Another Day in The NorthWest

A big wind storm hit Olympia! We’ve been told to prepare for blackouts just in case the weather gets any worse. I’m not a rain person but it’s not too bad. I’m just excited for hot chocolate and soup! I’m pretty excited for Thanksgiving break! I’m gonna head home to spend some time with my family and come back to work on my project before class starts up again.

Seminar on Wednesday was pretty cool. We met in our small groups to decide on titles and talk about our presentations. Stephanie also gave us her personal oral history of the 1960’s. It was really cool to hear how her opnions have been shaped and how it applies to what we’re learning. There was actually an interesting article in TIME about what marriage is like today. It’s like as soon as you start learning something everything becomes relevent!

S&A has been really busy. We have a lot of big groups with lots of big requests. The Chemistry Club is going to San Francisco for the Annual Chemistry Society (ACS) meeting where they’ll be presenting along with some Evergreen faculty. They’ve gone the last 6 years so they’re pretty excited to continue going and bring that enthusiam back to campus. Our budget hearings don’t start back up again until after Thanksgiving break but I know plenty of groups are working on their budgets right now. We have lots of events approved for Winter and Spring quarter!

Hope everyone had a good weekend! I was definitely busy. The Last 5 Years was awesome! It was really cool to see Allie & Mark (The coordinators) sing together. A new Dutch Bros. Coffee stand opened in Lacey this weekend too. They gave away free coffee all Friday. I ended up having 2 amazing coffees and a candy cane hot chocolate before the performance. Saturday was a little more stormy and a little less eventful. I ended up finishing the cupcakes with my roommates and losing at a very intense game of Sorry.

I managed to get some piano in today. I ran to one of the piano practice rooms during my lunch break today and got to play for a while. Seminar today was really fun! Stephanie (my professor) came in and said ‘When ice cream sales rise so does the murder rate so ice cream must cause murder.’ The whole point of the seminar was about using statistics properly and explaining what they actually mean. We talked about divorce statics and what it does to children and other relevant points in the calss. She’s throw out statistics and we’d have to find the mediator, or 3rd semi-related party, that explains it. We discussed causel affects (a sociological term for these explanations) and all sorts of fun stuff. By the way, ice cream sales and murder rates rise together because they both peak in summer.

S&A has been really busy too. We approved our first big budget today-$7,000! A group called Sabot Infoshoppe will be bringing 8 or 9 speakers to campus for Winter and Spring quarters. We heard another cool group’s budget called Circus Resurgence, they teach people how to juggle and do acrobatics, and even have connections with Cirque du Soleil teachers. I’m not involved in either of these groups, but if a board member does have connection to a group we usually stand aside from the deliberation. Here’s the view from our office:

Can’t believe it’s Thursday! I’m pretty excited though. Tomorrow night is the premier of The Last 5 Years, a one-act musical from the student group Riot To Follow Productions (RTF for short). One of my friends is the female lead and I’ve never heard her sing so it will definitely be a new experience. Saturday night is the Masquerade Ball, but I’m not sure if I’m going yet. Depends on how much laundry I have to do (I really enjoy doing laundry actually) and how much reading I get done before now and then. If I can talk some friends into letting me carpool though I’ll probably go.

Made cupcakes today for my roommates, they don’t know yet. To get rid of some stress we’ve bought some coloring books. It’s been really great to color and unwind after dinner! Class has been good. We had another small change of schedule when our professor realized she had to leave class an hour early on friday to catch a flight, but that just means we’ll cut seminar down to 2 hours. We’ve been reading this week about teenage mothers and it sparked quite an emotional seminar. We also received a few new resources for how that plays into our overall theme of relationships and family. Right now we’re starting to transition toward our final projects. Next week we meet in our topic-groups and decide how we’re going to collaborate and have everything relate to one another. I lucked out with a small group (3 people including me) so it should be pretty easy to meet durig our assigned time and see where everyone is on their project. Some classes are working through Thanksgiving break but we have that week off so we can get more of our project done then too.

Mostly I’m focusing on revising my paper at this point. It’s due again next week and now I have a direction for my editting. We start meeting in our small groups next week and I’m kind of looking forward to that too. I found a few more sources for my final project as well. My professor gave me an article from the New York Times that was helpful, but we both caught a few spelling mistakes throughout the article and it was a good laugh. I considered majoring in journalism but I know the field was getting really competitive. Maybe I could have a future in proof reading though

The S&A Board heard our first budget yesterday! It’s still a work in progress for sure, but we’re getting there. The retreat focused more on getting to know each other which has been a great way to help us work together. It gets dark so early and kind of bums me out. At least SEM I is right by the campus police office so if I do decide I don’t want to walk across campus alone in the dark and the rain I can have someone escort me. Everything is pretty well lit though and I usually walk to parking lot B with one of my friends after our meetings and F lot isn’t very far from there. I’m not afraid to be on campus alone, I just don’t like being anywhere in the dark when it’s so cold. I just pulled the last batch of cupcakes out of the oven so I better get back to my paper. Peace out!

Time’s flown by pretty fast. My little brother turned 11 on Saturday (I didn’t make it home to see him but we did turn our living room into a tent-fort in his honor) and the weekend was beautiful. I ended up going to the Super Smash Bros. Brawl tournament Saturday night. There was a lot more people than I expected. You always think you’re good at a game until you play other people…I lost within the 2nd round but still had a lot of fun. My boyfriend made it into the final round but lost that match. We were both a little bummed but it was definitely worth it to meet so many people with the same love for Brawl.

