Day 12- Not a Penny More

Celebrated an early Thanksgiving dinner with some members of The Wildlife Society today.  Thanks for a delicious meal ladies!

N is for...

New Experiences.

N was originally going to be for New Zealand, and I mean seriously, what else could N possibly be for?  Except that I don't really have much to post about New Zealand that I haven't already.  Basically it would just be a reminiscing blog and I don't want to do that.  So I will, instead, focus on new experiences and anyone interest in reading about my time in NZ can check out this post or this one. 

New Experiences!  I love doing new things.  Even if they turn out to be pretty suck-y, new things just give a little kick to life.  I've had a lot of new experiences in the past year, going to NZ, traveling around NZ, traveling around cities, abseiling, almost skydiving, etc.  All of those experiences are great memories to have.  Even little things like going to the Pennsylvania Renaissance Fair last fall or the 2012 Northeast Conclave of The Wildlife Society this past weekend (the reason I posted three blogs at once) are great to mix up the daily grind.

Yes, days off are always important.  Give yourself some time to relax, sure, but make sure you get out, too.   There is so must to do, so much to see, and so much fun to be had!  Why would you ever pass it up to sit on your couch and watch reruns on TV?  There are plenty of activities out there, both that require money and ones that don't.  There are plenty of parks around, even stopping by a playground while school is in session and spending some time reliving your childhood is a great way to step out of the ordinary.  Teach yourself to knit or go to a photography workshop.  Like the picture says, try something new! 

A reoccurring theme in one of the books I'm currently reading is the John Lennon quote, "Life is what happens while you are busy making other plans."  Don't let life go on without you because believe me, it's entirely too short to begin with.

All Work and All Play Make Caitlin a Very Tired Girl

So I'm completely avoiding doing work right now.  Typical college student.  Anyways, I figured I'd take this time and fill you all in on more of my semester.  My mom actually asked me the other day about my tree, Ferdinand.  She said I mentioned how handy he was and then didn't elaborate.  Well if this question has been bothering you as much as it was her then now if your chance!  Read on, my friend.

I left off last time with the 7th Banquet. So, looking back at my calendar the next thing I did was help out with Trick or Treat Street on Friday the 28.  Trick or Treat Street is an event put on by the campus, Halloween Haunting committee to be exact, where clubs can volunteer their time and put up a display and hand out candy to kids.  In addition to this Halloween Haunting also puts on a haunted house and a haunted hay ride, among other little things.  This year the haunted house was cancelled due to fire code violations, and the haunted hayride never actually took place because of the snow...  Yes, snow.  For any of you living under a rock, not in the Northeast, or not in the U.S., we had quite the snowstorm on October 29.  This was extremely unusual, extremely fun, and extremely bad for Halloween Haunting.  It closed everything down for the weekend, knocking out the power in a large portion of the northeast.  Luckily we kept our power.  Anyways, Halloween Haunting was cancelled both Saturday and Sunday.  After all, it would be cruel to have kids standing out in a foot of snow for three hours in the middle of a field so they could attempt to scare passersby.

This is also where Ferdinand came into play again.  He was lucky enough to be used in the A.S.S. table which was Lion King themed.  I knew having a tree would be an awesome idea.  Anyways, here are some pics from that night...

Where Has the Time Gone?

Well everybody I think this is the longest I have ever gone without a legitimate blog.  It's a little disappointing to me to be honest.  But at the same time, what was I going to write about.  I guess I just feel that the few things that I do do aren't very blog worthy.  Interesting.  But that is about to change! (Have I made that promise before?)  Anyways, the semester is finally winding down.  We have one week and then it's Thanksgiving break.  I get a whole six days at home, Yippee!!!!  Then we have two weeks of classes and then it's finals already.  Wow.  So I have 17 more days of class and 6 days of finals, of which I only have exams on 3 days.  Things are looking up!!

So what have I been doing for the past 2.5 months?  I don't even know, hahaha. My last blog post was on October 19, almost a month ago, and that wasn't even a real post, it was a pitch to get more votes for my contest pictures (which, if you haven't voted you can check it out here- Photo Contest).  The time is just flying.  The days seem to go by slowly, but the weeks are going by quickly. So let's see what I've been doing for the past month, shall we?...

Ok so on October 15 I participated at Monter Pumpkin Madness at the market on campus, manning the OxFam America at DelVal table.  We were given the duty of being the crafts table for the kids.  So we had those scratch-off paint things where there is color underneath, and we had Halloween themed masks and picture frames.  The event was actually two days but almost everything was gone by the end of the first day.  I'm not sure what they did for the second day because I wasn't there. 

I was, in fact, at Hawk Mountain with The Wildlife Society.  Hawk Mountain is a sanctuary in Kempton, PA committed to "conserve birds of prey worldwide by providing leadership in raptor conservation science and education, and by maintaining Hawk Mountain Sanctuary as a model observation, research and education facility."  It is quite the lovely place.  We hiked up the mountain, stopping at a couple of observation points along the way.  Once we reached our destination we joined the multitude of other bird watchers and kept our eyes peeled for some birds of prey.  We saw quite a few, but I didn't get any pictures of them because they weren't exactly close.  But I did get some shots of the beautiful scenery...

 

So that was a pretty nice weekend overall.  The next weekend was homecoming weekend.  Woot!!  October 21 began the festivities with a parade through town.  The parade was a competition between the clubs, each having their own themed float or car.  The theme this year was Bright Lights, Big City.  I participated with Animal Science Society (abbreviated A.S.S.) like I did last year.  Our city was Sydney Australia.  We decorated our float and dressed up in character and hit the road to impress the citizens of Doylestown and the judges awaiting our return.  As a part of decorating the float I, for some reason, volunteered to make a tree.  Well, after about four days worth of construction we finally had a tree.

