Sophomore year...what!?!?!?!

Ok, so I'm a bad person, it has been a year since I posted something here, but...I've managed to remember my username and password so here's at least one post for this year.

In short...summer was good...not long enough, but really good. One of the best parts was the end: I came to Maine early and spent a week with Hannah in Orono, and actually spent most of that time up at her camp on Ragged Lake. We just relaxed, explored the lake in the canoe, climbed Big Spencer Mountain, did a lot of crossword puzzles, I saw my first moose...in fact a saw a mama moose and her baby, we played the guitar, made s'mores, went night swimming under the brilliant stars...took the canoe out at night to watch the moon set over the mountain and stargaze...basically it was one of the best weeks of my life. Here are some pics from the trip

The Top pic is a view of the camp from the lake...it was completely isolated, we didn't see another human being until we got back to civilization. The next pic is the moon above Big Spencer Mountain which we climbed to the top of. The rest are just pictures of our excursion and the lake in general...it was a great time!!

After my week with Hannah in central Maine, we headed the two hours Sou

th to Brunswick to begin our sophomore year in college. We moved into our lovely apartment and only spent about two hours trying to figure out the best way to arrange our room, but we really love it. Especially having our own kitchen with a stove, oven and full size fridge, as well as having our own bathroom. Here are some pictures of our living quarters.

The first pic is of our living room as seen from the front door, the next pic is of our medicine cabinet in our bathroom which we were all very excited about, it was one of the first things we organized. The third pic is of the living room from the opposite doorway. Then the bedroom, which was surprisingly huge, and the last pic is of our beautiful kitchen.

We really enjoy our room, and then there are the three girls living downstairs who are our close friends, so essentially there are six of us living together in two rooms. It's a very nice set up. We're already having a lot of fun, the first weekend here (last weekend) we took a trip to the flea market to supplement our living areas with cool things like butter dishes and washboards. We also had a huge tie-dying party which was quite successful and a lot of fun...when we finished, Hannah and I found that we had too much dye left, so we had a bit of a skirmish, leaving us quite colorful!!

So far the year looks like it's going to be really good. In our two rooms combined we're pretty sure we have a total of fourteen instruments that we are all at different levels of proficiency in playing, but it's really fun, let's see if I can remember them all: 3 guitars, 2 ukuleles, 1 bass, 1 mandolin, 1 dulcimer, 1 cajun accordion, 1 clarinet, 1 oboe, 1 violin, 1 keyboard, 1 washboard...and I think that's all of them!!

My classes all look to be pretty good. I'm taking: Plant physiology ( a really cool class with a really good professor, and it's a small science class which is unusual but really nice), Physics (my largest class, but the professor is also really good and makes it engaging), Intro to Electronic Music ( where I'm going to be learning how to use recording equipment and how to manipulate sound and stuff, really cool!) and my last class is Middle Eastern Music ( also with a really good professor and it's a lot of listening to really cool music so that should be good). Right now that's about all that's going on. I'm hoping to join the craft barn and maybe throw some pots which would be fun....I'm still on the search for a job, so if anyone has connections at Bowdoin they should hook me up. The food, of course, is fabulous, the weather is good...life is good...and that's all for now!

Another Update

So I do realize that it's been over a month since I've posted on this blog, my bad, I'm sorry. All the things I've been doing have taken over and it's been hard to find a time to sit down and put everything I've been doing into words. Right now it's Thanksgiving break and I'm in Norwich Vermont with two friends from high school. It's been great to be off campus and in an actual house with people that aren't all my age. We're staying with Sarah's aunt and uncle, they kinda live out in the boonies, it's really cool. They've got a big backyard, actually it's huuuge! They have two donkeys, a cat, a dog and some grouse kept in a birdhouse for the dog to point at. It's been a lot of fun, but I'm definitely ready to go back to Bowdoin, not exactly for school, but I do miss it. 

