At Home in CO

belated and a dangerous precedent

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Everyday I think I should find something to post about and then don’t and it’s becoming a dirty habit, I’ll have to try to do better.  My classes have once again picked up the work load.  My teacher assigned a full length book review, a three part midterm, an assignment and over 130 pages of reading for the same two weeks and needless to say I’m attempting not to sink under the joy of that much busy work.  Other than that things are just peachy…

Matt’s dad, Larry, for those of you who read this and aren’t his family, will be here anytime now and Matt is super excited to show him around.  I couldn’t even convince him to go out for Rockband the other night – he had to get ready for Larry.  I just finished making a movie for a class project, which was incredibly neat.  It’s five and a half minutes of stills and video with voiceovers and background music and a dvd menu and credits that call me the co-director.  I’m massively egotistical about the whole thing.  Although, I must give credit to just about everyone else who did all the tough parts – Matt – for acting like a really old drunk suicide risk & Brant, of course for telling me how to do things on the mac besides check my email and admire it’s aesthetics.  I will post a link to the video on Youtube as soon as I remember to ask Emily to borrow her password to post on her account.  And, then, you can all congratulate me and Shauna on its supreme marvelousness.  Now, I’ve got three weeks of clean laundry to put away, a paper to finish and a ten page article to read before tomorrow morning so I’ll leave all the other goodness till next time.  Wish my belabored brain luck.

 

yours,

alaina

At Home in CO

Lovely Fridays

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So, it is a lovely Friday here in the middle of the country.  The sun is shining, I’m sure a bird is singing somewhere and I don’t have a physical boatload of homework this weekend!

I forgot how quickly school weeks go by whether or not you accomplish anything…..  But I’m hoping to do better this weekend.  I’m also hoping that next week I wont have to walk past a 20 feet tall anti abortion display with graphic pictures everyday of next week…  Keep your fingers crossed!  It was there all week in the middle of a walk way and it got really offensive.  I mean, why do they get to put up the display on campus?  The pro-kill-the-fetus people mind their own buisness, why can’t everybody else.  However, it was humorous that on one of the free speech boards in front of the madness someone wrote “WARNING: Necrophiliac Prenatal Pedophiliac Photos Ahead!”  That was hilarious.

Matt and I are getting new couches next week!  YAYAYAY!  We’re buying the cast-offs of a friend who got a new couch and I’m super super unbelievably excited.  They are a honey beigey color and very cushy.  And there is no evil spine killing bar in the back!  Matt has his doubts about them but I’m excited enough for the both of us and at the very least they aren’t too expensive and they will be an improvement.  We even found a friend of a friend to save us from having to pay to rent a truck to move them…  It’s so exciting.

Tonight is RockBand night at Emily’s where I’ve promised to try and sing on Medium instead of Easy, which is scary and means I will suck, but apparently we will get more “fans” that way, so I’m taking my lumps.  Tomorrow is bad movie night with a bunch of girls from my class, I think this week is “From Justin to Kelly,” which I can’t actually say I’m looking forwards to, but “Crossroads” was fun so I’ll go with them that they can improve the experience.

I think that ends the interesting things I have to say, so I shall now go pretend that I’m going to start homework.

We miss you all and Happy October!

yours,

alaina

Adventures in Colorado

Post 22!

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Now that I am 23, I of course have no such thing for such trivial things as keeping in touch through our lovely website… just kidding.

Things have been crazy here. My classes picked up speed so suddenly. I’ve spent more hours in the CSU library in the last two weeks than I did in the WOU library in my first two years there! My classes are okay, but not great, I’m a little disappointed to be honest, I had such high hopes. Short Story is a pretty frivolous in class and Chekhov is making me harbor thoughts of melancholy, melodramatic suicide. Research is a LOT of painful busy work, but I know it’s good for me – kind of like spinach, I imagine, but more expensive. Critical theory is like having a really, really, really, smart person talk to you in a language you don’t understand and without oxygen breaks for 50 minutes straight. yeah.

But, I have made fantastic new friends and recurring acquaintances, so Matt and I aren’t spending quite as much time alone in the house with the dogs. I’ve hosted two non-movie nights so far, where the only movie watching accomplished were on youtube, but they were so much fun. And, Matt and I have been frequently Emily’s to play Rock Band. I can do respectably not awful on the easy setting while she and matt play on expert and medium/hard, respectively. I am not envious – I just want to beat them up a little. But my ‘star power’ is screaming at the microphone which I think then gives me extra points and sparkles on the screen, so I just amuse myself with that while they kick my butt…

Now, as for my birthday, that was pretty awesome. I had a crappy day in school doing library busy work but after all that Matt made us reservations and I got marginally dressed up and we went out to dinner at The Melting Pot, which I guess is a whole change of fondue restaurants. Well, it was fantastic. We had yummy bread, veggies and apples in cheese fondue to start, then numerous random meats that we cooked “coq au vin,” followed by chocolate s’mores fondue with fruit, cheesecake and random goodies to finish. Gotta say, that was one of the neatest restaurant experiences ever, it was a lot of fun. And, with that I magically became 23 and a grown-up. Or not.

