Welcome to Finals Week

This week was so busy. All my classes had large assignments due last week, since this week will be finals week. I had regular classes Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, but Thursday and Friday were "Reading Days," which meant we had no classes and could use that time to do all the last minute homework that was due. I did a couple of large labs for my marine biology class, and a large section of my 10 page research paper, which I finally finished today. Good riddance.

Last night was the last 5-college party of the semester/calendar year. Harvey Mudd either trucked in or made snow and had a holiday themed dance party. It was not the same as snow at home. And it got gross pretty quickly.

Mom and Dad sent me a care package through the school with all sorts of snack foods and coffee and tea and popcorn and candy. It was the perfect thing for this weekend, while I was really stressed.

And now I'm sick, which is super lame! I have a really bad sore throat and just want to seclude myself in my room, which is actually pretty conducive to getting work done. Hopefully I'm all better before my finals start on Wednesday.

Only 6 more days until I'm home!!!

Christmas Spirit!

School right now is downright awful. So much work! So, we're not going to talk about that this week, alright?

Sunday night, on a break from my research paper, I watched A Charlie Brown Christmas, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, and The Island of Misfit Toys with Abby and Dinah while we made paper snowflakes to decorate our doors and hall. We've been listening to a lot of Christmas carols here too. Our dorm has a (fake) Christmas tree in the living room.

Saturday night Harvey Mudd threw a party. It was a pretty classy event, and we spent way more time than we needed too getting ready in pretty dresses.

December

This month has had pretty good weather so far. It's consistently been in the low 70s which is reasonable. Portland's going to be freezing compared to this. But I think I'm ok with that.

Next week is going to be brutal. I have a lab rewrite, a new lab to write up, an oral Italian exam, and a 10 page research paper. And then it's final week. The Field House where I work is bringing in a massage therapist for 3 days during final week, which is awesome. I'm pretty excited.

I'm really looking forward to going home in 2 weeks.
Here are some things I miss about Portland:
the rain
Shari's
friends and family
saturday market
conifers
my cats
Multnomah village and Fat City Cafe
Powells
good Chinese food
my knitting
christmas trees

A Long Weekend

I can't believe our Thanksgiving break is almost over. 4 days seemed much longer on Wednesday than it does in retrospect.
Thursday I spent at Taylor's house for Thanksgiving. It was good to be around a family, even if it wasn't my family. I guess in a way they kind of are a family to me. Theirs is sort of an adopted family, more family friends than blood relations as far as I can tell. And, for a change, I was the second youngest person there. Thanksgiving just isn't the same without all my younger cousins. And of course, Grandma's mashed potatoes and gravy, and home-made pumpkin pie. Maybe next year I should come home for Thanksgiving.

Friday I cleaned my room. You probably wouldn't be able to tell, but it's true!

Saturday, I told myself I was going to do more work than I actually did. I went to Target with a carful of my friends, and then to the Mall. I didn't wind up with much, Peanut butter Cap'n Crunch, some christmas cards to send out and a pretty clearanced head scarf to bring to Dubai.

Today I've actually gotten more done. Harvey Mudd finally stepped up to the plate and had a decent brunch this morning. Eggs Benedict, a waffle bar, a smoothie bar, good fruit. Yesterday, almost all of the cereal had run out, the only fruit left were green apples and honeydew, and the bagels were not very bagel-y at all. It was a sour dissapointment and spoiled much of the day. I have a hypothesis that the better the food is, the more productive I am. I completely read Making History today, which is a play that we're reading for Core, and I just started some laundry. And now I'm updating this thing. I think it can all be attributed to the eggs benedict.

Tomorrow school starts up again, and I'm not looking forward to it. I've got 6 things on my calendar for tomorrow in addition to classes, which is really overwhelming. Even though one of those things is Gossip Girl.

Thanksgiving!

