Finally Updating

It’s been a while, i know. It is partly just me, but it’s also partly because my computer had a meltdown at the very end of December that took a little while to get diagnosed and fixed (i’ll explain in another post), and partly because my right wrist/forearm has been out of commission for about a month, meaning that my current typing method has been one-handed lefty hunting-and-pecking, which takes FOREVER. And it seems that I will be typing that way for at least another week or two, so while the updates will start coming, it will still be slow, and they will be short. Like this one.

Happy Belated 2010!

I sold my car!

The maroon Jeep is no more. I sold it to a guy who needed a car for his son in high school. I just wasn’t using it enough to keep fixing the little things that went wrong and pay the insurance. So, I’m currently car-less — I’ll start looking at getting another one next semester, but I’m not sure I’m going to get one right away.

Thanksgiving Break 2009

The much awaited Thanksgiving recap!

Dave and I are not currently enrolled in any classes, so we took the week to go down to <a href="
View Larger Map“>Cheyenne for Thanksgiving. It’s a far drive, and Dave didn’t want to put the miles on his car if he could avoid it, so we found some cheap one-way tickets from Bozeman to Denver (about 2 hours south of Cheyenne) and were going to catch a ride back to Bozeman with a girl in our program who was going to visit her family in Denver. The flight is pretty short, which is nice, and we landed on the Friday before Thanksgiving around dinner so Dave’s parents picked us up at the airport and took us to dinner at a nice restaurant off the interstate on the way to Cheyenne.
We mostly hung out that weekend. Dave had to work on some editing, so he took a day to do that, but it was a pretty relaxed weekend all around. Dave’s brother Eric is a junior at Ithaca College, and flew into Denver Monday night, so Dave and I took that as an excuse to spend the day in Denver before picking him up.
Denver is a nice city. There is a street, 16th street, that is specifically designed for pedestrians. It has a lot of restaurants and stores along it, and has a bus that just runs the length of the street in both directions so people don’t have to walk one from one end to the other (it’s about a mile long). There’s also a covered performing arts complex that houses an opera house, concert hall, a few different theaters, and a parking garage.

We actually started the morning at the REI, which is ENORMOUS. They have, at the store, a climbing wall, a “cold room” so you can test winter jackets, and a kayak park in the river that runs next to the store so you can (I’m not kidding) try out kayaks. We took advantage of none of these things, because i needed to get new hiking boots. The boots i currently have, and have had for a couple years (I got them after i moved out here) have been tearing up my feet pretty much since I got them. At first i thought it was an issue of breaking in, so i stuck with them, but at this point i know it’s the shoes and not me. So we went to the store so someone could help me find boots that fit, and there was a guy in the shoe section that was amazingly helpful. I haven’t got the new boots yet, because i want to return my old ones first (REI lets you do that) and i won’t need them until the snow is gone, so we’re actually going to do that over this break at the REI in Fort Collins (just return the boots; i won’t get new ones until after Christmas, because i did put them on my Christmas list).

Anyway, after REI we walked around the city. We parked near the downtown, walked to a place to get lunch, then decided to go to the Denver Mint, but it was closed when we got there so instead we went to the public library, went to see Where the Wild Things Are (I thought it was a really good movie), then got some dinner and drove to the airport to pick up Dave’s brother, and headed back to Cheyenne.

Aside … in Denver, at the convention center, there’s this really big bear sculpture that i like:

Anyway, that was Denver, and that was Monday.

Tuesday, Dave, his brother and I went to their high school to talk to students about college. And there were 3 kids there who were thinking of William and Mary! It was awesome. So we had some snacks and talked about college, and then i worked a little bit on an editing project i had until school let out and i got a ride back to Dave’s house with his mom (Dave and his brother had gone to the DMV to get his brother’s license renewed).

Wednesday we cooked for Thanksgiving, and Thursday we went down to Dave’s uncle’s house for dinner. They live just outside of Greeley, which is a town in Colorado about halfway between Cheyenne and Denver.

Eric (Dave’s brother) flew back to Ithaca on Friday, so instead of going back to Cheyenne, after dinner we drove to Denver and spent the night in a hotel near the airport. We dropped Eric at the airport Friday morning and then drove up to Estes Park, which is a small tourist town in Colorado northwest of Denver, at the entrance to Rocky Mountain National Park.