So, at Bowdoin I have been keeping pretty busy. Since the last time I posted I've been in two band concerts, one choir concert and a movie. The first band concert was pretty exciting, the power went out right before we were supposed to go on stage so we had to wait another half an hour while they figured out how to get the electric piano offstage and fit the grand piano onstage with everything else. It all worked out in the end and it was a cool performance, we had a tenor singing a few pieces with us and it went really well. Then, last weekend on Saturday I played the wind chimes for a piece that the chamber choir was singing. It's called Cloudburst by Eric Whitacre and it's a really cool piece. I really wanted to play the thundersheet, but my part was just as important!! The next day we had another band performance, this time we performed with a very famous trombonist, Ron Baron, he is the retired principle trombonist from the Boston Symphony Orchestra and extremely amazing, it was a good thing I didn't have to play much in his pieces so I could listen to him. 

This same weekend one of my floormates decided to enter in the 48 hour film festival in which he and a group of people had to put together a film in 48 hours. I was part of that group of people, it was a lot of fun. Friday night we collaborated and worked with the guidelines we had been given and tried to figure out what our movie was going to be about and then the next two days we filmed around everyone's schedule, which really meant that we did a lot of filming at night. The movie ended up being about Russians supposedly trying to steal the Bowdoin endowment...oh no!! So Randy Nichols, our head of security called in a secret agent spy person (Elly, another adopted roommate from Seattle) to make sure that the Russians wouldn't get ahold of it. It's pretty cool and has a twist at the end that I'm not going to ruin, partially because I still haven't seen the whole thing and I don't really know what happens. I was a Russian spy that ended up getting killed by a really huge book in our library. It was a lot of fun!!

Some other fun stuff that has happened: We have brought two new roommates into our humble abode, Elly (the spy) and Chris, who plays the saxaphone and is in my music theory class. They're pretty cool and we have a lot of fun with them. Chris is signed up with zipcar, so the other weekend we rented one and went into Freeport for a day of fun. I bought a pair of heavy duty L.L. Bean snow boots that I am really excited to wear and really excited for snow!! On the way back from Freeport, we stopped at a bread bakery and somehow managed to buy four loaves of bread. I bought sourdough, Chris got a Mexican bean, Hannah got a fruit dessert bread and Jade got an herb ciabatta. That night we invited our whole group of twelve people over and had a fabulous bread party. This was during parents weekend, and the last thing we'd done the day before was stop in at goodwill to just wander around, I sat in the most wonderful chair ever and decided that we had to have it, so the next day Mary's dad drove us back out there and we bought the chair for only thirty dollars and brought it back to our room. Everyone loves it, we've named it Basil, as in Basil from Fawlty Towers and though he's amazing, he causes a little bit of strife because it's always a race to see who can get to him first. Here's a picture of Elly as the secret agent sitting in Basil. 

Life's been pretty good, classes are difficult, but the semester's almost over and then it's on to new and exciting classes. Right now though, my homework is calling my name.

Fall Break

So it's been awhile since I've written anything, so I thought it was time to update everyone. 

Well...nothing much exciting has happened, i've been attending my classes, doing a lot of reading, spending a lot of time in my room with my roommates, we don't go out much. Classes have been good, I feel like I've actually been learning, which I suppose is a good thing seeing as we're paying for an education. Last week was full of midterms and was quite stressful and exhausting. I had both my psych and Environmental Studies midterm on Tuesday and then my Music Exam was split between Wednesday and Friday. This past week was definitely a good learning time for adjusting to college and they way things work. A lot more emphasis is on tests, especially in all my classes since they are all big and I doubt professors want to grade sixty homework assignments. So learning how to study efficiently is going to be something I have to focus on. 

Also within the past three weeks my roommates and I have had five prospective students stay with us. The first three were all here at the same time, which was kind of hectic. We aren't exactly what you would think of as "stereotypical" freshman college students, but I think most of them appreciated us. The Sunday night that the first three came we baked pies. Mom had sent me marionberries because nobody on the East Coast knows what they are and I decided it was my duty as an Oregonian to introduce them to this fabulous berry. So we brought the three Prospies to Mac house with us (our social house where we've cooked before) and spent around three hours baking pies. Here's a picture of Mary and Jade with the pies, they look delicious don't they?! I think that if i were a prospective student, I would definitely look seriously at a school where my hosts were baking pies, but that's just me. I'd bake pies over partying any night, though we were partying in our own way. One of the prospies said her mother was very impressed and that she thought it was really cool. We were also the deciding factor in Jenny's (a later prospie) choice to apply early decision to Bowdoin, she was choosing between three schools and after staying with us she decided on Bowdoin, that's pretty cool!!