The S&A Board starts hearing budgets on Wednesday. After a retreat to Pack Forest where we got our training hopefully we’re ready. It will make Wednesday a long day but that’s alright, I have some reading to do after class.

Seminar today was pretty exciting. I got my paper back and it wasn’t as bad as I expected. I have a week to revise it so I’m hoping to start tomorrow. We’re supposed to write our professor a letter responding to her critique and telling her how we’re going to change it. I’m really glad she liked my argument though! I talked about family patterns (within marriage, divorce, and child rearing) and how 2009 is just as traditional as 1950 using information from our readings and each other. She’s really encouraged me in ways that strengthen my opinion and helped my writing. I just hope the paper turns out good in the end.

Tomorrow is a down day to read. Since we have our papers to revise we have one reading from a book and a couple articles. It’s really nice not to be worried about time or midterms! Since I’m lucky enough to carpool with my roommates I’ll have plenty of time to turn in my letter and get the readings finished on time. I have my appointment with the career center tomorrow too. I took a skills test I’m supposed to hear back on in a couple weeks. Wish me luck!

By the way, this last photo isn’t anything super relevant but it was drawn by a faculty member in the classroom we used for the day and thought you all could use a laugh

The weather has been so great today I couldn’t say inside. Luckily it was the perfect way to de-stress! We’re into week 6 of classes which inevitably means midterms. Every program I’ve had so far has done a paper instead of a test, but it was still a little intimidating. I finished my 6 page paper a few hours before the deadline and turned it in on campus. It’s also been really nice to get ahead in the reading so I don’t have to stress myself out later. We’ll get the papers back in class on Friday and have the weekend to fix them before turning it in again on Wednesday as a final draft. I feel like I did good, but I’m still pretty nervous about the critique! I love having a faculty member who really knows her stuff and I know it will end up making my writing stronger. This is the first paper we’ve been able to insert our own opinions using support from our texts so I’m really interested to see everyone else’s stance on our topics.

Then there’s my final project to work on. Week 9 we’ll have a final exam over the text, but we also have presentations Week 10 on a topic of our choice relevant to the class. My groups is talking about interracial/inter-cultural adoption, my topic is more specifically on whether or not to support overseas adoption. I have all my sources and think I have a pretty good grasp of the controversy, but I haven’t been able to pick which side to support yet. Last week we did a workshop on how to decipher an author’s opinion from fact on moral subjects, so I think I’ll go back through most of my sources again this week to see what I can use as evidence. Thankfully, I don’t have to worry about that all right now, we’re working through the project in pieces as part of the class.

I wandered around downtown for a while today. Enjoyed the weather and the color of the leaves while getting a bit of shopping done. I’m looking forward to going to the Farmers Market downtown this weekend too. I know it sounds really weird, but stickers on fruit kind of annoys me. It’s not only bad for the environment because it’s wasteful, but you can’t even eat it! I know, crazy. But not only is the farmers market a cool place to go (Jungle Boss, a band made of Evergreen students frequently plays there) but it’s usually cheaper and sticker-free! And Wagners (the best bakery in Olympia!) has a stand there every weekend. It’s so good!

Student Activities is getting busy too. The board starts hearing budgets on November 11th, I’m so excited! There have been some great events on campus already and we’ve already had a few groups come to us with questions. I think we have a good board this year and we even have a lot of new student groups too, which will make it even better. I’m used to having our office in the CAB (College Activities Building) but since it’s being remodeled we’re all squished into SEM I (the Seminar 1 building) and it feels pretty homey. It makes it easy to find coordinators and get news about budgets and events around too. It looks like the Gamers Guild is going to have a Super Smash Bros. Brawl tournament in a couple weeks. If I can find a Wii remote I’ll definitely be there!

This is a picture of the tree mural downtown. When I first moved to Olympia it was just a tree, the leaves and color have been added as a community project. I really like how it turned out! These are also all photos I’ve taken during the week and I’ll keep putting some up with every update. Have a good week!

Hey everyone! It’s been a busy week, but things are going well. Just finished cleaning up around my apartment and making some lunch while my laundry dries.

Seminar the last couple days as been pretty exciting. We had our first potluck yesterday and watched video clips from the 1950’s after discussing our books. It was so nice to get to cook! I always make time to bake cookies or cakes but this is the first time in a while someone has asked me to make ‘food food’ specifically. The book we’re reading now is definitely my favorite so far, it’s a mixture of history and sociology. I’m excited to see what everyone else thinks were the important points in class tomorrow.

All my other time seems to be spent in the Student Activities office this week! The S&A Board (9 students hired to hear budget proposals from student groups and make sure cool events happen on campus) is starting up for the year. As a board member it’s really great getting to know all the student groups and the coordinator. I think getting to see people do what they really enjoy and meet people with similar interests is one of the best parts of the job. I went to a workshop and a lecture last week brought my student groups-it was a lot of fun to learn what the chemistry club and other groups were up to.

I can’t believe how fast this quarter is going by! In the last week or so the trees turned bare and I’ve had to bring out my rain boots. I kind of miss doing most of my reading outside but I’m glad to see the leaves changing color. This quarter hasn’t been as overwhelming as I expected either, I was lucky enough to walk by capital lake for a while before it started to get chilly.

I’m also in the process of planning my academic pathway. Just trying to figure out what I’ll be taking in winter and spring as well as my possible contract for next year. I’ll be taking a skills assessment test from the Career Center and meet again with my academic advisor to go over the classes I’m interested in. I’m trying to buckle down into my focus since it is my 2nd year of college, but there’s so many cool classes being offered! I don’t know what I’ll be doing yet but I’ll keep everyone posted!