Exciting Day! January 29, 2009

1. I discovered that one of my friends speaks Italian (or is learning at least).

2. I learned that my Prof. (who’s from Greece) was a VJ for MTV-Greece when he was younger.  He was also a hair stylist… And has chased donkeys (and doesn’t recommend it).

3. We finished our movie & (hopefully) successfully burned it to a DVD.  We will be showing it in class tomorrow.

4. I sang at the Holden Evening Prayer Service with my good friend Sarah.

5. I saw Does it Make A Sound?: Three One-act Plays which was absolutely amazing.  I loved it.  The first one was a guy who seemed to be trapped inside a box, and was about fate.  The second was a family therapy session thing but it was a musical revue (so the entire thing was various songs from musicals).  The third was about making your own choices and giving meaning to your life.  Sorry… none of these discriptions give the plays any justice.

Happy Chinese New Year! January 26, 2009

I’ve decided I really hate the themed dinners at the UC.  They seem like a good idea, but really, they’re just kinda disgusting… 😦  There was one on election night, and every station served “Americana” food, such as ribs and BBQ chicken, and other such foods that I’m not fond of.  Tonight there was Chinese food… or rather a really crappy attempt at Chinese food.  And really, they need to learn that some people really don’t like spicy foods and they should serve something other than rice to accommodate for such people… 😦  Oh well…  There were fortune cookies, which made it better, I guess, and I got a fortune that said “Keep up the good work. You will be soon be rewarded.” (haha… lovely typo. :P)  Anyway, we worked on our movie for almost 12 hours today, so it was very nice fortune to receive. 🙂   Luckily, we’re almost done with our project (I believe…).   It’ll be nice to be done with it.  Especially with a final coming up on Friday that I need to study for…

Oi… :( January 25, 2009

So… I’m the type of person who likes to quickly and efficiently accomplish whatever task is at hand.  I’m good at knowing exactly how I want to do it and get it done in a timely fashion.  This doesn’t seem to be the way of other people, though… I’m also bad at dealing with incompetence… I understand concepts and ideas very quickly and it’s hard for me to understand at times why it’s so much harder for others.  Anyway, today we were supposed to finish our filming for our project.  So, around 1:30 I headed over to a fellow group member’s room, only to discover that we couldn’t really do any work until 3, when one of our actors was available.  Because of this, I was hoping to set up the shot in our location so that as soon as the person arrived, he could sit down, and we would shoot the scene (he didn’t have any lines in the scene).  But no.  I couldn’t get them to go over until I got a call from the actor asking where we were.  Then we had to set the scene up, make sure we had our lines, etc.  😦  The next scene we filmed was a pretty big scene with a lot of lines in it, so I had to wait around for maybe 15-20 minutes for each person to memorize their part.  Even then, people forgot their lines.  And their blocking.  And didn’t speak loud enough.  And was just not fun in general.  Yeah… And then we got to the Digital Media Center and all of the computers were taken, so we had to sit around and wait for someone to get off.  And then we had to transfer all the movie clips to that computer and it took forever… But, we eventually got all the clips and edited several scenes and got pretty much everything put into the editing program, so we made a lot of progress. 🙂  So the day ended well, but I was most a not-so-happy person this morning/afternoon… 😦

Movie Making January 22, 2009

So… most of this week my time has been devoted to making our movie for my religion class. It’s going pretty well so far. I like what we’ve filmed and we’re having a good time making it. 🙂 We still have a lot left to film, though, and one of the guys in it has been difficult to get a hold of and has a very busy schedule. But he’s also perfect for the part, and we can’t think of anyone else who would be able to pull it off as well as him. So… hopefully he’ll be available tomorrow and maybe Friday so that we can get the filming done and start working on the editing…. And, on top of all the movie work, we still have a bunch of reading to do and, on Tuesday and again tomorrow, I won’t be able to start until 9 o’clock due to my ballroom dance class. Oofda!

In other news, I’m very excited that we have a new president in the White House and hope that he is able to get this country back on its feet… and lower college tuition… and establish more affordable/universal health care… among other things.

