& pumpkin

Today not only included the first night of over 8 hours of sleep in who knows how long.. but also a farm! A bunch of CIAS honors kids went to Gro-Moore farms for some cow petting, chicken throwing and petting and pig races. All for the intent of getting pumpkin. Which we brought back and carved & then ate a tasty dinner which included the first pumpkin pie of the season (I've been eating pumpkin oatmeal every morning, fully taking advantage of the season).

 

I love love love having the new iPhone camera, makes me take so many more pictures! 

And my very nerdy pumpkin. It's an ampersand, in case you couldn't tell. 

design site

Lots of late nights & work later..

http://emilyokeydesign.com/

Still in progress, but I'm happy with it for the time being.

Pumpkin Milkshakes

The presence of both an ipad AND a new iphone in my life might mean it's time for more blogposts. Or at the very least, more pictures!


Let's just say that sleep has been little and far between lately. For some reason this has been a really hectic week seven. I can't believe we're already this far into the quarter! My design website was due today at 2pm so this week has meant spending a rather large chunk of time on that. As well as an art history paper due next week, portfolio projects, etc. But it's FUN! I promise.

You can see my design site [here] for now but soon (ie. when i figure out how) it will be switching over to www.emilyokeydesign.com! Yes, I know I had www.emilyokey.com before. That's far too long of a story. Basically I own that domain name but the company won't hand me the rights to it! So frustrating the number of phone conversations and emails I've gone through lately to figure that out and it didn't end up working!

I'm also getting to do a fair amount of freelance design lately as well as my normal admissions work. Working bright and early tomorrow morning at 7:30 am for Open House.

As for tonight, it's a rainy Friday night with a ton of homework on the agenda. I thought it would be in my best interest to make myself a pumpkin milkshake for dinner. (don't worry mom it has yogurt AND milk in it, plus pumpkin is a vegetable right?).

You might not want to look below, Mom.

Couldn't find the can opener for some reason and I was NOT going to go pumpkin milkshake-less. So this seemed like a good idea at the time. Still have all 10 fingers :)

Schedules

Really weird to think about the fact that this morning was my second to last time registering for classes..

and I FORGOT!

Goes to show I'm in denial as to how far into the quarter we are. Despite forgetting to register at 7 am, I got all of the classes I wanted because honors kids get to register a day early. Woo!

Here's the lineup: winter quarter schedule

Looks busy!

Calligraphy

This quarter I'm taking Calligraphy for the second time - and definitely not the last. 

On top of yet another quarter of calligraphy, next quarter I'm planning on taking a class called Typeface Design with Kris Holmes who is an RIT professor & famous for creating the Lucida typeface that is seen on your computers! Pretty cool! It's going to require a fair amount of movement in my schedule and possible a bunch of late nights but I think it will be more than worth it for the experience.    

To get into the class we have to show a sample of some of our best lettering so far. It's what were going to be basing our typeface on. Last night I worked on pulling that together and it's definitely going to need some tweaking but I think it's finally headed in the right direction.

Each quarter of calligraphy is a different hand. Spring = Foundational, Fall = Italic, Winter = Blackletter. 

I've been waiting since last year to take Blackletter so I'm pretty excited for that!

Art History Midterm

The big topic of the past 48 hours or so of my life has been art history. I have a 1900-1950 art history midterm at 12 today. 

As a graphic design major, we're required to take 3 quarters (what will be 2 semesters of art history) + 2 different art history classes of our choice. Since the 3 quarters left off around the turn of the 20th century, I thought I'd pick the next 2 classes to be more modern.

Now, I realize art history sounds totally intimidating.  Give me a sheet with 60 Slide Identification names and tell me to memorize their name, artist & date... quite daunting. And for someone who is rather horrible at memorizing things this is no small feat. 

Art history professors (and classmates) tend to be enormously helpful. My Survey of Western Art & Architecture professors used to hold (non-mandatory) breakfast study sessions on Saturday mornings the week before the exam. Since it wa a larger class (around 60) it was really nice to get a little bit more 1 on 1 time for questions. This quarter, someone in my class voluntarily set up a group study session in the library last night. Super helpful! Our professor had given us a full write up for a study guide- so nice! So we were able to talk through possible essay questions & some unknown terms.

As of a few minutes ago, I've cut the 60 images down to only NINE ones that have been tripping me up! Not bad! Plus I still have a few hours to go before test time. The nice thing about the study session last night was that I felt that I could actually talk through topics rather than just rattle them off the top of my head = better memory. 


-- From my RIT blog post

Learning to Run

Let's start this story out by reminding everyone how much I hated running.

I would never in a million years have considered myself a runner in any stretch of the imagination. Maybe if I was being chased. Or that forced mile for volleyball in 90 degree weather. Sounds fun right?

Except then I got to thinking. Running is a sport I could do on my own, determine the time spent, and involved nothing other than a decent pair of shoes (and well, an inhaler).

I got this crazy idea in my head that for my 21st birthday, my present to myself would be running a 5k. Yeah... I pick cool presents, be jealous.

So I started working at it, slowly as to not discourage my "can't run a mile" self. Eventually after a few weeks of running at 7 am even with my struggles to want to stay in my toasty warm bed, I worked up to 2 miles and finally to 3.

Despite my 6th-8th grade P.E. teacher and the River Hill volleyball coach's efforts to remind me that I sucked at running, I managed to prove them wrong.

But more importantly, I proved myself right. And I can actually say that I enjoy running. For real (mom).

As in. I ran 3.1 miles.

And I lived to tell about it. Let's just say, this won't be the last.

The sub-40 degree temperatures yesterday morning along with wind & rain put a slight damper on the run as well as a hint of blue on my legs.

Jon came out for some moral support and much appreciated body-heat stealing as I waited for the race to start. It. was. freezing. Plus I can pretend that I have my own personal photographer :) -- pictures to come later maybe.