SuperSaver

Yep, forgot about this again.

I suppose a good lot of you know that I'm a rower, and such, I row. Normally it's not such a heavy investment of my time, but due to multiple complications involving unfortunate timing, it's pretty much taken over my life for the past few weeks. But it's all about to come to a head.

It's time for the biggest championship amongst Division II and Division III schools. The Dad Vail Regatta in Philadelphia. More than a hundred teams will converge on Boathouse Row to do battle on a treacherous course full of current, curves, bridges, and geese. It's what we've been building to since last August.

As for the last few weeks, you see, the semester, and by extension my frosh year in college, finished up the third week of April. Sensible, albeit surprisingly early. That week everybody else but the fifty-sixty-odd rowers on the GVSU team left for the summer. I, on the otherhand, somehow ended up in the course of five hours on that week's Friday evacuating the entirety of my dorm room, plus or minus some perishable food, into my unfortunate Mercury, which is still loathing me for that to this day.

That was mostly my own fault through procrastination and poor timing, but the fact that A: I had to be checked out that day, B: My parents couldn't come up so I had to do all the moving myself, and C: The reason for the deadline was the crew team departing for the Indianapolis Invitational that same afternoon, didn't help. That sentence probably would've made my WRT150 professor engage me with a crowbar. But I digress.

Either way, fast forward a bit, I ended up moved into my head coach's spare bedroom for the duration of the few weeks left until this trip, while everyone else kind of scattered wherever there was space amongst the apartments. We took out Indianapolis, then tapered a bit for this past weekend's regatta here at home, the MACRA (Mid-American Collegiate Rowing Association) Championship, before prepping for this weekend.

I suppose I could mention how we've been doing competitively up to this point, since I'm pretty sure I rubbed my rower-ness in enough people's faces during the past year or so... I can't remember how we did in the fall races, but the spring races are all that really matter... From the beginning of the racing season, I believe our medal count goes as follows, out of six races so far, which includes races that didn't actually give us medals.

Gold: 2 / Silver: 4 / Bronze: 0

It should be noted that the two Golds were against a much less comparative field than the three main silvers (from the SIRA's, Indy Invite, and MACRA's) although Hobart (the other silver) was pretty decent too... We would've won that race if it hadn't been for those pesky kids if our six seat's oarlock hadn't decided to spontaneously open TWICE during the race... Also, silver doesn't really count as much when it's only a match race with two boats.

***

So I told you all that to get to this. I'm now back in bow seat of the Men's Novice 8, and we're seeded 2nd for this weekend, behind St. Joseph's University. I'm sick of silver medals and I'm out of betting shirts. We can... We WILL... pull this off.

I need to get to bed. Van leaves at 6A for a fifteen-hour drive. Wish me luck, I'll see all of you in a week or so.

dadvail.org/

Check back for Regatta Rumblings and the results.

Short journal this time.

So yeah, I have to get ready to go so I can be in Parking Lot K by 7:30... The van for Oak Ridge leaves at 8... I'm in van "Bowser", since all of our van names are themed to Mario this time... There's a van Mario, a van Luigi, a van Yoshi, a van Peach, and the aforementioned van Bowser...

I personally think it's cooler than the time that the vans were named after cereal, but not quite to the first race of last fall when we had "Van Morrison" and "Van Halen" and "Van Helsing" and "Van Gogh" and such... Oh well, we'll be there for a week, I'll report back to you guys next week.

Peace out, yo. Tennessee awaits.

You know, if I had actually made this journal earlier this week when I had intended to, I would’ve been talking about how I was glad that the snow was finally starting to freaking melt. Yes, all the feet of snow that we’d received in the blizzard earlier in the month was only a few inches away from being completely gone; all the sidewalks and roads were fine, most of the grass was getting muddy again, and for the best indicator, the Saturday snow removal group and I did absolutely NOTHING since the entire campus had already been shoveled, salted, and melted.

Which kind of makes me feel glad that I traded my last snow removal volunteer day, which would have been this coming Wednesday, for Saturday morning, even as inconvenient as it was to get up at 4:30 on a weekend. After a blisteringly hot week of temps in the 30’s and 40’s, we suddenly received a Winter Storm Warning that’s listed through 7AM Monday morning, and with it, at least two inches of snow to boot. And counting, if you look outside. The snow this time seems a lot finer than the clumpy snow from the blizzard, but it’s still a pain in the arse to drive in, as I also noticed during a Meijer run earlier. Oh well, this time I don’t have to shovel. Although I'll definitely say that cleaning the snow and ice off cars remains an amazingly annoying task.

Wish I had another snow day, though.