School has been super busy the last week and half or so. This weekend I wrote 2 essays and a giant lab report about our field trip. And before break I need to write a long paragraph in Italian. I'm shocked by how much Italian we've learned in just a semester.
Monday I had food poisoning, which was a really upsetting way to start the day. Hehehe. Get it? Upset. Like my stomach.
Today for dinner Harvey Mudd's dining hall had a really elaborate Thanksgiving dinner. It was really fantastic. I went with Julia and Grace. There was roast beef, mashed potatoes and gravy, asparagus in hollandaise sauce, and a whole table of fresh bread and cheeses. And for dessert they had pumpkin pie and pumpkin cheesecake! It was a very exciting dinner :)

There won't be pictures for awhile because my camera is a little broken right now, and I'm going to have to go and get it fixed. :(

More Pictures!

Taylor finally got me the pictures from Halloween! Here I am as Carmen Sandiego. I should get my own red coat one of these days. I borrowed this one off of Julia.

Yesterday we took a field trip to the Getty museum. It was a beautiful space. Large gardens, fountains everywhere, and quiet sections of museum. I got great postcards and a pair of earrings from the gift store.
Then we went down to Santa Monica for dinner, which was great. I love all my new friends. :)

Pictures!

So, here are some more pictures from this month!
Election day was a lot of fun at the Motley with a ton of people watching together.Today was a field trip to Laguna Beach with my marine bio class. We played with tide pools and surveyed some areas to collect data.


My Critical Language Scholarship Application is completed, so I've been looking at other summer programs to apply for. I found another international opportunity through a group called Humanity in Action. We'll see what happens I guess. I can't believe it's almost Thanksgiving! It doesn't really feel or look like fall here at Scripps.

November, already? + More Arizona Pictures

It's unbelievable that it's already November 10! This month is going by much quicker than the previous two. I had a really great Halloween. The Dr. Horrible Sing-Along I went to was a lot of fun, and I got recognized as Carmen Sandiego by a bunch of people, which made it even better. Taylor and his friend Carlon dressed up as the Bad Horse cowboys from the musical, and a lot of people posed for pictures with them because they're costumes were so good. Joss Whedon, Nathan Fillion, Alan Tudyk, and Felicia Day were all there at the screening, which was really neat. Carlon threw himself at Nathan Fillion and managed a hug before getting pushed away. I think I saw a crazy lady in a dress with little cat faces all over it try to follow them to their car. Creepy. Also, I found this picture of Taylor and Carlon on Flickr.com, which is pretty cool. By this point, Carlon's mustache is past it's peak.
Last week I had tests in 2 classes and a paper due, which made it a hard week, but it went by really quickly. The election was great to watch. I saw both the speeches streaming live online while I was at work that day. It's a bummer that Prop 8 passed here in California, banning gay marriage. People are really up in arms over it. I don't remember that kind of reaction in Oregon when we passed it as Measure 36 a few years ago. Maybe now stuff will actually get done about it. I thik what's even worse is that Arkansas banned gay couples from adopting children. But then again, we don't expect much different from Arkansas.
This weekend was pretty quiet. Friday night I went to the Southern California A capella Music Festival at Pomona, which was a lot of fun. Groups from the five colleges, as well as UCLA and USC came and they all did great. The Claremont mens group did a version of the Backstreet Boys "The Call" which made me very happy. Unfortunately, another group did "Come on, Eileen" which means it will be stuck in my head for the rest of eternity.
My friend Melody has dreams of starting her own pirate themed a capella group.

Anyway, I don't have Halloween pictures yet, because Taylor hasn't gotten around to sending me any. But Ellie did finally upload pictures from Arizona! That last picture is capuchin monkeys dressed up as jockeys riding dogs... Depressing, yea? It was called the banana derby.

Halloween!

I almost wasn't going to dress up at all, but I managed to pull together a last minute Carmen Sandiego costume, with a hat and everything! It's not perfect. The hat is a converted felt pimp hat, and the coat is Julia's, so a size smaller than would be ideal. But it works, somewhat. Tomorrow night I'm going with Taylor and a few of his friends to a Joss Whedon sing-a-long. I'm kind of bummed to be missing all the events going on on-campus tomorrow night, but I won't miss seeing a million and a half girls in costumes titled "Slutty _____". (Fill in the blanks with nurse, cop, penguin, whatever.) My peer mentor, Jocelyn, is going as Xenu, the alien from Scientology. Julia is going as Velma from Scooby Doo, Dinah as an Ostrich, Heidi as a French revolutionary, and the creativity goes on. I hope I'm able to get pictures.

