Impromptu cleaning day

I haven't made a blog post in a long while, mostly because I just kind of forgot about it. Oops!

Today's been a very odd day so far. I planned on lounging in bed for a while watching How I Met Your Mother and whatnot, and then doing some homework. Instead, a rogue cockroach caused my roommate and I to freak out and we decided to clean our room, like really clean it. We vacuumed, scrubbed the fridge and sink, washed our sheets, and wiped down the counters and desks. It was an exhausting couple of hours, but now our room looks so nice and not cluttered.

But we never did find the cockroach.

The past few days!

Hey howdy hey, it's been a while. Wanna hear about my life? Ha, of course you do, that's why you're here! So, story time!

Let us start off with...
TUESDAY

On Tuesday, Derek, Danyel, Dominic, and I all got dinner together and then went on a "gallery crawl," aka a visit to three of the on-campus art galleries. Danyel and Dominic are art majors, so they had to do this, but Derek and I tagged along.

The first gallery was all dark and the art was super tiny and detailed ceramic sculptures. That one was my favorite. The other two blur together in my mind to be honest. One of them had a painting that bore a striking resemblance to me!

 What, you don't see the resemblance? Look again!

Seein' it now? That's what I thought too. 

But of course, my favorite work of art was the rather colorful fork display they had for the refreshments:

I am nothing if not cultured. Anyway, after the gallery crawl, we all decided to show Derek the "secret" garden, because he was the only one among us who hadn't seen it. I'd like to point out that the secret garden is neither secret nor a garden, and it's honestly far more impressive in name than in stature. Still, it's worth it just to go down the ghetto, skanky ramp that leads to the garden, if only because going down it for the first time you're fairly positive it will lead to an underground meth lab or a rapist's lair.

Overall, we had a great night, which was nice because the beginning of my Tuesday was pretty awful.

Let's briefly move on to THURSDAY, when GLEE CAME BACK and I was a bundle of joy. My friends Molly and Kaela joined Derek and I at Derek's house to watch Glee, but sadly around 6ish I realized that my throat, which had been a bit sore for a couple days, was now really really REALLY fucking painful. And then I developed a raging fever and the shivers. Still, nothing could keep me from my Glee. Nothing. And despite my illness, I still managed to shriek, flail, laugh, and sob over the episode.

SATURDAY was when I finally began to feel marginally better. I finished my French homework with pride, got a 14 out of 15 on my sociology quiz, and finally forced myself to do some math homework. Then, Derek and Kimi and Leslie and I watched half of The Hunger Games on Kimi's computer before something weird happened and the website stopped working.

Today, I'm finally fever-free as far as I can tell, and my agenda is to clean the sink (ugh) and then go visit my family! That's all for now.

-Audrey

side note

I almost forgot, on Thursday my dorm threw this little party/barbeque thing and yeah wanna see a picture yes you do:

photo taken by one of the lovely CAs at McClintock

Friday night adventures

My goodness, last night was wild.
Well, not really, but it was probably the most fun night I've had since college started. Let me tell you all about it.

The evening started off with me getting my first ever paycheck!! I left work at five with nearly 100 more dollars than I had before, so that was nice.

Derek came over around 5:40ish and we joined some other friends for a Harry Potter club meeting. It was really fun, but we ended up leaving a little early because we wanted food. Derek and I went with my friend Charity to the MU to get food, and then we met up with my friend Ellen to go do some of the Devils After Dark activities. We went downstairs and played a truly horrible game of pool. I say it was horrible because the only one of us that could play pool was Charity. I couldn't even hit the freaking cue ball with the stick 90% of the time. Despite the fact that Charity and Derek were kicking our asses all over the place, Ellen and I won because they didn't get the 8 ball into the hole they called. I guess that's a thing with pool, not that I know a single one of the rules.

After that, we met up with my friend Molly and her friend Shannon upstairs for...you ready for this? KARAOKE, BABY. It was so so so so SO much fun, even though for most of the time we were there the only other person was some crooning soul-brotha who kept doing R&B songs I'd never heard of (and one rather awful rendition of Don't Stop Believing, but kudos to him for trying). Molly's friends Aydin and Sabrina joined us as well, and can I just say, they're pretty freaking awesome. Derek and I killed it with our fantastic duets, including You and I, We Are Young, and Take Me or Leave Me. Derek also did a fantastic job singing What Makes You Beautiful. I sang Popular from Wicked, Mean by Taylor Swift, and Fighter by Christina Aguilera. It was pretty jammin'.

And holy shit, but Molly and Shannon can belt it. Those musical theatre kids, man. I was blown away. Charity also had a lovely voice, despite her insistence that she couldn't sing. Ellen and I rocked our duet of My Life Would Suck Without You, and Aydin and Sabrina were adorable when they sang Lucky.

After about two hours of karaoke madness, we decided to go back downstairs because bowling was free after 10pm. By this point it was just Aydin, Sabrina, Ellen, Derek and I left. Apparently the bowling alley had so many people on the wait list they wouldn't let us sign up, so Ellen and Sabrina and Aydin started playing foosball and Derek and I went up to the POD market to get some ice cream. We ran into some people from the Harry Potter club there and talked to them for a bit, and then Aydin and Sabrina and Ellen snuck up behind us and gave me about 790,000 heart attacks. We all wandered the POD market for a while after that, talking about Fleetwood Mac, theatre, and Lost, until some time after midnight.

