'Tos

To you too, Alex! Hope you had a great French one, hee.

Abomasum

I'm back! (If nobody's as excited about this as I am, I'm fine with it. Just needed to say that I'm happy to be back.)

everwoodfan52

You have no idea how excited I feel every time that I see that you're back!

I hope that your Christmas was super merry.

Abomasum

No I probably don't. But it's good to know.

It was... great, but exhausting. The Christmas tree drama wasn't that much fun, though... that tree looked so hideous at first. I got my brother "The Bro Code" for Christmas and he loved it. That was nice. ^^ I've been wearing a Santa's hat for three days. Most of my family came today, that was rather nice, too... found out that my aunt likes Everwood and that she and my cousin watched Boot Camp months ago. And that just needed to be told.
How was your Christmas?

BepperGirl

The book or the audio CD? I have the audio CD and NPH is just awesomesauce.

Abomasum

The book. It's so funny.
What's NPH?

BepperGirl

NPH=Neil Patrick Harris, the guy that plays Barney Stinson on HIMYM

Abomasum

Oh! Hee! Yeah.

Well, audio CD wouldn't be that great for us... we can read English well, but if there's just one accent we don't have that much experience with, if somebody's talking quickly, or with too many words we only read and never heard, it's quite exhausting listening to it. Juno was too much for me for example. I gave up after twenty minutes and watched it in German, I couldn't imagine concentrating that much for the whole movie.

everwoodfan52

It was super, Leo! Lots of family, food....we included some religion (church)....but I didn't wear any Santa hat! I'm sure that you looked adorable in yours.

Abomasum

Oh, it's so nice to hear that you had a good time, I'm a big fan of Christmas and I just love to hear of others enjoying it like I am.
Well, hee, I don't really look as adorable as I actually am.

'Tos

Heee. That's really cool, though. Can you do any of the songs Kyle, Ephram or Cleveland played? I'm just assuming you would have tried them, but since I threw up my hands in defeat as a child when it came to playing piano, this assumption may make an ass out of me.

I'd definitely say the dedicated group was a lot more than two or three at UBC. I'd say at least a third of most of my English classes were pretty into it. Unless it was the lower level ones and non-majors needed it for some sort of requirement, then you'd get a lot of people that just really didn't want to be there. Of course, I've wanted to be anywhere else other than an English class at times too, thank you very much Mrs. Children's Lit prof who told stories about her life for the whole class. You know it's bad when I'm tempted to skip! Where was I? Hee. It mostly depends on the class, though, but on average, that Shakespeare class experience was an anomaly.

Any horror stories from any of your dealings with apathetic peers? I love academic horror stories, hee.

Awesome! "All this computer hacking is making me thirsty. I think I'll order a TAB." /Simpsons reference

Well, you already have the poetry anthologies and Victorian novels (unfair, heh) covered, so I'll bring some autobiographies, because I have a big thing for those for some reason. And a bunch of children's literature because despite that prof I love me books like Peter Pan and Anne of Green Gables (yes, I am quite the girly man, hee).

Bringing this over from the Picture Thread because it's a little more appropriate here:

It's the thought that counts, I guess? Hee. I kind of have to admire the finicky nature of cats. They could be starving, meowing their heads off for food and they'd still turn away at food they didn't want.

Ooh ooh! Nice! I have never had the luxury of meeting an Everwood fan in real life. I mean, I'm sure I have. I'm sure I've bumped into something, and lo and behold, they just happened to be the biggest Everwood fan in Canada that is not me! But to actually talk to an Everwood fan knowing they were a fan...oh, I would probably hug that person and scare the crap out of them, hee!

Did you two talk about the show at all? Or Greg at all? Or your deep-rooted love and hopeful marriage to Greg at all?

Thief Of Love

Boy, I was bored because the board (homonym! Score!) was ridiculously quiet all day, and now it's hopping. What, did you get a life or something? Pshaw. Hee.

Aw, you beat me to the chance to make any "You know what happens when you assume..." jokes, hee. No, Kyle, Ephram, and Cleveland's songs were all a little beyond my purview, so I didn't dare attempt them. Not that things being beyond my purview has stopped me from trying to sound out other complicated pieces, heh.