There’s a historic hotel in town called the Stanley, which was at least the exterior location for the hotel in The Shining.

It’s less scary when it’s not in a Stephen King movie.

Estes Park has a Christmas parade the Friday after Thanksgiving, so we walked around town for a bit looking into some local boutiques, got lunch at a local brewery, and then watched the parade.

After the parade we drive back to Cheyenne.

Saturday we went to get the Christmas tree!

First you find a good one. the trees we were looking at were big, so we were just looking at the top.

Then you measure, to see what exactly will be your tree.

Then you cut. You take down the whole tree first, and then cut where you want your tree to end once the whole tree is on the ground.

I helped cut!

Then, you tie it up and drag it out of the woods.

And you take it home.

This year went a lot faster than last year. After getting the tree we went into town to look at this great little bookstore, and the candy shop next door, and then got some dinner before driving back to Cheyenne.

Sunday, we ended up renting a little car to drive home. Our ride ended up needing to stay in Bozeman to work on grad school stuff, and we couldn’t find another ride back. Renting a car was actually the cheapest option among plane tickets, bus tickets, and the car.

We successfully avoided hitting a deer, found a good Chinese place for dinner in Billings, got back to Bozeman late Sunday night, returned the car, and slept in Monday. Dave had class at 12.

And that was our Thanksgiving break. It was nice to see Denver and the surrounding parts, and nice to visit Dave’s family again. I think this Thanksgiving was better for me than last, because i knew everyone there and had done it once already.

And tomorrow we leave for Cheyenne again! And then fly to Boston on Sunday, and will be in NJ (at Kristen’s apartment) on Wednesday. So I will see everyone really, really soon!

Pre-Thanksgiving

Just a quick note — we’re going to Dave’s for Thanksgiving again this year, and using grad school status to go for the week.  Dave’s brother is also coming home for the week (he’s an undergrad at Ithaca, and i guess they get the whole week for Thanksgiving) which is great — I’ve met him, but haven’t had a chance to spend much time hanging out.

We’re going to go cut a Christmas tree (!!) and probably spend a day in Denver, which is exciting because I’ve never been to Denver before.  I’ll call on Thanksgiving, and post pictures and stuff when i get back.

VOICE center

I recently started volunteering on campus with the VOICE center, which stands for Victim Options in the Campus Environment. It’s a mostly volunteer advocacy group that works with victims & survivors of sexual assault, domestic and relationship violence, and stalking. What we do is educate ourselves about the options students have in dealing with these situations, and then provide a confidential environment in which students can talk to an advocate and work out what they want to do and how best to do it.

Just in case anyone is concerned, I don’t have any personal reasons for wanting to volunteer for something like this. It’s something that I’ve been interested in since I was an undergraduate, but a lot of groups and centers that do this type of advocacy have serious time commitment requirements, and I was never able to make that commitment. I’ve only been working with them for a couple weeks (I had to go through several days of training before I could start working in the office) but I’ve already been able to help a student with an issue, which is really rewarding. The two most surprising things that I’ve learned so far:
1. stalking is significantly more prevalent and much more of an issue on campus than either relationship violence or sexual assault (about 80% of the students who come to the VOICE center for help are dealing with stalking), and
2. there is a practical use for a Women’s Studies degree. The whole basis for and theory that underlies how the center runs and is administrated, and the argument for its existence in the first place, comes out of Women’s Studies. The VOICE center doesn’t discriminate based on gender or sexual orientation, but the majority of issues are women having problems with men.

So it’s been really good so far. And it’s something that I’d like to continue to do after i graduate, so i’m looking at also volunteering with the local crisis line and women’s shelter to get a feel for how a community organization operates as opposed to a campus organization. It’s nice to be volunteering, and it’s nice to have something that I’m doing that isn’t specifically documentary film related but that I’m still interested in. And, the time commitment is minimal partly because it’s geared towards students, and partly because the type of work can be so emotionally intense that they don’t want anyone to burn out on it. So I’m only in the office 2 hours a week.

I can talk about it more when i see everyone at Christmas. We have a confidentiality policy so we can’t talk about specifics, but i can tell you more about how the center works and what we do.

2 ft of snow

We got some snow at the end of last week. Dave thinks it was at least 2 feet … i thought it was a little less, but it’s hard to tell without measuring.

