13 days until Christmas

Yes, amazingly I still get excited about Christmas every year despite the unheard of number of family tragedies I have experienced. I’m not sure why; maybe it’s just the feeling that it’s happened so many times, it can’t possibly happen again. In any case, I love how laid back Christmases are in my house now. Nobody dresses up or anything, we just wear what we want. We have an amazing dinner just like Thanksgiving, and it always feels nice to have a break from school and studying. 

My high school’s basketball team will be playing in some intriguing games which I hope I can make it to. These include the Hall of Fame Classic in New Castle, a tournament which is considered an honor to be invited to, and a game in our high school’s old gym. This old gym is listed under some of the most prestigious “old high school gyms in Indiana.” Our school still used it until the Class of 2000 finished up, and then everybody moved into a new school building for the 2000-01 school year. Playing a game in the old gym is really going to be awesome and bring back a lot of memories from when I was a little kid and went to the games. 

As I sit in the library typing this, I’m amazed as I look out the window. It’s snowing really hard even though the sky was clear and sunny a little while ago. While we don’t have snow days in college, I still think it would be cool to have a huge snowstorm. Everyplace else in the country is getting snow but us. This includes New England, Tennessee and even Texas. Maybe we’ll get some snow in time for Christmas.

Last day before finals

Lately I’ve taken up the habit of going to the library to study between all of my classes. Although I’ve kind of had a hard time focusing because finals aren’t until next week, I figure the more time I spend trying to study, the better. Plus, it’s so much easier to study here where it’s quiet than in my dorm room where my roommate is always listening to loud music or playing video games. 

I’ll be going home much earlier than most other people. The final exam time scheduled for this class (even though we don’t really have a final, we just turn in our essays) would be the last final I would have. Because I can turn in my essay before then, I’ll be free to go after taking a final at 7:30 Wednesday morning. My roommate got a horrible schedule for his final exams: he has to take 3 on Monday, and then sit around for 3 days with nothing to do before taking his last exam on Friday. 

At first, I was really nervous about final exams, but that fear has eased up a bit. In one class, we get to write down as many notes as we want on regular piece of blank paper. In another, our teacher gave us a list of the 15 most missed questions from the previous exams, all of which will be on the final exam, in addition to questions that we already answered. My two other finals aren’t even comprehensive; they’re just tests over material we’ve covered since the last exam.

Almost Thanksgiving!

So I figured I could use this post to talk about what my Thanksgiving will be like since we don’t have to do blogs next week. It will hopefully get off to a great start as I will be going to the football game on Tuesday night to watch the football team try and wrap up a perfect season. Once that is over, I have to go to Indianapolis to meet my brother when his flight gets in at 11:30. We will probably end up getting home sometime around 2AM.

I also look forward to seeing my best friend for the first time in 3 months. He goes to IU, and I think we had Fall Break on the same weekend but he chose not to come home. This will be his first trip back home since leaving in August, and we will probably go to a couple of our high school’s basketball games together. We always enjoyed doing that when we were in high school and it will no doubt be fun this year as our team has everyone back from last year’s team which finished with a record of 23-1 and lost to the eventual state champion by 2 points. 

In addition, my friend and I may take a road trip to Michigan. When we were sophomores in high school, we always thought it would be so cool to say we’d been there. We found this amazing pizza place in a small town about 10 miles across the border that kept causing us to come back. This was back when gas prices were only slightly higher than they are now; when gas prices soared during our senior year, we were unable to make this trip. I never thought we would see gas this low again, but now that we have, I think another road trip is in order. 

And, as always, I’ll make sure to eat plenty of food on Thanksgiving.

Wierdest day ever!

I am going to go out on a limb and claim yesterday, November 19, as the strangest day of my college experience thus far. It began at 4:30 in the morning when the fire alarms went off in our complex, waking everybody from a sound sleep. We were forced out of bed, thrust out into the cold, and evacuated to Worthen Arena, where we stayed until about 8AM. The fire was in the basement of LaFollette near the classrooms and caused pretty significant damage. It took away our cable, which we just got back this evening. 

