Snow states

I was going to type this a week ago, but I forgot to so I'll just do it now. Last Monday one of my teachers said that on the Friday before (Feb. 12) every single state in the U.S. had snow. Yes, Hawaii had snow up on its tallest volcano. Yes, Florida had snow in the panhandle. Yes, Texas and Arizona and New Mexico and California all had snow. Amazing isn't it. Apparently, so my teacher claimed, that was the first time every state had had snow in the same day. Crazy, eh? I think so. Also, (not that this is on the exact same topic) I am amused that the term "global warming" is going out of style for the newer and more-hip expression "climate change." Do those in power really think that, by inventing new phrases to scare the public into believing whatever they're told, they can dictate the events, natural or otherwise, that will happen to planet earth? I'm pretty content to leave the future of the world up to God. It means a lot less worrying for me to do and that's just fine.

Snow Day

Today was awesome. I got a phone call last night from the photo editor about a story she kindly agreed to write for the first issue of the Accent. At the end of the conversation about the story she mentioned that there was a marketing story on the school's Web site about Friday's classes being canceled. I was pretty happy about it and got even happier a bit later in the evening when I checked my e-mail and saw the real, live proof. I have to say I was a bit amused by the entire thing. There wasn't even half a cm of snow on the ground when I opened my door to check if more snow had fallen since I'd entered my house. Having lived in Alberta and experienced many real snow days (ones that only took place if the temperature was -40 C or lower, which is when a diesel engine quits working and the school buses couldn't run) this Tennessee snow day was a joke. But don't get me wrong. I'll take any day off school than I can get. I'm already sick of this semester, well at least those two classes that I don't really want to be taking. I guess I'm just kind of ready to be done with school for a bit. Oh well, less than four months left.

So on to my day. I spent the entire morning catching up on lost sleep (I know, ridiculous right? Lost sleep less than a week into this semester? Unheard of. Oh well. It happened) and then later on in the afternoon I went over to Jonathan's. He had made me a lunch of bean threads and we ate it when I finally got over there. It was delicious and I was surprised that I've never had that before. Tim was decided that he would provide our dinner entertainment and showed us a 16-minute video called Ticket Validation or maybe just Validation. It was pretty hilarious. Then Jonathan and I had our Christmas, which was awesome. (It's always nice to have a second Christmas, especially when it's on a snow day!) First I sent Jonathan into his bathroom to hide while I conscripted Tim to help me hide Jonathan's presents for a treasure hunt. I made up the treasure hunt before I'd come over so I knew which rooms I wanted to put each present in, but not where in each I wanted to hide them. Tim was a great help and within minutes I told Jonathan he could come out again. Then we had Christmas in January using Tim's little fibre optics Christmas tree. It was tons of fun, especially watching the treasure hunt, which Tim took pictures of. After that we did some reading and then came back over to my place to make supper and listen to a Dr. Ashton sermon from SEYC a few years back. I love listening to Dr. Ashton speak, even if it's not in person. He just has such a great voice and has a lot of knowledge and good things to say. After that was done I wanted to listen to something else so we found Paul Howe's testimony from GYC a week ago and listened to that. It was super good and I was really impressed and quite inspired. And that's how I spent my snow day. How about you?

Career list

Last night I got inspiration. I was in bed and semi-snoozing when, for some reason, I started thinking about all the careers I have, at one time or another, wanted to do for my lifework. I was beginning to compile a list of those careers in my head when I realized that it might be a neat idea to write them out somewhere. At first I was just thinking it might be a fun blog post, but then I started thinking about why I wanted to do each of those jobs and how my idea of the actual career was quite different, especially when I was in elementary school, than what the job was really like. Suddenly I was struck with a thought; I could use this for my writing assignment for Adv. Creative Writing. I liked that idea so much that I sat straight up in bed, reached over towards the door and flipped on the lights (first telling my sister, as any nice older sister should do, that I would be turning the lights on), and then took out my Moleskine out of my pillowcase (it lives there for moments just such as the one I'm describing to you) and started scribbling wildly. Once my idea was appropriately documented I turned the page and made a few notes about some ideas I've thought up for Literary Journalism. They aren't the greatest so far, but hopefully making a list will help to inspire some more ideas for that assignment. Then I put my Moleskine back into my pillowcase, turned off the lights and went back to bed. Although I was planning to go right to sleep, my sister and I started a night time conversation (something we used to do almost every night my first year here when we were roommates in the dorm, but haven't done a lot of lately because we usually go to bed at different times this school year), which just got more and more hilarious. By the time we actually finished talking and tried, once again, to sleep I was wishing I'd turned on my voice recorder or taken a video with one of our cameras so we could have recorded the conversation. I was totally random and just got more funny the longer we talked. It was nice to have one of those night time talks again.

Today it snowed. It was awesome, but I wish we'd got more snow. Oh well, what we got was pretty good for down here. At least it snowed enough for classes to be cancelled tomorrow, which is awesome and hasn't happened yet since I came here. I shall let you know what transpired in our "snow day" when I write again tomorrow. Good night for now.