Formally 20

First blog post of my twenties!

Yup, that's right. I'm 20.

20. Two decades. Twentyyyyy yearrss old! I was still trying to figure out how I felt about this whole leaving my teenage years behind when I looked down at my watch in IHOP and realized that it had just turned February 17th and I had just turned 20 years old.

O.O Cue my friends singing Happy Birthday at 12:01 am in a fairly busy IHOP. The reason we were in IHOP at such a late hour is 1)really, when else would one go to IHOP? and 2)we had just left formal.

Formal is the biggest dance of the spring semester-- here's a post to pictures of last year's formal. Being the photographer, I ended up with zero pictures of me in my dress-- something that I fixed this year.

This year formal fell on the day before my birthday, an interesting way to end my teenage years, finally feeling like a teenager in a mock-club party.

Questionable stereotypes of teenage years aside, we all had fun getting ready for the party.

The happy couple!

While I don't have any pictures of formal, it was downtown and pretty cool. We stayed there for a couple hours before heading off to the obligatory IHOP late night snack and musing about two decades of life.

Two decades. I feel like I should feel like an adult now. You know, live on my own, not in a dorm, have a job-- though grading Astronomy totally counts--, have my life figured out. Or something like that. Still, I don't feel drastically different then I felt in high school. Twenties are when I'm supposed to get my life figured out. Finish school, find a career, fall in love. Ten years from now (a date impossibly in the future) I can barely imagine what my life will be like.

Anyway! On Sunday the caf workers all came out to sing and give me a birthday cake-- yet another reason why Hendrix is awesome.

I spent most of my birthday doing homework, per usual. However, it was most pleasantly broken up by a surprise birthday party my friends threw for me.

Here's the delicious cake my amazing friends made for me!

You can't really see it in this picture, but the candles all burned different colors. :)

Since I've never really celebrated my birthday much-- being at All-State for three of my birthdays kind of complicates the whole celebrating thing-- I loved having the surprise party. It was short, as everyone was terribly busy, but the fact that everyone took the time to organize it and bake the cake was so nice. :)

I had barely finished eating my slice of cake when I was taken to the fountain for the lovely Hendrix tradition of throwing people in the fountain on their birthdays.

Thanks Ashley and Michelle for snapping photos as I was tossed into the frigid water. Luckily for me it was an unusually pleasant day, even if the water was terribly cold.

Cold!

Apologies for the break in posting! It has been a hectic couple of weeks, packed with far too much work. I should go study for my Chem test tomorrow, but I wanted to post about you know, the whole 20s thing and the fact that I am no longer a teenager.

Thanks for reading!

A Montage

Photo montage, that is.

Look at that! I'm not dead after all. It has been a ridiculously long time since my last post but I just kept waiting for something photogenic to happen in my life and give me something to talk about.

Instead, life happened. A mountain of physics homework and far too much advanced French reading has been keeping me far too busy. And this week is the kicker-- two tests, problem set, physics paper, history debate, and general reading. All due within like five days of today.

Yeah.

To distract myself from this fate of misery, I thought I would post some pictures of my life. I saw a really cool TED video a couple days ago about this artist who would film one second of his life everyday and then put it together. It's a really cool idea, and not necessarily a novel one in the photographic realm. I have seen far too many 365 projects, or monthly projects where people think that using a forward facing camera to snap a shot of their face everyday is fulfilling the photographic challenge.

Pet peeves aside, here is my life:

The annoying part? I worked alllll weekend and didn't finish this list

 

The worst part? Its all wrong. I made a small transcription error on the first line and everything that follows is wrong. 

Something to do while playing D&D

D&D! One of my friends thought it would be cool if we allll got together, most of us only knowing about D&D through Big Bang Theory (me!) and played a game of Dungeons and Dragons.

Three weeks later (do you know how much planning goes into one game of D&D??) we finally played the game. There was like ten of us and it was a lot of fun, I got to say. Odd, but interesting.

Ice skating fun! If I do end up in Conway this summer (*fingers crossed*) then we will go ice skating a lot; it's so much fun, even if none of us know what we are doing.

The picture that started this post! I snapped this shot, and then thought about how all the little pictures I take with my iPhone portray a glimpse into my daily life. It might be cool to do the photograph a day- like the video a day the TED guy did- and then string them into a video, watching weeks go by in less than a minute in a flurry of shots and memories.

