New Phone

I picked out my new phone last night and it’s supposed to arrive sometime next week.  I took advantage of AT&T’s 3-day free Pantech Matrix offer.  I’m getting the red one.  It’s a pretty cool phone, although I’ve never had a Pantech.  I like the slide out keyboard, even though I rarely text on my phone.  I text on my iPod for free.  But it’ll still be useful.  I’m the world’s slowest texter, so for those few times I text with my phone, it’ll be nice not to have to take five minutes to send a five word text.

Apparently, At&T’s free upgrades aren’t really free.  The phone was free, but they’re charging us a $15 ‘upgrade fee’.  They always sneak a fee in somehow.

The Good and the Bad, Mostly the Bad

After a few weeks of not having much to blog about, I all of a sudden have quite a few things to blog about.  I’m just going to put them in one entry to make my life easier.

I woke up today to the lovely sound of my phone making a crackling noise that sounded somewhat like my alarm clock tone.  I hit snooze to see if it would do it again and it did.  Then I messed around with the ring tones and now my phone seems incapable of making any sort of ringing noise, choosing only to vibrate when someone calls me.  This really wouldn’t be the end of the world if it chose to happen while I was home and not while I was at school.  I’m long since due to a free upgrade and just kept this phone due to its excellent battery life.  However, since I’m not home I can’t get a new phone right away.  The phone’s in my dad’s name and I can’t just go into the AT&T store and get a new one without him.  So, he’s going to email me a list of phones that I can get for free and I’ll choose one.

I’m also sick, which doesn’t help matters.  Just a cough/sore throat, no fever, so that’s a plus.

The one good thing that happened today is that I discovered that I do not have to take anymore French classes in order to graduate!  Turns out only incoming freshmen needed to take two semesters worth of foreign language, not transfer students, so I’m in the clear after taking that one class over the summer.

Then I had to get my story critiqued in fiction workshop today.  The actual critique wasn’t bad.  My class seemed to like my story and had constructive things to say about it.  But then I got my grade.  C+.  Mostly due to mechanics!  It’s a fiction class, not a mechanics class!  He liked my story, just not the mechanics.  I don’t think mechanics should lower your grade that much.  I’m so pissed off about it.  It’s going to kill my overall grade which will then kill my overall GPA.

I’m so ready for this week to be over.  I wish mid semester break was this weekend instead of next.  I need a break.

It’s October

Where did September go?  Seriously, that month went so fast.  Seems like the first day of school was just last week.  But nope, it definitely wasn’t.  Mid semester break is in a few weeks, which means that, hence its name, it will soon be the middle of the semester.  Guess who hasn’t started her senior thesis?  Hehe, that would be me.  I really should get started on it.  I am such a bad procrastinator.

October also means that Nanowrimo starts in a month.  I have a plot and I’m excited about it.  It’s a futuristic story about what happens after scientists figure out how to cure death, and it becomes mandatory that people cannot die.  That’s the story in a nutshell, but it’ll be more complicated than that.  I just hope I’ll have the time to work on it.  After finishing last year’s Nano in a mere two weeks, I decided to up my word count goal to 75,000 this year instead of Nano’s standard 50,000.  I’ve changed my mind now that I’ve realized how busy I’ll be that month.  If only I could use my thesis for my Nano, that would motivate me to get it done!

Ahhh, Spoilers!!!

The other day I was zoning out in my Literary Analysis class, idling doodling on my notes like I usually do.  There were fifteen minutes left in class and I was counting down.  It was the last day we were talking about Sent For You Yesterday, which is a very confusing and boring book.  The author neglected to use quotation marks throughout the entire novel.  I may be new to my English Minor, but I could’ve sworn quotation marks were a standard convention in the English language.

Anyway, the teacher had connected that book with one we will be reading in a few weeks, Anna Karenina.  I have actually been looking forward to reading that one since I’ve heard it’s good.  I looked up and started paying attention.  Then, he told us exactly what’s going to happen in Anna Karenina!  He spoiled the whole thing!  I was just staring at him, trying to comprehend what he had just done.  I immediately grabbed my iPod and hid it under my desk while I texted my friend who was sitting next to me (gotta love the new way of passing notes).  I could not believe he’d actually done that.

I hate spoilers.  I am completely anti-spoiler.  I flat out refuse to spoil any book to anyone, no matter how much they want me to.  I am so incredibly mad that my teacher spoiled Anna Karenina.  Seriously, what kind of teacher does that?

A Great Day for Twitter!

Today was an epic day in the world of Tweeting.  J.K. Rowling now has a Twitter.  It’s real, too, not a joke.  The Leaky Cauldron confirmed it.  I am proud to say that I was one of her first 1,000 followers!  As of right now, 6pm on September 25th, she has over 15,000.

