Getting back into the swing of things

I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I know I haven't posted anything in forever!! My apologies to the, like, two people who probably read this. But school starts tomorrow, which means my Ecuador classes start tomorrow, and the Ecuador trip was the reason I started this blog in the first place. So I'm going to make a real effort to blog much more often, starting right now.

I'm all moved in, and I like my room. It's way smaller than last year's, but it's a double instead of a triple, and it's definitely bigger than my room freshman year. I'm rooming with Jamie again, and we've pretty much got things sorted out. There are just a few little housekeeping things left, like flattening out my awesome Half-Blood Prince poster (which I got in Chicago at HP: The Exhibition at the Museum of Science and Industry!!) so it will actually stay on the wall.

I just got back from the first Certified Peer Educators (CPE) meeting of the year, and it looks like I'm in for a great six weeks and everyone else is in for a great semester. It was so nice to see more friends after so long, but I really missed Jayla, who is in Australia right now!! :(

The Braves beat the Marlins and they've actually overtaken them in the standings, so that's awesome!! Have a great Sunday night. :)

End of a loooooong week

Well, this has been just about the longest week ever. Phish (aka my sister) was here on Monday, just to hang out and go to classes with me, and we had a blast!! She was such a trouper, crutches and air cast and all. We finally got our Acting Shakespeare scene re-blocked on Monday too, even though we were missing our trusty Crab. :( But the rest of week was pretty insane, with a diet analysis and a character analysis and an important email to my high school board of education and superintendent to write.

But now I can relax, at least for a while...Pat was my hero and cut the music for Shakespeare (the Outlaws in The Two Gentlemen of Verona are rocking out to "Dancing Queen"), and now he and Jamie and I are watching Accepted, the best college movie ever. Then we have Becky's birthday party tonight, Red Beard and other sweet bands at the SAC tomorrow, and Katy's show, Free Will and Wanton Lust, on Sunday. So it's going to be a pretty darn crazy weekend, but hopefully I'll get a ton of work done too.

"People would never believe the life I live..."

"People would never believe the life I live" has jokingly become my mantra this year, thanks in large part to one of my lovely roommates, Jamie, and her boyfriend, Pat. I feel I have to start out with this, since they are currently having some sort of strange tickle fight involving sitting on each other's feet and holes in socks and I don't know what all. They generally provide 60% of the amusement in my life, and I always threaten that they're going to end up in my novel someday.

But anyway, it's thanks largely to them and all my other friends that I have ridiculous adventures to write about...which I'm not sure other people would believe if I didn't explain them thoroughly. And one of my main reasons for starting this blog is that in approximately six and a half months, I'm going to embark on my coolest adventure to date: ten weeks studying in Ecuador!! Study abroad blogs seem to be the thing to do these days, so I might as well do one too...but I figured I'd better get into the habit now.

I actually have no idea how often I'll be able to post for a while, since school keeps me pretty darn busy, but I'll do my best. I'm sure my posting frequency will have a direct correlation to how badly I'm trying to procrastinate my papers...lol. (I should probably doing some kind of work right now, but I get to see two wonderful old friends in a few hours whom I haven't seen in over a year, so my brain is in no condition to work!!)

We had our first official meeting about Ecuador today, and I was sitting there thinking, "I can't believe I'm actually going to be doing all these things!!" We leave October 2, 2009, and fly into Guyaquil. From there we travel to Cuenca, the third largest city, and meet the families with whom we're going to be staying whenever we're not off climbing mountains or swimming in the Amazon or whatever. We're going to visit the Intag cloud forest, the Amazonian rainforest, the Incan ruins at Ingapirca, travel down el avenida de los volcanes (the avenue of the volcanoes -- I'll do my best to translate everything, but I have this habit of breaking into Spanish without realizing it!!), and best of all, spend a week in the Galapagos Islands!! When we are in Cuenca (for a few weeks at a time), we'll be taking classes at a language institute. Hopefully we can get it worked out so the other Spanish majors and I can take appropriate levels, because most students on the trip will get credits for SPN-110 or -210 (here at B-W), and we're taking -310 this semester.

The only thing I'm really not excited about: shots. I HATE shots, and I'll have to get four or seven of them, depending on whether or not the pre-exposure rabies vaccine becomes available before we leave. (There's apparently a shortage of it in the US right now, but it may become available this summer.) I'll also need an oral vaccine (pills) for typhoid, and I'll have to take a weekly pill for malaria before, during, and after the time we're in the Amazon basin. But I suppose I can deal. Oh, the rough life of a world traveler...;)