Sunday, February 12, 2012

What A Week and New Words

Just... wow. What a week. I really can't explain my life in explicit detail right now, because a huge chunk of it is personal. But here is something that happened that I can divulge:


http://centralny.ynn.com/content/top_stories/573286/classes-at-suny-canton-to-resume-feb--20th-after-fire-in-chemistry-lab/ 

The link will lead you to a news story about how on my boyfriend's campus, his science building practically exploded, preventing him from going to classes for a week or more. Unfortunately, he was at my campus at the time, so he is practically without any belongings until he gets back to campus next weekend. So yeah, these past few days have been mind-blowing, just to say the least.

In other news, I had to read a scholarly article for a paper I was doing. Of course, there were so many words that I didn't even understand and I had to go to the Oxford English Dictionary and define them. Also I will include some words that I defined from the novel A Hazard of New Fortunes, by William Dean Howells. It's a long novel, but it's pretty good so far. That book is also for my Literature class. Here are some of the defined words:

Diatribes: Bitter criticism
Quixotic: Ideal, (referring to Romanticism in the novel)
Lacuna: Missing part of something
De-legitimation: Taking away legitimacy
Duplicity: Acting in two ways at different times
Aphonia: Unable to speak

Thanks to Lauren for giving me this idea. :)

Saturday, February 4, 2012

First Week of February

My time has instantly went from not so busy at all to barely getting a minute in to write in this blog. Even though I have so many things to write about, just the time to write them has reached nearly zero. My life is still pretty exciting, I just wish I had more time to write about it.

Firstly, I have decided that every Monday, the day I have Thanatology, I will write a blog post about what we talked about in class/what I'm reading in the textbooks. This is mostly for Lauren, who is fascinated by the subject, but it's really for anyone else to gain insight as well. I mean, if someone can have a whole blog devoted to sea glass, I can have a post once a week about dying, right? Sometimes, however, I might have to wait until Tuesday, as I have a newspaper meeting on Monday nights. Speaking of newspaper meetings, I write for the newspaper, so I may put up general info articles I have written here in the near future.

Anyways, this week was slightly stressful, but still as interesting as my life could be. Work at the kitchens (in the bakery department) has reached a whole new level of fun. Even though the job does get repetitive and sometimes monotonous, the guy who works with me is really nice. Thursday he gave me a cranberry muffin :) I think it was because the muffin was extra and he didn't want to throw it out, but it was still very nice of him. My co-worker is very adamant about not wasting food, which is great. In the other place I work, the people who work there throw a lot of food out that they don't need to, which disappoints me.

Other things that have been going on in my life? My friend Bill will be coming back to town next Tuesday, and I will be going with a professor to pick him up. The place that he is at is an hour and a half away, so it should turn out to be an interesting adventure, to say the least.

Also, I didn't mention that I am taking astronomy this semester. One of my friends suggested I take it for the general education credit it provides, so I added it. Of course, I haven't mentioned yet on this here blog that I LOVE ASTRONOMY.

In fact, I dragged my boyfriend outside at 12:30 am last weekend just so I could look at the stars. He lives in a rural area, so the sky there is free of trees and looks absolutely fantastic on a clear night. Thanks to the star chart my professor gave us, I could pick out a few more constellations than I could before. A lot of the winter constellations wind through the Milky Way, so it's really hard to pick them out. What gives the Milky Way its cloudy appearance in the sky is the sheer multitude of stars that is in it. So it's hard to pick out the constellations. However, I did manage to see Orion, Gemini, the Big Dipper (Ursa Major), and Sirius (Canis Major). I couldn't pick out Ursa Minor or Polaris that night, but I'm learning more about them. Contrary to popular belief, Polaris, or the North Star, is not the brightest star in the sky. Sirius, or the Dog Star, is the brightest star in the sky, and also the inspiration for J.K. Rowling's character Sirius Black. Also, stars are measured by brightness using the magnitude scale, 1st magnitude being the brightest, and 6th magnitude being the dimmest. Something else interesting? I managed to see a moonbow the other night, which is when there is a rainbow around the moon. Because it is nighttime, a moonbow appears to be white clouds, but it is actually a rainbow at night. That's a very rare occurrence and I was very lucky to see it.

Wow, sorry for the rambling about astronomy. Something else I'm very excited about is that tonight is the Snow Ball, our college's equivalent of a high school prom. To me, the Snow Ball was the high school prom I never really got to experience (Tara and I were NEVER popular in school), and it's a great chance to unwind from this week and relax. Since college kids are much more mature than highschoolers (with a few exceptions, unfortunately), I always have a lot of fun at the college dances.

I think I've blabbered enough about my life. Until next time!