Straight No Chaser

Straight No Chaser is an a Capella men's singing group. I bought a couple of their CDs for my family for Christmas. Anyway, they had a couple fun music videos on youtube that I thought I'd post.

They did an awesome version of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight."


And they wrote this song "Who Spiked the Eggnog?" for their Christmas album.


Ariel

Mental Institutions and Econ Professors

So, the Spring semester has started at UTC, and I've had the first meeting for almost all of my classes. I have the same professors for English and Accounting as I did last semester so I pretty much know what to expect for those classes. And I think my Art History teacher is going to be good. Of course, I'm beginning to think that I must be committably, certifiably insane for signing up for a class that requires you to memorize the name, artist, time period, etc. of 60 works of art for each test, of which there are four, which makes a total of 240 items to memorize information about...sigh.

And then I have an economics teacher who I think is probably certifiable too, although my one request is that she please get stuck in a different mental institution than I do because I'd really love never to see her again. On the first day of class she told us all that no one had to come to class. Class is apparently "voluntary." She said, "If you're feeling really tired around class time, you probably need a nap, and you should just go home and take one." And, "If you think this class is boring, don't come." Etc, etc. Of course, she also said that there would be pop quizzes about once a week, so if you aren't at class you'll lose lots of points from missing the pop quizzes. And throughout her whole intro to the macroeconomics class spiel she kept inserting "jokes;" jokes that she apparently thought were enhanced by the addition of swear words. It was rather ironic when she started talking about classroom behavior and not being disruptive in class, etc. I wanted to raise my hand and ask if swearing was considered "disruptive behavior," and if so, what should we do if she was disruptive in class. Obviously I didn't actually do that, but I did consider trying to switch sections of Econ 101 so that I could get a different professor. Unfortunately, all the other sections are full. The wierdest thing was that I had multiple recommendations for this professor. This girl I knew from my speech class told me that the professor was "so nice." Hmm..."nice?"

Code Red

Well, I haven't posted in forever because I've been gone on a ten-day vacation--my grandparents took our family on a cruise to the Carribean. I was hoping that there might be internet access. And there was; it was just really expensive. Since a cruise ship is a geographic monopoly, it can pretty much name any price for anything. Anyway, long story short, the monopolistic nature of the cruise ship made using the internet impossible. Being unable to check my email, I discovered when I got back that I had around fourty or fifty emails, which was pretty cool. I'd never had that many emails at once. Of course, by the time I deleted all the spam there were only four or five emails left, but still, the 50 had looked pretty impressive.

Besides spam, I have an excess of pictures. Not that I actually took any of the pictures. I stole them all off of my aunt's camera. I'll probably post some pictures soon, so consider this my official disclaimer: I did not take any pictures on vaction (except for maybe one or two) and thus (almost) all of the awesome photography is my aunt's and I only have pictures because I "borrowed" hers.

The trip was a lot of fun. I did, however, learn that the sun is different in the Carribean as compared to here--I refused to wear sunscreen the first day off the ship claiming, "I don't get sunburned," and ended up with "a slightly painful tan" (read sunburn) that I slathered in sunscreen the rest of the week. Also, two days before the ship got back to the US, we were under a "code red," meaning that a huge percentage of people on the ship were sick. Apparently, all the automatic Purell dispensers that they had on every floor of the ship, and all over the dining room, were not enough to dispell the spread of the flu.

During the code red, we weren't allowed to touch pretty much anything. At the buffet you couldn't serve yourself--you couldn't even get your own packets of sugar for your coffee! Dad was actually the only one in our immediate family who got sick, although both of my grandparents did as well.

In fact, in spite of instructions to quarantine herself if her temperature reached 100, my grandmother showed up at dinner and announced that her temperature was 101.5. I'm not sure she grasped the meaning of quarantine...

We probably would've run into problems with being allowed to get off the ship if we'd docked in Florida under a code red, but the ship's status was suddenly changed right before docking (imagine that) to code yellow. So, we ended up getting off the ship early Monday morning, and from there we drove home and got here around 2:00 AM Tuesday morning.

So, that's a quick recap of our week. Tomorrow I'll try and post some pictures.

Mandatory Hope Session

A few days ago, I got an email from UTC with that as the subject line: "Mandatory Hope Session." The only reason I even opened it was because Luke got the same email and told me it was about financial aid and scholarship meetings. Otherwise I'd probably have figured it was some government-subsidized self-help session for depressed college students. Either that or an end-of-the semester meeting of the young democrats' club on promoting Obama for 2015. In either case, I would have promptly deleted it.

