Back 2 Skool

So spring semester has begun. After much hassling and stressing I got my schedule figured out. I'm taking 12 credits so that shouldn't be too bad. Only one Political Science class, which is kinda meh, but oh well. I'm fairly sure I'll like all my classes, hopefully this proves true. I have a friend or two or more in every class which makes it all the more entertaining. This semester is going to be very important grades-wise. I'm making some changes to help improve my grades and get my @$$ in gear.

I applied for a job at a nursing home down the street as a receptionist but haven't heard back from them so I'm assuming that means I need to keep looking. I'm going to post my resume on UMBCworks and see if I get any hits from there, and if not, I'll start applying around Catonsville. I have absolutely no money whatsoever so the job thing is kinda crucial if I want to do anything besides eat this semester. Lord knows the food around here is so freakin expensive i'll need money to help cover it by the end of the semester.

I'm excited that it snowed and stuck! I want to go skiing again...but no money. ugh I need to find a way to make money. all i need is 30bucks for skiing. i currently have 11 dollars to my name which i'm saving for...something. maybe skiing.

Ummmm I think that's about it. Oh! New phoneeeeee :D not going to be flushed this time!

Peace y'all

P.S. Common Sense Life Lesson for the week: trim the wick when lighting a candle...else you get weird flame with black smoke coming off it.

so close, so far

One exam left!! Almost doneeeee :) So So close to being done, but still so far from being home...I wanted to go home after my exam tomorrow but I haven't even begun to pack yet soooo thus I have to stay one more night. It won't kill me, but I'm really looking forward to being home. This is where having a car would come in handy...O well. Next semester hopefully.

I can't believe how fast this semester went by. This year even. I heard a song on the radio yesterday that I recall listening to while packing for winter break this time last year...this winter looks to be quite different, which is good. I have a license and a car so I have more freedom to come and go. I'll be returning the favors to friends who drove me around I'm sure, as well as taking munchkin here there and everywhere. I also don't plan to be injuring myself, but then again, those types of things are never really planned. I'm thinking I'll avoid the ice rink...sigh. That reminds me of the one bad thing different about this winter. Jennifer won't be here :(. Boo. I'm going to see her tho! yay!!! supposed to be flying, but Steph is saying she wants to take a road trip. I told her about my plans, and she said she's free around that time soooo a road trip would most def be cheaper then flying. I wonder if I cancel my flight if I can get it refunded? It would be a nice bandage for my bank account that's for sure. Which reminds me, I need to call tomorrow and see if I can grab some hours at Blue Mash over break. ARgggghh that was one aspect of this winter I wasn't planning on, but alas I am in desperate need of moneys. This winter will also be free from the emotional drama that plagued me last winter, thank you God. I'll also hopefully be going skiing and taking a winter class here at UMBC.

I should really be sleeping now, seeing as I only slept from 530-730 yesterday and then from 1030--1330. not really that good for me, though im sure sleeping for 8-12 hours all the 5 nights before that is why I'm not totally exhausted. Alas there are so many other things I am doing, eg writing here, talking to people on aim, and i'm sure I'll end up on some sort of game site eventually.

Rant time...why is it that I am so unable to find a decent guy? My standards aren't really that high. It seems like my ideal guy is a combination of all my guy friends. While it's definitely easier being single and free, and having guys as friends, at the same time there is always that desire for someone who is something more. That special someone. I know I'll eventually find the right one, or at least someone to get me started in the relationship world. My luck with guys has been almost nil since college. Oh well. I'm thinking it's time to be Miss Independent again like I was in high school, and then someone will come along and care enough to work through all my issues when I least expect it.

Okay brain is shutting down...9 days till Christmas including today weeee!!

peace y'all.

P.S. Common Sense Life Lesson for the week: don't wait until 10pm the night before an 8am exam to start studying (something I re-learn every semester)

It's the holiday season...

I love Thanksgiving. I really do. It means a break from school, time with the family, lots and lots of food, and many memories. It also kicks off the "Holiday season" which, being the Christmas commercialism sucker that I am, makes me very happy. For example, I'm now laying on my bed listening to Christmas music, pondering when it's going to snow again. It actually has already snowed TWICE this month...both times last week. It made me very happy, despite being sick as crap on Friday, to look out my window and see white fluffy stuff falling from the sky. Earlier in the week, on Tuesday, my friend Maya and I went outside when it was snowing and danced around like idiots. Fun times :)

So as previously mentioned, I was sick last week. It set in on wednesday/thursday and is still going. I'm getting better though. Friday through Sunday sucked majorly. That was the worst of the sick period, and I spent most of the weekend just trying to sleep and drink fluids. Today and yesterday have been better. Just abusing my nose with tissues and controlling a cough with oh so yummy Robitussin. ::sniffles:: The weekend did have it's good points. Saturday night was the highlight, being as it was my friend Dan's 21st birthday party. Lukie came up to chill with me and hang out at the party. That was tons of fun on so many levels. I can't wait to see all the crazy pictures we took. Fuuuun times :D

Currently waiting on the laundry to finish drying so I can finish packing for a trip to see my cousins and my uncle down in North Carolina. Sadly, we haven't seen them since this time last year, and they only live 5ish hours away. When I'm allowed to have the car for long distance driving (i.e. this summer) I'm really going to try and make it a point to visit my extended family more often. After all, who doesn't like road trips? I know I like them much.

