Summer in Rochester

Summertime in Rochester is arguably one of the greatest things ever. We spend so much time here during the awfully cold months that it makes you look twice when Wegmans is seen selling things like sunflowers, they just look out of place.

Adventuring is a mandatory task that sometimes leads to bouncy ball searching (we refrained from releasing them all).



And nerf gun (sword?) fighting in the aisles.

But best of all there is the Rochester Public Market. Which is open year round but Oct-March offers little outside of the usual onion/potato/apple/insert your root veggie name here. In spring & summer (which feel quite similar up north) there are flowers! And fruits! And lots of tasty things.

Of course, there is the obligatory coffee stop. How else do you expect me to wander around for 3 hours?

Free samples help too. Especially when the apple seller handed us an entire apple to try... Along with the bread samples, vegan mango pudding, farro with tomato pesto and honey. So pretty much you can consume lunch for free if you wander for long enough.

Not to mention bringing home bucket loads of food all for under $25, who needs Wegmans anymore ;) (See the rhubarb mom?)

Three hours at the market spent wandering does leave one rather exhausted which calls for a little outside relaxation and book reading. And potentially more apple samples.

oodles of things

I can't believe classes start tomorrow! Eek. I think i'm ready for it though, even though I totally would not mind another whole week of orientation!

Let's see... Friday morning woke up around 6 am, got ready, had an OA meeting & then met my group so we could board the buses and drive into downtown rochester for artisan works! That place is seriously cool. If i had a car, i'd buy a year membership there and just camp out. I've been there 3 times now and met one of the artists as well as talked to the owner for a good long while. Apparently they do weddings there.. I told him to hold a spot, I'll find the guy asap ;) Just kidding. Came back around noon, went to admissions to hang out for a while & straighten out some things. Ended up going to lunch with a bunch of them =) Went grocery shopping with ashley and then we went over to check out the guys apartment. It ended up being 7 of us going to dinner at Five Guys just down jefferson, except i ran next door and got the best burrito ever from Moe's. Tofu burritos are delicious. Drove around for a bit exploring and then came back here for an early bedtime.

Saturday morning, woke up at 8... yay for sleeping in! OA meeting at 9, group meeting at 9:15. Two worlds together session, lunch at crossroads, group hanging out, connect and explore, tiger den kick off, IV get together, laundry, cleaning, figure out some class stuffs. Ashley made mac & cheese for dinner :) Hung around and then headed out to brick bash. except the music was horrible, it was jsut like a giant techno rave and the DJ refused to change the music for the entire night from 9-1 but it was cool because all of the OAs eventually wandered over to underneath the sentenial for some shenanigans. Got home around 12:30ish i think, watched some saturday night live and then fell asleep.

This morning i annoyingly woke up at 7;30 because i guess i'm so used to getting up early but i was determined to sleep in because this is the one chance that I get, so i ended up falling back asleep until 9. Got up and made ash and i breakfast.. pancakes & hashbrowns. Showered, got ready and now we're headed over to the club & activities fair from 1-4.

Woohoo. And that was only 3 days of this week.

Hope you all have a good labor day doing whatever is appropriate to do on that day.. I'll be in classes =) RIT apparently does not understand the word "holiday" at least the admissions office is giving us a day off. Even though I was looking forward to going back there.

brief hiatus

no more blog posts until next week. packing to do, people to see, miles to drive, moving in to do.

check back soon :)

taco salad birthdays

my birthday is in 50 minutes =)

alison slept over last night, we woke up this morning and went to brunch with kristin at double t. we all go blueberry pancakes they were excellently delicious. came back and watched some full house with sarah. ate taco salad for dinner. sarah and i looked up super expensive houses in various states. alison and jimmy came over around 9 and we watched ella enchanted. now we're watching myth busters and the guys are swimming through syrup.

not sure what's up for tomorrow. maybe some delicious muffins, random hanging around and other fun things.

