Happy New Years!

Look at the beautiful "corn in the snow" picuture my sister took this morning.


Have a great end of the year, everyone!!

I am looking forward to another year of blogging. And, I promise more frequent blogging in 2008.

Happy Christmas!

It's finally christmas!! Yay.


Merry Chrismas everyone! Feliz Navidad. Wi na ge nyare Su dome Kirismass. Bonn e Erez Ane. Sugeng Natal lan warsa enggal. Ia manuia le Kilisimasi ma le tausaga fou. Nadolig LLawen a Blwyddyn Newydd Dda.

So that's Merry Christmas in a bunch of different languages. Yeah. And for all I know, I could have just said you look like an elephant and smell like one too. I am a trusting soul.

Merry Christmas in 360+ languages...

O Christmas Tree

I absolutely love my grandma's Christmas tree. It is so quaint and endearing. The colored lights make me feel nostalgic. She sets it up in a large antique basin/sink structure so people can see it from the front window.

And I love my mom's Christmas tree. After dumping the the old one last year, my parents got a new, 'cheating' tree, as in the lights come already installed in the fake green piney branches. Let's just say it made my dad happy as it practically eliminated his job. My mom, nevertheless, laments about how we are all party poopers and won't bother to help her with the decorating anymore. We tell her to just not put it up then, and that makes her sad so she ends up making it look like a Martha Stewart tree year after year. Her tree standards are just too high for the rest of us.

Cookies, Cookies, Cookies are for me

My family's annual cookie-baking day was this week. Look at the yield below.

If that's not enough cookies to last a year long, you either smear cookies on your toast for breakfast or are friends with the cookie monster.

My grandma's house was so nice and warm and smelled Christmas-cookie-delicious. Mmmm.


Seriously. We made bucket-loads of cookies. The whoopie pies are my favorite, but I don't have any pictures of those. Amazinlgy, I escaped the day only eating one cookie. That is self-control my friend!

Icing Explosion

May have had a little mess while baking cookies yesterday.
When I was mixing up the icing for the whoopie pies, I may or may not have used a bowl too small for the recipe. Everything in the kitchen got splattered with powerdered sugar, including myself. I ran to get my camera and left empty floor-colored footprints where I had been standing. Whoops.

StumbleUpon

Hey, I just now discovered StumbleUpon. It is so cool. You create a profile, select your interests, download a bar for you browser, and then click on the button. Every time you click it takes you to random site in cyber space. They have a subject for every fancy. Satire, humor, bizarre, advertising, blogs, linguistics, literature, varius nerdy topics, photography, everything! You can learn such cool stuff.



You can also piggyback on the cool stuff that other people have found too. If you want to be my friend, let me know and I will add you. (I also added an icon to the right if you want to Stumble my blog).

Choir Clash

A guy from Shippensburg is actually on Clash of the Choirs on NBC. He is part of the Oklahoma City choir directed by Blake Shelton. That's exciting. He was stationed at a military base in OK and made it onto the show.

About the show: Writer's Strike evident, no big news flash there. I hate how every clip had a sob story. "Oh, something bad happened to me and I overcame it. Vote for me and my choir." If you are good at singing, then you don't need the sad, sad story. The melodramatic edge was really insulting and over the top by the end. The only choir that didn't have one of those stories was Patti LaBelle's, and hers was amazing--exactly what you think of when you think of the Southern Baptist church choir, only from Philadelphia

If only I had a Harley

I love this ad. It makes me smile. The small details are what counts.


The gloves, the headphones, the neckbrace, the black socks with white pants and shoes, the long corridoor, old man's little tiny head. It's just advertising art.

3 YEARS!!!! Fiesta.

Whoooo! Who is turning 3 today?

It's you blog. It's you.

It been 3 *tear* beautiful years.

Thanks for reading. Those who do. My blog loves you!

At the Berlin zoo, polar bear Knut had a giant marzipan for his first birthday. "His giant birthday cake was made from 300 eggs, more than 30 pounds each of flour and sugar, and 22 pounds of marzipan." MSNBC

Now that's a polar bear sized cake! That's what I got for you too, blog. A 22 pound hunk of ooey gooey sweetness. (in theory) Mmmmm.

Finals and Icicles

I'm done with finals!! I was afraid I'd never make it, but yay, I'm done. I had my last one this morning in English Renaissance Drama. I'm hoping for straight A's but I fear an A- in Conservation of Natural Resources. It's always the gen. eds. They always rip down my GPA, because I get so bogged down by my real classes. Grrrr.

Now I can focus whole-heartedly on grad school applications. I've sifted through my choices to 7 schools. I'm hoping to cut one more, but I'm not sure which one is gonna get the axe yet.

I noticed how beautiful the trees were as I was driving home today. Then I snapped a pic of the tree dripping with icicles in my back yard with one sad, brown, lonely leaf. Hold on little guy, it's only what?, 4 more months till spring thaw.

Goats in Trees and Everlasting Storms

When I went to Morocco I didn't see the goats in the trees. This upsets me. Look how cool it is.

