From Spring Break to Summer Vacation

Dear Everyone!

Sorry for the prolonged absence from my dear blog. It was based entirely on a regrettable busyness since my last post. I'll give you all a quick run-through of what's been up.

I left you all during Spring Break, right before my art tour of New York and Brooklyn (in and out of galleries, street tours, poetry slams, and more) and my first experience of geocaching. However, I left the Big Apple and went to Connecticut to visit my Aunt Rachel and Uncle Dan. They live in Windsor, but I also had time to explore Hartford, and then later Uncle Dan and I made a day of it in Boston while I was there.

My Uncle and me outside of the Capitol Building in Boston

When I got back to school, the next major event was the next play that the engineering theater group put on. I'm now the president/director of College of Engineering does Amateur Radical Theater (COE does ART (CDA)) so it was my first directing job ever. I did auditions, ran all the practices, orchestrated props, and had a great cast who helped 100% with everything. Luckily, it was a fairly simple and fun production, so aside from the HUGE amount of lines to learn, Completely Hollywood! Abridged was a great play for a maiden voyage in directing. Grace, Sarah, and Anjana (the ONLY three actresses in the whole show) were simply brilliant.

I also got a really REALLY bad ear infection during that time. I was literally incapacitated for almost a whole week. I couldn't sleep because of the pain, I couldn't open my jaw because of the pain, I couldn't think because of the pain, the works. I must have been really pathetic because my friends were bringing me food and putting me to bed constantly. The best part was that this was right in the middle of performances AND a big essay (which I later turned in and got an A on, by the way)!

Lastly were finals, which seem to have gone alright. I don't have the desired all A's (sadness) but I did well I suppose. My GPA is sitting at 3.247. I can't exactly say I'm doing well in school, but I'm doing alright. Freshman year of college complete.

One of the last little adventures before I was quite able to move out was named Tucker.
For those of you who didn't know, I managed to pick up another family member during my last week at UA.   Long story short, some ROTC guys on campus got baby ducklings that they couldn't keep and gave one to me. It was all Grace's idea. We kept him hidden in the dorm for a week as he got bigger and ate more and more. Every chance we could get, we smuggled him outside to the quad where he would follow behind me and be the coo and cuddle of every passerby. All things considered, he was pretty darn adorable. I don't know if belated imprinting works, but if it does, I was his mommy. He slept with me, followed me, and was most satisfied in my arms tucked deep into my coat.
Unfortunately, I don't have Tucker anymore, but he was a good friend while we did. Everyone loved him.

Tucker asleep on my arm

Aside from that, I'm back in the airport again and will be traveling in Europe this summer, I have accepted a research opportunity in the astronomy department on campus, had a really great time with the company at the going away masquerade ball, said good bye to all my college friends for the summer, and I am learning to play the violin.

Anyway, sorry for the very rapid run-through, but it was the only way to get everything caught up. If you care to hear the full story of any of the little things mentioned (which no one probably does) comment about it below (which no one probably will). All of them are great stories. But I guess that's just the nature of a story.

I'm Jonathon and this is my life.

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A Few Adventures Later

Hello!

Well, so a part of me hoped to keep better consistency of this blog thing, but the other knows that no harm is done in my persistent procrastination just as long as the project completed by the due date is awesome and I am not dead.
Sigh...yes, I have the 'project' mindset right now: just got off of a few of them!

Quick input on Halloween: it was fun! No, neither spectacular nor candy-filled, but we enjoyed dressing up for classes. I was my classic Captain Jack Sparrow (much to the awe of a lot of my classmates!) by day and then changed that evening to partner costume with a friend of mine: she was Christine and I was the Phantom of the Opera. Nothing more than a lot of pictures and a little bit of running around like silly people on All Hallows Even; the most fun was putting together the costumes together!

Anyway, as I was saying about the projects, I just turned in an art and an engineering project. The first was a kind of 'reaction' to something else I had done, only I wanted it to be more destructive and more chaotic. Here's the picture of the first one and the second, so you can see what I mean...

This is the first project, a giant puzzle that in the viewer's eye slowly and controlledly comes together to form a solid cube structure.

And here's the second! The opposing response, chaotic, explosive outward, but with a similar theme of the shapes and colors to connect it back to the original.













Both of these were done with wood in my 3D design class.






That took a lot of time in it's own right, but also this past weekend, we completed a month-long project in my engineering class to design and construct a scale model of our football stadium out of cake. Yes, it was an independent and original project, and it actually turned out pretty well! We spent the month testing cake recipes, figuring out dimensions, doing PR to get the word out so we could sell pieces for charity, the whole nine yards, and then this weekend we actually baked and built the whole thing. Granted, not a one of us has ever decorated a cake before (and all but one or two of us had never baked anything at all ever before) but it turned out alright. It was a job that you look at and say "Wow, these guys are completely inept at cake decorating, but they put so much into this that I kind of like it!"

Anyway, pictures of that too!

This took almost 12 hours straight of sculpting and icing... We never got a total cake weight, but it took no less than two people to move.



We decided on an apple-cinnamon spice cake recipe (an invention of our own culmination!) as the best in taste, structural integrity, and sculptability.




We were expected to have 2-3 hours to try to sell pieces to fans coming for the football game, but it was so popular and tasted so good, our poor cake barely lasted more than an hour!

We raised $500 for the food drive!




And now, I hardly have an off-week! The show choir performance is coming up at the end of the month, so we're all practicing hard for that, and I'm working hard to make sure that my grades are all superb. And then, like a doofus, I decided that this was going to be the year I actually participate in National Novel Writing Month. Not to mention I'm still working on that cure for cancer...

Sigh, busy month I guess. They happen!
Hahahahahahahaha ANYway, that's all for now, everything is going pretty mostly a whole lot of well. Got a few tests this week, but all should be well there too. Still looking off into the nether future to finals, but...you can only take so many scares at once. Matthew 6:34, ya know? If not, you should =]

I'm Jonathon, and this is my life.





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