And to top it all off, the biggest football game in school history resulted in a victory for the Cardinals. I had to go watch the game on a big screen TV in a lecture hall at the Teachers College because we had no cable. There were only about 10-15 other people there, but it was still pretty wild and intense in the game’s final moments! After 3 and a half hours of pulsating drama and a win that moved us to 11-0 for the first time ever, I went back to my dorm and crashed. What a day!

Now I have to study for a History test tomorrow. It’s one of only two remaining tests for this class. I have a B- right now and I want to avoid getting a  C so I hope I do well on it. 

My group met in the library for about an hour this evening and got a lot done on our website. We plan on meeting again on Monday to try and finish it up.

Strange feeling

As another weekend approaches, I find myself staying here on campus while my best friends go home yet again. Ironically, I’m the only one who has a car. 

It really is a strange feeling: I feel homesick, yet home is one of the last places I want to be. I’ve heard people say that they don’t go home because of their families. My reason resembles this, but it’s because of who isn’t there, rather than who is. 

My grandma lived a few blocks away and died last summer. I used to go to her house every day and tell her how my day was going. She would tell me funny stories about things she or other people in her apartment complex had done. She always had a candy bar or some type of treat waiting for me. 

Now she’s gone, and I have to pass by her apartment complex every time I come home. I try not to look at it because I don’t want to see a lighted window in the apartment that she lived in. 

In addition, I also miss my dad. I’m the only guy in my house now, and I never imagined I would feel so lonely. My brother is coming home for Thanksgiving so this will be a relief because we can do things together. 

I wouldn’t feel angry about my friends going home if their reason for doing so wasn’t so opposite of mine. Everyone in their families is still alive, so there are always family get togethers when they go home. 

Thanksgiving dinner in my house this year will consist of maybe four or five people. It’s not fun having so much of your family gone, but it does make you feel closer to those you still have left.

Presentations

Presentations aren’t very fun. Especially not when you have to do two of them in the same week. 

For my Journalism class, we were divided up into groups of three and were given a chapter from the textbook that we had to teach to the rest of the class through a powerpoint presentation. Since there three of us, we divided our chapter into three parts. The objective was for each person to talk for 10 minutes. My group accomplished this without any trouble. Our chapter dealt with Public Relations. 

I had another presentation for a different class that was supposed to take place today, but got pushed back to Monday. This wasn’t good since we were giving out donuts to people who correctly answered our questions. We were going to teach Latin abbreviations by playing “Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader?” but we ran out of time. So we had to give everyone the donuts and resign ourselves to doing the presentation on Monday. 

Our website is coming along very nicely. I’m in charge of the web design, and so far I feel that I’ve done a good job of putting it together. It seems hard to believe, but soon we’ll be done with the whole project. The web design program we are using is Weebly, and it’s a whole lot easier to use and to get websites to publish than using iWeb, which is what I used for my hometown media assignment. We meet with Mrs. Sheets next Tuesday night and it should be an easy week since we don’t have this class next week.

Indiana weather

So I’m sitting here, typing this, in the first week of November, and I have the window opened in my dorm with a breeze blowing because it’s so warm in here. 

That’s right, it’s November, and it’s too warm. I won’t have to wait too long for relief, though. The weather forecast says that by this Saturday, it will be in the 40s with rain and even some snow likely. This is Indiana weather in a nutshell. For those of you who are not from this part of the country, this is the time of year we midwesterners refer to as “Indian Summer” (the warm period after the first frost). 

My Election night project on Tuesday night turned out to be sort of a wild goose chase. I wasn’t able to find the Democratic tally, and the Republican tally was out in the middle of nowhere. Actually, it was at Damon’s Grill, but the path I took to get there took me down a country road with no lights or street signs. I also had to drive through the ghetto of Muncie looking for the Democratic tally, at a location which apparently doesn’t exist. I was given the address by my teacher, but when I went to the correct street and block, the area where this place should have been was just a big empty space. Oh well, at least I got half of what I needed. 