So I’ve officially broken out the snow boots for the season. It’s already started to melt out, but there was a lot of snow, so i don’t know if we’ll see the ground again before the spring or not. And we didn’t even get a snow day.

Mom, I got the H1N1 Vaccine

Homecoming

So, it’s been a while since my last post. Sorry!

Anyway, it was my 5-year college “reunion” at W&M this October, so i flew to Virginia for Homecoming. I was there for a week, because i also interviewed a former biology professor for my thesis film. It was nice to be back on campus and to see everyone — almost all of my close college friends made it back, and a bunch of other friends from college were there as well.

There’s not much else to tell — there were a couple of organized reunion things, but because it was only 5 years, there weren’t nearly as many people there as other reunion years (W&M does all its reunion stuff during Homecoming, so there are multiple reunions happening every year). And i got some cheap school swag, and a couple new W&M tshirts.

We went to Mug Night the Sunday before we all went home, and were there for about 5 hours hanging out and drinking beer out of big plastic mugs.  This is my favorite picture from the trip:

Also, I did talk to some former film and biology professors about the possibility of working at W&M next year, but it’s still really tentative. Basically, they are involved in an interdisciplinary project on campus and are applying for a grant to fund a post-doc position, which i could apply for. But they don’t have the grant yet, so there are no details yet. Overall, it was a really fun weekend and really good to see everyone. Just 5 more years until the 10-year reunion!

Williamsburg

So, i’ve been trying to get better at keeping this up regularly.  However, I’m in Virginia all this week — i just landed tonight (I’m on Beth’s couch right now) and am flying back to Bozeman next Monday.  So, either I’ll write a long post this week because I’ll have down time and nothing to do, OR I won’t write any posts because I’m busy and out of town, and it’ll be a little while yet.  I don’t know which is going to happen.

But for now, this is it.  Huzzah!

Balloon!

So, it’s been snowing here for like FOREVER. meaning, about a week and a half, on and off. But that feels like forever when it’s October, and things were shaping up for a really nice fall. Now everything is frozen and snowy. And, one of my friends, who’s a geologist, says that depending on how the weather goes in the next month, this much snow this early could make for a bad winter for avalanches. Basically, if snow falls, and then warms up and gets kind of melty and then re-freezes, the refreeze makes it really slippery. Then, when more snow falls on the slippery snow, it’s really easy for the snow on top to just slide down the slippery stuff, which makes an avalanche. Because it’s early in the season, there’s a really good chance that this snow will refreeze into slippery snow, and because it’s the bottom layer that could mean avalanches all winter.  Anyway, I don’t ski in the backcountry, so I’m not too worried about avalanches. I just don’t like how cold it is right now.

But about the balloon.

Hot air ballooning is pretty popular out here — the weather is good for it (it works better in the cold) and there’s lots of open flat spaces to land a balloon. Apparently, some of these spaces are on campus, because a few weeks ago, before the snow, a hot air balloon almost hit my apartment building.

This is the balloon deciding not to land in the field behind my apartment building and instead gaining altitude to go somewhere else. Basically, Dave and I woke up to what sounded like a blow torch outside my window. I thought it was a blow torch, because they were doing construction on the sidewalk outside my apartment and things that don’t really make sense (like using a blow torch to pour a concrete sidewalk) are not that silly when you’re still half asleep. But Dave looked out the window and saw a hot air balloon basket float by — what we actually heard was the torch they use to heat up the air in the balloon. Dave got excited and ran to the door to see if they were going to land in the field behind the building; i went back to sleep (Dave took the picture). They must have decided it wouldn’t work because they went back up and floated off, but almost hit some roofs before they got out of there.

Also, side note — a friend of mine went up in a hot air balloon about a month ago, and walk talking to the pilot about it. Apparently, they have a champagne toast at the end of a ride, which goes back to WWI (or WWII, i can’t remember exactly), when ballooners wanted a way to convince farmers (in whose fields they often landed) that they weren’t Germans, so they would carry French champagne. Also, ballooning is not an exact science, so a lot of times you’re landing on private property. Usually people don’t mind or you can talk your way out of it, but i guess the backup plan is that balloon pilots can always declare an FAA emergency, and then you can’t deny them the right to land. So if a hot air balloon ever lands in your yard … they’ll win, so maybe just ask for some champagne.