Disjointed Dump of Seriousness

(Note: This wasn't ACTUALLY published until 2016, when I found the fully completed draft hiding out among all the published posts. I had finished it and completely forgotten to post. As a favor to the Meg of 2014, I decided to remedy that.)

I am ashamed. I said I would post more often, and I haven't posted in more than a month. In my defense, we had midterms in the middle of October and I just needed to give myself a break from HARD THINGS. Also, I spent the last few Sundays talking to people here or at home, which is rather more important than blogging. Right now, I ought to write in my journal, but I don't think I can do it with the guilt of this neglected blog riding on my conscience.

A few weeks ago, Dad asked me to rate my experience here at SVU on a scale of 1 to 10, and I placed it at 10. (I think. I don't actually remember what I said, but the sentiment was that of 10.) Have there been some things that haven't lived up to my expectations? Yes. The food is first on the list, but I can forgive that because I like to think that I wouldn't have reason to complain about it if I wasn't a paranoid vegetarian. As it is, many meals are slightly traumatic as I determine to turn a blind eye to the fact that someone just dropped a chunk of beef in the beans, etc. But the staff really tries to provide us vegetarians with food we can eat, and I appreciate the thought.

As I was preparing to come here, a lot of people asked me why I'm going so far away to school and the only answer I had to give them was that this is the only school I wanted to go to. That fact remains the same. I miss Canada. I was lying in bed last night and it suddenly occurred to me that if I go to school here, I'm probably going to marry an American and end up living in the US. The idea is painful, in a way. A lot of kids talk about how they didn't realize how much they loved their families until they left, but I always knew that my family was the most important thing to me. The place where I hold all my regrets is in my appreciation for my country and my tiny little Magrath. The USA was the one who fought the revolution, who has all the cool places and the hustle of a bustling nation, but there is a distinct tranquility about Canada that I really miss. Canada: the 'invisible' nation. Where 'everybody's nice' and the world just looks clean.

Even with all of that, I want to come back to this school. I recognize that I am insanely blessed in that I love all of my teachers. Homework and classes can pile up at times and make my life go crazy, but I still savor every opportunity to sit in class and soak up whatever the teacher has to tell me. I feel like I have the world at my fingertips, and it shows. My life is changing. I started NaNoWriMo yesterday, and everything that I have learned in Tyranny & Totalitarianism came spilling out as my main character was learning how to bring down a country. I have some sort of crazy dream about working at NASA now. Dad is going to be so happy when I come home and know how to use a drill and build a wooden flat. Over the past few years, I've felt like I just didn't like to learn, but I do now. I'm excited for life now.

As you may know, I spent the last year wishing to die. It got better in March, but I still didn't really have any idea of what my life would be like if I lived to old age. On the one hand, I had a sort of hazy idea about getting married and having kids, but I couldn't picture it anymore. The other option, the one where I spent my days doing things I didn't really care about and then came home to a place that was cold and dark and empty, was seeming far more likely. Both ideas scared me, but they don't anymore. It's funny because during those months of depression, I chose the second option in my head. It wasn't the one that I wanted, but it was the one I could see. Now, as my life has opened up, I can see myself being happy whatever happens. The idea of marrying somebody doesn't seem alien to me anymore, but I think I could be happy if it was my lot to live alone. I've learned to love life again, and that makes me happy.

Sorry for the disjointed dump of seriousness. It just sort of came out, but I think I'll keep it. If all the testimonies given in sacrament today give an accurate depiction, this last week has been pretty hard on everybody, but I'm feeling at peace now. I've decided to do NaNoWriMo this year, if you missed the reference above. It is going to require writing 2,000 words a day (besides homework), and I'm still not quite sure how I'm going to do it, but I feel like I need to get this story out of my head before I can move on with life. (And yesterday's writing was pretty stinking fun.)

Good luck with your lives. I love you all.

Learning, and Growing... and, um... Illness?

Hello!

I know I missed last week, but that doesn't matter because I didn't even say I would post every week! The last couple weeks have passed in a bit of a blur. I can hardly believe it's been--what, three weeks now? Four! Time flies when you have a lot of homework.