Not a whole lot else going on right now, but when I get back to school, I will commence studying my friggin butt off for finals...joy. Library lockdown! Not to mention catching up on all my backwork for Spanish.

That's all for now folks. Yay for Christmas music!

Peace y'all.

P.S. Common Sense Life Lesson for the week: When your phone is in your pants pocket, and said pants are on the floor, be careful when picking them up to point the pocket away from the toilet. Otherwise, said phone ends up in said toilet. Or in my case, landing in the toilet just as it's flushing. Gotta love life.

O hey, I have a blog!

So I haven't written/vented in a while. Let's see what's happened since then...

July: Went to the beach in North Carolina with the fam, got to see the grandparents, and got to chill out.
Also went up to NY for a few days, got to see my "adopted" families up there and hang out with my girlies

August: worked 5 days a week for the first two weeks, then the second two was 6 days. Got some lovely paychecks out of that, and a have a kickin' recommendation waiting for me when I need it because I did pretty much everything there was to do there except pay the bills. Combine me doing everything with being respectful and honest (three of my coworkers got fired for skimming money...idiots) and being personable, they love me. My manager is practically begging me to work over winter break. I say this not to brag, but simply to show that it's really not that hard to please those in authority over us. To God be the glory. :)
Jennifer left in August :( I'm reallly hoping to go see her in Florida over winter break otherwise I don't see her until summer...
School started last week in August. The new freshies are (for the most part) soo cute! My class was definitely not that cute. First day of classes was Daddy's birthday :)

September: not much to speak of. School stuff, making new friends, catching up with friends from last year, all the first month of school fun stuff. Mom and Little sister's birthdays...Little sister is 14 now...growing up too fast :/

October: Grammy went home to be with Jesus Oct 2 :'(. Sad but I know she's dancing with the angels. God must have needed a little more joy up there in heaven :}

So far October has been up and down, just trying to keep up with everything. School is stressing me out but that's kinda life in college, right? One of my friends got robbed at gunpoint the other night...methinks I'll stop walking around at night by myself so much.

That reminds me (don't ask why, it just does) I need to get my hands on the rest of the books in Stephanie Meyer's Twilight series....OMG SO GOOD! Little sis had me read the first one and I was instantly addicted. Not that I have time to read for pleasure, since 3 of my classes are all reading all the time, but still. WANT!

I've also been introduced to some new music: Crazy Loop, Shake It, and White Tie Affair.

Upcoming events: License test #2 this saturday, Intervarsity Fall Conference at Summit Lake next weekend (YAY!!), Monsterbash 10/30 at Bedrock (woohoo!) which means i need to find time (as if there is such a thing) to go shopping and get my costume

Oye so little time so much to do....Now off to study for a history midterm.

Peace y'all!

P.S. Common Sense Life Lesson for the week: Don't let your little cousin climb all over you in dress clothes (Oh c'mon those stockings cost like $5 and she was too cute to resist)

nineteen :)

I'm nineteen!!! yay!!! Thank you Jesus for 19 years of grace and mercy on my life.
p.s. common sense life lesson for the week: when going to the movies remember to bring your wallet