I got my Core midterm back today, and I did really well! Unfortunatly, the work just goes on and on. I have a paper due Monday on Toni Morrison's Beloved, a Marine Bio exam on Tuesday, and an Italian exam on Wednesday. I've managed to catch -up on, and even get ahead, in all my reading, so I started reading Fellowship of the Ring on the side. A couple years ago when I tried reading it, I found it super dense and difficult, but after all the reading we've done for Core I find that the Lord of the Rings is much easier, and even has a relaxing cadence.

My face hasn't gotten any better. The muscles that I can't move are a little sore, and trying to eat/drink is an adventure all it's own. At least my friends are nice enough to laugh with me when I take too big of a gulp and my coffee falls out of my mouth unexpectedly.

I need to go do laundry. I'm down to about 3 shirts, which makes getting ready in the morning quite a pain.

Also, what was I thinking when I didn't bring ALL my shoes?!?!?!

This is the picture of Julia and I that was taken for the Photobooth project. Last month for 2 days a photo booth with a professional photographer was set up in front of the dining hall. He took 238 sets of pictures and then they created a large wall of pictures that stands in the lawn in front of the dining hall as a visual representation of the Scripps community.


In other news, over the last couple of days I've developed Bell's Palsy which is a paralysis or weakening of the muscles on the right side of my face, caused by some sort of trauma to the 7th cranial nerve. The doctor said it was probably a virus I caught on campus that attacked the nerve instead of making me sick. The last couple of days food has been tasting really weird, and then my hearing became super sensitive, and then yesterday I was having trouble eating and wrapping my mouth around a straw. I asked the girls I was eating with if my smile was lopsided, which it was, so I called the on-call doctor on campus who suggested I go to urgent care and suggested that it could be this palsy. I went to the hospital with Julia and Dinah, and they prescribed me a steroid and said most people get better with in 6 weeks. In the mean time, it will be very strange eating and I can make really funny faces:

That last one is my "kissy" face, if you can't tell.
Oh! And I can't really close my right eyelid, so I have to wear an eyepatch at night so nothing scratches my eyeball.

Arizona

Taylor and I went to Arizona for fall break, which puts one more state under my belt. It was ridiculously hot! Even in October it was 100˚F every day. Saturday we went to the Arizona State Fair with Taylor's friend Greg, and my friend Ellie and her new boyfriend. We rode some rides, rode an elephant, saw monkeys riding dogs, went to a petting zoo where they had an adolescent giraffe, and went to a Weezer concert for free. And Sunday we had lunch with Taylor's Aunt and cousins. The drive wasn't bad, aside from the heat. It was 5 hours from Claremont to Tempe and all on one freeway. It was a whole lot of nothing though, so I'm grateful we didn't break down.

Fall Break Looms

Last weekend Taylor took me to see Joan Osborne in concert for our anniversary. It was a great surprise. We also spent all day Saturday at Santa Monica. My camera was broken, so I couldn't take pictures, but it was beautiful weather and a whole lot of fun!
Fall Break starts on Friday. I'm excited to be going to Arizona to see Ellie, but not so much excited for the drive. I also wouldn't mind some alone time in the dorms, but I miss Ellie so much. We're going to the Arizona State Fair and have tentative plans to see Weezer in concert. And plans to play a thrilling game of speed scrabble.

Good News!

This week I got back my first Core essay and my Marine Biology test. I got A- on both of them, which I'm so happy about! My Core professor said he had graded all the essays pretty harshly and that we shouldn't freak out about it. But I don't think an A- is very harsh and I can certainly live with that.
On Monday it was our anniversary, so Taylor and I went to Red Lobster (where it was crab-crackin' monday!) and watched Garden State. Tonight we're going out to do something, but it's a surprise, so he won't tell me. It's amazing how much harder that makes choosing what to wear. I hope it's fun.
My voter registration went through! I would've been pretty upset if I couldn't vote against Sarah Palin.

