Halloween Weekend

So Halloween is quickly approaching and Kara and I have been planning our costumes. Tomorrow night we're going to the same haunted cornmaze that we went to last year in Yakima, which should be pretty scary and awesome! After that Kara and I are going to come back and dress up as faeries then go over to Nathan's to have a Halloween costume party. I actually don't know if anyone's going to dress up other than us, but oh well. I always have so many ideas for Halloween costumes but only one day to dress up! So this year I'm making a whole weekend of it. So Friday it will be faerie, Saturday I'm going as Ke$ha, who is a pretty big popstar right now. This is what she looks like:

So yeah, that's Ke$ha (Pronounced Kesha), she basically just wears a lot of ripped up clothes and has crazy hair and glitter all over her all the time, so it shouldn't be too hard to pull off.

Anyway, Sunday we probably won't do too much since the next day is class. We might go back to the cornmaze with another group of people, but not sure on that yet. Should be some good pictures though, so hopefully I'll have some to post.

Tomorrow I only have one class. I'm kind of sad about that because my other class got cancelled and I wish this one would get cancelled too so I would just have a long weekend.

GRAWR!

I don't know if it's just been the weather lately or what, but I'm seriously itching to ski right now. For the past week it's been a bit cooler and crisper here which makes it feel like I'm walking around in a little ski town, particularly Sun Valley. It feels like I should be walking down the sidewalk with all my gear on ready to hit the mountain instead of going to school. This might be because the scenery here looks a LOT like Sun Valley, pretty open sky with low rolling hills surrounding the town... And our apartments look kind of like little ski condos. When it snows here (which should be very soon), I'll post pictures so you can all see what I mean.

Speaking of snow, it's been snowing up at Snoqualmie! Not much, and on the webcams it just looks like rain, but hey I'll take it. It's supposed to snow here on Wednesday, although it'll be mostly rain...


I am so tired today, I just need to sleep now. I didn't get the best sleep this weekend and it's starting to accumulate. I got the paper about the family schism thing back from my English teacher and he suggested revisions but I think it's fine the way it is. The revisions would just make it like... way better, but I'm too tired to care. So if you want to read it I shall send it to you via e-mail. If I don't have your e-mail, send me an e-mail first, hannahryker@gmail.com

Prima Donna

So for the past 19 years of my life, I always thought that Prima Donna was spelled Pre-Madonna. Which of course doesn't really make sense when you're calling someone a prima donna, but today I just looked it up finally because I used it to describe Loren and he asked what it meant and I had a vague idea of the meaning, but I googled it just to be safe. Thanks Wikipedia for teaching me something new everyday!

In other news, I got on to TypeTrigger.com It's an invitation-only writing site that gives you a short prompt and then challenges you to write about that prompt in under 300 words (Paul told me about it). As far as I can tell, it seems fairly easy to get in, as long as you give them your e-mail they'll eventually e-mail you back, whether you consider yourself a writer or a plumber or a dragon-slayer, it doesn't matter. So don't congratulate me, it's not like I won some sort of award for my amazing and abundant prestige.

Paul also told me about 750words.com which is a site that challenges you to write 750 words a day on whatever you want, just as long as you do it. You get points for daily streaks of writing. So I'm doing that as well, which is pretty cool and super helpful for my English class right now. We have an assignment to write a fictionalized story and I was having some trouble with it, but when I'm writing on this website page instead of on a Word document, I've found it's a lot easier to get the creative juices flowing. So that website has so far been pretty useful. Although I spend all day in my classes daydreaming about what I'll write about when I get back to the apartment, so that's the only downside I suppose.

Weekend (edited)

Watched Nick's soccer game on Saturday! His team is so much better than the last time I watched them play. They have red jerseys, so they decided their team name would be Russia, which is pretty funny. The whole time I was watching, I just kept making communist jokes.

After the game, we went back and carved pumpkins. Mom made cider beef stew, Paul brought bread, and Erin brought pumpkins. My pumpkin turned out looking stupid as always, but Erin made a cute one that looked like Frosty the Snowman (unintentionally). I'll get some picture up in the next post. Right now I have to rush over to Kara's to study for our Philosophy exam at 2.

All the questions that were asked in the comments on the last post, I answered with another comment so that's where all the answers are! I'll put up pictures from the pumpkins later today most likely.

EDIT: Here's some pictures :)

 Nick with his "peace sign" pumpkin. Haha, it reminded me of the comic "Zits" where the son is wearing a shirt with the Mercedes logo on it and he thinks it's a peace sign and he says "give me peace, or give me a Mercedes, either way I win."

