anfin’s Blog

According to Tori, I should provide an roommate situation update, so here it is: Girl C got offered an RA job complete with a pre-assigned room. She asked me to live with her, and we also found another nice roommate. However, since it’s preassigned we don’t have to go through the lottery at all. Hooray! The apartment is slightly far away from campus (For the benefit of Furmanites who know things about NV, I’ll be in NV D) but at least it has singles, and that’s the most important thing to me. At least I won’t become a complete hermit separated from all the world of upperclassmen by living in the dorms next year. Hooray again!

P.S. Girl B also found 3 roommates so all is well with her too.

So for those of you who don’t know, Horton the Elephant of Dr. Seuss fame is known for saying, “I meant what I said and I said what I meant; an elephant’s faithful one-hundred percent.” In fact, if you know the story, you’ll realize that he didn’t just say it, he followed through with it. It would be a very sad, meaningless quote if he hadn’t done so. Anyway, it has become apparent to me over the years that no one follows these Hortonian ideals. I can immediately recall several occasions during my college years during which a friend (?) said that they would do something, no maybe’s or probably’s attached, and then later backed out because it was not convenient. In each case, I wouldn’t have cared about them not doing whatever it was except that they had previously said they would.

For instance, I thought until an hour ago that I finally found roommates for North Village next year. We had a meeting early last week where Girl A (the names have been changed to protect the not-so-innocent) said, “So we are definitely all rooming next year right?” We all responded positively. Girl A sent an email to me an hour ago saying, “I am so terribly sorry to have to do this, but I have been selected from the waiting list to live off campus for next year. I really have to take the chance for financial reasons in my family. I feel so horrible leaving you girls out, but I hope that I have left enough time for ya’ll to figure out another plan. I have talked to Girl B and will be sending a message to Girl C as well. Again, I am so super sorry to leave you girls.”

And thus it is that I yet again am lacking in four roommates. I’m not really understanding the “take the chance” part. She didn’t take any chances. She used us as a backup plan without telling us that she had really signed up for the off-campus lottery. Anyway, had Girl A been honest with us up front, I would not be practically boiling with anger towards her right now.

Basically, it would be really nice if people would let their yes be yes and their no be no. Don’t say you’ll do something if you can’t make a real commitment. A commitment isn’t a commitment unless you are going to do everything in your power to follow through.

That’s right. Despite the forcast I read last week, we’ve had nothing but sun since we got here, and it hasn’t yet been too cold. Granted, I’ve been wearing three layers of clothing one of which was Gortex, but still, it hasn’t been as bad as people have been warning me of.

 Anyway, we had a very pleasant plane ride. We sat next to some nice people and there were good movies. However, I never really was able to sleep. Strangely, I never even really felt too badly tired until after being awake for 32 hours straight we finally went to sleep Stratford-upon-Avon. We really didn’t get much sightseeing done the first day due to the hecticness of train-times to Stratford, but we did walk around Stratford a bit.

 After a lovely night’s sleep and a good breakfast (during which we met some really nice kids our age who were at an acting school in Birmingham) we set out for Oxford. We got to eat fish-n-chips at the Eagle and Child Pub. Hooray! We then had a grand time walking around Oxford. We also went to the History of Science Museum and went to Christ Church College (which as may interest one or two of you is apparently one of the places where Harry Potter filming occurred). We successfully made it back to Stratford via train and we are about to go out again into town again. And that’s the end of your quick update. The end.

Oh wait, I forgot the pictures. Now it’s the end.

It is amazing how completely helpless I am without my cellphone. Upon accidentally leaving it in the library yesterday, my life went from being reasonably carefree to almost unbearably hectic. I had many plans which were completely thrown out the window because they were impossible without the apparently necessary ability to call someone at a moment’s notice. It seemed that eveytime I went to do something, I had to stop mid-action because I realized it simply couldn’t be done without that simple little communication device. It had also been my backup alarm which led to dire consequences when I failed to set my alarms last night after a looooong day. Yes, everyone, I have actually, officially, as of today missed a class at Furman. I woke up at 10:00 and made it to my 10:00 class at 10:05, but alas, I shall never really know what happened in my 9:00 class. I normally would have been very sad to lose such a record as the rare I’ve-never-missed-a-class-while-at-Furman record, but I was going to have to miss CHM-33 on Friday to leave for my trip anyway. Thus, I’m almost glad that I missed my first class in the way that I did–without a conscious effort.