I HATE THIS

I am so entirely fed up with being sick. Especially this nagging cold/allergy crap. If I'm gonna be sick I'd rather it be like last week where it was all out fever dizziness upset stomach etc. Since Wednesday afternoon I've had this nagging sinus crap that's fogging up my head more and more every day. Oh and then there's the lovely cough that comes between 9pm and 9am, wonderful conducive to sleeping. Everyday for the past 4 days I wake up and I can barely breathe because I'm stuffed up, or my nose is running like a sieve. I'd rather the runny nose today but no, I get the stuffed up head to such an extent that I can barely think straight and have absolutely no motivation to do anything productive.The only good thing is that my wretched sore throat has passed. I wish I could take my friend up on her offer and just go lay out in the sun or do hw outside. Unfortunately I have a paper to write that's due tomorrow and that necessitates my computer. Seeing as said paper will most likely consume most or all of my afternoon, evening, and night (here's hoping I make it to bed at a decent hour) I can't work outside because there is nowhere to plug in my computer. I would love to be outside on a beautiful day but being outside would probably make my head worse anyhow. Acetaminophen and Sudafed take the edge off the sinus misery but only for so long. I can only take them every four hours but of course they wear off after about two hours. To add to all this, I'm cold. It's something like 68 degrees outside and 75 degrees in my room yet here I sit in a fleece robe, fuzzy socks, and my favorite slippers (which just so happen to be falling apart). I don't think I have a fever, it doesn't really feel like I do. Even if I did, the acetaminophen should knock it down. I hate this so much! I wish I could snap my fingers and make it all go away. I'm concerned about this week. It's the last week of classes, and if this rotten head fogginess keeps up, my concentration levels will be even less than usual, when i need to concentrate more. Joy...*whines* ugh I have no motivation to do my paper or clean my room, both of which are high priorities. My room is a disaster and the paper is due tomorrow. I can't skip my morning classes to finish it because I skipped last week due to being sick. I'm sure my dance teacher loves me for skipping three classes in a row, two because i was sick, which hopefully she's leaning towards as an explanation in her head. I don't generally skip twice in a row, much less three times. *sigh* all I want to do right now is sleep, to escape this miserable cold or allergies or whatever the hell it is. Alas, a messy room and a paper command my attention, however disoriented I may be. Maybe I'll make some tea or hot cocoa. For now, I'm hungry, and need to get going on being one day closer to the end of school.

Peace y'all.

P.S. Common Sense Life Lesson for the week: when you know you're sick, and may be sick for a while, buy more than one box of tissues. Cough syrup and tissues may necessitate a trip to rite aid.

QUADMANIA Review

Sooo last weekend was QUADMANIA, or rather "Parking Lot 17 Mania". UMBC didn't want to mess up the pretty grass in the quad, so the carnival and live music was held in a parking lot on the outskirts of campus. Convenient for my dorm and the two dorms near me, but that's about it. If you didn't know it was going on, you probably would never know. Anywho...I had alot of fun. I had a perfect view of the setup a few days in advance from the window in my room, and I was very excited. On Saturday morning, I woke up to some of the music (nice day so window was open) and got to listen to it as I was straightening the room and getting ready for the day.

The Rides...Some people complained about how the carnival seemed to cater more to the local elementary and middle schools, but I love carnival rides so it didn't matter to me. If you went at night, there were less rugrats and shorter lines for the rides. $10 per day was, in my estimation, a tad pricey but I understand that SEB (the people responsible for the fun times) have costs to pay. The swings were fun, but a tad nauseating after a while. The tilt a whirl was tilting and whirling as one would presume, but there wasn't much cushioning so I got a little beat up. It was still fun, it would whirl you around and you would feel like you were going to fly out into the middle of the carnival full of people. The spaceship ride next to the tilt a whirl was tons of fun. It started out nicely just going around, getting a little bit higher with every rotation, then it picked up speed and used pressurized cables and springs to straighten the rods attached to the spaceship cars (kinda like pinkish purple versions of the Space Mountain ride at Disney World Magic Kingdom) which would throw the cars even higher suddenly. It got going fast enough that I almost lost my sunglasses, and had to take them off while trying to hold on as the ride was spinning around. Woohoo! The ride I went on the most was the parachute ride where it went up and around at an angle at a nice speed and gave you a little dip in your stomach right as it started going down (I can almost feel like I'm on it now :p). I went on that three or four times and had lots of fun.

Finally, the ultimate ride...the Zipper! This was very scary to look at, because it looked like it would break at any moment. Rusty metal cages attached to a long rotating vertical machine that was also rusty. You half stand half sit in this little cage, the only thing holding you in is the support bar attached to the door. If you wanted to live you held on to hand bars attached to the inside of the cage door. When this machine started going, it rotated 180 degrees and brought you up to the top (kinda like a ferris wheel) then would spin around and around. Meanwhile as this machine is flipping, your cage is also flipping. The first time I went on, I was petrified. My friend Caitlyn and I were going on it for the first time together, and she was excited. I was very scared, which is odd, because I love thrill rides/rollercoasters, etc and they rarely scare me. I've been riding rollercoasters and such since I was about 8 years old, props to Daddy for getting me hooked on them early. Maybe it was just the insecurity of the whole thing. So after we got off, I was ok, and then my friend DK finally showed up (after I called and texted him multiple times hassling him to get down there). He wanted to ride it and made me go with him. I had much more fun the second time (although I spent the first few minutes telling him to hold on because I wasn't bringing his dead body back to his girlfriend). After twice around the Zipper on a stomach full of cotton candy and kettle corn, I was a bit disoriented and took a break from rides for a while.