Anyway, we're supposed to go to this mandatory meeting either today or tomorrow at 10:00am or 2:00pm. Well, since it's already past ten today and Mom's going to need the car this afternoon for the boys' music lessons, that only leaves tomorrow, and tomorrow there's a fencing tournament at 2:00. So I guess we'll be going tomorrow at ten, directly after the econ test. I'd have thought that after making us sit through hours of information on financial aid and scholarships during orientation we'd be done with these superfluous meetings, but I guess I was wrong.

Party!!

I am officially finished with Linear Algebra! I was going to go to UTC this morning and work on the "extra-credit" maple assignment, but I didn't feel like working on maple at seven a.m. So, when I got up, I pulled out my trusty calculator and calculated what score I would have to get on the final in order to keep my "A" in the class, and it turns out that I need to get a minimum of 69.5%. Well, I'm pretty sure that I got an "A" on the test anyway, but 69.5% is a lot of leeway. So, I managed to convince Mom to let me skip the extra-credit, which means I get to go straight from One-last-assignment-in-Linear-Algebra-*sigh* to Linear-Algebra-is-finished-party-time!!! Yay!!

Oh, and Happy Thanksgiving!

Finis!*

Well, I just turned in my final portfolio for English! And I have my last speech test on Monday and my Linear Algebra final on Tuesday. So, I will be done with three of my classes by Tuesday*!

I also had this idea, but I can't decide whether it's brilliant or inane... So, here goes: I was thinking it might be nice to make Christmas cookies for all of my professors and give them the cookies and one of our church's "invitation cards." But I can't decide whether my professors will like that, or if they'll just think I'm uber-weird. I guess it doesn't matter if they do think I'm uber-weird since the semester is almost over anyway, because most of my tests are already graded, except for my finals, but I guess the finals are worth the most points anyway, hmm... To bake or not to bake.

*(OK, so I'm not quite done with English, but we're only meeting once more--on the 30th--to do the teacher evaluation. So technically the class is finished it's just that the evaluations aren't.)

Barney, the "Piggy," and the Real-life Fictional Sci-fi Game

I recently found out that [one of] the best book[s] on the face of the earth has a sequel! That's right; there is a sequel to Interstellar Pig!! It's called Parasite Pig. Both books are awesome YA/middle grade sci-fi. They're lots of fun and they're really creative.

I know the fact that both books appear to be about pigs might make some people less inclined to read them, but actually they're not about any real pigs at all. They're actually about the "piggy," which is an item from a game in the book. The game is apparently a made-up sci-fi game, except that it actually becomes real, and Barney... Yeah, that's the main character's name. Shoot, I've been trying to convince you to read this book, and I think I've just done the opposite--first "pigs" and now "Barney"... Anyway, Barney finds himself thrown in the center of a dangerous real-life "fictional" sci-fi game. And even though he saves the whole world from the weird aliens, his parents just think he's crazy and send him to "the clinic." Of course, he knows better than to try and convince anyone at the clinic that he just saved them, and the whole world, from crazy, psycho, infiltrating aliens all intent on possessing "the piggy."

Also, in the process of saving the world, Barney kind of made a mess of their summer house. So he has to work at this bookstore until he can pay for all the damage he caused while "saving the world." And Barney has this new "friend" who randomly met him in the bookstore and is obviously all sinister and creepy. Barney is such a complete and utter dolt that he doesn't realize his new best friend is actually another creepy, infiltrating alien! How stupid of him! If I were a character in a book, I would totally be suspicious of anyone who conveniently bumped into me in a bookstore... especially if I was the main character of a sci-fi book and the weird person happened to smell like an alien.

Anyway, just saying, Barney's a twit. But then again, I guess without twitty characters there'd never be any stories because the characters wouldn't get themselves in messes where they had to destroy the house to save the world.

Spring 2010

Yay! I have signed up for classes for the spring! I'll be taking the second semester of Rhetoric and Composition (English 122), Macroeconomics, Differential Equations, Accounting 202, Art History, and Calculus 3. Doesn't it all sound like fun?! I even ordered my textbooks from Amazon yesterday. And I typed up my spring class schedule.

But I guess I should finish this semester before I start getting excited about the next one. I still have the final and two quizzes left in my Accounting 201 class, two tests in Microeconomics, a Speech test--although I have finished giving all of my speeches, and a Linear Algebra test. I also have to finish editing my "final portfolio" for English 121, although I just sent in my last paper today, so I'll have to edit it next week. And I actually skipped revising my third paper because I hated it. (I decided to argue for something I didn't agree with, i.e. smoking regulations, because I thought I'd be able to find more sources for that than for my personal opinion, i.e. smoking regulations are pointless and unnecessary.) So that means I need to work on revising that now. Ah, well, I'm ready for spring!