October Arrives

Here are Dinah, Abby, Hannah and I posing as Jedi. I'm the androgynous looking one on the right.

I've been here for over a month now. It doesn't seem that long, and at the same time it feels like it's been forever. A lot of things are like that here.
My Core paper went super well. I haven't received it back yet, but I have a really good feeling about it. We did get our Writing 50 papers back and I was one of 2 people in the class within an A-range. I only have minimal revisions to do to it. My Marine Bio test last week went reasonably well too, I think.
Friday night I went to go see the Dandy Warhols in concert in Hollywood with Taylor. It was a really good show and I super enjoyed it. There are so many concerts down here! It'll be pretty hard to pick and choose which ones are worth seeing.
Saturday, Scripps sponsored a trip to Disneyland with about 46 freshman students. I went with pretty much my whole dorm hall. It was the most fun I've had so far and a really good bonding experience with all my new friends. The Indiana Jones Ride and Splash Mountain are probably the best rides ever. I didn't take pictures, but plenty of other people did!


This is Abby and I after Splash Mountain. (She went to Lincoln!)

And this is Abby, Hannah and I in the O in front of California Adventure.


And this is all of us waiting in line for Indiana Jones.

Another Monday

We get our Writing 50 papers back today, so hopefully I didn't do too badly. I was always pretty high up on the curve in high school, but everyone here is a good writer.
My Core paper is going pretty well. I've got 3 pages so far, and all I have left to do is to write my introduction and conclusion. It's not due until Thursday, so I'm feeling pretty good about it. I might finish it and take it to the writing center tomorrow night so I can get some help revising and editing it.
Tonight I'm getting together with my lab group to work on revising our lab write up from last week. I have to skip pilates to do it though, which is a huge bummer.
I haven't been taking very many pictures lately. Carrying around my camera hasn't been terribly practical. I'm going to a meeting for "Voice: the Scripps college newspaper" tonight, and may decide to take pictures for them. I never heard back from "The Student Life," the 5-college newspaper.

One Paper Down

My writing 50 paper was due last night at midnight and I got mine turned in online at exactly 11:59pm. I liked the paper over all, but I didn't have 4 full pages of stuff to write about. It turned out to be 3.5 pages, which hopefully will be close enough. Dinah and I finished at the same time and then went to the Muddhole at Harvey Mudd to get late night snacks. Then we stayed up reading magazines until 3 in the morning. At least some part of my Friday night was salvageable.
I worked last night during the Obama/McCain debate, and since not many people come in on friday nights, we watched the debate live on the computer. So many of the things McCain says are just downright frustrating. His strategy was to make Obama look unintelligent by starting all his rebuttals with "The thing I don't think Obama understands is..." and then he'd say completely unintelligent things himself. Apparently the way to convince Iran to be submissive to our will is to create a coalition of like-minded democratic states to stonewall everyone else? I just don't see that going well for us. In fact, that sounds like a great way to start a third world war.
Yesterday I also got swabbed to be entered into the national bone marrow database. Giving bone marrow used to be one of the most painful donations, because they had to physically go into your bone, but now with new technology it's apparently much more like giving blood.
Thursday I had a lab for my marine biology. We made little clay planktons and dropped them in corn syrup to see how fast they'd fall. And that night was a speech by Patricia Williams ,who is absolutely brilliant. She talked about the state of race relations in the country, today.
A lot of people are getting sick, but I haven't caught it yet. *knock on wood*

College Stress

My work load has been pretty manageable up till this week. I now have two essays to be writing at the same time, which is not as thrilling as it sounds. I'm sure in the end I'll manage it find, but right now it's pretty stressful. I'm looking forward to going to work tonight because it's 2 hours to read instead of 2 hours sitting in front of a blank word document trying to wring ideas out of my brain and onto the page.
For Writing 50, I'm comparing Charlotte Perkins Gilman's piece Women and Economics to Joss Whedon's Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I'm just finally getting a hold on that paper. I wrote my first body paragraph, which I think turned out pretty well. I found out that Whedon studied Gender and Feminist Theory at Welseyan University, which explains so much.
For my Core class in the Humanities we've been assigned a compare and contrast essay using the works of these people: Needless to say... I'm not terribly excited.