Finally we went our separate ways and Derek headed home around 1:30, because I was stumbling around like a drunkard from exhaustion by that point and it was pretty cray.

I wish I'd taken some kind of visual documentation to share with you guys, but you'll just have to take my word for it when I say it was TOTALLY AWESOME!!!

-Audrey

Adventures

The above is my sad attempt at documenting the "party" (come on it was 5 people do you think you're having a party because you're wrong) that was going on in the lounge last night. They were all doing the Soulja Boy dance and it was really amusing so I tried to take a sneaky picture of them from my doorway but my flash was on and it was super bright so now they know what I've done. My roommate was like, "NOW THEY THINK WE'RE CREEPY" so oops. That was dumb of me. I went running across the room screaming "CLOSE THE DOOR BEFORE THEY SEE" so maybe I will remain unknown. We'll see.

Today, Dominic and I were wandering around the P.O.D. market and we saw these odd looking sodas in fancy glass bottles. The company was Fentimans and they all had weird names like Curiosity Cola and Victorian Lemonade, and my personal favorite, Mandarin & Seville Orange Jigger. Now I don't know what they think a jigger is, but according to the internet the definition of the word is: a machine or vehicle with a part that rocks or moves back and forth, e.g., a jigsaw. So I'm not exactly sure what that means in drink form.... anyway.
So we decided to be adventurous and each buy one of these mysterious drinks, just to try. They were like $2.50 with tax, so why not?

Dominic got the Victorian Lemonade, trying to play it somewhat safe. I decided to go crazy and buy the jigger drink. I couldn't even say the name of it out loud, it just sounds like it should be offensive. We wondered vaguely if anyone had every bought these drinks yet, or if the cashier would judge us because let's be real, who drinks this weird shit? So we buy the drinks and go sit down, preparing ourselves mentally. We crack open the tops, and simultaneously take a swig from our respective bottles. 

And holy shit, but it was nasty. It tasted like acidic bile and bread with a faint hint of citrus, as if it remembered being orange juice once but had since gone bad, so there was just the idea of orange left. We both spluttered and gagged and started laughing because what the hell did we just buy?! 

Neither of us like to waste money, so we were initially determined to finish them. The second swig wasn't as horrifying, but it was still pretty unbearable. We kept taking tiny swigs, wincing and choking every time. 

"Imagine how good everything else will taste after this," Dominic said at one point. 

I couldn't shake the feeling that these drinks tasted kind of alcoholic, even though obviously they weren't because it's a dry campus and we bought them on campus. Still, they said "fermented" and they tasted so weird and sour. We Googled the company, and surprise surprise but apparently the bottles have 0.5% alcohol. I was horrified, even though Dominic pointed out you'd have to drink like 200 mL of the stuff to have the alcohol content of one beer, and there was only 9.3 mL in one bottle. Plus, it counted as a soft drink. Still, that was just one more reason for me to not want to drink the stuff anymore. Fun fact, the Victorian Lemonade was actually banned at some school somewhere in America. 

I really couldn't stand to drink another sip of the weird bread-barf drink, and I'd barely drank what was in the neck of the bottle. So we went to the bathrooms and I went into a stall and covertly dumped it down the toilet. It sounded and looked a lot like pee. I'm glad I was alone in the bathroom though because I was standing in front of the toilet and if someone had walked past my stall it would have appeared that I had a penis and was peeing standing up in the stall. Awkward. 

After that we rinsed out the taste of awful from our mouths with Starbucks. 

So that was my little adventure of the day. The moral of the story is, don't buy weird ass drinks from the P.O.D. market because it will only end in misery. And irritating the guy sitting next to you in the student lounge with your shrieking in disgust. 

Happy Labor Day! 

-Audrey 

What's been going on

I swear I'm not so ghostly pale in real life.

So life has been pretty all right the past couple of days. My job continues to be interesting. I'm learning a lot about AP Style and journalism and just how many people have to proofread something before it's published. It's actually really interesting. I've been checking links, proofreading for typos, and fact-checking. Having a desk job as my first ever job isn't something I'd expected, but it's been a unique and learning experience so far. I'm happy with it!

Classes have been going well. I can finally get to most of my classes without having my face buried in my map the whole time. I'm also pretty positive I've fully recovered from my illness because I eat all the freaking time. Last night at nearly 1am I was eating applesauce and poptarts, and the giant jar of candy on my windowsill is starting to be a lot less full.

I joined a club last night! Dumbledore's Army, the largest Harry Potter club on campus. It seems like it's going to be a really fun club. The leaders of the club were hilarious and awesome. There were a few weird people too, but overall everyone seemed really nice. And they're all Harry Potter fans, which is always a plus.

Hmm, what else can I tell you? I watched the 25-minute promo episode thing for Ryan Murphy's new show, The New Normal, and it is SO GOOD. I highly recommend you watch it. It's on NBC's website, and it's hilarious and sweet and perfect. I'm already invested. And speaking of Ryan Murphy's shows, Glee comes back in 12 days! I can't even tell you how excited I am. I'm refraining from just devolving into keyboard smashing because that's basically my only reaction that will truly express my feelings.

Anyway, three day weekend hooray!!! That's about all I have to say for now. I guess I mostly just wanted to update so my most recent post wouldn't be a sad one. I promise, overall I am enjoying college life. Some days are just a little rough. Being a grown up is weird.

-Audrey