Learning Experiences

A couple things I've learned over the last week:

1. Do NOT forget hiking boots when climbing a mountain. Hiking through a foot of snow in Converse is not fun. It's also very chilly on your toes.

2. When you spend two weeks preparing for a musical, you don't care nearly as much as when you spend 3 months on it. I'm in the school's production of Pirates of Penzance (Read the last post about that), and I kinda jumped in at the last minute. This means I didn't actually know how the story ends until the third performance when Les told me how it ended. Also, I don't know any of the cast inside jokes, I wasn't there to see the set go up, I didn't help paint the set or anything. I feel so... outsider-ish. The high school productions, while not as good quality, were a much more personal experience for me, which I miss.

3. Doing laundry at 12 am is so worth it when you have to take up 5 washers. Which I guess is my fault, because I haven't done laundry in 3 weeks. It'll be weird to go back home and have to do laundry one load at a time.

4. I don't really know how to break in cards. No one wants to play with them because they are so new, but then no one will ever want to play with them because they will never be un-stiff-ified.

The musical world is sucking me back in!

As the title suggests, I am once again involved in a musical. Now, if you didn't know me in high school, anytime between January and April I probably couldn't do anything as I was in the musical. NOw, don't get me wrong, I loved it, it just took up a lot of time. From Anything Goes freshman year to Les Miserables sophomore, then Big River junior (woot woot for House Manager!) and then Into the Woods senior year, I was busy! But I loved it! From our crazy conductor who couldn't keep time to the Skittles and Twizzlers we consumed to crazy 10 hour rehearsals and getting off school all day for the full day, we had good times down there in our little pit world. But then, once Into the Woods was over, I thought I was done. People would be better than me, or professionals would do it, but never me the lowly freshman, non-music major. But, lo and behold, what do I get but an email from the choir director asking for a percussionist for the pit of Pirates of Penzance. there will be two rehearsals, then three days of tech and five performances. Now this I had to see. A pit, put together a week before the show? Madness! We spent MONTHS putting the pit together, and still had trouble come tech week, depending on the show. But, I decided to try it, as I had nothing else important to do on those nights, and the rest of the percussionists all had marching band during the nights of rehearsal, so I was a last resort.

So here I am, sitting in the smallest pit in the world, after only two rehearsals, two days before opening. And boy oh boy is it good to be back.

A Week in Review

Oh dear, it seems I've left all my faithful readers out there high and dry for the last week, and for that I am truly sorry. However, let me give you a little run down of some exciting (and not so exciting) things that have happened over the last week or so:

1. I made pie with my dearest sister, and watched a charming movie about ballet.

2. My math midterm did not go so well, and I know why and how to fix it.

3. Engineering is getting easier

4. My schedule is getting more full.

5. The internet is WAY too easy to spend a lot of time on.

so, to expound a little on these things:

1. Pie is tasty, but not necessarily when it's made from cans. My mother makes the best pie crust, and I cannot wait for Christmas break, when I will get to have some.

2. I got one point away from a C, and I know exactly how to get a much better score on the final (which she will count twice and drop the midterm if it's better, which it will be).

3. I went to a presentation on the track in Electrical Engineering that I am interested, and it is exactly what I want to do. Originally, when I came to OSU, I thought I would have to do the Energy Systems track, which would leave me somewhat with a lot of extra course work for not the thing I really wanted to do. So, this new track, called Sustainable and Renewable Energy, is exactly what I want to do, and they've created it just in time for me to get on track to take all the right core classes I need to get into the pro school (you apply after your sophomore year to get into the "pro" school, before you're just in the "pre-engineering program").

4. My schedule is getting a little bit more full, now adding Pirates of Penzance (we open on Thursday with only 5 rehearsals from the pit, 3 with actors! This is MUCH different from what I'm used to...) as well as TSA (The Student Abolitionists, a group to raise awareness about human trafficking) and InterVarsity (a small group in my dorm and large-group on Wednesday nights). However, this is not interfering with my homework doing, as I still have the mornings and all day Thursday and a lot of other times to work and keep up.

5. The internet is very easy to waste time on. I have found a site called stumbleupon.com, where it gives me random things, be it a video, a random picture, a game or whatnot just with a single click, something I've found to be quite dangerous as I once wasted about 2 hours on it, so I now avoid that. Also, Google Reader is a very handy invention, but some of my subscriptions update too frequently, so I've removed those so I can spend less time on it.

So, avid fans, that is my week (albeit briefly) in review. There was obviously a lot more that happened, but we'll stick to the important things, like homemade pie, and how amazing God is :)