Oh dear… January 19, 2009

It’s been almost a week since I’ve posted.  Sorry… I’ve had a very busy week…

For my Old Testament class, we have to make a 20-minute movie based on a story in the text.  Our script for the movie was due on Friday, so my group spent all of last week in the library typing it up.   I think it’s going to be good… We’re doing a modernized version of Jezebel.  Hopefully we can get people to be in our movie, though… There’s a guy from choir that we’re really hoping will be available to do it.  He’d be perfect for the part.  Anyway… that’s what I’ve been doing.

Ballroom has been fun. 🙂  We started learning waltz and east-coast swing last week.  Waltz has a lot of the same moves as fox trot, just with slightly different rhythms.  East-coast swing is a bit different… In Swing club we’ve been learning west-coast (although this month we’re doing blues, which is a lot of fun), so it’s interesting learning a different style of swing.  West-coast is pretty much “slow, slow, quick, quick ” whereas east-coast is “triple-step, triple-step, rock, step”.

Campus has been really quiet this weekend… With the 3-day weekend, a lot of people went home (which was what I was planning on doing, but both my parents are out of town, so I stayed here).  The highlight of my weekend was definitely last night when Elaine called. 🙂  We talked for like an hour and a half.  It was lovely. 🙂

Happy Birthday, Mr. Angelidis!!! January 12, 2009

Today is, as you might have guessed, Mr. Angelidis’ birthday. 🙂 (Mr. Angelidis was my AP Calculus teacher at Kentwood).  I wanted to say thank you for all the support you’ve given me and my family over the past couple years.  I feel very blessed to have had you for a teacher, and a friend. 🙂  Yours was definitely one of my favorite classes (minus the Calculus part…lol) and I looked forward to seeing what crazy, fun, off-topic thing we would be talking about that day. 😛  Thanks for everything!  Have a fantastic birthday and many wonderful years to come!

Ballroom January 7, 2009

Last night I had my first ballroom class. 🙂  Yesterday, there were 26 girls and 27 guys!!  The teacher said their might be more, later, too.  So many people!  But it’s fun. 🙂  We’ll be learning the Fox Trot, Walz, and Eastern Swing.  Yesterday we started by making sure we knew the proper dance hold, then worked on Fox Trot, learning the basic step, the box, the box turn, the promenade, and the “get out of trouble”.  Most people came in pairs, so we spent most of the time with our oringinal partner. (For those who didn’t come as a pair, they found someone to dance with when we began).  Throughout the night, though, we also switched partners.  Dancing with someone else helps you better feel the leading necessary and the cues follows need to be aware of in order to know the steps that come next.  The class was very fast paced, which I liked, and the instructor said that we were learned more last night than he usually teaches in the first lesson… Yay!  Maybe that’ll mean that we get to learn more…. 🙂

In other news, my TV, while working when I left for break, didn’t work when I returned, causing me to miss some shows I was hoping to watch, including Superstars of Dance.  Luckily, it started working this morning!  Just in time for the Ellen DeGeneras show! 😀  Yay!  It was nice doing a little dancing before class. 🙂

Website January 6, 2009

I found a new website for language resources… http://www.transparent.com There are games, vocab, and articles in the target language, among other things. 🙂  Yay!

Another good site is: http://www.bbc.co.uk/languages/

First day of J-term January 5, 2009

Unlike many parts of Washington (I understand), there was no snow on the ground when I woke up.  Which is fine with me… At 10, I headed down to the book store to pick up my textbooks (since we had arrived 5 minutes too late last night).  After that, I came back, got a sandwhich, then headed of to class: Old Testament.  I was excited to find that I knew 3 people in my class!  Yay!  Also, my professor, Antonios Finitsis, is from Greece!  And lived in Chicago for many years. (Just like Mr. Angelidis! (Hi, by the way, since I’m sure you’re reading this. 🙂 ))  The class seems like it will be fun.  Today we mostly did an overview, going over the syllabus, why studing the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible is important, and stuff like that.  It’s kind of weird only having one class… (Ballroom is only Tuesdays and Thursdays).  It definitely gives me plenty of time to do all of my reading though. 🙂  Which I should probably get a head start on.  We don’t have much to read for tomorrow’s class, but I’m supposed to have Genesis 2-12 and chapters 2 & 3 in our textbook read for Wednesday.