On the bright side, I had a yummy warm chocolate chocolate chip muffin for breakfast. Yum! :)

Monday Morning

Monday mornings and Friday mornings are the best. Everything in between is really difficult. Monday mornings I have to wake up early to work from 8am-10am, but it's the beginning of the week so I'm fresh and it's ok. Plus, the Field House director brought me coffee and a muffin this morning. Friday mornings I only have one class- Italian. That means I go back to sleep at 11 when it gets out. But Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday mornings are brutal. The days here feel so long, but the weeks go by so quickly. It's a time warp.
I would like to digress so that I may show you how creepy our basement/laundry room is:I was talking about laundry with Rachel the other night on the phone, though, and she claims that hers is much creepier because strange guys from their dorm hang out in the laundry room. At least, we don't have that problem.
This weekend was good. Taylor and I hung out and went shopping at an obscenely large mall. I pumped my own gas for the first time. It was a pretty stressful ordeal though, because I was running out of gas in an area I didn't know very well and the first two gas stations I stopped at were closed. Finally, a friendly guy on rollerskates playing a plastic recorder pointed me in the right direction. I started watching a new show called "True Blood" about, what else, vampires. I think I got my roommate, Julia, and my neighbors addicted to it too.
Friday night, a group of us went to Harvey Mudd's gym/rec center and played foosball, scrabble, and air hockey. Turns out they also have a tandem bike to rent, and a couple people tried that. I really enjoy Harvey Mudd's campus. One of their dorms is always having a bonfire outside, and other dorms have couches, hammocks and coffee tables in the areas outside.
Last night, when we all should have been doing homework, we had an apples to apples party. It wasn't really a "party" but the guide to student life qualifies having more than 8 people in your room a "party." Apples to apples is a great game, but it's hard to play with 11 people, and it really relies on having some idea of what people find funny. It's a really good "getting to know you" type game though.
I just finished reading "The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass" and found it really interesting. Probably the best of my core reading that I've done so far. I'd recommend for anyone, but think that Grandma would especially appreciate it.

Week 3 of School

Monday: Karl Rove came to campus and students peacefully, but loudly, protested in front of the auditorium. They died fountains red like blood and held a teach-in led by many professors of the 5 colleges. I went to Pilates instead.

Tuesday: Scripps hosted a 5-college club fair and "Turf dinner." All 5 college dining halls came up with a menu around the theme "carnival" and distributed their food on the lawn. Unfortunately, it was too small a space for all the kids from all 5 colleges, and getting food was super hard. And none of it was very good. I signed up for "On the Loose" a club that organizes outings to places like Mount Baldy, the beach, Joshua Tree- anywhere outdoors. I also got information from the Scripps College Newspaper, and the 5-C newspaper. It sounded like they could both use photographers, and I only have to be involved as much as I want to be.Wednesday: I watched Bones with someone from another dorm. I thought more people would be watching, but I guess America's Next Top Model is in the same time slot. I also talked to my Writing Professor about using Buffy in my compare and contrast paper. She thought it sounded great, so I'm really excited.

Today: Tonight is a lecture called "the Shock Doctrine" by Naomi Klein about "disaster capitalism." That would be when people profit off of disasters like New Orleans or the tsunami. It sounds like she would be an interesting speaker.

Tomorrow: My first test as a college student! I think it should go well, and I feel prepared. It's in Italian, which is the only class I have on Fridays, thank goodness.


Scripps emailed out information about the Critical Language Scholarship Program, which is a summer program run by the state department where you live in a different country for 7-10 weeks and learn their language. They pay for it completely and offer programs for beginners in Arabic, Bengali, Hindi, Korean, Punjabi, Turkish and Urdu. I'm seriously thinking about it. There aren't that many downsides.

Pasadena

Taylor and I went out to Pasadena today to wander around their Old Pasadena section. It's not terribly "old" except for the buildings. Otherwise it's just a collection of stores and restaurants like the Cheesecake factory, Urban Outfitters and H&M. We had a great lunch at a trattoria and wandered around looking at stores.