Anyways, I must leave the computer now or I wont be able to ignore the paper I need to write anymore.

yours,

Alaina

Adventures in Colorado

I was just brained by a butterfly.

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I was just brained by a butterfly.  I’m not kidding.  A butterfly, or possibly just strangely pretty moth, just flew directly into the center of my forehead.  Hard enough to feel it too.  Had this butterfly or moth been slightly larger or more forceful, I could have been injured!  Really!  Luckily, I was not harmed in this ordeal and simply now have an interesting anecdote to share with you all.  Thank goodness.

yours,

Alaina

Adventures in Colorado

Mt. Evans

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For Labor Day weekend we all (dogs included) decided to go up to Mt. Evans,the tallest mountain unto which you can drive to (14,130 ft).  It was quite a drive!  The road was literally wedged into the side of a cliff, not a drive you wanna take if your scared of heights!  As we neared the top of the mountain I noticed my breathing was changing.  I was breathing twice as frequently.  Also I began feeling nauseated.  When we got to the top we started walking around checking out the great view and at times I felt very dizzy.  I guess this makes sense seeing how I get motion sickness out at sea, I get altitude sickness too!  Which kinda sucks because I like going up to the top of high mountains.  But, the awesome view is worth it.

On the way down we saw a Pika.  Alaina was excited to see that tiny little critter hopping around collecting food and hiding in the ground.  I must say it was quite entertaining.  If the dogs could have seen over the wall, they would have probably pulled like hell to catch that thing.  Also, we saw some mountain goats!  We parked the car and climbed up the hill to get a closer view of them.  There was a heard of them, and they were just laying around in the sun, old ones and young ones.  We were standing within 10 feet of them!  I wanted to get closer, but their horns on top looked a little intimidating.

Finally, on the way back home we stopped at a brewery in Idaho springs called Tommy Knockers.  The beer was delicious.  I think that is my 3rd favorite brewery for taste in beer.  The first of course being Lost Coast and 2nd Ice Harbor.  Their Oatmeal Stout and nut brown ale was to almost die for.  And to top it off we had really good food.  Alaina had some delicious french fries, dumped in buffalo sauce and blue cheese, and I had a taco salad, a little less creative, but very scrumptious.

Adventures in Colorado

First Days

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Well, two days down and …  many many more to go.  I’ve had all three of my classes now and they sound incredibly intimidating, but I’m optimistic.  MWF is Reading Literature: Recent Theories which is over crowded because it’s required and popular and is basically a class that will study every critical theory for literary or cultural criticism that the professor can fit in – which is quite a few given the extra long terms out here.  This class sounds insanely difficult, but only one or two papers and no tests or oral presentations, so that’s something.  TR are Research Methods and Theory and Genre Studies: The Short Story.  Research methods sounds like it’s going to be a great many hoops to jumps through but I know it’ll good for me in the end and Short Story sounds great until the oral presentation part and then the actual writing of a short story!  If I had that kind of creative mind I would be an MFA, not an MA, yikes!  Maybe I’ll write about the poor little academic who got lost in the vicious wonderland of critiquing her own short story and ended mad as a hatter…. Good plan.

Besides that I biked to and from school yesterday, which so incredibly nifty.  And then incredibly painful (up hill) and I’m officially a registered biking student.  Yay.  I love not having to find parking!  Although so does everybody else, so all 15,000 bikes per day (literally the average) appear to be fighting me for the bike rack.

I must go now, I cant believe I’m saying this again, but I have homework.  Weird… And neat.

everything

This one is for you, Mariko!

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The Short Stories – Ernest Hemingway

The Aspern Papers and Other Stories – Henry James

Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil – Alain Badiou

Gender Trouble – Judith Butler

The Foucault Reader – Paul Rabinow (Ed.)

Open Secrets: Stories – Alice Munro

Ten Little Indians – Sherman Alexie

Sexual/Textual Politics – Toril Moi

Gilles Deleuze – Claire Colebrook

Deconstruction – Christopher Norris

Marxism and Literature – Raymond Williams

Interpreter of Maladies – Jhumpa Lahiri

Where I’m Calling From – Raymond Carver (you should see the cover – guy has scary bug eyes.)

Chatterton – Peter Ackroyd

Literary Research Guide (5 ed.) – James L. Harner (it’s gi-normous and scary)

 

It’s not gonna be the same without in my corner.

yours, 

alaina

Adventures in Colorado

12,020 ft

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A view from the top!
A view from the top!

On our way up to Rocky Mountain National Park we stopped at a place called the Dam Store.  This gift store was not your normal gift store.  Yeah it had the t-shirts, post cards, key chains, and rocks, but it also had jerky.  Now this jerky wasn’t your standard beef jerky.  You could also buy buffalo, venison, pheasant, alligator, kangaroo, and other strange types of jerky.  While we were buying some buffalo jerky the woman at the counter told us that the two most beautiful states in the US were Colorado and Oregon.  After seeing Rockey Mountain National park and the foot hills in our front yard, I tend to think she was right.