Pretty beast if I do say so myself.  Any ways so we rode our float in our costumes...

And we had a grand ole time.  We didn't place, and therefore didn't win any money, but we still had fun... and a tree.  My roommate and I decided to keep the tree, not knowing at the time just how handy he would become.  Oh yes, we named it Ferdinand.  

A New Year at University

So it's September 27, about a month since I've started classes, and this is my first post.  My apologies.  I have quite the workload this year and it's really distracted me from other things, such as this.  One of my weekly assignments is to write journal entries about the reading we've done that week.  We can also do 25% of that journal on personal things.  I've basically been using that in the same way I would this.  So I'm going to give you a recap of my first month here on campus by copying and pasting those entries, with some modifications.  Pictures, for example.  Enjoy...


September 5-

So after a wonderfully long weekend I have discovered something about myself.  I need more friends.  Mainly here at DelVal.  I have plenty of friends elsewhere, and that’s the real problem.  They’re elsewhere.  I need real human activity on a daily basis that involves more than the 20 words spoken between myself and my roommate.  This might end up being my loneliest semester yet.  And what can I say, it’s my own fault.  I left my friends from Plymouth State when I transferred here last year and then I went off to study abroad after only one semester.  I do not regret either of those decisions by any means, but I regret the repercussions it has had on my social life here.  

It also doesn’t help that I’m shy.  I read something today though that really got me thinking; “You’re not afraid of the people around you.  You’re just afraid of rejection.”  And isn’t that the truth?    I find it extremely hard to introduce oneself to a new group of people and feel included right from the get-go.  It takes a special kind of personality to be able to do it.  And as much as I wish I had it, I don’t.  I come close, but let’s be honest; the group has to be willing to let you in as well.  And that’s just as hard.  New people change the group dynamic.  I like feeling comfortable with my amazing group of friends rather than trying to insinuate myself into a new group.  My only problem with that now is, of course, my friends are not here.   And we return to my original dilemma.  My boyfriend told me the other day that one can only have two out of three things in college; grades, a social life, or money.  I guess this semester is just my turn to concentrate on grades and money.  I hope it works.

September 10-

Well here is my weekly rant about my personal life.  After the depressing hole that was last weekend, I fully immersed myself into this past week.  Total immersion was not hard by any means.  I seem to have a very full schedule, although it didn’t seem that way before classes started.  For example, Tuesday I started the day at 8am and didn’t finish classes until 8pm.  I had about an hour each for lunch and dinner, but that was about it.  And then, after all that chaos I had a club meeting followed by class work.  Luckily I had a nice pick me up on Thursday when I received two packages in the mail.  The first was a photo book that I made and ordered online, which I was not expecting until the end of the month, the second was a care package from my boyfriend in New Zealand.  He sent me a nice array of sweets that I can’t get here.  I was so super stoked for both packages.  They were simply the best thing that happened to me all week.

On the other end of the spectrum, the worst thing that happened all week was waiting for the Saturday shuttle for 13 minutes before Security came and told me that that shuttle doesn’t run anymore.  Thank you for that information, Mr. Security man.  I’m glad somebody told me.  I tried to take it the weekend before as well but when it didn’t show up I figured it wasn’t running because of Labor Day.  It’s so nice of the college to let us know these things, isn’t it?  As I mentioned before I have a really busy weekday schedule.  The weekend is the only time I have to get away from this campus, even if it’s only to town.  And since neither my roommate nor I have a car, we’re pretty much stuck here.  Luckily I had a thought of genius as I was walking back from the bank, not wanting to continue into town due to the risk of rain.  The train!  How simple. So my plan is to catch the train into town tomorrow.  From there I will walk to the grocery store to pick up some supplies.  After that I will walk to the market to buy milk.  Hopefully the rain will hold off.

September 26-

Well I was finally able to escape this prison they like to call a campus yesterday (Saturday).  I volunteered with The Wildlife Society to participate in National Public Lands Day.  We took a bus to Valley Forge National Historical Park for the day.  We left at 7am and arrived there around 7:45.  We were one of the first groups to arrive, which means we each got a free t-shirt from REI.  They are nice, quality shirts, too.  That was a nice way to begin the day.   

We were assigned to Catfish Island, where we were to be cleaning up plastic and such.  However, due to the rain Friday night, the water levels were too high for us to get out there safely.  Instead we tagged along with another group who were doing tree netting.  There was about a mile stretch of land where the park had planted pine trees about ten years ago after a beetle came through and decimated the trees that were there previously.  Following the planting the trees were surrounded by plastic netting to prevent deer from eating them.  Well, the netting was never taken off and the trees were starting to be smothered by it.  So it was our job to go out and take all this netting off.   They quickly armed us with gloves and shears and set us loose.  

It was pretty decent work.  Each tree developed differently, some growing taller than the netting before branching out, others not so much.  There was even one where the trunk of the tree grew around the netting. 

After about two hours of work all of the trees were de-netted, the netting was loaded into a truck with some people on top for security, and we were on our way back to base for some free food.   

Overall it was a very enjoyable day, especially since we were off campus.  Perhaps you’ve noticed the fact that I don’t like being on campus all day every day.  It gets quite boring with few friends and fewer activities.

The worst part of the weekend occurred today, however, when  I discovered a lively little creature by the name of Ixodes scapularis residing on my leg.  Yeah, that's a tick. F-ing great.