This weekend has been kind of a depressing one in Claremont. David Foster Wallace, author and creative writing professor at Pomona apparently killed himself, while a senior at CMC died in the Metrolink crash in Chatsworth. He was taking the Metro home from Claremont to Simi Valley.

But it was also my neighbor Heidi's birthday this weekend, and we baked her brownies and filled her room with balloons and streamers. Saturday we all took a walk down to the Claremont village to check out the shops and the great smoothie place. I hope we made it a good birthday for her. It would be so hard to have your birthday so early in the school year so far from home.

Second Weekend

The second week of classes seemed to go by pretty quickly. Each individual day feels like forever, though. The homework is mostly reading, but it's a lot of reading. I finished To the Lighthouse by Virginia Wolff, which I'm very proud of. Next up I have the Yellow Wallpaper and Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass.
Monday night, Dr. Maura Cullen came to campus as part of Orientation to give a speech on diversity. I was in the front row with a group of girls from my dorm, and 3 of us were absolutely bawling by the end. She was a great speaker.
Wednesday night, a professor from England gave a lecture on Globalization. Scripps (and the rest of the Claremont colleges) get great speakers to come give lectures, and I'm pretty excited for some of them. Next week's lecture is "The Shock Doctrine" by Naomi Klein, and next month Jared Diamond (author of Guns, Germs and Steel) will come and give a lecture centered around his latest book, Collapse. Karl Rove is coming on Monday to talk about "Politics and the Presidency." Some students have organized a protest for tonight against his coming to speak at all.
And in slightly sweeter news, the Motley coffeehouse had it's opening night celebration last night.

My Dorm Room

So I posted pictures of the outside of my dorm room because the inside was pretty messy until today. This is my side of the room. I'm really excited, because now that I bought posters and we got curtains and those funny little mirrors, it feels homey. And it will be messy again by tomorrow- so here's my photographic proof of my beautiful spacey room.
And this is Julia's side of our room. Together, it's one very large room. And we finally got food for our refrigerator. We bought cereal, milk, lots of yogurt, and snack bars. We've been taking fruit from the dining hall, too. Though you can pick tastier oranges right off the trees!
In other news, Field house training was today. It was all pretty basic customer service stuff, but since the building/administration/policies are all so new, the rules are very up in the air. Which makes it pretty hard to be certain about anything. Like whether or not it's ok to wear flip flops at the front desk. I'll continue to do it until someone tells me not to, I guess!

Here are a few more views of my dorm room:

First Weekend of the Semester

I got through my first week of classes alright, and now I have a job! I sit at the front desk of our new gym and make sure people sign in. My first shift was so slow that I read 50 more pages of To the Lighthouse by Virginia Wolff. Shifts come only 2 or 3 hours at a time, as well, so I'm not losing huge chunks of my day. Most non-work-study students have a hard time finding jobs on campus, so I'm glad I nabbed this one so early!
On another note, meal-plans here max out at 16 meals per week, which, if you'll count, don't exactly account for every meal. Julia and I are planning to go find a grocery store or some such and try to buy some breakfast foods.

First Week of School

Today was my second day of classes. I'm pretty happy with them, for the most part. I love Italian. It is the best way to start my day. Profesoressa Magistro speaks to us only in Italian which was a little intimidating at first, but is a really fun way to learn the language. I like it so much better than French. And Julia is taking Italian too, so I have someone to practice with. :) Core I is a little borderline. The lectures, which are every other day, are pretty interesting. We have discussion groups the day we don't have lectures, but the professor that leads my discussion group doesn't lead discussions. He just spends all the time we have talking. My peer mentor, Jocelyn, had him last year and she says it's like that all semester. The homework for that class is really intense. We had 40 pages of Galileo to read before the second lecture, and Galileo is a very wordy and repetitive guy. It was almost pointless, all the reading they gave us.
My marine biology class looks pretty promising. I'm one of the few first-years that was able to get into the course, so the first day I sat next to a couple of Scripps seniors. I was worried that I wouldn't be able to find the building because it was on Claremont McKenna's campus, but as I was walking there I ran right into Trevor, a football player from Wilson who now plays at CMC. He was able to point out the building to me and I found the classroom just fine. Hopefully, that class is as fun as I think it will be. We have a field trip in November to the coast.
My Writing 50 class is awesome. Our professor just has us call her Chris, and this first day we just went through the syllabus and introduced/talked a little bit about ourselves. We write 4 papers over the semester, and at the end of the semester/year the 2 best papers get awards and the authors scholarship money. I'm going to try really hard for that, but we'll see. It sounds like our class will also be having a lot of interesting discussions on the topic, and I'm pumped for that.
It doesn't feel like it's only the second day of classes. Scripps feels like home already.