puppy fur

slept over at Alison's on Tuesday night. we got stuck in a torrential downpour on 32 but the rain slowed after a few minutes. watched secret life of the american teenager & how to lose a guy in 10 days. alison swept up all of gali's fur but then jim and gali decided to walk through it.

home again, home again

i'm home home home...

and unpacking only to be packing up and leaving again in 13 days. i have to say that i'm a total nerd and i'm really looking forward to classes starting. like i said earlier, i've already started reading some of the books... i can't help it! 

the housing situation currently remains up in the air. we'll see how that goes, i believe dad sent out an email to housing today.

as for last week ... it was college and careers part two. we had the first two days in july and then this time around it was an entirely new set of people... plus about 300 more than last time. exhausting beyond belief but so much fun. the weekend basically involved the same as last time, directing people, leading packs of families around campus, sitting on the student panel and answering questions, fooling around, etc. mom and sarah came up on friday to go to syracuse for a college visit saturday morning. they actually were able to sit in on the last half of the student panel i was on. we left rochester around four.. after mom got stung by a bee =( sarah drove the entire way home... with one stop at jone's cones of course. made it home by 10:30 on saturday night and then i slept in until noon on sunday... guess i was just a tad exhausted. not only did we work from 8 am until 11:30 pm on friday but all of the ambassadors got together on friday night until around 2 am. then woke up at 6 on saturday to work until 4 pm. longgg day. i worked a total of 60.5 hours last week i think. crazy. 

haven't really done much today. slept in until 9:30 or so. unpacked a bit. packed up fall clothes and all of my art supplies. sarah gets home from drivers ed in about an hour so maybe she'll entertain me. 

silk, laundry & master locks

long busy day

monday frenzy

today was kind of ridiculously unordinary.

woke up bright and early at 8am, made it to work well before anyone else showed up so i took it upon myself to reset the room (they had cleaned the carpets over the weekend so everything was on the tables). i turned on all of the computers only to find them unnecessarily sluggish, oh yeah and the main IBM computer system was down. someone called the ITS desk with no luck. our big project is based entirely around this system so it was no good. we managed to entertain ourselves. around 9:30 or so, the fire alarm went off. evacuated, waited outside and proceeded to come back in. after 5 minutes inside someone told us that we weren't supposed to be inside yet so we walked back outside and around the building to figure out what the heck was going on. except no one was outside so we went back in. 10 minutes later, fire alarm number 2 went off, only this time an information session had started with, oh, about 30 families. quick change of plans, all of the ambassadors that were outside walked around and answered some questions and then they had us take out a tour group. except, i was not supposed to be giving a tour today so i was wearing flip flops. epic fail. i now have lots of blisters and 5 band-aids on my feet. the tour was actually really good, it was small and people were asking questions which was nice. came back from the tour, folded some mail, and then took a quick lunch break. the afternoon was fairly normal except they didn't get the system working until 3 which is only an hour and a half before we leave.

after work i walked from the admissions building over to park point to hopefully get some of my textbooks for next year. except they didn't have all of them so i'm going to have to order the rest from amazon or get them from barnes & noble later this week. oh well, i'm actually looking forward to my graphic novel class... despite needed 7 different books for it, it should be interesting. 

anyway, i should go get some dinner before the corner store closes. i need to decide what i want to eat first though. this is telling me "autosave failed." go figure, just adding more complications... hopefully it works!

nope... fail.... what is going on today? 

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. 

food updates

i don't know why i suddenly feel the need to document lunch and dinner but it's something to do.

lunch on tuesday was outside in this little garden place by building 7. carrots, a peach and homemade trail mix =) with a book of course, but i didn't eat that.

dinner tuesday night was spicy kung pao pasta made in the microwave and milk. tasttyyy

last night there were some crazyyy bad storms, huge thunder and lightening and pouring rain. in fact, it flooded one of the walkways i get to work on so i had the lovely experience of walking in 3 inches of muddy water to get to work today and ended up with water and mud all over me. 

tonight for dinner was oatmeal & peaches! there is actually oatmeal under that HUGE peach.