So! Besides pictures; I just turned in my ISEP application. I'll know in a few months if I'm studying abroad next semester, and where. I'll also know in a little less than a month if my research program received funding.....

I've procrastinated enough, I should get back to reading my quantum physics papers.

Thanks for reading!

Sushi on a Student Budget

Last Saturday night some friends and I got together with the intent of making dinner.

Our dish of choice?

Sushi!

Seaweed!

Sushi sounds pretty extravagant, especially for four broke college students. Néanmoins! When you make it yourself, it actually is pretty cheap. And delicious.

Ingredients:

• 1 Avocado
• 1 Cucumber
• Drop of lemon juice
• 8 (ish) seaweed pieces
• 1 package (ish) of imitation crab (because we aren't stupid and didn't want to die of eating raw fish in Arkansas)
• 1/2 package of cream cheese
• 8 cups or so of rice
• tablespoon of rice vinegar
• tablespoon of soy sauce
• a placemat
• sharp knife

For roughly 10 dollars the four of us made plenty of sushi for dinner-- cheap, and as it turned out, delicious!

I'm not normally a sushi fan. After all, raw fish?? No thanks. I always felt uncultured, but I would rather just have steak (or really any other piece of cooked meat). However, these rolls really changed my opinion of sushi as a whole.

We made vegetable and California rolls. For those of you who don't know (me before Saturday night), California rolls are where the rice is on the outside, and there isn't any raw fish, only delicious imitation crab! Once again, I am grateful for my cheap tastes.

We began by washing the rice.

Or rather, Dave washed rice while Blair and I caught up on Game of Thrones (an amazing series I just got hooked on). For sushi, you need to wash all the starch off the rice-- and often tedious procedure.

Once the rice was properly washed, we stuck it in the rice cooker. When it was done we put it in the fridge and got all of our vegetables ready. We had opted to use avocado and cucumber but there are a lot of other combinations out there. For the meat eaters among us, we grabbed a package of imitation crab meat-- which my friend and I can eat straight out of the bag.

Taking the rice, we sprinkled some lemon juice and rice vinegar on it to instill magic sushi properties in it. Or something to that effect.  

Next, we spread the rice out onto our rectangle of seaweed. The rice was very sticky, and had no issue adhering to the seaweed.

Then we flipped the seaweed over so the rice was on the bottom, and began layering all the goodies onto it. Trying our best not to overstuff the roll, we carefully lined up thin slices of the vegetables and chunks of the fish. We tried a variety of combinations with our ingredients, but my favorite was imitation crab meat + cream cheese + cucumber.

We took our placemat (and yes, for the record you are supposed to use a bamboo rolling mat. Conway apparently does not sell bamboo rolling mats. So we just used a placemat) and rolled the seaweed-- a nerve racking step.

It was pretty dark in the room (for a camera) and I was using like 6400 ISO (which is really high for you non camera people). I still took far too many photos to put on here ;) The sushi was just so photogenic!

Then we took our sharp knife and sliced the roll into little disks.

 

 

Editing these pictures has forced me to learn some new tricks in editing food photos-- something I don't do as often as editing nature photos. I should post another Photoshop tutorial sometime. In my copious amounts of free time I have as a Physics major. Ha.

 

 

Those are certainly not the only photos I took, but the only photos I had time to edit.

In total we must have made like eight rolls-- each of us getting our fill of sushi. All in all it was a pretty cheap dinner, a great idea for a Saturday night.

After dinner, we headed to a concert being held on campus. They were the Punch Brothers-- I hadn't heard of them, but they were a pretty good folk/Mumford and sons-esque band.

Yeah, I couldn't see much.

On an unrelated note, look at my new telescope!

His name is Legolas

Long story short, I have amazing friends. A girl from my school won this at the raffle at the Physics conference. My friend then traded her gift card with this girl for the telescope, and then gave the telescope to me, because she knew how much I wanted it.

Yup, amazing friends. :)

Side note, it may look all spiffy, but I think I put it together wrong...you can't see anything out it....hopefully I'll have time this weekend to take it apart and figure out how to make it work.

Anyway! It has been a while since my last post-- thank you insanely busy sophomore year.

Thanks for reading :)



Phantasically Physics

The physics conference, that is!

Last Friday at the awful hour of seven in the morning, we all piled into one huge van and headed to the Southern Undergraduate Women in Physics conference in Austin, Texas.