We've only been able to go puddle jumping twice, and that might be it for this season, we're expecting for it to continue getting colder and the next time it rains i doubt any of us will want to put on shorts and a t-shirt and go get sopping wet. But here's a picture of our crew, starting at top left: Malachi, Me, Sam, Danny (both from next door), Chelsea, Teresa, Hannah (my roomie) and Atilano. We had a great time exploring new parts of campus. There's an elementary school right behind Thorne (one of the dining halls) and we spent a good while sliding on the slide and swinging. 

The past few days have been breathtakingly beautiful here, which is great because we've been on our fall break. Saturday I spent about four hours out on the quad reading a novel that Malachi had written, it as so peaceful to sit in the sun with the autumn smell surrounding me. There was a wedding taking place in the chapel that day too and it was definitely a perfect day for it. Here's a few pics of what the weather has been like up until today when we woke up to overcast skys and rain. 

Jen and I have the room to ourselves for this long weekend and we've done about...nothing all weekend. we wake up late and go to brunch with two of the boys who also stayed from next door and Malachi who also stayed because she lives just as far away as I do, almost exactly in fact. Today I cleaned my area and did laundry and puttered around the room which was good. I've also read both of Malachi's romance novels that she wrote in high school over the past couple of days, and yes, she does write romance novels. It was nice to read something that was not academic for the first time in a long time. Right before everyone left on Friday my clan did a kind of photo shoot because the trees and the leaves were so nice. I had to go to my chem lab though so I didn't really end up in any pictures, but here are a bunch from both my camera that Mary took and Jen's really nice camera. Jen's not a big fan of pictures, kinda like me, but she likes being behind the camera. Here's a pic of our beautiful quad.This is Malachi enjoying the quad and the pretty pretty leaves.

Last night we decided it would be fun to go into town for dinner because we've been going to Moulton for every meal for the past couple of days, so we went into town. Little did we know that everything closes Sunday's in small towns. So we played on the traintracks for a little while, went to Dunkin Donuts and then went back to dinner on campus. The sunset was awesome, here's a pic of Peter with it. 

 

Well that's about been my life for the past couple of weeks. Classes are going to start again on Wednesday and though this break has been good, I'm looking forward to my room being filled with happy chattering roomies once again. 

Another week gone so fast!

Mmk, so week two of classes is over and I'm definitely starting to feel it, not actually because of classwork, but because i've just been stretched a leeetle thin. 

This week I started my job, at 5:30 in the morning. That's right, I was so excited to not have to be washing dishes, but here I am waking up at 5:30 to count snails! It was ok, I'm still trying to recover though. So we met both Tuesday and Wednesday at six in the morning and drove out to the "coast", or inlet. But there was salty water and it was tidal and that's what counted. The weather was absoultely perfect though, I wish I had brought my camera, the sun was just rising over the water, none of the fishermen were out yet so all their boats bobbed gently on the water. The first morning a GBH (great blue heron) was striding through the water looking for breakfast, it was breathtaking. Anyways, we spent those first two mornings just figuring out what exactly we need to be doing and how we're gonna go about it. First we had to find the snails that we were looking for, they're called Crepidula Fornica and they're pretty cool critters.This is what they look like. Th senior I'm assisting is interested in them because of the fact that the first one secured to a rock or solid surface (sometimes a hermit crab) is a female, the second one is male, and if there are more, the one on top is always male and the ones in between are both...so cool!! So that was good, even if I didn't get enough sleep.

This week has gone by so fast, I'm having a hard time remembering what we did. This week the East side of our did some bonding, last Friday afternoon we scrounged all the cardboard boxes we could out of two trash rooms and built a cardboard fort in the boys room. it was utterly amazing and lasted for two whole days before gravity just brought it down (Everybody who passed the room was astounded by our masterpiece). We helped to finish the job and then blasted "Time to Say Goodbye" through the dorm as we carried the remnants down to the trash room. The first pic is of the finished box fort (sorry it's small). The second is of Tom and me doing a victory high five, we had just successfully acquired a bunch more building materials from Hyde Hall. Then there's the one of me peeking out of the entrance and the last is of our procession with the pieces, it was quite dramatic. 