I was going to ask if you've ever played any instruments. Guess that answers that, hee, unless you've had luck with anything else.

That's good. Things were generally better in my upper level classes -- more classroom discussion (though a number of students usually skated by without doing most of the reading) and the mandatory senior thesis rather required that everyone in the class really do their work. Though even then there were one or two students who just threw something together at the last minute -- but they were Communications majors, rather than English (the two departments were connected), and they earned D's and F's for their efforts. Ha.

Oh, 'Tos, you don't know what you're asking. Heh.

Well, here's one of my favorites: first semester of sophomore year, I had group projects in three of my six classes, which was nightmare situation in itself. One of these was in my World Music class; the professor (whom I actually liked a lot and had had for a class the previous year, and who was later my violin instructor) organized us into randomly-selected groups of three, and gave us the assignment to choose a piece of world music and visually interpret the music's structure -- melody, harmony, rhythm, instrumentation, all that great abstract stuff -- in some way. Already a difficult project, but it was made even moreso by my partners: a Chinese exchange student who spoke little English and was taking 21 credits, and a girl who routinely came to class hungover (I privately nicknamed her "Drunk [her name]," to distinguish her from several other girls of the same name) and spoke frequently of her deathly fears of squirrels and American Indians.

I did my best to try to arrange meetings or, at least, e-mail convos, so we could pick our piece of music and how we'd interpret it, but received basically no response. So the weekend before our project -- which was to be presented before the entire class, by the way -- was due, I found myself completely freaking. I wound up choosing a piece of klezmer music, because this was the same year I was taking Hebrew and I figured I could use my mad language skillz somewhere, and bounced around a few ideas for the visual aspect of the project (like using beads to represent the various elements of the song, or putting together a scrapbook), which I shared with my partners, neither of whom wrote back to support or critique any of my suggestions. I settled on the scrapbook, was fairly pleased with my desperate efforts, and explained everything to my partners in class the next day. Then we go on, we present, everything seems good, and then...our professor says "But you didn't actually do the assignment," by which she meant, we didn't visually represent things properly, and she goes on to list things we could have done instead. And then, to make things just a little more humiliating, I burst into tears. To my eternal gratitude, when our professor mentions making jewelry and using beads to represent things, Drunk _________, who apparently read my e-mail after all, said that I had suggested that to the others, but they'd supported the other option. Which was decent of her, though the support would have been nice prior to the presentation date...

It all worked out, though; I made the bead bracelet and brought it in to my professor, and she apologized for sticking me with a "bum group." Heh.

Oh, autobiographies, lovely. As long as we're branching out of purely literary forms, then, I'm bringing over the histories and historical bios, too.

And, aw, Anne of Green Gables is terrific. And yes, you are a girly man, hee. Or maybe you just have good taste!

Oh, indeed. Or, if they're like our gray cat (Missy), they might turn away from the wrong kind of cat food, but they'll then proceed to meow incessantly at anyone who's preparing or eating people food, take whatever scraps they're given, and then climb on tables, counters, and laps in a desperate effort to eat whatever is left, regardless of whether or not the person's still eating his or her own meal. Actually, she does this no matter what cat food is out...

Did Rocky receive anything for Christmas? And is he still enjoying the snow?

BepperGirl

So I bet you all are wondering what I got for Christmas. heh. Anyway, I'm working on a picspam, but here's a little teaser of what I got from my Dad (who did the majority of his shopping when he was on his China trip):


I really think this is the neatest thing ever. The guy that painted the rabbit and the carrot painted it by putting his paint brush INSIDE the little hole that's visible from the last shot.


Beautiful jade necklace.


Pretty bracelet. The purple bracelet is something I wear to remember my dad's dad who passed away in '98 due to pancreatic cancer.


A purse and a hat (I love the hat so much). You can also see my class ring in the photo

Abomasum

Wonderful presents, BepperGirl! The hat's really cool. ^^

No. No, we didn't.

everwoodfan52

Lovely presents, Gaby! Wear/carry them in good health.

I just returned from Manhattan (Madison Square Garden). No, It wasn't to see the Rangers, Tos! I saw Cirque du Soleil. It was one of my Christmas presents. What an incredible show!