15 days?!

i can't believe that it's already been that long since i last posted. good thing i already hit my quota for the year some time ago.

christmas was excellent. lots of family. lots of cookies. and TONS of card games (old maid, hearts, euchre, trash, etc). i'll have to dig up some pictures eventually. i tend to stop blogging when i come home because let's face it.. a good chunk of my daily readers are right here with me! ;) as for now, i've got some homework and admissions stuff to get working on. school seems pretty far away, it's a wonder i even remembered what homework i have.

sarah's getting her wisdom chompers out tomorrow morning so it looks like we'll be watching movies and making smoothies (ha! that kind of rhymes) for the next few days. no big plans for new years.

heading back to school on sunday night (late flight around 9 but tons cheaper than the earlier one) still have some friends to catch up with. things to do, people to see, sims lives to mess up (the sims is a computer game in case you didn't catch that).

check out [this] to read a cool hockey story

and [this] to see pictures of our 23 inches of snow!!

adventures

Life has been rather eventful lately (both good and bad). So much so that this blog post has been postponed a few days.

Last Thursday Rochester, like much of the rest of the country, got slammed with snow and wintery weather. It wasn't so much deep snow drifts but the ice that was created on top of the snow. Walking to class on Thursday proved to be quite the challenge... involving not one but two times when I totally wiped out. Luckily the first time no one was around to experience my awkward tumble as it was 7:30 in the morning. The second however was in a more populated space in the middle of the day. I felt a little better when I found out that I was not the only person this happened to. Both times were not particularly bad falls although my leg is still sore days later, but they did make me feel a little nervous for my tour Thursday afternoon! Which ended up going just fine and I didn't fall once walking backwards.. go figure! It was kind of fun to give a tour in the snow, it adds a level of excitement and I got to take some back routes to avoid the outdoors. Hopefully my tour group wasn't too cold!

Life event number two... Thursday after classes I was hanging around working on homework or something of the sort when all of a sudden the fire alarm goes off. Now ordinarily, not a problem. However, as mentioned above, it was snowing bucketloads and also about 25 degrees out so I was slightly less than excited to be standing outside. I had the sense to first put on sweatpants, a winter coat and grab a blanket before heading outdoors. Public Safety came after some time to figure out the problem (no actual fire or anything as far as I know). After about 45 minutes of cold we were allowed back in except the catch was the fire alarm had not yet been disabled so we stuffed a bunch of hats and sweatshirts on to mask the noise. Ironically when it finally turned off an hour and a half later I didn't even realize it because I had become so accustom to the obnoxious noise.

Moving on, Friday morning my roommate and I decided it would be a good idea to go out to lunch and do some Christmas shopping because we had some extra time on our hands. Ashley wanted to stop by Tim Horton's for a quick cup of coffee. That quickly turned into an hour and a half cup of coffee when we realized that she had left the keys in the ignition and the car was locked. Not to worry, my handy internet searching phone found us a locksmith and we were soon on our way.

Last night was the only RIT hockey game in the WHOLE month of December. I've been rather hockey deprived lately and I've had to resort to watching tons of NHL games. Anyway, after a long winning streak, the Tigers lost to Niagara. Our shots on goal were nearly double but their goalie was on all night and their shots looked a little stronger. Definitely a good game, just wished the Tigers could have pulled out another win! Now we'll have to wait until January for another game.

And the final event was our christmas party today! Last night after the hockey game we got back and immediately set to work decorating our entire apartment with those old school paper chains and snowflakes! It looked very festive along with all of our holiday lights and live christmas tree. This morning we woke up and got to work baking lots and lots of cookies! Chocolate chip, cranberry white chocolate, peanut butter with hershey kisses, and puppy chow. A bunch of people came over for dinner and a movie. We had spaghetti (minus the syrup) all inspired by Buddy the Elf, which was of course the movie choice of tonight.










All in all, a pretty decent weekend. The nice thing about these three weeks is that while there is still work to do, there is a good amount of time for hanging out before we all leave for the holidays. The good thing about blogging is that no matter how unfortunate the situation, the first thing I think about is what a good post it would make :)

alison's RIT adventures

Okay, so you put two unruly friends together for a weekend in a dorm room sans parents or any other type of authority and what happens? 

Well here you go... in picture form. We tried to document each and every portion of our adventure to the best of our ability. I apologize for how long it is but we quite literally packed our weekend full and ended up with 180 pictures so here are about 40... it was hard to cut them down! 

Anyway, to start off with. I had work on Friday until 4:30. Alison got to the airport sometime Friday afternoon only to discover that the plane had been delayed two hours. Not to worry, she got here safe and sound close to 8:30 i think. And proceeded to almost break a couch...

We decided to do sushi for dinner. When dad dropped me off two weeks ago we took a trip to Wegmans to get some food and one of the items was microwavable sushi. Sound sketchy? It was.

Alison took the task of cutting the carrots into itty bitty pieces while I microwaved the sticky rice and lined all of the seaweed with it. 
I guess we're not the best sushi rollers and don't really plan on starting our own restaurant anytime soon but we both agreed that it was quite tasty. Especially after we found some soy sauce!