I have learned a lot in the past month. Both about myself and the world around me. For example, I now know more than I ever did about the nature of light and how telescopes work. I know why Nero was a bad guy (though, at least according to Suetonius, Caligula was rather worse). I've learned that the children of Israel really were significantly more righteous than your average ancient culture, and that Hector of Troy was the first hero worth fangirling over.

I have also learned that I really need to brush up on my essay-writing skills. I will get my first paper back on Tuesday and half of me can't handle the anticipation, while the other half thinks it would be a good idea to go bury my head in the sand and pretend I did a good job. Thankfully, we will have writing conferences with our professor where we will go over the issues in our papers so we can up our grades.

Last week, I neglected to post even though I really wanted to. I have a public thank-you to make, you see. I woke up feeling rather ill on Wednesday morning and, despite my best efforts, I was not doing well by the end of the day. My sore throat made it hurt to breathe, while my stuffed up nose made it even harder. I was starting to feel nauseous and achy, as well as suffering from sudden chills. I knew that it was the 'freshman flu' everybody warned me about.

Terrified that I wouldn't be able to go to my classes the next day, I covered myself with essential oils and then prayed as hard as I could with a brain that felt wrapped in cotton that I would either get better, be sick only for Thursday, or that my sickness would be staved off until the weekend. I then slept for nearly a full twelve hours and I am very pleased to report that I was ten times better the next morning. I was still hoarse and congested, but the flu-like symptoms were gone. I know that a loving Heavenly Father saved me from a doom that maybe wasn't such a big deal in the grand scheme of things, but really felt like a big deal to me, and I want to bear witness of that.

There isn't really much else to say. Sarah and I got to talk to our ZoeyBrielle and Jocelyn last night, though they weren't quite sure what to make of us talking to them out of a screen instead of in person. We also got to talk to Dad and Meme, which was also great. For all those who were worried about me moving out, I'm doing very well. Surprisingly well. Time is going by so fast that I haven't really had the time to feel homesick. I mean, yeah, I want to see my family but it isn't something that I think about unless I think about it. You know what I mean?

School... and Stuff (Lame Stuff)

I have tried...
     ...and tried...
          ...and tried again to write this blog post. (Actually, that's a lie. I only actually tried to write this once before, but it was such a harrowing experience it counts for three.) The fact is that so much has happened in the last year I just can't cover it all. Heck, I can't even cover what has happened in the last three weeks.

So I have given up.  I am not going to try to cover it all. If I have something to say that relates to something that happened in the last year, I will give you the story as it comes up. Suffice it to say that in the last year, I went through the toughest things in my life so far and I came out alive. Mostly.

I also went away to school. Actually, that was just a few weeks ago. I'll be starting my third week of school tomorrow and it's going great. A little hectic at the moment since I have a presentation to give on Friday and I'm not near ready, but it'll be okay.

(Quick note: I'm going to try to blog more often, because it is a lot harder to start up blogging again than to never stop. So if I haven't posted in the last month, feel free to yell at me.)

So, anyway, I have some loved ones back home who probably have all sorts of questions for me. I'll try to cover the ones I know are coming, but go ahead and leave questions in the comments. Seriously. Do it. It'll make it easier for me to blog if I know what you want to know. (So make sure you only ask questions I know the answer to, 'cause otherwise I'll just make things up and stuff your head full of fluff.)

Question One: Has the hill killed me yet?

I don't think so? For those of you that don't know, that hill is how you get from main campus to The Lofts (the girls' dormitories). If you think it doesn't look like much, try climbing it when you're already sweating from the heat and worn out from the schoolwork. I think I'm going to die every time and then I end up taking the stairs instead of the elevator when I finally reach the building. Crazy right?

Apparently the walk gets slightly easier with time, but I'm really just dreading it in the winter. I'm considering packing a crazy carpet in my backpack.

And... I know I should write another question but I can't think of any and I'm already really sick of this blog post. I know it's lame, but that's allowed because this is my blog, so I can do what I want. Mwahahaha.


P.S. Please, please, please ask me questions. Funny questions are good. If you give me good questions, you avoid future lameness. It is an investment for the future.