It's effectively Midterms right now, or at least the next week will be, although to the best of my knowledge the only classes I'll actually be having a proper Midterm Exam in are COM101 and CTH151. Still, it's definitely a stress inducer.

Other than that, in Calculus we've finished the second of four exams not including the final, and apparently it didn't go over well with the class; hence we'll be apparently spending the majority of Monday's session cleaning up our tests and submitting them again for extra credit to help us out. The Newton's Method Math Lab project will not be due until well after Spring Break, which is a plus.

Communications has remained fairly standard for a while now, we've been cruising through the chapters at a rather decent pace. Sometime in the future we'll have group and individual projects to work on some more, and my prof has actually encouraged me to look into the animation deal more; she says she'll make sure the other professor I heard was the so-called 'animation queen' is actually the proper one before I go asking.

Big lecture hall classes like my Psychology class rarely deviate that much from an established norm, particularly when the head of the department is the professor, but that hasn't really been a bad thing so far. The class has for the most part been the easiest for me since it's mostly a standard lecture and note-taking class, but Prof. Henderson remains cool and continues to sound like Mr. Gath.


This is the week before Spring Break starts, which translates to this being Test Week, which, well, sucks. From what I've gathered from the training plan, it's mostly tapering at first that culminates in a rather crucial 2000-meter test on Thursday. It'll be the first one we'll have done all year, which is a bit of a stark contrast to the two 2K's a week strategy we had for a good part of high school crew.

Then again, high school crew also had that one week where we had a 2K on Monday and we ALL had to do better, or we had to do one on Tuesday, with the same conditions. We ended up stopping after Wednesday when our coach apparently realized that we were on the verge of mutiny. But I digress.

The 2K'll probably just be a good 6:30-6:45 minutes of pure pain and agony, followed by a good ten minutes of stumbling around like an extra from a zombie movie. At least for the most part I think that's all we're doing; the day after I think we're just doing weights and no actual workout. That's all fine and lovely, though, since I believe directly after that we depart for Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

I have no idea what Oak Ridge will be like so far, since I have yet to receive an itinerary; hopefully it'll have a somewhat similar workout schedule as the Winter Technical Vacation in Florida, which I believe was sufficiently staggered as to not induce too much mental exhaustion by the end of the day. Hopefully.

At least we'll be on proper water again, which will certainly be a nice change after four months (with the Floridian exception) on rowing machines. Although I'll admit, on what I later learned was the last 20-minute test of the season, I surprised myself by knocking an entire half-second off my PR split. Before you ask, a half-second is a hella lot more than you'd think, especially since I hadn't even matched my PR since last Fall.

I think maybe I just do better when it starts to get warmer; hopefully this little snow storm right now'll be more of a burp in the whole weather scheme of things. The weather's had a great deal of influence on a lot of my performance issues lately. Being from a somewhat milder climate hasn't really helped my body readjust to the beautifully bitter Michigan winters, and I've had a serious issue with my mucous membrane drying out overnight, from how remarkably dry my dorm room has gotten.

This is probably due in part to sleeping without heat back home in a somewhat more humidified house, compared to sleeping with heat here. My parents ended up getting me a humidifier, which I think has helped a little so far, even though for some reason whenever I add the requisite salt for it to make more steam, the steam ends up making my room smell like Auntie Anne's Pretzels. Now that I've sufficiently either predictably grossed you out or confused you, I can move on.


Not really that much on the visual scene has been finished lately; I haven't really had much of anything to scan. The status on Requests and Trades and that like, for anyone interested, are being moved to the Shoutboard, so if you're interested you'll need the full journal view for that.

I've mostly been working on written stuff on the creative scene, mostly editing character biographies and working on the universe bible for a few of my different continuities. Hopefully things will get easier from there, that way I can just refer people to the universe bible instead of having to nutshell it in every individual biography.

My roommate's unfortunately playing the accordion right now.

On the topic of my roommate, a good portion of my weekend was spent being the unwitting star of my roommate's rather emo-y student film, for his Sound and Video (I think that's what it was) class. It mostly involved me walking around various parts of the campus looking depressed, and punting a bag full of recyclables into a ravine. He says he'll clean it up, but hopefully he does so we're not attacked by Captain Planet.

I also got to walk down to the vending machines in my dorm in my pajamas, stare at a Butterfingers bar and then chuck it into a wall, have the obligatory "main character feeling down while all of his friends stand grouped behind him" shot, and mimed getting hit by an invisible car on one of the pedestrian bridges downtown. This is all going to be dubbed over by a strangely hypnotic music track he made with his instruments and this giant mixing board he got, so hopefully it'll be interesting, even if I'm not a fan of being filmed as much as I'm not a fan of having pictures taken. It seems to be a requisite for all college students to be in at least one weird student film, so I guess I've done my part.