 Carvers at work!

The finished pumpkins! The one in the front on the left is Kara's Harry Potter pumpkin, the one next to it is Erin's ghost pumpkin. Behind those left to right are Nick's, Erin's, Paul's, mine, and Paul's again. I think if you click the images they get bigger in another window or tab or whatever everyone uses these days.

And here's a picture of Daisy, just because I think she's great. And fat. And very entertaining.

Sick

I'm sick. Bleck. Sore throat, super stuffy nose, "sick breath", etc. And I'm going home this weekend to carve pumpkins and get new license tabs for the car and whatnot. It seems like I always get sick right before I go home for a weekend. Maybe my subconscious mind makes me sick to get more attention or pampering or something? I don't know. The nice thing about college is that it's taught me how to suck it up and get on with life when you're sick. Like at home in high school, you have your parents who are like "oh you're sick, you don't have to go to school, here let me make you some soup." But in college no one cares so eventually I realize that and get out of my little cave of self-pity and move on with it. It's just a cold. I'm not dying. I don't need anyone to make me soup, I can do it myself now. So yeah, if I've learned anything from college so far, it's that no one really cares if you have a cold. Life goes on.

I love Fridays because I don't have class until noon. Which is good because on Thursday nights Jersey Shore is on and I usually don't get to bed until midnight because I go over to Kara's to watch it, and then get all worked up about it (I know, how silly of me), and then I can't sleep for awhile. So I got to sleep in today, which is nice.

On another note, I can't imagine how some girls manage to wear cute clothes every day. Like, really, it's a lot of effort. Why bother trying so hard? On Monday, I wore a dress with tights and some cute boots and my warm purple jacket and it was super cute, but so much effort to think about. I just don't get how some girls can spend that much time and thought on what they look like when there's so many other things to think about. But maybe it's just me. Maybe living on the Plateau didn't rub off on me like it did on so many of my other friends. I don't know.

Anyway, I'm off to make me a delicious egg for breakfast!

36 Degrees

It is currently 36 degrees out, and since Loren left the window open last night, it's absolutely freezing in here too. I turned on the heat for a little bit, which the cat appreciated.

Yesterday we got out energy bill for the first month. It was 32 dollars! Which split between 3 people is completely manageable, so we're all happy for that :) But as the weather gets colder we're going to need the heaters more soooo....

Today I don't have class until noon!

CheezBallz (a.k.a. the longest post EVER)

Instead of saying something is cheesey, I've taken to saying it's cheezballz. At the dollar store here, they sell Cheezballz in a can that looks like a Pringles can, except it's wider thus allowing even the fattest of fatties to fit their hands in there so they can get to their fake-cheesey puffs of saturated and trans fat. Cheezballz are basically a rip-off of Cheetos Puffs, except worse. So yeah. That's the story behind cheezballz. I felt the need to tell it because I have the feeling this post is going to be kind of cheezballz.

Alex and Loren and I went exploring through the Manastash canyon today. We found lots of campgrounds that I plan on going back to when the weather gets nice next spring/summer. If any of you ever drove up to our house in Carnation, imagine that hill of gravel road and steep drop-offs and all the bumps and holes and how narrow the road got in some places. Now multiply that hilly road by liiiike 100. We drove on a gravel road for probably 30 miles or so and it was really bumpy and there were cliffs on the side and parts of it were pretty scary. But overall it was really fun and nice to get back to the wilderness (here comes the cheezballz part).
Being out there in the woods really put my life back into perspective. Lately I've been acting kind of crazy, like overreacting to stupid little things Loren does or overreacting to the way the weather is or how many gnats there are flying around. Like everything has been making me mad lately and I've just not been a happy hannah. But getting back to the woods and being out there in the middle of nowhere pretty much turned all of that around. When you lose perspective on what's really important, it's nice be surrounded by things that are all a lot bigger than you. It was so peaceful to be surrounded by old mountains and old trees who have been there through all the rough weather and the snow and rain and forest fires and whatever else has happened in the time that they've been there. It's just a nice reminder that our lives go on regardless of the little (or big) things that make us mad.

