I Can't Stand 'em!

This will be short:

Singing in the Rain, is a fantastic film in any weather. It is also very much worth it on the big screen. To everyone who had the pleasure of seeing this movie, you should now join me in a sing along version that will be playing all day tomorrow as I pack my life for my move back to MN.

Whirr of VHS Film in Reverse

Fun game: Drive to Bonner Springs and to eat Chinese food and listen to pretty music.

Does it sound like a Monday night flash back from high school? It should, minus the whole Bonner Springs thing, I didn't have to drive there for music or Chinese food.

But the hours spent in the car were well worth it. A mini reunion with people that after years of not talking or hearing from pop out of the wood work and make your day that much brighter. Spring, welcome back. Missed you!

But that was not  the only  surprise of the day! I had the pleasure of not only reunionizing with Allegrians, but with some Barstownians too!  Looooooonng time no talk and suddenly-KA-POW!!!!  Bamalamadingdong there they are catching you up on the oh, say, 6 years you missed in the middle. Woof. So that's my day. A series of flash backs and rewinds just to keep me on my toes.

And I couldn't have imagined a better one.

Taxi!

I'd like to call this round two of airport shuttleship. And it went surprisingly smoothly. Other than the point where I had to circle around and around terminal 2 in order to not be arrested in a school vehicle. Oh well, such is life, and I didn't have to run over anyone in the process (though the opportunity always presents itself at places like airports). And more unfortunately, I have to be up in 6 hours to do one last round of registration. Why anyone in the world thought 7:30 am registration was smart is beyond me. Boo that. So good night world!

Also, Michelle, can we be blog buddies again? Thursday's are lonely.

Singing lessons

Well, it wasn't the worst hour and a half car ride of my life. It would take me a while to think of the actual worse car ride, and instead would likely resort to the worst hour and a half I spent in a car- regardless of the time of the car ride from beginning to end. But it was strange.

To catch the rest of you up, I often pick people up from the airport on a semi regular basis. Not a big deal- until they are super quirky. Lisa, reminds me of Miranda Sings. Once I'm not blogging from my phone, I'll post some links to beautiful videos. And to be clear, it's not that she doesn't know her stuff- she does. But man do they look alike, and I like to think they are the same person. Woof.

The original: Voice Lessons

One of the more recent amazing videos: Starships

And to round it all out: Teaching Pentatonix to sing...

I hope you enjoy them as much as I do. What a classy lady.

"I Was Making a Lasagne! (For One)"

Singing duets with Justin Feit must be one of the best ways to pass a work day. Seriously. I think we could go on tour, but it would make Hannah Montana and Miley Cyrus break up for jealousy. We sat in the team room for about an hour stuffing name tags for SSI singing our creative loosely covered renditions of Flight of the Concords.  Good use of time? Absolutely. My only regret is that Cadi and Kris missed our version of "The Most Beautiful Girl" by about 35 seconds. So that's a bummer. But we enjoyed it, and art is really for the artist most of the time.

"I'm not crying... it's just the rain on my face"

It rained!  And other than standing around watching it pour for 45 minutes, we just admired the after affects of a good rain storm on both the heat and my hair. As the rain fell, my hair grew... just like the grass except exponential curls. Woe.  But that's ok, because it's closer to 70 than 100.  Winners. Except for the person sitting behind me in a theater... Then that sucks.

Remind me, I have an amusing story about answering phones and what you should learn about that.

Weather... and other tales blown in from the recent past

"With the chance I've been given, I'm gonna be driven as hell!" -Legally Blonde the Musical
Well, there's that for a study night. Me. In the library. With a soundtrack. Nothing that different from normal. In all probability, it's a little different considering that I'm in the library, disrupting the majority of studying students with my dancing and sneezing. I'm not sure if I'm using this quotation as a sense of motivation for myself now that speech is done, that I identify with it, or that it's just freaking catchy. But regardless, I'm sticking with it now.

Oh yes, MN has caught up with the rest of the world, it's allergy season here and that means I'm probably the most worthless here pretty soon. The good news is that Voice Juries are done, and so is the Forensics showcase (Pictures? Some are really attractive, so be jealous: https://picasaweb.google.com/116804446869401815266/ForensicsShowcase?authuser=0&feat=directlink), so the meetings are wrapping up and so are my speaking obligations. That means that my semester is also getting progressively less fun. Instead of performing, talking, or having any kind of strange adventures, I'm stuck with the regular kinds of adventures you can have by making regular days awkward days around the people you don't know. Sound familiar? Need I remind you about all of the strange people I happen to wink at? Or the ones that "judge" (read: envy) me for dancing recklessly in the library? There are many of those occurrences.

Other things of interest as of late. Let me list them, everyone loves lists.

1) Dancing in the down pour of rain with Vanessa. I mean this was of biblical proportions. The kind that you envision flash flood warnings coming from. We got out there within the first 10 minutes of the rain starting and the drains were already over flowing, the puddles in the street over ankle deep, and people everywhere! So much splashing and being wonderful individuals. Needless to say, I have a few goals in life, and one is that when given the opportunity to dance in the rain: do so with glee.

2)Tornado watch at GAC. Silly Minnesotans. Rain does not equal deadly twister. And if it does, get me cell service and internet in whatever hovel of a basement of a building you are going to sequester me. Boo.

3) Found out some rooming things (not for sure, but it's gonna happen) for the summer. Ava, me, Mariecus, and Colleen. What a splendid group full of all kinds of amazing wonderful adventure potential.