Camp NaNo 2013: ILLUMINATE

The house has been blessedly quiet for the past few days, since my parents took my siblings on a fishing trip to B.C. I was invited along, but considering that I've been sick the past week, I'm terrified/grossed out by fish and I've been looking forward to a girls only party ever since I found out they were going... I declined.

There's another reason, too. Remember NaNoWriMo? I mentioned it in the last post? One month of crazy writing in November? Well, there are summer sessions. Camp NaNoWriMo they are called. I've only done the November NaNo before, but I'm trying to switch over to summer because I don't like how NaNoWriMo interferes with Christmas preparations. (I like to start getting ready in October.)

I also have a novella to write that I want to get finished as fast as possible. (At least, it's supposed to be a novella. It's stretching out pretty long in outlining.) I'm not going to bore anyone who doesn't care with details, but since I know some people will actually be interested in a few facts, I just want to give a quick overview.

This novella is a prequel to my six-year-WIP with the working title Taken. I came up with the idea for Taken when I was nine, so let's say it has grown a lot. It's taken a gigantic leap in the last few months, though, when I cut out major plot threads and reworked everything I'd planned about the plot.

I don't know if you understand this, but making changes that big on a six-year project is disorienting. To deal with that and really flesh out what the heck is going on in this story, I'm writing a prequel with the previous generation. Currently, I'm calling that Illuminate.

And boy am I glad I'm doing this. Everything I thought I knew had happened a mere twenty years before the story was a lie. I'm looking forward to a very fun filled, mind-numbing month. I probably won't check in again before August.

Reflection on NaNoWriMo 2012

Hello, everyone! As I sit here under my brother's bed to protect him while he tries to go to sleep, I decided to look back at the last work I did on my sort of WIP. (I haven't written in it since last October... I think) and compare it with my NaNoWriMo of 2012, the one no one is allowed to read.

I have affectionately nicknamed this unseen draft The Set Animal, a reference you will understand only if you have read The Kane Chronicles. (For those of you who haven't, this is a monster from Egyptian mythology that is gigantic, disgusting and generally monstrous.) I decided last year that the only real way for me to really experience thirty days of literary abandon is to ensure that I am the only person who will ever read it.

Looking over both my half-WIP and The Set Animal, I made an astonishing discovery.

The Set Animal may not be gorgeous, but it's fun.

My WIP, however, the thing I worked on for years, is dry as an oven after it was on Auto-Clean.

There is a very simple reason for this. It wasn't that the plot was mortally flawed, though it was. The Set Animal was worse in that regard, however. It was the simple fact that I wrung all the life out of it. Every time I sat down to write, I sweat and bled and stared at the page and got a few sentences out of it. Sentences that I wrote and rewrote until they were 'perfect'.

Now if I sweat that much picking the BEST word for every. single. word. How are my readers going to feel? Like they want to hit themselves in the head with a hammer until the pain goes away is my best guess. That's how I felt, reading it over. It was like the kind of poorly written classic that evil teachers make children read for poor behavior. The scene structure was okay, it was just painstaking to read.

So, I don't know if any of this made any sense. I may well read this in the morning and wonder what I was talking about. But I just want to say to anyone who reads this and has any kind of interest in writing: Don't sweat it. Learn everything you can about how to write well, but when the time comes to sit down and write it, have fun. Worry about making it look good as the last step. The first draft is for falling in love with the story and fleshing out the idea. Do that. Be happy.

The End.

Percy Jackson Birthday Party

Sam turned 10 last Monday. The poor boy has been sick for a few weeks now--an awful cough and lethargy being the main problems--but he was feeling a bit better on Monday so I let him eat his cake, despite my threats that he wouldn't be allowed to if he didn't get better soon. 

I loved this cake, though I didn't expect to. Mom bought the Whoppers a month ago and I've been trying to find a time when I could use them to decorate the cake. But as I was making the cake and taking the occasional taste of the icing, I was thinking how I would tell people about it. ("It was good. The icing worked well with the sweetness of the Whoppers, the ganache was a nice touch... the only mistake I made was, well, making a Whopper cake.")