While traveling through the park I was awestruck by the monstrosity of every towering peak in front of us.  It turns out that the road we were traveling on is the highest consecutive road in all the United States.  At these elevations trees stop growing and only a thin layer of grass is present, we were driving through the TUNDRA!  It was kinda weird to think that we were driving above the elevation of mount hood!  The air was certainly thinner and I felt slightly nauseated any time we hiked up little hills.  Quite a beautiful place.  Next trip is to Mt. Evans, where you can drive to the top:  14,264 ft!

The weather here is something else…  We have had really hot weather, really cold weather, hail the size of peas, lightning, thunder, windy, everything under the sun.  The weather here keeps life interesting, thats for sure!

I hope all of you guys can make it to Colorado to check this place out.  It has been pretty fun living here and being a tourist at the same time.  I’m looking forward to school starting on Monday.  I’m actually enrolled in a weather prediction class.  Now maybe I will actually know what I’m talking about when I forcast weather!  OSU taught about 2-3 courses per term, here they teach about 10-15, so I think I will get a quality education here.

Until next time,

-Matt

At Home in CO

Green thumbs? Try sore thumbs.

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Today we planted grass.  Here’s how much fun we had.  Matt got up at 6 and turned on the water to moisten the tough as clay back yard.  Next, we overslept, which meant doing all of this in the 80 degree sunshine.  After a trip to Home Depot for organic matter (sheep poo and peet moss) and seeding soil, we came home and hand till-ed the backyard and I trowl-ed out some of the weeds.  Now, our back yard is approximately 706 square feet, which isn’t really that big, so hand tilling with a rake, no biggie, right?  WRONG.  Between the incredible denseness of the soil and the weak ability of the rake and rakers it was really hard work and I can still feel the muscle aches all over my hands from such desperate gripping and pushing and prodding.  But, a couple hours later we had tilled in at least a couple inches. We then went to lay down the sheep poo and seeding soil mix only to discover that the Master Gardener (that was her job title, really) was completely misleading in saying we only needed a cubic foot of the mixture.  So, then came trip two to Home Depot.  After sprinkling in six more bags of grass growing goodness, we raked that around and were actually ready to use grass!  We sprinkled on a bag of seed, going over it twice in the multiple directions like good little instruction followers, raking in between each coat.  This was the first fun part of the adventure in gardening, turns out sprinkling grass seed is unbelievably entertaining and zen when all you’ve done all day is attacking dirt with a rake or trowel.  Next came sprinkling the fertilizer – also cool, it looked like little rocks in a whole rainbow of colors.  Teal, Blue, Green, White, Tan(ish).    And, that brought us to twenty minutes of trying to determine how to use one sprinkler to water an L-shaped yard.  But, we are now finished……

EXCEPT to water it three times a day and not walk on it for 3 to 4 mowings.

Are you grateful for your already established lawn yet?

 

All this is only in the hope that the grass will establish before the first frost, which could be within the next month and that it will further survive the winter with minimal damage so we will only have to repeat parts of the project then.

In all fairness the whole thing was kind of fun, if not painful.  And, if the grass grows you can all bow down and look on in wonder and at the master gardeners that we will have become (in our own heads).  🙂

Stay tuned to discover whether or not either of us can move tomorrow without muscle aches and whimpering (or swearing).

 

yours,

Alaina

At Home in CO

Catch-Up Time

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Alright, So here’s how it went.

We drove here in one 9-ish hour day and one 11-ish hour day.  It was long and hot, but there was some really cool scenery and one incredible rainbow.  I think it looked so neat because there was nothing to interfere with the view, all flat lands.  I’ll try to learn to upload a picture.  I listened to my ipod for so long that I actually killed the battery, it was impressive.  I listened an actually unabridged Pride and Prejudice, which was way more fun to listen to than you’d think.

On arriving, it was an entire week and a half of HOT HOT HOT days, and the occassional (thank god) nights.  The city is pretty nifty, there is a swanky downtown area that is somewhat distant from all the strip mall areas.  It’s big but manageable and there are a ton of everything: movie theaters, breweries, restaurants, parks, cutesy stores of crap you cant afford to buy but is fun to look at…

Our apartment sits on the west edge of town and out of my bedroom window we actually have a partial view of the foothills, which is gorgeous.  There is a giant A on the hill, which is apparently a leftover from when CSU used to be the “Aggies” (dont ask me what an “Aggie” is, i dont know, best guess: an agate).  The apartment looks a lot like the one on Conifer (for those of you who saw it), except bigger and with a garage.  We’re currently trying to figure out how to get grass in the backyard.  I’m duke-ing it out with the bed for room to function in the big bedroom and Matt is all set by his lonesome in the little room.  Lucky Punk.  🙂  We’ve painted walls in the living room, hall, and bedroom assorted dusky red/brown/tan colors and it’s really made the place feel less like a generic townhouse.  I’ll write one of these later about our adventures in home decorating/repair – it’ll be so pathetic you’ll die laughing.

We’re both all set with new licenses, ID cards, Matt got new plates, and now we just have to wait till Monday for classes to start.  In the interim I should probably recommence the unpacking – we’re both getting tired of the tripping and toe-stubbing in the hallway. 

More to come, my darlings, and thanks again Brant and Mariko, I love the site.

yours, Alaina