My English class was cancelled due to my teacher's sickness once again, which is slightly a shame since I was already there and had my laptop set up and everything. This time I wasn't to blame for not checking my e-mail, though- she didn't have the chance to send one this morning, and it was another teacher or adviser who poked her head in to send us home when our teacher hadn't shown up after a few minutes.
That is one nice thing about college- if your teacher gets sick, you don't have to take a class with a sub. You're free. And if there were a class I could afford to not attend three days so far (two sick days and one snowed-out one), this one's probably it. Although admittedly we have been focusing on mean, median, mode, and range work in statistics.
There were some impressive snow creations out on the quad that were made during the snow day on Monday, or the Tuesday following so I took pictures:
It's hard to tell, but that snowman was huge
Seriously, it was very tall
Here is a snow fort
And my favorite, the giant igloo!
There were also huge bowling pins with red stripes around their necks, which I didn't get a picture of.
I headed over to the Emma Eccles Jones building to kill time while waiting to visit the computer lab at 11:30 for stats. While there, I went over my abnormal psych flashcards, registered for the Sona website (where the research studies are posted, and where I can earn points to get extra credit for abnormal psych, although I have yet to find a study I'm eligible to participate in because I don't have obsessive behaviors or other qualifications), and I took a look at a writing contest USU is hosting. I saw the sign in the TSC. It's been there for awhile and I've been meaning to take a closer look at it, but I never had the time to stop and never remembered to go back to it later.
The entries are due by 4:00 pm on February 6th, short stories have to be under 17 pages long, and the winning entries will be published in a special addition of Sink Hollow, which seems to be a magazine. It doesn't look as though we were given a topic (Yes! For once I've found a contest not about diversity! That topic gets old after the first few times). I'm on the fence about whether I want to participate, because with two tests (abnormal psych and statistics) coming up on Tuesday, I'd rather focus my attention there.
But maybe I can give the contest some thought and pull something together when the tests are over. Shame I didn't stumble across it earlier, but they have the contest at the same time every year and the requirements are probably similar each time.
I did write several paragraphs for a few different story beginnings, but the problem is that each one seems too promising to submit to a contest and turn my back on forever. I don't like the idea of surrendering my work permanently. If I had a guarantee that I'm allowed to turn these pieces into full-blown stories someday or otherwise reclaim them for my own use, I'd be more willing to offer them up. It's the not knowing if by entering the contest I'm swearing away these promising beginnings that I have a problem with.
When 11:30 finally rolled around, I headed into the lab. We were walked through how to do a short assignment using the SPSS program, which is a lot like Excel except it has some cool extra features. Then I stuck around the Emma Eccles Jones building until my next class there, the one about psychology as a career. We had a guest speaker talk to us about the CASA program, where volunteers act as a stable, trusted adult in the lives of children whose lives have been upturned in times of court cases or additional abuse-related situations, which was pretty interesting.
On my way across campus, I stopped to have lunch/dinner. I sat at a table with a guy named Umar (spelling may vary), and he was pretty enjoyable to talk to. He told me he'd been born in France after his parents had moved there from Africa. The TV was playing behind me, so sometimes he would watch it, and get excited when weird fish, crabs, or plants that hid themselves under the dirt would lurch up and snap their jaws around fish that were swimming nearby. One time one of these sea creatures swallowed an octopus, and he was bouncing a little in his seat, asking me what the word was in English for "long fish with all the legs".
He also asked me at one point if I was Hispanic, and was surprised to hear that I had grown up in Georgia. He asked several questions about what life was like for me growing up, commenting that "he'd heard the Southern states could be very prejudiced". Whether he meant for me or for him, he didn't say. Perhaps he was taken aback that a little Caucasian girl asked to sit by him? That's a sad way to view life. Well, I think he enjoyed having me to talk to.
Then I went to interior design. Our topic for the day was harmony. At the end of class, our teacher talked to us about those projects that are due on Friday, and showed us some pictures he'd taken of projects he had done. Aside from being a teacher, he's some sort of interior design consulter ("consulter" was the word he used), and shared pictures of several dining room chairs he had bought at thrift stores in poor condition and reupholstered over the weekend.
Lastly he showed us the finished dining room scene and said that the materials and things had cost him maybe $60, but "he had charged $2,000 for it". Wow. Pretty impressive. Heh heh. If Dad were more into upholstering furniture like that, it sounds like something he might enjoy. I wonder if that $2,000 including the bookshelf/side-table he'd made out of a weird, old-fashioned, ugly cabinet. He'd painted it white and navy blue and it looked pretty cool next to some of those refurbished chairs.
Hopefully he won't be too harsh of a grader, since all I have to show for this first project is a trashcan made out of a cardboard box. I talked to him after class for a minute and told him my project wasn't very fancy, and asked what he would be looking for with the project in terms of skill level. It sounds like my trashcan fits all the necessary criteria. Here's to hoping, I guess.
After that class, I made my way to the Institute building. I found a couch downstairs and alternated between running through my vocabulary terms and doing a bit of writing. Class was fine (although once again, my teacher made many of the same comments that he did in the previous lesson). I do enjoy listening to him though, because he tells us some interesting things that the average reader wouldn't pick up on, like wordplays in the Hebrew language (Jesus was born in a manger - ebus - which sounds like the word yebus, which means Jerusalem, stuff like that).
I came home and checked to see if the new "Fairly OddParents" episode ("Crockin' the House") was airing, even though I didn't have much hope. I wasn't able to catch it, and this time I didn't have a friend to toss me a link to an online version. Well, I'm sure I'll find it eventually. I DID get to enjoy "Dadlantis" and "Chloe Rules" though, so fair trade-off.
The second episode opened with this big dramatic build-up about how well Chloe did on her book report (including following "the most important rule: taping a five-dollar bill to the bibliography"), and when Crocker was ready to announce the new hall monitor, he said he would reward Chloe... by naming his nephew Kevin as hall monitor instead. Chloe's reward, he announced, was that she would learn the valuable lesson that life wasn't fair.
Poor Kevin. Crocker keeps forcing him into awkward positions like that and trying to groom him to be his "heir" to the "family business" of fairy-hunting, telling him that he doesn't need friends, that he needs to act more like a Crocker, and Kevin is so confused. For several episodes he's been wavering back and forth on whether he wants any part of that life, or a life of being Timmy and Chloe's friend. I think we all know which side he'll pick in the end, but it's fun to watch him fight to find a middle ground, since he loves his uncle dearly but has never had any friends before.
As for me, I love watching Kevin, because he's so very... Kevin. Even when the camera isn't "focused" on him, he has little personality quirks. For instance, when he gets nervous he covers his eyes with his hands, even when he's in the corner and the other characters in the scene are doing the same or similar actions together (all pointing and screaming, for example). It makes me happy when the animators remember that every character reacts to situations differently. Timmy and Chloe may panic and scramble to find a solution to a problem. Though there's been no direct attention called to him, Kevin just shrinks back and tries to hide. It's very interesting to me.
There was another scene in that episode I liked where Crocker and a bunch of students - including Timmy - were tearing down the hall at top speed in order to escape Chloe on a power trip. Chloe demanded that they all show her their hall passes, which is when they realized they didn't have any. Crocker, still running, then screamed, "I'm a teacher, you lunatics! You're all excused!" ... It's funnier if you see it, I guess. Sometimes this show just kills me. I don't know why it was so funny, but it was.
Well, Wednesday is certainly my busy day, and I was on campus for about ten hours without returning to my apartment. Right now I can only imagine what it will be like to add English class into the mix too. I hope it doesn't become too overwhelming. Luckily my classes aren't too difficult for me just yet.