Contrary to my expectations, I don't have to tell you that because the cake was phenomenal. The icing tasted far less sweet once it was on the cake, all the flavors worked together perfectly. I detest too much ganache, but I used a hairdryer to spread the little bit I put on the top of the cake into a thin layer. The cake even tasted better the second day.

But you probably don't care about the details of that and I'll be posting it on my food blog, anyway.

This treat deprived sick kid was very eager to dig in

Sam was only allowed one small piece of cake because I insisted he needed to treat himself well and get better. (The one who made the cake has quite a bit of weight in these matters.) Sam was convinced I had an ulterior motive. And I did, just not quite the one he expected...

A surprise birthday party! I'd been planning it since my own surprise party in January, but Sam still had no clue. He persisted in alternating between saying that surprise parties are lame, and complaining that he's never had one. 

After much debate, I discovered that Sam was wanting to do his own Percy Jackson themed birthday party this year, so I just took his ideas and improved upon them. Happily. I'm pretty sure I love those books more than he does, but he'd fervently deny that, so don't tell him.

For those of you who haven't read the Percy Jackson books, I just want to tell you why l love them. Rick Riordan created fascinating, full characters and put them into a fascinating world. I'll be the first to pronounce that Greek mythology is really dirty, but--unlike the movie--the books are clean. Percy is blind to what it says about the Olympians morals that they have so many half-mortal kids, but that's completely natural. People don't want to believe bad things about the people they love. Beneath the fun story, Riordan has powerful messages about perspective.

The invitations were a lot of fun to make. I tweaked the words from an invite I found online, printed them in Greekesque lettering and printed them. Then, I poured raspberry herbal tea on them and let them dry in the sun. Then I burned the edges and tied them up into nice little scrolls.

The next fun order of business was the Medusa head pinata. It was a complicated business. The idea behind the pinata was simple: Blow up a balloon, paper mache it, and decorate! In practice... it exploded twice. So if you make a pinata, don't put it somewhere very warm to speed the drying. Even if you already have four layers on it.

The nose

The best part of making this pinata was watching how clueless Sam was. I said I was making a globe and he believed me. I said the nose on the 'globe' was Mt. Everest and he believed it. It was also fun to fill it with 'ambrosia' and 'Hermes Multi-Vitamins'.

They had to be blindfolded so Medusa wouldn't turn them to stone

They had a wooden sword to hit the pinata with

Sam was an hour late arriving to the two hour party, so we were pretty rushed the entire time but we had a fun time. Erik dressed up as Poseidon for me and kept the kids entertained while we waited. He also taught them sword fighting and led the Poseidon team for Capture the Flag.

 Poseidon's team flag and swords

Athena team (I led this one)

After we got Sam out of the house, I had two hours to get the party things ready and over to the pond for the party. I was rushed enough I ended up leaving about half of the things behind, but the rest of the family was able to bring them later. The toughest bit was frosting the cake, which I had ten minutes to do. And it was an ice cream cake. I have never made an ice cream cake. But I had the right tools so it turned out pretty well. I forgot to take a picture until it was almost gone, though, so you can't see the entirety of it.

And that's it! I could go on and tell the story of tree limbs breaking off with the party guests in them... but the post is getting long enough as it is.

Incoming Blog!

(Note from 2016: This post was written back when the title of the blog was Rambling Through Life.)

So, yeah, I've started another blog.

If you're reading this, you probably found it through my other blog, where I already explained why I was starting this one. Just in case you didn't read that, I'll just say it again. Meg's 1000 Words is too crowded with all the things in my life, so I started Rambling Through Life to keep my life straight. This blog is about the things I do in my life, for the information of the people who actually care.

An explanation for the name: I like to ramble--as Grandpa knows from the 'hike' we went on in Langley. A ramble is a time to go the places you love because you want to go there. It is a time to live and breathe and do what you want without worrying about hurrying to the destination. This blog will be that for me. I'm sorry if I get carried away sometimes jabbering on about something not especially clear or important; but it's a ramble. Expect it.

Also, note that the URL is megramblingthroughlife.blogspot.com. I forgot the 'meg' once and ended up somewhere else. While it looks like a lovely blog, it isn't mine.