Viola Camp (and My Birthday!)

It's August, and I'm at viola camp again (this is my fourth year now). I'm having fun, which I'm glad of since I haven't really played my viola much this summer and I was worried that I would have too much trouble keeping up (I'm doing ok so far). I'm the "college intern" this year, so I have a fun week of errand-running and ghost-blogging ahead of me.

I had my 19th birthday last week on Friday and I had a really fun time. Alex took me out to a farm by Nampa called The Sheep Shed. They raise sheep (as the name suggests) and the woman of the couple that runs the farm teaches spinning lessons. Alex got me a loom there, which I have been weaving with (or at least I was before I left). It's been lots of fun. Alex made me a ring out of wood on his new lathe and I started whittling a knife out of wood with my awesome new (and extremely cute) little Ka-Bar (my birthday present to myself).For dinner, we went out to the Crow Inn and had steamed clams, which were superb. I baked my birthday cake, and I'm glad that I wasn't making it for anyone else, since I accidentally cooked wax paper onto the bottom of the cake, but it turned out ok. None of us are big sweets eaters, so the majority of it is now in the garage freezer. Frozen cake is good in the summer, though. Lori gave me a gift card to one of the yarn shops downtown and enough money to get a spinning lesson from the lady at the sheep farm (Cleo), about which I am very excited.

That's about all for now. Lunch is almost over and I need to get back to the church for more viola fun. : D

Let's Get Something Up Here Already

This blog has been suffering from a marked lack of content, so I figure I'll work on fixing that.

Let's start with what I've been up to lately:

I graduated from Boise High in May of 2010 and I'm now attending Boise State. I got a National Merit Scholarship, which I'm desperately trying to keep. That goal is not made any easier by the fact that I have to keep a 3.5 GPA and I'm an engineering major (currently Materials Science, but I'm thinking of switching to Mechanical). I just finished my first year of college, and will be going back for more in the fall.

My family is currently pretty spread out. My mother is living with her dad in Republic, Washington. My father will be starting his new job with the Veterans Administration in Vancouver, Washington at the beginning of August. He was living in San Francisco and Seattle before that. I'm living with my boyfriend, Alex, and his mom, Lori, for the summer. I've really enjoyed being able to stay in Boise, and they have two dogs, Oreo and Katie, who make life pretty interesting.

What do I do for fun? When I have the time (which during the school year is rarely), I like to do a number of things. Because I'm an engineer (and I feel like being a little ridiculous), I shall present these in a bulleted list.

• reading (science fiction and fantasy mostly)
• knitting (mostly rectangles and tubes - whatever I can do without thinking too hard)
• looming hats (like knitting, but even more brainless - also requires less patience)
  
• drawing (I'm not terrific, but I enjoy it anyway)
• dogs (playing with them, staring adoringly at them, etc)
• cooking (this is a newer pursuit, and I'm still working on it, but I've been having fun with it - especially when I do it with Alex)
• writing (poetry, stories, fanfiction, blog posts, bulleted lists)
• listening to music (classic rock, classical, and assorted other music my friends like)
  
• making music (playing my viola, singing - generally when nobody else is around)
  
• messing around on the computer
• sleeping (yes, as a college student, this counts as recreation)

Hopefully that gives you a little bit of an idea about me.
I'll try to post again soon, but no guarantees.

Inaugural Post

I've had a lot of creative steam to blow off lately, and I have also been "microblogging" via Twitter, so I thought it might be fun to start another blog, since my old one's been dead for years. The content of posts here will vary greatly, and updates will be infrequent, but I hope that someone other than me may be able do derive some small amount of enjoyment from this blog.