Personal Entry No. 54

[outou]

L e v e l     U p !


+ 72 JNL ENTRY
+ 6 ICN ENTRY
+ 773 ICN
+ 1065 SCRP IMAGE
+ 38 PARTY
+ 1 HP

It's been exactly a year since I first created this journal for posting icons. (My first post was actually on the 16th, over a week after I left school for summer break, but I spent my extra time during finals drawing my first header and getting the layout fixed.) Back then, I didn't think I would be that involved with the fandom outside of graphics--I never had been before, and I'm not that great at socializing.

As we all know, fandom exploded (The Fanbook Project actually pulls through and gets some blog posts from CLAMP! TRC has dozens of Shyamalan-esque plot twists and then abruptly ends! Watanuki becomes an unlikeable drag queen! Kobato. gets a storyline!) and I expanded my tastes to include Mass Effect, Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou, Armored Core, FMA, Tegami Bachi, Umineko no Naku Koro ni--too many things to count!

That said, I've never had a gift with words, so I'll leave it at this: Thank you all so much for a great and eventful year, and here's hoping there are many more to come.

Now, as a celebration: cheese bad photographs for everyone!





This is the crabapple tree I wrote about last month, back when it was in bloom. The flowers were out for a long time; now the tree is in that awkward stage when all of the petals have blown off, but the dry flower stems jut out of the leaves. Everything else looks a lot more, um, verdant than it does in the pictures here, so it's still very beautiful outside. It's a shame that the leaves on the trees now prevent me from spying on that white house, though. (They deserve it! You haven't heard their dog barking for half an hour just to be let in during the winter.)

I'm on the fourth floor of the residence hall, so my room has a dormer jutting out onto the roof. The composite photo isn't pieced together so well--the roof doesn't bend like that!

Also, to celebrate my finally finishing and handing in my Russian paper, here are some photographs of my (giant-mound-of-textbooks-free) room:

    



    

This is my kingdom.

If there's anything you see that you think is interesting, I'll be happy to take a close-up shot for you! (Note that I didn't intentionally order a giant laptop. D: My grandmother offered to buy my sister and me our first laptops for school last year, and this one met both my memory specifications and her price range. Weirdly, the smaller laptops with the same performance specs cost more.)

I got one of the worst numbers in the housing lottery last year (the school doesn't take GPA into account, so it's completely random), and somehow ended up with this. It's a beautiful, large room with a great view and little study space that more than makes up for the "closet." (We got the curtains at the local Wal-Mart--I'm sorry, I know it's a horrible corporation--the day I moved in. The closet actually has what appears to be hinges, so it must have had some kind of door once--until some genius built the water pipes right through them.) The closet itself has a lot of space, though, so I shouldn't complain! Everything's so much bigger here than in my room back home.

The residence halls themselves are very nice, too: they're a set of three identical buildings connected by the first floors, and each one has its own color for the doors and tiles. (Isn't that cute? We have red, the middle building has scratch-me green, and the building across from ours has hospital-ward blue.) It's true that mostly freshmen live here, but why was it that the singles in my building were among the last rooms available in general?

I think it has something to do with the fact that a) only a handful of people on this floor are capable of cleaning up after themselves and b) things started breaking inexplicably in the bathroom after a few weeks. One shower has a broken handle and for a while couldn't be turned off, another shower doesn't drain, one sink is plugged up, and another sink's hot water handle can't be moved by a Krogan. On top of that, the hot water is occasionally turned off and the showers are as cold as the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.

Did I mention that someone once tried to cook a Peep in the floor's only microwave, left behind a gummy mass of burnt sugar, and then tried to fix it by sticking the microwave's flammable safety instructions on top of the Peep's remains? Th-these children are brilliant children, you guys. It only took me about ten minutes to scrub off the microwave's plate so that I could actually make pasta on my own floor. (The poor cleaning people have to put up with so much more!)

Complaining aside--and I'm sorry to take up your time by complaining about frivolous things like this--I'm still going to miss this room when I move out in a few days. I know now that I'm going to get through finals all right, so I can look forward to going home without any dread. So far, I've got both a Russian and Japanese exam tomorrow, a 15-page paper on global corporations' use of sweatshop labor due by midnight of the 11th, and a Russian/Central Asian History exam at 7:00 PM on Tuesday night.