Day Before Classes

I registered for classes yesterday. My first semester classes are:

• Core I- our interdisciplinary humanities class
• Writing 50 "Dangerous Domesticities"- which is my writing class built around a theme of relationships that have been seen as abnormal at one time or another i.e. same-sex marriage, polygamy, interracial couples, etc.
• Beginning Italian
• The Living Sea- a marine bio class for non-science majors.

I'm pretty happy with it. But I couldn't take fencing because it conflicted with my Writing class. I bought books for the classes today and it was $400. Ouch.

The last couple days have been filled with 5-college parties. The first photo is from the carnival held here at Scripps, and the second is from a dance party held last night at Pomona.

Orientation

This is the view from my room. Our window opens up into an enclosed courtyard. The tree is great, provides a lot of shade, and has two mourning doves building a nest right outside our window.
Move-in day (8-28-08) was incredibly stressful, but I was pleasantly surprised by my room. It's spacious and the lack of a/c hasn't been unbearable. We have 2 fans going and our windows open most of the time and the room stays within a pretty reasonable temperature. After mom and dad left we had meetings with our Resident Advisors and our Peer Mentors. We had a Safety Awareness Session where they had us memorize the Campus Safety phone number and a self-defense coach taught us to slap-grab-twist-pull. I tried to sign up for one of her self-defense workshops afterward because she was so amazing, but both were already full. The first night there was also an improv comedy show on the Harvey Mudd campus that we attended. It was funny, but everyone was tired because it had been such a long day.
Yesterday's (8-29) schedule was chock full as well. I got to skip the language placement test in the morning because I'm taking Italian as a new language, but I still woke up at 730 for breakfast. The math placement test later in the morning didn't go so well. I placed into PreCalc, which I've already taken. The test doesn't have a huge impact though, since I plan to either take statistics or logic to fulfill my math requirement. We had group advising sessions where a faculty member talked with us about classes. I register for mine tomorrow. Taylor and I had dinner in the Claremont village, which was fun to explore. The Dean, Deb Wood, hosted a dessert where I bonded with girls from my dorm and met a lady who worked at the Career, Planning and Resources office. And after that Pitzer hosted a luau for all 5 colleges. There was music (a band covering Bob Marley and Jimmy Buffet songs) and some hula dancers, and a fire dancer. For the most part it was just a lot of freshman standing around awkwardly trying to make friends.
Today has been much less hectic, thank god. I had breakfast (the dining hall has great waffles), filled out a job application and wrote a resume, had lunch catered by In N Out, and took pictures around my dorm. In about 15 minutes I'm leaving for a Scripps sponsored Target trip for all those essential things I forgot. Like hangers. So I'll leave you with some more pictures from around my dorm.

1 Week to Move-in

Next week I will be moving into Susan Miller Dorsey Hall with my roommate, Julia. Dorsey is one of the original halls on campus, and was built in the late 20's. Unfortunately, it doesn't have air conditioning. That may mean I do a lot more studying by the pool instead. It's heartbreaking, really. Dorsey's age means it has some especially neat characteristics, though. The hall was built with many themed courtyards, like Manana courtyard pictured here. Manana courtyard is built with plants all native to California and the Southwest. I've heard there's a pomegranate tree hidden somewhere around the building, too!

Hopefully this blog will keep everyone sufficiently up to date with what I'm up to and how I'm doing. I probably won't be writing letters, and I won't be back for thanksgiving. I'll miss everyone, so make sure to leave me comments to let me know how you're doing as well!