Last Week of Vacation

December 29 I went to New Voices with Matt, which was a lot of fun.  It’s a kind of cabaret show, where a number of singers sing new selections by contemporary composers, or from new musicals.  Before the show we had dinner in the food court at Seattle Center (we both had fettuccine Alfredo. 🙂 Mmm) and then went to Starbucks and watched a very strange circus-esque performance on the little stage in the Seattle Center.  It was quite bizarre…  The show was good.  The sound was much better this time. 🙂 (This was the 6th New Voices show, and the last one (which was the 1st I went to) did not have good sound…)

December 30, Sarah, Kenna, Roxanne, and I (plus Kristen and Nick) went to see Mr. Angelidis.  He recently adopted a little girl from Ethiopia, Leyla, who is absolutely adorable. 🙂  She’s  7 months old, has the cutest smile, and is very well behaved.  She barely cried the whole time we were there (which was for several hours), and she fell asleep 3 or 4 times, too.  Afterwords, Sarah, Kenna, Roxanne, and I went to South Center for dinner and did some shopping, too. 🙂  Sarah and Kenna especially had fun playing dress up with me. I ended up getting a pair of jeans and a cute shirt.

New Year’s Eve I went to a New Year’s Eve/”surprise” birthday party for David at Josh’s house.  It was cool seeing everyone again, especially since Josh and Isaac will be leaving for their missions  pretty soon.  Lots of fun… food, friends, keraoke, cranium, etc.

New Year’s Day I had to wake up really early because I was kennel help while Mom was in Palm Springs.  Umm… I think that was it.

Friday, I woke up early again (to snow falling!) and danced with Ellen DeGeneras at 11. 😀  It was fun.  I love Ellen.  She kind of reminds me of my mom. 🙂  After that I watched an Anthony Bourdain marathon! (Yippee!)  For those of you who don’t know, Anthony Bourdain is a chef who has a show on the travel channel where he travels around to different places around the world and eats their food.  The last episode I watched was his trip to Brazil.  My mom and I want to go to Sao Paolo just for the Mortadello sandwhich he gets at the market there.  It looks sooooo good.  Wow.  After that episode, Kenna picked me up to go to have pho with her and Elaine at the Great Wall Mall.  It had been far too long since I had had pho.  It’s so good!  Afterwords, as always, we got bubble tea. (Also delicious).  That night, Dad and I went to see The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, which was very good, but also very long.  Make sure you go to the bathroom before you see it!  lol

Saturday, Mom came home  and we went to Greek for dinner! 😀  I love Greek food.  Sometimes there is “Greek” food at school, but it’s really not.  And it makes me sad.  I love my saganaki, pita, Greek salad, gyro platter, and baklava…

Sunday at church, our pastor began by telling how that week he had been woken up by a squirrel howling on his roof at 6 in the morning.  The next morning (around 4), clad  in camo and equipped with a BB gun, he went outside and hid in his bushes and, after a conflict of conscious, prayed for forgiveness, then shot the squirrel. lol After the service, I found out that the situation hadn’t been completely taken care of and that he was planing on going shopping for a pellet gun that day. 😛  At 3, we went up to Capitol Hill for a home inspection and, while we were there, it started snowing.   We went to Pagliacci (a pizza place) afterwords and, by the time we were done, the snow was sticking.  We had heavy snow all the way to PLU.  It was crazy.  Anyway… after getting all my stuff put away, Kellie and I watched Mr. and Mrs. Smith.  We were going to watch 50 First Dates, but it kept skipping. 😦  Elizabeth still wasn’t back yet… apparently she won’t be getting back until 9 or 10 tonight (Monday) since she didn’t have class today.