So we drove out there and explored nearly empty campgrounds and old logging roads and such for about an hour and a half before we decided to turn around and find a place to build a fire so we could cook up dinner. We brought some chicken breasts that had been marinading for a couple days in some delicious concoction that Alex made, and they were SO good roasted in tinfoil on the campfire coals. I whittled some sticks into spears with my pocket knife so we could make s'mores with giant marshmallows. It was really fun!
It's kind of funny to go and do outdoorsy things with people who don't necessarily know my background. I guess at first glance I don't come off as the outdoorsy type to most, because it seems like they underestimate me in these sort of situations. It's like, I know how to pitch a tent, I know how to light a fire (I mean those things literally, not in any other way for those of you with your heads in the gutter), lord knows I've done those things about a thousand times in my life thanks to camping with my dad and then being a camp counselor. I know the fine art of cooking things over a fire, it's like I've been there, I've done that so many times. But in order not to sound like a stupid know-it-all girl I kept my mouth shut tonight. I figured tonight was the Alex Show, he can do it his way and next time I go camping without him I'll do it all my way. I just don't like being underestimated or being pushed aside as "a girl who wouldn't know a thing about camping". Pshaw biotches I know what I'm doing.

Anyway, enough about that. I've sort of decided that this blog needs to have more of my thoughts behind it (as you may have guessed by all my thoughts in the previous paragraphs). I feel like I've been writing a lot of what I've been doing but not so much my thoughts on it. So that's that.

I would have taken pictures of the adventure but as usual in my rush to get ready to go I forgot it. But there will be much more adventuring there in the future. OH I almost forgot! On Thursday I went on a hike to Umtanum Falls with Alex, Loren, and our friend Eric. I'll post some pictures of that below.

I have more but the internet is being dumb and not loading them right. But you get the idea, it was lovely Fall colors at the falls!

Daisy and Me!

Here's a picture of Daisy and me! Not the best quality since it was taken with my webcam, but at least you'll get the idea of what she looks like :)

Creative NonFiction

In English, my teacher gave us an assignment last week. We have to write a creative nonfiction narrative about something in our lives with emotional complexity. While I have no shortage of those things, I decided to go with the biggest and most current one. The Family Schism.

I have to say, it's a difficult thing to write about. Not really because it's emotional for me, more just because I can't really get it all in within the limit of 6 pages. I mean, it's emotional too, but gee whiz, it's kind of a long story to write! It's weird to think that I could go on and on for pages, but it all happened within a fairly short amount of time. Although who knows how long it will all drag out.

On Monday night, my professor was doing a reading of some of the poems in his latest published collection of poems, and since I'm in his class he wants us to go to the readings. So I went and it was pretty good! It was definitely a good experience I think, to listen to someone's poems and hear how they flow out loud rather than just in my head. In between poems he talked a little about why he wrote poetry and where his inspiration for each poem came from. He's a pretty funny guy. He called poetry "the cultural skunk in the road that people swerve to avoid", which I thought was hilarious and very true. He explained how he feels that it's his job to write good poetry since so few people out there do it well these days.

Very interesting. His name is Joseph Powell if any of you are interesting in Googling him. I'm off to finish this narrative before it's due tomorrow.

Insta-Fall

It literally turned into Fall over night here last night. Since I've been here, it's been 80 degrees most everyday and sunny and warm which is nice and all, but I am SO ready for the crisp cooler weather. I'm ready to wear sweaters and hats and mittens and snow boots. But I hate wearing long pants, so that's the only downside....

But yeah, yesterday was warm and it was a nice warm night and then I woke up this morning, and it was cloudy and all the leaves were falling and it's much cooler. So yay!

Anyway, who cares about the weather. Yesterday Kara and I went to Yakima to go longboarding at the same place where she fell last year and got hurt so bad. But we walked down the big hills and stuck mostly to the flat stuff so no one was hurt this time! It was a lot of fun, and we're both getting a lot better. I'm still not confident enough to ride it to class, but riding around campus when it's not too crowded is pretty nice :)

OH! I almost forgot! On Friday, Loren's parents dropped by on their way to Selah and dropped off Loren's cat from home! Her name is Daisy and she is a very fat calico. She's about 3, but she still acts like a young playful kitty so she's a lot of fun to play with! I'll try to get some pictures of everything up soon. I always feel like a tourist (or in this case a freshman) when I take pictures of things, but I'm trying to overcome that.

Still don't know what I'm going to write about for a serious blog. Not even sure if I was serious about making a serious blog. But thanks for the serious suggestions anyway! I have filed them away in the back corners of my brain where they shall stew for awhile.

Ah and one more thing. My creative writing teacher is da bomb. We have a lot of similar ideas when it comes to writing. Ideas like don't push the reader's emotional buttons too hard and stop writing stupid cliches. Of course I say that, but then I probably write stupid cliches all over the place. But whatever. I like the way he teaches, and I think his class will help my writing be a lot more raw and authentic and a little less hollow.