It's snowing pretty hard outside. I'd hate it if we got another snow day. </sarcasm> Well, I'll find out sometime tomorrow morning; my first class fortunately isn't until 10 on Mondays. I'll have new Homestar and new Lil'Formers to look forward to, hopefully. Peace out.

Or, as I almost called it, "West Michigan Blizzard 2007". Yep, the incentive for me to write a journal for the first time since before the New Year's pretty much ended up being the fact that I'm currently buried in at least a foot or two of snow and don't really have much of anything else to do.

Yep, I was told repeatedly to expect mass quantities of the white stuff when I decided to go to school in Michigan, so I guess this is kind of par for the course. 'Course the temperatures are now also down in the single digits and negatives so that's always fun as well; it's just too damn cold, though. You can't even go tubing or skiing because the cold'll just go right through gloves and balaclavas and everything. Not cool. Well, it is cool, but in the literal sense.

And I guess there're some things that actually CAN cancel college classes. All this weekend since late Friday the campus has been effectively shut down, and from what I've seen on the school's website it will be for tomorrow too, so I get an actual college snow day! That's almost a unique achievement in itself, really, but then again, when there's that much snow on the ground and it's that cold, it must make sense somehow. Whatever works, I guess.


I've got effectively a month of semester behind me; I'd forgotten how effectively short the GVSU semesters are. It's already February and we're less than a month away from Midterms already, although this has the added benefit of like I probably mentioned, Finals being the end of April. Classes are doing surprisingly well for me, but I guess that can be more attributed to me becoming more at ease with the university concept and grasping what all I have to do to succeed in class.

MTH 201, Calculus, is proceeding much nicer and easier than last semester, even if the latter is probably from the fact that it's a retake and all. I've gotten a lot more comfortable with the class which is more than likely because it's in the afternoon and not at eight in the morning, but still. I'd like to think I've convinced my professor that I actually want to succeed in his class, and I think I've done well at that so far.

I'll also say that there's not that many things as inherently satisfying  as your calculus professor passing back papers and simply saying "Good job on the test, Dan." That let off so much suspense on me, even if we haven't actually gotten the tests back yet. It's just good to here, and I hope I can keep this up for the rest of the semester.

COM 101, Communications, has been rather interesting so far. The first part of the semester so far had rather depressing undertones as my professor's husband passed away, leaving us with both cancelled classes and substitutes, but she's returned and is feeling better now, so that's a plus.

We've already been formed into groups for future group projects, and my group is planning on doing a mock propaganda film advertising the university in the style of 1930's era German propaganda films. That should be interesting, to say the least.

PSY 101, Introductory Psychology, has been one of the quietest yet more interesting classes I have. It's been fairly uneventful in the sense of making new friends or interesting other things happening since it's a gigantic lecture hall class and I haven't had the same seats twice, but the professor is good. He's also the chair of the Psych department at GVSU, so he's apparently damn good, really. We've had one exam in there so far, which was a multiple-choice scantron test, and also painfully easy, so I guess that's good as well.

CTH 151, Acting 1; this one started out rather uncomfortably with an incredibly awkward sense of stage fright on my part, culminating in a tremendously embarrassing monologue attempt. Fortunately for myself and my GPA, I believe I've overcome the awkwardness and gotten a lot more at ease with it, as my second monologue presentation came off a lot less robotic and scared than my debut monologue.

I'm definitely not ready for prime time or much of anything yet, but I'm hopefully on my way there. By the way, my acting professor wrote the book mentioned in the "Reading" heading.


We're less than a month away from Spring Break and the initiation of the spring water season, so we've begun the shift from distance pieces to pure power pieces on the ergs. I did end up finishing the million-meter challenge, and I'm awaiting the monogramming of the gym bag I received as a reward.

The Florida trip went reasonably well; the weather was excellent, the lake was excellent, and the beach was excellent. Well, except for all the man 'o wars and the rip current. Like, five of our guys got stung by the man 'o wars and one of them had the scabs from it until like, just a few weeks ago still.

Also, I learned I need to take a remedial swimming course or something since I got stuck in this nasty rip current right over this part of the beach that was full of holes, so even though I was mostly taller than the water, I kept falling down and basically almost-drowning. Fortunately, I didn't, otherwise I wouldn't be typing this. Still scary as hell, though.

