I feel more and more like an adventuress with each passing day. This past weekend was a highlight of the year in two ways: I participated in an annual living history event with hundreds, perhaps thousands, of other reenactors, and attended the wedding of a friend from college whose ceremony made me actually like the idea of a traditional wedding better than an elopement. It was tricky, though. The events were taking place in two different states. My solution was to skip out on half the reenactment Saturday in order to drive to the wedding, stay over at a friend's college apartment and drive back for the last couple hours of the reenactment on Sunday. But nobody wants to miss much of a reenactment. I established an itinerary in order to stay as long as humanly possible on Saturday. It looked like this: 12:15 p.m. - Hide in the reenacting tent with women at each end to guard the openings. Change out of reenacting dress and into dress more appropriate for a modern wedding. H...

...I'm ready to go. Who knew that you could travel to Asia using only carry-on luggage? Well, I didn't, until I found out I'd be packing for 80- to 100-degree weather. Then I realized... shorts and T-shirts take almost no room. So I'm almost completely packed for my trip. Right down to the bags of delicious flavored coffee I'm taking for me and my friend to enjoy while we're there. Even with the coffee wrapped in two plastic bags (one shopping bag, one zip-close bag), I suspect its smell will rub off on my clothes. Is that a bad thing? This is the farthest I've ever traveled. And the first time I'll be in a country in whose language I have no hope of making myself understood. I'll go through customs all by myself -- they'll even take my temperature, to make sure I don't carry H1N1 or SARS or MERS in with me -- and then I'll get to spend the next nine days hanging out with a good friend from college, almost the only other person in...

Since I moved to Indiana, I've been overwhelmed with the realization that I'm so much closer than I've ever been before to certain major national landmarks. Like Chicago. When I realized Chicago was now within reach of a day trip -- not a 7-hour drive away or more -- it was a revelation, and I promptly convinced a friend to accompany me on just such a trip to see the city. I may or may not have gotten overly excited about a Bean. Another friend of mine was interviewing at a university in St. Louis this week and invited me to visit her while she was there. I then realized that the city was a feasible weekend trip away -- again, not the daunting drive it's heretofore been. And I could even swing by the Illinois Statehouse to make it a circle. What could be more fun? Thus, I present: An album, because everybody needs a road trip once in a while. ( Check the album for more photos! )

I'm taking my sister's advice to tell about what I've just been doing the past several days. Not particularly enthralling, I warn you, but here goes. I learned today that it takes precisely 8 seconds to cross a two-lane, one-way street downtown, walking at a rate of two steps per second. That is, one complete set of steps per second, one right-footed and one left-footed. If that makes sense. And yesterday, I checked five books out from the library. Three of them were related to journalism: "Letters to a Young Journalist," Sam Freedman "Newsonomics: 12 new trends that will shape the news you get" "The Best Business Stories of the Year: 2004" "Studies in Words," C.S. Lewis "Spanglish: The making of a new American language" I've already read bits out of "Letters" and the business stories compilation. Quite interesting. Once I get my laptop back up and running, I'll write a little more about the bo...

OK, I know I halfway-promised a real update to come last weekend, but better late than never, right? I’m officially moved into my apartment-with-stained-glass-windows. The windows are ever so gorgeous, especially in the evenings. Unfortunately they still can’t tempt me to do dishes more than a couple times a week. Mind you, the sink never truly overflows—it just gets full. That’s because it doesn’t take any dishes to eat a sandwich. And I like sandwiches. I painted my bookcase this past weekend, probably part of the reason I didn’t actually sit down and write a blog post. It took more spray paint than I bargained on. See, I didn’t want to have to get that dumb spillable of black paint and a brush to paint the thing. I wanted something that would dry quick. Well, spray paint dries quickly, but it takes an awful lot of coats to get the bookcase looking pretty. Took half the morning and a good bit of the afternoon. And a bike trip to Big Lots and a quick car trip to Wal-Mart in betwee...

You probably had no idea, but last weekend was the Lincoln Highway Buy-Way series of garage sales stretching from PA to who knows where (somewhere out in Indiana no doubt). And it ran right through my little town. I love garage saling to start with. I’m good at finding deals, I think, merely because I’ve been to so many growing up, with my parents. So I rejoice to have so many garage sales and church rummage sales going on for my enjoyment! Except that they all occurred over the same very busy weekend which included a wedding to attend, two and a half hours away. Not that I’m complaining about the wedding at all! But I would rather have had my cake and eaten it too, ya know? So, at the same time that I was snapping pictures of the garage sales for the newspaper and planning the weekend’s wedding voyage, I perused the various cast-off articles for sale and tried to decide what I really needed and what would have been more of a “hey, this is cool and I’m bored” purchase. In the end, I...