We went into mass production mode...

After a few games of uno and an episode of the office we fell asleep. Saturday morning we set the alarm for 7:30 to allow enough time for showers and crackers & peanut butter for breakfast. We caught the bus around 9:15 to go over to the marketplace mall. 

We actually got to the mall before it even opened so we just did a few laps around and eventually found that Dick's sporting goods was open so we went to go check out some hockey equipment. 

I'm not exactly sure why I was making such a disgusting face.

From there we walked across the street to the wegmans! 

We both picked out some lunch from the prepared food section and sat down to eat. Alison had asian meats and I had a jumble of veggie salad mixings.

Alison was particularly impressed by the 5 cases full of cheese.

After our lunch outing we were ready for a ride back to campus, the only hitch being the bus wouldn't be there for an hour and a half! We found ourselves a spot on the pavement outside of wegmans and sat down to wait. We must be professional waiters because that was the fastest hour and a half ever. We played 20 questions, which I'm apparently horrible at, as well as a word game. We also witnessed a robbery of some sort in the wegmans parking lot which resulted in a chase scene by about 5 wegmans employees. 

After getting back to campus, we took a walk around because Alison has only been here in the dark before. She even got to stick her head in the tigers mouth!
And sit on the greek rock..
Kodak quad... who said RIT wasn't pretty... 

And hang out with the computer science majors..

We came back and played some uno until Ozzy asked if we wanted to join some IV people at the Park Ave fest and the beach. 

Oh yeah, at wegmans we bought some dinner which consisted of 2 lbs of blueberries and a loaf of bread. 

We decided to go adventuring downtown with the rest of the group so we soon found ourselves in downtown rochester walking down park ave. It's an annual festival including lots of food, music and blocks and blocks of vendors. Seriously this thing goes on for so far that we didnt even make it to the end. It was such a nice day out though-- actually slightly hot! but nice to walk around.

We had to stop for the obligatory funnel cake. 

From there, we all piled back in the cars and headed to Ontario Beach Park.  Of course, we got slightly lost... maybe a little more than slightly. But we eventually got there after a million games of 20 questions and quite a few stops to look at the map. See?! Old school style.. paper map and everything. 

We set out the stuff and got right down to frisbee-ing and walking to the pier. 

Pretty cool picture if I may say so myself, it was the perfect time of day for the light.

We were pretty exhausted after walking to the pier so we all came back and played some silly group games. 

Finally got back to the dorms around 10, watched an episode of the office and then passed out. It was such a long day!! 

We woke up this morning around 8:30 ate some bread in bed for breakfast and then got ready to go to church. After church we came back, made Alison a blog, played some more uno, took another walk around campus, got some milk for cereal and then watched the office again until it was time for Alison to leave. 

I think i'm going to have to go to bed really early tonight! I'm going to need a weekend to recover from my weekend but it was all worth it =) I had tons of fun and we packed in the maximum amount of adventuring. 

another turning point, fork stuck in the road

work, work, work. 

good thing it's fun! 

today was busy yet not at the same time. woke up, talked to housing (argh), went to work, inputted, ate lunch at crossroads-- not by myself for the first time (yay!), wandered around campus with another admissions friend taking pictures, unsorted folders and played text twist. came back and ate blueberries & yogurt for dinner (sound familiar?) then ozzy came over well actually we ended up at his apt until i got sleepy and wandered back here. took care of some emailing business and now i'm ready for BED! (hooray!)

today was rather fantastic. for no reason in particular. just a lot of good things piled into one. 

another turning point, a fork stuck in the road

time grabs you by the wrist, directs you where to go

so make the best of this test, and don't ask why

it's not a question but a lesson learned in time

it's something unpredictable, but in the end it's right.

i hope you had the time of your life

happy birthday alison

dear alison,

happy birthday goofball :) 

love,

em

freshman year

sophomore year

junior year

senior year

now

last day in rochester

it was another rather late night last night. ended up staying up until around 5 am. strangely enough, i woke up without an alarm around 8:30, took a shower, packed up a few things and then went upstairs to hang out. studied some for my last final (psychology), got lunch, watched the big bang theory (which by the way, is my new favorite tv show). dad came around 4:50 right as i was getting ready to head over to the final. i actually finished the test before it was supposed to even start. ive gotten in the habit of going to class at least 30 minutes before to look over stuff all quarter and so he let me take the exam early. went over to the ritz for dinner and then moved most of my stuff out to the car. wandered back upstairs and ended up going out to fridays with matt and ozzy for dinner except i didn't eat dinner twice so i played peggle instead which is a pretty awesome game with quite possibly the best sound effects ever especially when hooked up to a car stereo. came back here, hung around and such and now i'm just finishing pulling the last few things together before maybe hopefully going to bed at a semi decent hour? but it's already past 2 am so that's not really looking very likely anymore. as long as i'm not sleeping, i made it to stage 5-3 (only matt & ozzy will understand that if they ever run across this...).

mmm yeah, so bye bye rochester see you in a month or so :) 

friends