Well, life is going pretty well. I’ll be in England this time next week, and I have successfully bought train passes and made housing arrangements. I’m also pretty much packed and am happy to say that everything that I need can indeed fit into one backpack with room to spare. Hooray! Basically, everthing I would need to be worried about concerning the trip is out of the way, and now I can just look forward to a week of fun.

In other somewhat-related-but-not-so-much-that-I-feel-like-explaining-
the-relation news, it’s the end of my hair as we know it.

I have now learned that, assuming I ever go to a three hour party during which I drink at a steady rate of one 12 oz. bottle of beer every 30 minutes, I will be seriously imparied after 0.739 hour and I will be legally intoxicated after 1.24 hour. It will then be 6.6 hours after the start of the party before I will legally be able to drive and 8.94 hours before I will no longer be seriously impaired. Finally, my maximum blood alcohol content will be 0.164 g alchohol per 100 mL blood. So now you know what I have learned in my mathematical models class. Now imagine you are a lowly freshman in an introductory Calculus class who has come Math Resource Center to dive into homework, and you hear the upperclassmen in the room deriving such a model. I don’t know about you, but this strikes me as a funny image. The end.

However, it must be noted that I never claimed that I would be. Anyway, hello all. I know that I have been rather silent for the past couple of weeks, but really, I was very busy. Now, though, I have survived last week with relative success, so perhaps I will be a little bit better about blogging. Perhaps. . .

Consequently, I have actually written a post or two in the past couple weeks only to quickly erase them because I thought they were rather stupid. One was entitled something to the effect of “John Glenn, the energy crisis, and impressive toads,” and I don’t even remember what the other one was about. In other words, you haven’t missed much. I’m a boring person.

So it’s official. I’ll be going to England over Thanksgiving Break. It may kill my grades, but I really couldn’t pass up the opportunity. My goal is to pack as completely lightly as possible. One backpack: that is all that I will allow myself. We’ll see how it goes.

I’m feeling very powerful right now, for I have been given the task of grading CHM-11 labs. That’s right, a tiny portion of all the CHM-11 students’ grades is in my hands.

Hmmm. . . Well, I really don’t have anything else to say. See, I told you I was a boring person.

Prove by use of truth tables as many parts of Theorem 6.2 as you can tolerate.

Well, here I am at 1:45, writing at a very Tori-ish hour out of the sheer boredom which has arisen from cleaning and packing and in general doing things which I promised myself I would do three weeks ago. Alas, I lack the will power to do anything of value during the summer. What I have been doing for the past three weeks (consistently at least) is watching TLC. I’m not really sure how this happened. I was just flipping through channels one day because Nick, TV Land, and Cartoon Network all lacked in decent programming (and because Greenwood cable doesn’t have Disney) when I came across a show which someone in the Wheeler lab had mentioned only a few weeks before. The show was and is called “What Not to Wear,” and in it the two fashionable hosts take someone who has no style or really atrocious style and give them the choice to give up their entire wardrobe in exchange for $5000 to buy a new wardrobe by the stylists’ rules in New York. The results are usually pretty amazing. Anyway, there was a marathon of this show today which did not help my packing situation at all. I’ve also come to enjoy shows like “Trading Spaces,” “While You Were Out,” and “Flip That House.” I know it’s sad, but hopefully it will all go away when I move back to Furman and into my tiny, tiny room tomorrow. Oh well, back to packing.

You might think, “Well, of course. She’s on stage at Newspring every Sunday.” However, usually I am only on the Kindergarten and 1st grade stage, while today I actually ended up on the stage as well. It all started when an oldish man and his family sat next to me. He was wondering what “Deal or No Deal” (the name of the new series) was and was also confused about the stage with it twenty something suitcases set up. I went about explaining to him the gameshow which I hadn’t even heard of until I had to play a math version of it at a Furman Math Department Banquet last year. A few minutes later, one of the Newspring administrative people came up and started talking to him and asked him if he’d like to play the game on stage. He said that he didn’t really want to, but then he directed them to me and said, “Hey, she knows how to play. Let her do it.” They turned to me and asked if I would like to, and I was more than happy to accept. They strapped a mike on me, called me up after the welcome, and I went up and played a game that was a lot more like “Let’s Make a Deal” than “Deal or no Deal.” It took about three minutes tops, and I won 4 series worth of CDs and returned to my seat. Anyway, I find it quite amusing that twice within one year I have been randomly chosen to play the same game that most people haven’t even heard of. The End.