It’s been precisely four weeks, almost, hasn’t it? Well, I might as well make the announcement—now that I’ve begun work as a journalist in a little town, a lot of the thoughts of which this blog is a fount will most likely revolve around my experiences each day. Such as that time I rode in a fire truck at a firefighter’s training. A couple days ago, I spent half the morning out at the wastewater treatment plant watching ten guys rip into a few cars as fast as they could while not endangering themselves. It was pretty cool, aside from the stench of the waste water… There’s this little tool that firefighters use to break open car windows. You know, those reinforced windows that are designed to be difficult to break and even harder to shatter? It took one guy several hard whacks with a sledgehammer to get through one window. Anyways, this little tool—a little longer than a pen, and about the thickness of a man’s thumb, perhaps—will take out a car window with a couple jabs. Maybe one j...

Yes, here it is, the third (and final, I think) installment of the freezer saga, posted early because I was in a writing mood and had a little time. (Parts one and two previously.) So, there I was, happily pulling spices and rye flour from the tub on the kitchen floor and loading them into a plastic basket to be put into the chest freezer in the garage. *Sniff* something smells strange… … very strange. Turns out, Mom accidentally left a cow tongue out of the kitchen freezer. A cow tongue, you see, which was now very stinky, smelly, gross, and unappetizing. (Not that it was ever meant to be appetizing in the first place. The cow tongue was an AWANA Council Time illustration piece that my mom has used for years—ever since I was in AWANA, I think, so nigh on eight years now. For those who don’t know, AWANA Council Time is like a short children’s Sunday School meeting.) Back to the cow tongue. To make things even ickier (is that a word?) this cow tongue had leaked… some type of f...

So, you may now read the rest of the freezer story …. We left the freezer on the driveway for a couple days to completely thaw out, defrost, and otherwise be rid of the layers and layers of ice coating the entire inside. We even tossed out some large ice pieces partway through the defrosting process. And then came cleaning. Which involved turning the freezer on its side, thereby dumping the goop (and gross bit of meat that had been embedded in the ice), and aiming the garden hose into it. I got all wet. Not comfortable. Anyhow. Once the gunk and grossness was generally removed from the freezer, it needed a thorough scrubbing. I had to go to work, so Mom took over from there. I returned to find a shiny white freezer sitting upright, drying, in the driveway. Very nice. It sat that way for a while. Not so nice. We finally got to move it back into the garage, where it belonged, after it had sat out for a couple days drying from the thorough cleaning. Of course, we picked the one day...

You know a chest freezer needs defrosting when there is old meat actually embedded in the ice along the walls of the freezer. I helped empty out a medium-sized chest freezer today—one which hadn’t been defrosted in years. It had ice built up a hand’s-breadth thick along all the sides of the freezer, and even had ice building up inside the lid. (Therefore, the lid would not stay up like it ought to, and would slam on your head if you weren’t careful.) So, I proceeded to pull the contents out, parcel by parcel. The family staples (bread, milk) had already been reduced on purpose, in preparation for the large defrosting task, but there was still quite a bit of foodstuffs left. Much of the foodstuffs was comprised of meat. Oh, and little freezer baggies full of cut-up rhubarb. Anyways, I believe I tossed all of the meat except one large turkey into the handy-dandy garbage bag I had next to me. Mostly because it was all from the 1990’s or something. No seriously! There were two parcel...

I made it home. After spending 24 of the last 40 hours on a bus or in a van. (By which I mean, 20 hours by bus from Manhattan to my cousins’ place, then more than 4 hours from my cousins’ to home. Time spent on bus layovers was made up for by driving from the bus station to my cousins’ and from there to the graduation ceremony.) How am I not crazy? Two good-sized novels pass the time quite pleasantly. (I read some of my favorites, Eight Cousins and Rose in Bloom by Louisa May Alcott.) I much prefer being chauffeured over driving myself. Go figure. (That’s why I loved the public transportation options in NYC.) Simon and Garfunkel provide a perfect soundtrack to a trip to New York City. Seriously, half their songs are specific to Manhattan. I loved it. It is actually possible to sleep on a bus. (Not too comfortably, and not too long, but it is possible.) Mothers are fun to talk to on long van trips. And sisters supply a great variety of songs to sing along to. Staring out t...

[tweetmeme style="compact" only_single="false"] My entire convergence news package about Fleet Week is up on the WJI Times Observer (the video was posted here yesterday). Be sure to check out the slide show for some nice photos (if I do say so myself). :) My previous projects have been about immigrants overcoming the language barrier and a new pedestrian-friendly design for 34th Street right here in front of the Empire State Building. (Those also have slideshows and an audio piece.) And tomorrow? Well, we’ll see when we get there, but another package will be completed Wednesday night. Then we’ll be working on a radio piece, 60-90 seconds, and I have something rather interesting in mind for that, I think. We’ll see how everything pans out. Tonight, though, I’m going to try to do something non-journalistic and quite touristy—I’m going to walk across the Brooklyn Bridge. Pictures will be forthcoming provided I get somebody to go with me! (I think I have two apart...

I was up way too late last night. (Don't tell my mom. *wink* ) First of all, I was out covering my current story until quite late, then I stayed up even later to get laundry done. I'd have done the laundry Sunday night but the little laundry card machine was out of laundry cards. *sigh* So I was up till 1:30 waiting for the dryer to get done. And I take the elevator four floors down... and walk around the corner to the laundry room... and find the door securely locked. The large sign in one of the windows to the laundry room proclaimed the room's hours: OPEN DAILY 7AM -- 1AM You'd think I'd have seen that sign earlier. The laundry waited until this morning to be removed from the dryer.