Speaking of the election, I was SO happy that Obama won. I am neither Republican nor Democrat, but I was really afraid of what would happen to this country if we were faced with having a Republican in office for four more years. 

I also think it’s pretty neat that the first election I ever voted in was the one where we elected a black president for the first time ever, in addition to a Democratic candidate winning Indiana for the first time in 44 years.

Busy evening ahead

For my Journalism class, we have to go to the Delaware County Democratic and Republican Party tallies in groups and record our observations. These will later be described in one of “team papers” that we turn in every three weeks. Right now I’m busy studying for another History test tomorrow, which is mainly over World War I. 

On top of all this, I have to remember to get my car to the Delaware County Fairgrounds before 9:00 tonight. This is pretty convenient because my group and I can just go to the stadium where my car is, go to the tallies, and then park in the fairgrounds when we are done. One of the parties is having their tally in the Heartland Building, which just so happens to be on the Fairgrounds. 

I don’t know about anyone else, but I am SO ready for the election to be over. I voted for Obama last week and hope that many others will do the same. I heard one of the most ridiculous conspiracy theories ever by a McCain supporter last night, that the world will come to an end in 2012 (according to the Mayans, anyway, since their calendar ends with that year), and that just so happens to be the end of what would be Obama’s first term. Obama will bring change to this country, and whether we like it or not, change is what we need, even if it doesn’t completely work out. I just can’t understand how McCain supporters cannot see that. 

So, have a nice Election Day, and if you haven’t already, get out the vote!

Time for another website

Just when I thought I was done with web design for a good long while, I’ve got to get right back at it. The next project in English class is to create a website expressing what Ball State could do to improve its campus. On my last website project, I had to create a page explaining what media outlets served the community. The web design isn’t what causes me to struggle. What I have a problem with is getting the website onto the Internet. Unfortunately, no one in my group seems to know how to do that either. Last time, I went to a student service center in the Art and Journalism Building and they helped me get my website up and running. But I have no idea how they did it, and it seemed very complicated. Oh well, at least I have four other people helping me this time. 

In other news, I just received my absentee ballot in the mail today and cast my vote for Obama. I had mailed my request for the ballot on Friday and was worried that it wouldn’t make it back to Bluffton before midnight on Monday. It obviously did, and now I just have to make sure my vote gets back there by Tuesday. 

When I left English class this evening, I got back to LaFollette and once again saw fire trucks parked out front, with everyone evacuated from the building. This has been a pretty frequent occurrence over the last few weeks and I’m not sure why. There hasn’t been a real fire, but the firefighters have had to go into the building twice to look for a fire. I’m not sure if someone pulled the alarm out of panic or just as a joke. Hopefully it stops because it’s getting to be kind of a nuisance.

Advertisement essay reflection

Well, my second essay is now complete. Here are some of my reflections in looking back on it:

When I look back at the work I have done for this project, I feel relieved that I finished the project and impressed that I only wrote the rough draft five days ago, putting together this draft in such a short time frame. 

I think the strength of this paper is the introduction. It flows smoothly and I feel that I covered all the bases in terms of discussing everything in the paper.

I think an area of my project that could be improved upon is the conclusion. It was very short and not very well written when I wrote the rough draft, and I felt like I really forced a few sentences (the last one) into it when I wrote the final draft. I’m not used to writing conclusions that are more of a reflection than a summary.

I preferred working on the media photo essay more than I did this assignment because this one felt more restricting. The photo essay related to my life more than this essay, which was really just my reaction to seeing something in front of me. 

My favorite part in this unit of advertising was choosing an ad because there were so many different ads to choose from, and it was nearly impossible to have the same ad as someone else. 

My least favorite part of the unit on advertising was putting together the essay because writing the rough draft seemed very difficult this time. Nevertheless, I feel that I did a good job writing this paper.

I hope my readers learn from this project that advertising should make you think in more ways than whether or not you think you should buy it.