4) Speaking of summer, if you are reading this and like to get letters, give me a holler and an address for the summer and we shall initiate Letter Leader Board Phase 2! I write letters like I listen to Ke$ha: all da time. And often her lyrics make an appearance in said letters. It's a good deal.

5) Choir tour. This actually happened before #1 over here, but it deserves mention. It was fun, we survived it. Saw some GAC history, laughed a little, met some good people, sang pretty. Yup.

6) OH (not Ohio, that was three weeks ago), last weekend (honors day and that stuff) there was this dance milieu that was the shit! Pardon my French, but seriously, the best. Props to all of you dancers out there who happen to read this. Our Place, In Place was super spectacular.  Gave me shivers every time.

7) Speech people are fascinating individuals who tend to make regular life more interesting just by using facial expressions that don't typically appear in daily conversation. I like that.

8) Apparently one of my projects for the summer is going to be burning discs off of my hard drive...  My computer seems to think that it is full of pictures and music. How silly.

9) Cross words are fun and occasionally make you feel smart. Thanks Ch-low for that tip. I'll now sometimes feel smart while I am maintaining my A in Stats.

10) There may or may not be an escaped State Hospital patient running around on campus. We have had many alerts but I like to think of him meditating in the arb, or streaking the football field, or just watching the mysterious dial in Nobel, or climbing the art building. Mostly because those are the first things I'd do if I escaped the State Hospital in St. Peter. Chances are that he's hitched a ride someone, I would be hard pressed to climb a hill after working so hard to get outside walls.

You lucky mallards, two posts in a day. Dig it. Live it. Love it.

Though I Czeched out of Prague ages ago...

Aren't you thrilled?  You should be excited for two reasons: 1) I'm actually posting about Prague now! and 2) I'm done with classes at JCU! That means one step closer to home!!! In the words of Patricia Kazarow, 'Wahoo!!!"

Ok, now Prague. (And while I'm thinking about it, remind me to tell you Charles stories. There are two)

So day two in Prague arrived, and it was much like the first one-kind of rainy.  But that's ok! Because I have a mildly sunshiny personality, and I'll make due with any thing to be in Prague. So basically the first thing you should know about walking around Prague is that it's common to forget you are not actually an animated cartoon with forest creatures following you around.  It looks like a fairytale! Not even a joke. You basically cross one bridge and suddenly all you can think of are Disney Princess songs and twittering birds. It's almost ridiculous. But not really because I love it.

So the first thing we did was grab Starbucks. And there is not much more delightful than a take away cup of coffee that is larger than a Dixie cup. You think that's a joke, it's not. It's a wonderful invention by apparently caffeine crazed people from the US. But that's ok, I love it.  Then we caught a tram to go meet one of Erica's friends: Gabriella.  What a delightful person! She is studying in Prague and was gracious enough to not work on her paper for a few hours and show us around! So we went up to the Prague castle and walked around the area, saw some great views, saw a pretty spectacular cathedral with some amazing stained/painted glass. Once we were done taking pictures of that, we decided to go see one of the major squares with some markets (and the name escapes me now, but that's what you get from a person who wrote a philosophy paper today), and while we were there we got some delicious pretzel-cinnamon-sugar things. I don't really know what they are called, but they were circular and warm and delicious. See? Even the food is fairy-tale themed. Then we managed to walk around a bit more (saw a 'large' ice rink....  lies.) T

Then we went to a French lunch!  Oui! Ok, you caught me. We really did go to a place called the Cafe Louvre, but I'm not so very French. Anyway, we had a delightful lunch of Quiche and good times.  Then Gabriella led us up to another excellent view before she darted off to work on that pesky paper.  We photo bombed each other and then headed back down the hill to do some shopping and look around a bit before dinner. For dinner we headed back toward the Christmas markets (where there were obviously the most people) and we had a delicious dinner under a canopy watching the people go by. I personally had some goulash with dumplings, and that was quite good. And being the good roommates we are, we all had to share, so that was fun.

Then we decided to walk around the Christmas market (now that we're there to shop and not just to pass through) and it was so much fun!  All kinds of places open and selling food and ornaments and hats and gloves and everything else!  It's like window shopping, but they are in little vender stalls.  At one point, Molly and I lost the other two and went up to a vantage point to seek them out. Upon finding them in a crowd (and watched them look for us) we called them and made them dance for our return: always appropriate task.

So after finding all kinds of worldly goods, we were just reveling in the atmosphere and started spontaneously singing Christmas carols. Well, eventually we found ourselves standing in a circle, by one of the most crowded places in the market and singing full volume all of the Christmas songs we knew, regardless of whether there was a distinct language barrier.  And after about 30 minutes of this, a man came up to us speaking in rapid-language-I-don't-know and we assume that he was complimentary! So that's good. And we spent half the time fudging up the lyrics, or giggling, but it was amazing. And since we didn't get a video the first time, we walked back toward the giant Christmas tree and starting singing Hark the Harold and O Come All Ye Faithful back to back. During this rendition, we were not only applauded, but someone was taking video of us. So that's pretty fricking spectacular. And we had fun, so that's totally worth it.

After that little crowning jewel, everything was pretty much a slide from there. We met up with Gabriella for another hour later that night, and saw her at this adorable cafe the next morning (and had some cake-very good) and then back on the plane.  What a stunning last trip.

Now that all of my papers are done, it's just finals and packing (PACKING!?!?!??????!?!) and that's always a good time.... ish....