Another funny thing that happened during the Florida break was just plain and out something I thought I'd never see. I'll have to browse my friends' accounts on Facebook to see if they've posted the pictures yet, but still. One of the days I was rotated into the frosh 4 instead of the frosh 8, the Frosh 8, driving the Spirit, somehow managed to flip the fracking boat. Not swamp, not beach, flip.

There seems to be a curse for a freshman crew driving the Spirit to have something horrible happen to them.

Fortunately, unlike last year's incident, this year's Spirit Misadventure resulted in no boat damage, just a lot of ego damage. I guess what happened was the coxswain was trying to hurriedly align the Spirit amongst the other boats and turn to prepare to do race pieces, but they ended up taking like, five straight backing strokes before she ordered port side to row. Bad idea. Port's oars apparently dug into the water and pulled the boat into a painfully slow, unrecoverable flip.

I wish I'd been facing the other way when it happened. Oh well, we saw it, and we heard the hilarious aftermath, including Coach verbally destroying anybody that tried to swim away from the boat. They were just really damn lucky they flipped it where they did, in a cove near a bunch of condos' private beach thing, where they got it un-swamped and dumped it out. I can't even imagine what would've happened if they'd flipped it on the side of the lake that didn't really have anything but a bunch of mangrove trees for a shore. Or the middle of the lake, for that matter.

We never did get to go to Disney, although we did go to a Jai-Alai place and bet on stuff. No, I didn't win anything, although they had good French Fries. New Year's we spent in Bahama Breeze, a seafood restaurant where I ordered chicken. Kind of inherently contradictory, but even though I hate seafood, that's where everyone was going, so, eh.

Florida notwithstanding, I'm still basically trying to beat or beat up two or so other freshman for bow seat in the aforementioned Spirit.  This might become easier if our biggest freshman, at a ridiculous 6'7" and like, 230, ends up going varsity, which wouldn't be much of a stretch since he's already the third-fastest out of ALL the guys. But still, it's hard to say. I personally think I've noticed a sudden increase in my speed this past week, but it's still too soon to tell. I hope it was. An increase, that is.

Another thing that's slightly irksome occurred during the Saturday morning practice, where our task was to simply pull the fastest 500-meter split in 20 minutes. My personal record on the 20' piece previously was a 1:49.8 split. Pretty good. The team goal on Saturday was for the entire team's average to be one second lower in PR split. Okay.

I pulled a 1:49.9.

You know, I've done pitifully bad on 20' minute pieces before, being an amazing eight seconds off my PR before (not a good amazing), but missing my PR by a tenth of a second is even more aggravating than blowing it completely. If I'd started sprinting just a minute sooner, I could keep asking myself "What if" questions until the cows freeze over. Oh well, that didn't make any sense.

Even though the rest of the university stuff remains closed, we're actually still scheduled to have practice tomorrow, although it's reportedly 'any time between 1-7' instead of being a set time, so I guess they just figured if you're physically not buried in snow you could come. Whatever works, I guess.


I'd like to think I'm starting to escalate back into the art scene; for whatever reason it's gotten incredibly easier the more comfortable and the better I've been doing with my classes. A counselor, a psychiatrist, a psychologist, or a parent could probably explain why, but I can't. Oh well, it works. I've gotten a lot of non-art stuff done lately like the influx of deviant stamps and the new CSS journal stuff, but there's been a decent amount of art flying around.

At the writing time of this journal I'm consolidating what my original plan for the journal header was into a deviantID, and hopefully my theoretical company's logo won't be splashed around my front page too much. It should work better than that Jeopardy! one; even if I still think it's a fairly original idea, I just can't get myself to like the looks of it.

New designs for Camaron and other furry characters of mine should be forthcoming, as well as perhaps some Transformers fanart and more bird-like robots. I've also been writing a lot of things like biographies for my characters, and depending on who you ask they've either gotten pathetically over-long or amazingly thorough for characters that started out as fancharacters, but then again, that's all opinion. Still, I can keep hoping that I'll be able to successfully pitch a series or three down the road.


I think this is one of the longest if not THE longest journal I've ever written, to the point that my fingers are frankly starting to hurt and I'm probably going to get carpel tunnel.  I guess that's my fault for letting my life backlog since late December, but at least if I update more in the future I shouldn't have do describe a month plus in a few paragraphs.

Hope you like the new journal set-up I got here; all my stamps've moved to the Shoutboard plus a little dohicky I picked up from WZZM... I love the Weatherball. It's even cooler in person, but unfortunately it's a wee far from campus. Maybe I should just go downtown more, though. Oh, and the two flags are just showing off a little quiet national pride, me being half-Korean and all. Nothing major.

With that, I leave you with a head full of unnecessary information and myself with negative lows and accumulating snow drifts. Peace out.