A long nine hours later, we pulled into Austin, Texas.

All of the people attending the conference were put up in a nice hotel. The first night we had dinner and an amazing talk about galaxy formation in a dark universe.

Yeah. It was every bit as cool as it sounds.

Feeling Official

The weekend was jam packed with all sorts of interesting talks and panels. One panel talked about life after undergrad, and what opportunities were out there. My favorite talk discussed the Higgs-Boson and other fundamental particles.

This talk was all about statistics about job opportunities. I was surprised to find out that becoming a professor was not what the majority of people with a PhD in physics did. It was also nice to know that there were plenty of jobs to be had for every level-- from undergrad to PhD.

One dinner was held in this huge ballroom in the museum on campus. Not only was it a gorgeous room with 50-foot ceilings, the museum itself was pretty cool. We ate our food, and then went off exploring.

The entire weekend was just a lot of fun, and a good opportunity to get to know the students, and faculty, in the Physics department better.

There was an abundance of fossils in the basement we stumbled upon by accident.

Turtle!

It's crazy to think just how huge some of these animals were.

Sunday afternoon we got to tour a couple labs at the university. It was really cool to see the high tech labs, even if I didn't fully understand what they were doing.

Anyway! The semester has officially started, and the work has already started to pile up. I should probably go study for my Chem quiz.

Thanks for reading!

Winter Wonderland

Title courtesy of my creative friend, as I hate coming up with titles.

Regardless! Tuesday morning I happened to glance out the window, only to spot dainty snowflakes drifting toward the ground. For the next half hour my roommate and I were glued to the window, squealing as the snow started to fall down harder.

It was a nice little surprise snowfall. Even though we got less than an inch, it was fun to watch.

We made up any excuse to just be outside, walking around in the frigid wind and swirling snow.

The snow was a beautiful surprise on the first day of classes.

Yes, that is like the fifth picture I have of Dave holding Blair. ;) I should do like a montage of those one of these days. As it is, I'm currently procrastinating from reading medieval French stories, and physics homework to write this post. Even with the homework, I'm excited about this semester. In Modern Physics we're learning about special relativity-- headache-inducing, yet terribly interesting-- Medieval Europe is a topic I've always been interested in, French Short Stories looks like it'll be challenging but really interesting, and Chem II is....well it's Chem II and a requirement for my major.

The Happy Couple

My beautifully photogenic roommate!

Anyway! I should probably get back to my homework, seeing how I am taking a break this afternoon to watch the Hobbit...for the second time. ;)

Thanks for reading!

USS Alabama

I'm officially back at Hendrix!

Which means that I'll have considerably less time to craft, which is sad, but c'est la vie.

What I do have time for is to post some pictures from our stay in Mobile! We went down there to watch the Red Wolves bowl game (we won!:) and stayed an extra day to see the town.

Panoramas for the win!

Our first tourist stop was the USS Alabama, a decommissioned battle ship from WWII. It was huge, and really interesting. We spent a couple hours there and I felt like we could have spent a couple more. The only drawback was that there was no guided tour, leaving us to wander the giant ship armed with only a piece of paper and colored arrows that dotted the steel walls.

I tried taking some pictures of the insides, but it was dark and none of them turned out.

On deck, however, is another story. It was a beautifully almost too bright morning, and I took some pictures of the huge guns.

This is actually the view from one of those telescope things that you have to put quarters into to work. I thought it might be interesting to take a picture through one-- it's nothing special, but I wanted to see how it would turn out.

My reflection! Everything was so blue and beautiful-- from the faded blue of the ship, to the robust blue of the sky, to the blue expanse of the bay.

We spent the rest of the day shopping at an outlet mall and headed home the next day. On our way home, we pulled over to get a better look at this beautiful derelict mansion we had driven past on our way to Alabama-- the mansion I posted about in my Photoshop tutorial.

Its front lawn was dotted with gorgeous live oaks-- lending it a classical Southern bell air.

I had some issues with overblown highlights-- it was a cloudy day, and white sky was hard to expose for. Still, I liked the pictures I ended up with.

Well I should get back to organizing! We completely redid the room, moving just about every heavy piece of furniture. It was so worth it; my bed is now at a normal height, and not six feet off the ground.

I know. I'm excited.

Thanks, as always, for stopping by! :)