That is, with my old-lady part in the Winter One-Acts! I loved this. But I will be glad not to have to wander around in white hair and age lines after every performance. I'm told I look like a very convincing old lady though.... some of my friends hardly recognized me (and said as much).

One week on campus (mostly), and things have been crazy. If you've been reading my other blog (the link to which is by request), you know I've tried out and gotten a part in a one-act comedy to be performed the first weekend in February. That's in addition to a class on Spanish conversation, and on top of preparation to write the prospectus and annotated bibliography for my senior honors project (this beginning stuff needs to be done by the end of the month). Plus, I've helped tutor a young ESL student who's struggling in math, and watched a million episodes of Touched by an Angel a couple nights ago, and have also been getting caught up with the yearbook (I'll be assistant editor). Oh and I've been working, but that's a given. I absolutely love the honors project preparation. I'll be helping to plan and launch my college's new website for the college newspaper & broadcasting programs! I also love Spanish class, except that today we tal...

The title should convey all the information I need to share--but the emotion and exhilaration behind it is impossible to put into words. :) I got sunburned on my legs, though, which hardly ever happens and kinda stings. Also, I discovered a fascinating word from an obscure language a few days ago. Apparently lost-in-translation can get pretty bad sometimes. In addition, I will be meeting a movie star tomorrow (hopefully). The main actor in this year's hit film in this Central American country is best friends with my professor's son, and since half my class went to see the movie, he'll come visit us and we'll get to practice speaking Spanish with him. Should be fun.

So, I just went on a weekend field trip (kinda like this one , only longer than just a full day) to the rain forest, and it was wonderful. However, I was also sick about half the time. Well, I had been sick on Wednesday, just from a reaction to too much sugar... basically, I ate two, largish, peanut-butter-topped, wonderful homemade brownies, and some pop, in the same night. Not a good idea for me. Anyhow. So, I was well again Thursday and Friday. Until, that is, I happened to have a snack that contained chocolate. Apparently I had a delayed reaction of sorts--I was sick from chocolate on Wednesday, so my body didn't like the chocolate on Friday. That turned into slightly sleepless nights and a sometimes-not-so-happy stomach... but, somehow, I still had a blast. I was just well enough to do the hiking and the ziplining Saturday morning (think about it! Ziplining from peak to peak in the rainforest!!) and managed to stay alert enough during the Quaker meeting (more on that later) to...

Wow! What a day I had. I can't even begin to tell all of it... basically what I did was just take pictures, posted them on Facebook, and put on some captions there. We took a field trip all over an area of the country I'm in today. We visited three Catholic churches. Early on in the field trip, at the first (and biggest) church, we had to ask locals what was so important about this church and what its history was. We asked one of the security guards there, and since the assignment was to ask two people, we went over and asked the gift shop clerks too. An older man behind us in line took a liking to us and talked to us a little bit after we had our questions answered by the clerks. To begin, he introduced himself to our group and... asked me if I was the teacher! I'm not sure how to take that. I'm assuming it was in recognition of superior Spanish pronunciation or some sort of confidence in having asked the first two questions? (I'm just guessing here!) Considering I...

It seems that Sunday night is usually a good night for writing something lengthy for my blog (and doing some other stuff, too). Anyhow. This week I've been really busy, or rather busier than before. Classes started this week, of course, so I've had homework . That involved asking my Central American dad about lots of peculiar sayings that are used here (like "when frogs grow hair," which is along the lines of "when pigs fly"). And going over present-tense verbs umpteen times in grammar class (kinda boring). And reading three chapters in an apparently rather famous book called "Pantalones largos." And writing a nine-minute speech in Spanish. Yeah! I was sooo proud of myself when I finished that thing! And all that was only for two of my classes. The third class, touching upon the culture and civilization of my host country, meets only on Fridays and is a pretty interactive, field-trip-based class. Which means it's awesome! We went downtown ...

We went by ourselves to the downtown of the (rather largeish) city where we're living today... [6:26:19 PM] Sarah: anyways. We went there Monday with our guide, but this was the first time we went by ourselves on any bus and we waited for like half an hour to get a bus that would go where we wanted. Even then we had to ask a lady to help us (she was very gracious and took good care of us while we were travelling the same path) [6:26:33 PM] Sarah: So, we got there fine, and had a good time browsing the AMAZING souvenier shop down there. [6:26:39 PM] Sarah: now, it gets interesting. [6:26:50 PM] Sarah: on our way back, first we went to the wrong part of the bus stop hub [6:27:03 PM] Sarah: (there's a collection of bus stops and we were at the completely wrong end) [6:27:54 PM] Sarah: so once we finally get on a bus headed back home, we accidentally get off at the wrong place (too early) because there are apparently at least two stores with the same name... a popular brand which ...