I’m Such A Yank

Last night I was video chatting with a few of my friends from LeakyCon.  I was telling everyone that Chik-Fil-A had this deal a while ago where if you wore your favorite sports team’s jersey, you’d get a free chicken sandwich or something like that.  I read about it on MyLifeIsAverage.  I wished there was a Chik-Fil-A near me so that I could wear a Chudley Cannons (Quidditch team) jersey and get a free sandwich for it.  Hence why I had to tell my Harry Potter friends about it.

As I was telling the story, one of my friends started cracking up.  Apparently I have been pronouncing Chik-Fil-A wrong ever since I first heard about it.  I had been prouncing it Chick Fill Uh.  She told me it’s pronounced Chick Filet.  Then she told me I’m the most Northern person and I’m such a Yank.  She used to live sort of close to me, but she recently moved to North Carolina and she lived down South when she was younger as well.

I’m glad she told me.  Now if I ever go to a Chik-Fil-A, I won’t pronounce it wrong.

They’re Mocking Us

The other day I walked through my college’s main quad and looked at the light up sign thing that the college government uses to advertise their school sponsored programs.  It had been blank for days.  That day it said ‘Have a good summer!’  I wonder who decided to put that up.  Everyone was able to see it as we were trudging our way to class, summer well behind us.

“I Love Living in a College Town”

Yesterday three of my friends and I were walking to the movie theater for the midnight movie from one of my friend’s apartment.  It’s a really short walk.  We were about halfway there when we crossed paths with an old drunk guy who exclaimed.

“I love living in a college town!  There’s all these beautiful young women walking around.  But I’m too old.”

Once he passed us we burst out laughing.

The Classes

Class has been in session for over a week now, so I have sat through enough lectures to give you a sufficient opinion on my edumacation for the semester.  This semester is odd because only three of my classes have meeting times.  Besides them, I am working in a research lab and working on my senior thesis.

Class number one is Literary Analysis and is currently top pick for the semester’s most boring class.  It is a required class for every English major and minor, hence the reason I am taking it.  Right now, the only good thing about it is that my roommate is taking it with me and we get to rant about it after we leave the room.

This class involves reading five novels.  The first one, which we are currently reading is called A Personal Matter by Kenzaburo Oe.  I will not recommend anyone read this book.  It is awful.  How it won a Nobel Prize I’ll never know.  I’m quite happy that we only have one more day of discussing it.

The professor is kind of strange.  He cannot stand still for more than a minute and spends class pacing in front of the chalkboard.  On the first day he freely admitted that he was the toughest grader in the English department and that he has favorites.  His favorites are those who speak in class.  I don’t really speak in class much.  Yeah, I’m kind of screwed.

Second class is Fiction Workshop and is currently holding the place of my favorite class.  A few of my friends from Creative Writing are in it, which adds to its awesomeness.  We each have to write two short stories and read a bunch of short stories from an anthology.  All of our stories get critiqued in front of class.  I’m already working on my first short story and I plan on putting it online once I’m finished.  The professor is very nice and seems quite normal.  Definitely an enjoyable class so far.

Third class is Animal Behavior.  This class is good so far, although we’re still learning about the history of Animal Behavior.  Then comes the research methods section, which is guaranteed to be boring.  I’m sure it’ll pick up after that.  I just can’t wait until we do the unit on animals and their desire to locate and consume food.  I almost wish we had to do a paper on that because I could easily write a 20 page paper about Benny and his insane desire for food.

There’s not much to say about my other two classes.  In the research lab I’ll be conducting research, but I can’t blog about ongoing research.  I haven’t really started my thesis yet, so there’s nothing to say about it.

At Least It Wasn’t at 3 AM

I woke up today to the lovely sound of the fire alarm going off.  Last semester I configured my schedule so that the earliest I would ever have to be in class is 11:30 am.  What is the point of that if they’re going to do fire drills at 10?

When the alarm went off I was half-asleep and thought that the alarm had gone off from the steam in the shower (yes, this does happen, the RAs warned us about it, happens at my house, too).  So I spent a good few minutes standing on my bed trying to figure out how to turn the damn thing off, only to realize that there was no button on it.

So, next I got my computer and went out into the living room to try and find out how to turn it off by looking online.  Then I realized that the sound was even louder in the living room than in my bedroom and looked out the open windows.  There was a whole crowd of people standing around.

Oops.  Everyone’s alarm had gone off.  Then it clicked.  Fire drill!  All my roommates were in class, so I grabbed my keys and left the building.  The alarm stopped two minutes later.

Better than last year’s fire drill, but still not fun.