The Music...I saw a number of the performers, and enjoyed most of them, although Dan Deacon's antics were partially responsible for getting my friend thrown out of quadmania. Shoutout to Mother Nature's Recipe! These guys were great!! My friend Ben plays the keyboard and he and the rest of his band members were definitely one of the best acts at the whole weekend. They played a swing number toward the end, during which vocalist Leif came down and started dancing with a girl in the crowd. I had to laugh as I watched my friends Julian and Alli dancing as well. Julian was having fun, and I think Alli was too, but I could tell she was a bit "omg why am i doing this?" about the whole thing. Speaking of dancing, on Friday evening, me and my friend Rachel had tons of fun dancing to the closing act of the evening, a cool rock band. There weren't too many people around by that point so we had some space to just kinda do our own thing.

The Food...cotton candy and kettle corn kept me alive all weekend (temporarily lost my redcard so I spent all my money on carnival food). I couldn't bring myself to pay for the drinks when I had plenty in my room to drink, water, soda, juice, etc. I wanted funnel cake, but the line was always ridiculously long whenever I tried to buy some, and it wasn't worth it.

The Games and other stuff...I tried to win some stuffed animals, the shooting game, the basketball game. They were only three bucks so I figured why not give it a shot. Close but no cigar. Contemplated trying to win a fish, but carnival fish generally have a very short lifespan so I decided I'd get a healthier one over the summer. The trampoline things where you could bouncey bouncey bouncey and do flips were fun!!! Granted I have some bruises from the harness, but still fun. While I was on the trampoline thingy I got to see a step show put on by some fraternities and sororities from the National Pan Hellenic Council. Although the girl who was introducing the students was slightly irritating, it was still a cool show. One of those things I've kinda always wanted to try...till I remember I'm a skinny white girl. Yeah I think I'll stick to my ballet. The two things I didn't get to try was the blow up slide/obstacle course thing and the rock wall. Rachel and I were supposed to do the slide after the TPain concert, but the carnival closed an hour before we were told it would, so that didn't happen. I really wanted to do the rock wall, but refrained. Having dislocated my elbow twice back in January, the ligaments aren't quite strong enough to support that kind of tension/weight yet. Yes you're supposed to use your legs more than your arms, and yes I probably would have been fine with the short 20 foot rockwall, but no use risking it and ruining my weekend (and the next 3 weeks of my life) by injuring it again.

The T-Pain Concert...waste of $15 and two hours of my life. Seriously. Doors opened 20 mins late, show started 2o mins late, the opening act got old after 5 minutes. DJ for 25 mins after the opening act was cool but after a while the general vibe was "bring out T-Pain or someone we came to see please". Finally Jay Lyric and Tay Dizm came out, danced/sang/talked for a bit, and brought out a giant baby blue teddy bear with dreads and a tophat, claiming it was T-Pain's cousin. Shortly after, T-Pain decides to grace us with his presence. If you subtract the opening act, the DJ, the time they all spent talking/walking around the stage doing not much of anything, all the time he spent trying on his 10 different grills (cuz we all just really want to know how rich he is and how much they all cost) and the time T-Pain spent introducing all the people on his record label, he only performed for a grand total of about 40 mins. 40 mins out of 2 hours...NOT WORTH IT! Turns out that due to copyright etc, he couldn't even sing most of the songs all the way through because he only does part of it. The most ridiculous part of the entire thing was when T-Pain and his fellow rappers came strutting out on stage with their pants around their ankles, and boxer briefs showing the world everything we never wanted to see. Then they just had to shake it in our faces because "this is for the ladies". My friends and I examined the floor and each other's makeup during this little interlude. Oh and then T-Pain starts going off on how guys shouldn't act all ashamed to look, because "if you never looked at another guy's, you don't know how small yours is". Yeah...umm...how about no. So T-Pain, being the sensitive guy that he is, decides to do a moment of silence in memory of the VTech shootings. Legit, since the 1yr aniv had been that week. Then he extends it to all the people who are "dying for no reason". He lists examples like other school shootings, 9/11, urban crime, and then starts getting political with the Iraq war and just random "people who are dying". He of course exits the stage with an unoriginal comment on how much George Bush hates black people. I hate when rising celebrities start politicizing and just making random comments with nothing to back them up. Seriously, we didn't come here to hear you mouth off about your opinions on the war and the gov't...we came to see you try to rap/sing. So that was that.

Overall Quadmania was lots of fun. I got a pretty purple flowering plant and two henna tattoos, a purple lei and the beginnings of a tan. Not too much burn, thanks to Rachel H for the sunscreen :). I got to hang out with some really cool people, including a girl who I later discovered was the niece of my highschool history teacher...small world. The hype and my excitement were justified. Haters aside, I love carnivals. I can't wait till the moco fair this August!

Part two: "adventures after the concert" soon to come. Sleep now.

peace y'all.

P.S. Common Sense Life Lesson for the week: don't break in new shoes in bare feet...blisters anyone?