"The goats climb them because they like to eat the fruit of the argan tree, which is similar to an olive. Farmers actually follow the herds of goats as they move from tree to tree. Not because it is so strange to see goats in trees and the farmers like to point and stare, but because the fruit of the tree has a nut inside, which the goats can't digest, so they spit it up or excrete it which the farmers collect. The nut contains 1-3 kernels, which can be ground to make argan oil used in cooking and cosmetics. This oil has been collected by the people of the region for hundreds of years, but like many wild and useful things these days, the argan tree is slowly disappearing due to over-harvesting for the tree's wood and overgrazing by goats. "

7 Incredible Natural Phenomena you've never seen

The "Relámpago del Catatumbo" is pretty interesting too.

"Located on the mouth of the Catatumbo river at Lake Maracaibo (Venezuela), the phenomenon is a cloud-to-cloud lightning that forms a voltage arc more than five kilometre high during 140 to 160 nights a year, 10 hours a night, and as many as 280 times an hour. This almost permanent storm occurs over the marshlands where the Catatumbo River feeds into Lake Maracaibo and it is considered the greatest single generator of ozone in the planet..."

Free Rice... and Words

Coolest website ever. I wish I had found this before I took the GRE's.

A word pops up. You click on the correct definition. For every vocab word you get right, the United Nations World Food Program distributes 20 grains of rice to impoverished peoples. The money comes from the advertisers on the site and everybody wins. You learn words, corporations get advertising, and hungry people get rice. I'm just guessing, but the last one is probably the best.

-I dare you to beat my score. Suckers. My highest is 40 as of right now, but I probably average at the 36-37 range.

I am a vocab beast, I dare you to surpass my mad skill. Do it. Click on the green.

Alexander the Great

I did a paper and presentation in Art History about Alexander the Great, especially the famous Alexander Mosaic that once graced the floor in the House of Faun in Pompeii. Today, the original rests in the Archaeological Museum in Naples, which we got visit this summer with Mirabile Inventu!

In doing research for this project, I found a website that records the process of creating a copy of this mosaic for display. The steps that this team went through and the intricacy and tediousness of their work is amazing. At this Reconstruction Website they show pictures of each step of the process.

If I had to deal with that many little stones I just know I'd poke my eyes out after just one day. I thought mossaicing my bathroom floor was a nightmare, this one took about 500,000 tessarae. Kill me now.

GRE update

Here's the outcome of my GRE.

Snow-yes. Ridiculously slow driving on 81 both ways. Limited visibility and numerous rubber necking slow downs.

The good news: I improved 60 points on the verbal section, exactly my goal.

The bad news: I dropped 60 points on the quantitative section. Not so much my goal.

I ended up getting the same freaking score, only reversed. I know exactly why too. They made me take the math section twice, one is for their 'improvement of the test for future test takers', and one you actually get a score for. The first one I took my time and probably did awesome. On the second one, my brain was fried. I lacked the motivation and mental clarity to answer how many sides that triangle had. ha. I'm 100% sure they took my score from the second one. Darn it.

GRE

Ok, so GRE go #2.

I'm freaking out.
I want to improve my score by about 60 points in each area.
Yes. In my little Utopian happy world. That will be the outcome.

I had wanted to take the test 2 weeks ago so they'd be in by deadlines for my grad school applications, but all of the seats in all of Pennsylvania and Maryland were filled. Hence, I shall take them tomorrow. Or really it's today at this point of my writing this.

Goodness, what if my score goes down?

Then, that'd be another $140 down the drain. And no grad school would want me at all then. I would assume students who get more stupider is generally frowned upon.

*Nervous Anxiety* And I hope it doesn't snow too much. I'd like to make it to Harrisburg and back again alive.

Naked Mole Rat

I have a dirty little secret. I like PBS. Shhhhh, don't tell anyone else. It is my guilty pleasure. The Antique Roadshow? The History Detectives? British movies? Sesame Street? Arthur? V-me? Nova? Documentaries? Special Performances? Educational Programming? It's great. Come on.

The other day I saw an episode of Nature: The Beauty of Ugly. Oh my gosh. It was so cool. They hunted down the ugliest creatures in the world, and made a show about it. There is a contest at some elementary schools to find the ugliest bug. Why didn't my school do that? huh? The best animal, by far though, was the naked mole rat. Ewwwww. They are so ugly they are almost cute!

PBS' website about it.

Relax'n on the East Coast

One last post on Atlantic City. There was a parade that took up one side of the street while cars continued driving on the other side. That was something I've never seen before. We walked up and down the boardwalk even though it was chilly. We also went shopping on black Friday, as tradition goes. Didn't really find any killer deals though.

Caesar's Palace was definitely the most impressive resort/ casino in Atlantic City. the Pier Shops are pretty cool, not like I could afford to buy anything there though. And we went to see a show that was actually a lot of fun. The Duprees. The senior Miss America party was there and a lot of drunk old ladies were throwing themselves at the singers. It was hilarious. I haven't laughed that hard in a long time.