Sunday night Danny, (the boy in red above) made dinner for our whole floor in Mac house. We went to help and cut veggies. He made an amazing chocolate cake and Texas Macaroni, I am so glad that I ended up on a floor with him. Today is Jen's birthday and he baked her fabulous chocolate cookies that I can't stop eating. 

Today I went on my first Environmental Studies field trip which was fun, but also way too early in the morning for a Saturday. We drove out to Merrymeeting Bay and broke up into groups and did tests. I was in an insect group and we spent a few hours trying to catch and then count insects, it was very arduous. 

Tonight is the 80s party at Quinby House, my roommates and I have opted out of going, but we're making up for it by doing our reading and listening to 80s music, and we've definitely gotten into the party spirit, we're going to head to Supersnacks later and have a wonderful Saturday night, and then get a good amount of sleep. 

Tomorrow I hope to be going to a Diabetes walk in Portland because tomorrow is also the Race for the Cure in my Portland and i'm really sad that I'm not able to do it with the same people i've been going with for the past few years. This will hopefully be a lot of fun

That's about all for now, not much has really been happening. 

p.s. if you feel any inclination to writing snail mail, I would be an ecstatic recipient. My mail address is: 

Rebecca Perez

765 Smith Union

Brunswick, ME 04011-8407

The First Couple of Weeks

So first of all I do realize that I am not actually living in Portland Maine, but I am close enough that I think it's ok to put it in the heading. We are only twenty minutes away from the city...town? It's pretty small, but it is quite cute.

Anyways...I've officially been in Brunswick for 25 days and it's all been pretty great. I arrived here by myself on the 20th of August for the Bowdoin Science Experience (BSE). I'm really glad I decided to participate in the program, we all definitely got a head start on getting to know college life. There were 24 students and fifteen upper classmen mentors. We spent a lot of time going through all the orientation kind of things like learning how to use the library and the Bowdoin network and I'm pretty sure we had three talks about the different support systems there are in place here, which is good, but kind of repetitive. It was ok though, we had a lot of time to do other stuff, we probably played around four to six hours of games a night, often staying up until the wee hours of the morning playing Mao or Apples to Apples. We were also assigned lab groups which were led by our premajor academic advisor, so we got to meet and talk with them early. I chose the Field biology lab and it was amazing, we went out to Professor Wheelwright's house and caught frogs in his pond and put up nets to try to catch birds. We also took a hike through the Bowdoin Pines to find as many different types of mushrooms as we could. I didn't particularly enjoy that hike, I did find a lot of mushrooms, but the mosquitoes also found me...I walked out of there with about 70 bites on my legs alone. 

The BSE ended on the 26th, but we're all still hanging out and we've got a lot of dinners and stuff throughout the year which is cool. Also, the BSE has grant money that they're using to pay students from the program to help as research assistants for professors and upper classmen that have research projects. We had to apply for the ones we were interested in and I got placed with Amy Johnson, a marine biology professor, so I'm going to be getting paid to help with her and a couple other people's research. I'm really excited to get started, Rachel (I think she's a senior) is interested in marine snails and how the reproduce and other aspects of them so we're going to be going out to the coast to study them. This work study position also enabled me to not have to work in dining services, which is utterly amazing. My first year of college and I don't have to be a grunt worker, I get to actually be part of research...I'M SO STOKED!! I've talked to a lot of people who are into science and would love to have this opportunity, but couldn't take advantage of it beacuse they didn't do the BSE, so I'm completely glad that I did come out extra early. 

After the BSE, the rest of the freshman class showed up (minus 12) for pre-orientation which is run by the Bowdoin Outing Club (BOC). It was really weird when tons of other people showed up on campus, we were all used to having the place all to ourselves and now there were hundreds of other kids our age wandering around in our home. This is when Mom came out to spend some time helping me settle in and put my bike together and also bring out the rest of my ridiculous amount of stuff. I met two of my roommates at this point, Jen and Mary, Hannah wasn't going on a pre-o so our room was only three-quarters filled with boxes and bags. The night of the 26th everybody slept in the Field House, it was slightly overwhelming and pretty uncomfortable. My group, Acadia Mountain Biking B, left with the other Acadia groups at five the next morning to ride a bus the three hours to Acadia national park. I spent the trip listening to Les Miserable with Cris and dozing, it actually wasn't that horrible. We arrived in Acadia and set up camp, the tents were ridiculously hard to put up, they were not symmetrical, but we finally got them figured out and then hopped on our bikes for a "short" bike ride. 

