trad leading and multi-pitch climbing. Basically, I was something like 400 feet off the ground, hanging off two anchor bolts and getting to see 360 degrees of Idaho around me. It was beautiful and the coolest thing I've ever done, by far. You should check out my pictures on facebook.

I also got promoted to checker at Safeway, which means I get to work awesome shifts like 5-11pm tonight, when I have 20 pages of Spanish poetry to read and a 3 page essay analyzing poetry in Spanish due tomorrow. Checking is actually a much harder job than most people give it credit for. All the random little things you have to remember to do, like dealing with an order that's paid for half with food stamps and half with a credit card, or asking for donations for breast cancer research, get really tricky sometimes. Not to mention that training is so not helpful for produce codes. They require you to know codes for rutabagas, bok choy and turnips during training, but not carrots or sweet potatoes. Fail.

I just started another class--Intro to Music Theory--so now I'm actually taking all 21 of the credits I signed up for this semester. It's a little crazy, since our homework is to practice interval identification, and quizzes require us to hear two notes and say not only the interval, but also its quality (aka we have to tell a minor and major 2nd apart, or a perfect and augmented 4th). Which is basically impossible as far as I'm concerned, but I'm working on it.

In spite of all the insanity, I'm having a really good time. I just need to take fewer classes next semester, though I highly doubt that will end up happening.

Sign Stealers Suck!

So Sigrid and I have had our name tags stolen off of our door 6 times now, I think. A couple times we put up a sign asking who was stealing them, or telling them to stop. That didn't work. When I got back to the dorm today, someone had made signs for us, to replace the most recently stolen ones. I asked Sigrid if she had seen them, and apparently I missed a whole evening of sign related drama (instead I was dealing with sine related drama on my math test...). I guess she went and thanked the people who made them, and as she was coming back heard the boys who live above us coming up the stairs. She looked through the little hole on the door and one of the boys stopped to look, then the other came up to the door and said, "I really want to steal this right now." She opened the door and said, "fuck, no!" They ran away. A bit later she heard them sneaking down the stairs to our door, and as one guy(Tyler) was stealing her sign, she opened the door on him. He ran away. Later, she was talking to Tyler's roommate, who insisted that it wasn't Tyler doing it. She told him that she had seen him... and then in walked one of Tyler's suitemates with the sign saying, "look what I found in Tyler's drawer." So we have finally found our sign stealer, and we have signs for the moment. Stay tuned, because I doubt this will end here.
In other news, I went up to Baker two weekends ago for a mountaineering class. The weather was beautiful, although it was really cold. I got to do some ice climbing. :) Then, I was going to go on a mountaineering class for trip leaders last weekend. It was raining a lot. We got up the trail a mile or so and came to a really swollen river. It was way to high to consider crossing, so we had to come back, and learn about crevasse rescue from a power point. Then the next day we went to the arboretum on campus and set up the systems we had learned about over a small cliff. It was pretty sweet.
Also, I'm pretty sure I just aced a math test, so I'm quite happy at the moment. It's not a particularly easy class, either.

Western is the Best...ern!

I really like it up here at Western, and I'm super glad I decided to go here! I really like my classes, and the frisbee team is awesome. I decided to play ultimate instead of rowing, which is what I had been planning on doing until I went to the crew meeting, and it was kinda boring and I started thinking about doing something else. Then I went the to frisbee meeting/practice, and it was awesome and fun, so I decided to go for it.

My engineering graphics class seems really cool so far, and I'm excited to finally learn CAD. We have a semester long project making mousetrap powered cars, which will be fun and intense, because part of our grade rides on it (haha ride, because it's a car and you ride in cars). Art and Linguistics are cool, but my Microecon class is pretty boring. Mostly because the teacher drones on and on and just repeats what was in the reading.

My roommate and both of my suitemates went home for the weekend, so it's quiet around here. Luckily they are all smart and nice. The other day I ran into Ian, and we were going to go eat lunch, but he forgot his meal card so we went to his dorm, and I had the pleasure of meeting his roommate. It was around noon, and his roommate was still in bed, having skipped his morning classes. Ian says his roommate has a goal of getting all the girls' phone numbers in their dorm, talks incessantly, and his only interest other than girls seems to be cars. It made me realize how lucky I am to have cool room/suitemates.

Stack 2, Floor 2 Craziness

Alright, so Sigrid and I had to do our roommate agreement yesterday. We had heard that our RA (Andy) would try to beat around the bush when it came to creating an agreement on how to let eachother know that they shouldn't come back to the room because it was being used for sex. So we prepared for this awkward moment by making a sign for our doorknob. One side says "studying" and the other side says "sex." "Studying" for our purposes means anything less than sex.
Anyway, we were going to present this sign to him when the topic came up in our meeting, and be really straightforward about it in order to make him even more uncomfortable. Our suitemates were even hiding in the closet to overhear the imminent hilarity. So he starts asking us about "what other activities is it okay to partake in with a guest in your dorm?" And we were prepared... only then he ammends it with "and I don't mean sex."
Basically, we think he didn't think we were likely to be having sex, or weren't attractive enough for any guys to want to, or that we were lesbian or something. Later, Sigrid thought it would be a good idea to attach a post-it to it saying "please return this when you are done using it. p.s. we're not lesbian, in case you were wondering" and put it on Andy's doorknob. A few minutes later she freaked out and went to remove it before anyone saw it, but it was already gone.
Also, he knows it came from our room because of some blue duck tape that we had used previously to attach notes to his door asking questions and the like which we also put on the sign.
We haven't seen him since...
Also, the guys in the suite above us started a basketball team and practice in their room. It's really loud. They also hand down video game controllers to hit our window and get our attention. The first time this happened, Sigrid threw a nasty cinammon candy up and managed to get it into their window. End of story. It was probably more exciting in real life...

So this took 5 min for me to figure out how to do...

I just found out how not tech savvy I am. Anyway I am currently sitting in my 4 man dayroom in the Zeta Tau Alpha house the night before school starts. See I can cram so much info into so little space. I did end up surviving rush and am rather enjoying the house. The girls are all fun and relaxed, and according to Walter "You haven't changed!". I was a little insulted...
Anyway I have 9am class tomorrow so am going to go to sleep, but when I have more energy I will tell of my first 4 frat parties, that all happened Thursday night. Then I got the swine. More to tell later.