My group had ten first-years and two upperclassmen leaders. So there were twelve pretty tired college students riding around Acadia. It was fun, we headed off to find a carriage trail and it was all very pretty. The weather was perfect, the pictures show one of the lakes we biked by that first day. We only really had one incident, one girl, Caitlin, skidded turning a corner on gravel and fell pretty hard, she got a couple of scratches and it wasn't that bad...but then we decided to take the quickest way back to camp, which involved going the wrong way on a one way street, it seemed ok because it was two lanes and we were in the passing lane, and it was ok, until a bus turned a corner going ridiculously fast in the same lane we were in. It pretty much skimmed us, and Caitlin decided that she needed to take some action and dove off her bike into the ditch on the side of the road. That wasn't very pleasant, and then a cop drove by and told us that we had to turn around. So we ended up walking a couple miles uphill back to where we had started going the wrong way, and then it was probably another five or six miles back to camp. That first ride ended up being about 22 miles long, it wasn't that easy!! 

The next morning we woke up at three to hike the four miles up Cadillac Mountain to be some of the first people to see the sun rise on the continental US...it was really really cool!! We were all pretty much sleepwalking on the way up, but it was beautiful and definitely worth it. There it is, the sun just peeking up over the horizon. 

We spent the rest of that day napping and just hanging out...we played a lot of four square. The next couple of days we went biking a couple more times and did a couple more hikes. The most exciting thing we did though, was finish the Five and a half pounds of cheese that the kitchen gave us...it is not a common occurrence for a pre-o group to finish the cheese, and we did it!!Here's a pic of the cheese being cut up for mac and cheese...we all ate some at every meal just so we could finish it. 

We came back from pre-o and started orientation for realsies this time. There were a lot more talks about being safe, we matriculated and saw Nathaniel Hawthorne's signature in the Matriculation book from over one hundred years ago...kinda cool. We met with our advisors and made our schedules, put together our rooms and met our roommates. It was all very exciting, yet boring at the same time. My roommates are all really cool: Jen is from Michigan and is into technical theatre, Mary is from Portland ME and a ballerina and Hannah is a really cool hippy poet from Orono Maine. We all get along really well and our room is fabulous...and surprisingly really clean. We've also adopted two good friends as roommates as well. Jade lives on the second floor of Coleman (my dorm hall) and likes to spend a lot of time with us because none of us do the ridiculous things that typical college students seem to enjoy, so we hang out and play games and sing disney and musicals very loudly. We've also brought Malachi in because she lives far away and in a double...so now we really have six roomies.

Ok, so the picture with the beds in it is of my room that I share with Hannah, this is where we sleep and that's about it. Then next ones are all of our common room. It's really big and now that we've got rugs it's really nice and homey. Our food area is well stocked as you can see and the last pic is of my corner. It's quite lovely. My room and the boys room next door have become really good friends. The first night it rained we all went out puddle jumping and dancing in the rain for a good hour and a half, we also built a box fort in their room yesterday, it was amazing. 

To end this, I'm taking four classes, psych 101, chem 101, music theory 101 and Environmental Studies 101. I didn't get a first year seminar, but i will take one in the spring. All my classes are really interesting and I'm doing pretty well so far, even though we've really only had one full week of classes. I've also joined a few clubs that haven't started yet, like Salsa...as well as the Concert band where I'm playing the oboe. I've also joined the JV soccer team which is a lot more flexible than Varsity or even Ultimate Frisbee which i was thinking about doing. I signed up for IM (intramural) tennis and am looking into joining the Craft Center, so I'm keeping busy.

I'm having a great time out here, Brunswick Maine is a wonderful place...I do miss home a little, but I know I'll be back soon enough and until then I have Google street view to look at my house.