M*A*S*H and Civil War

GO BEAVS! Watch the Civil War today, and look for me in the Beaver Dam! I'll be wearing a Beaver Dam T-Shirt and a brown beaver hat, and I will be loudly cheering on the Beavers and heckling the grellow waterfowl.

And completely unrelated... have you ever seen M*A*S*H? I was introduced to the show while in Korea (I did, of course, know what it was, just never sat down to watch it before), and instantly became a fan. It is kind of weird as it is the perfect show to watch at 5 a.m. when I can't sleep, but I am less likely to turn to it during the day, but whenever it finds its way on to my TV screen, I can't help but get really into it. My first viewing of it: Army Training on Korean Hemorhragic Fever. Yes, our training actually was watching an episode of M*A*S*H, though don't tell anyone! I'm sure the Training NCO that day would have gotten in trouble if a few certain people found out!

Duck Hunting

I mostly try to leave this blog kind of an "OSU-Free" zone, mainly pertaining to athletics since I banter enough already on facebook, but I need to break the silence with this one. Pictures are worth a thousand words.

BEFORE:

AFTER:

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I am now up to over 4300 words in my novel! I got into the 16th page last night in my writing as my creative genius took over and kept me up until after midnight, a full two and a half hours later than I had intended. My novel has been an ongoing project for a couple of years already, and the progress is slow, but for the first time, it is working. I did take a longish break recently while I took a fiction writing class, and although the class mostly applied towards short stories, I learned enough from the class that I decided to hold off on the novel until after the class was over so I could apply lessons learned. Last night I did a thorough re-edit and added some more pages.

For an idea of how big it is for me to have 16 pages... I have never gotten past 10 or 11 before, not because I did not have an idea, but because I would have this "master plan" for a story, but no idea of how to go about it. I would think of an epic plot where the main character goes from Point A to Point C, except I never really had more than a vague idea of what Point B was, much less what happened during Chapter 2 or 3, so while the first few pages were (at least I supposed to be) great, writers block and inexperience always trashed the rest of the story. Not this time! Besides having notes equaling the length of the story so far, I have literally spent hours going over the plot and character development, changing and tweaking it and fixing problems with it. I am finally getting somewhere.

Christmas Cookies

During our first Christmas, we started a tradition of making Christmas Cookies. Apparently this is a tradition that goes on all over the place, but it was a new tradition for me as I did not even know the exact meaning of "Christmas Cookie," other than that it referred to a cookie maybe cut in the shape of a tree or candy cane.

This Christmas, we added tools to our arsenal from last year of just a butter knife for each color of frosting. Since then, Deanna's intereste in baking, and subsequently cake decoration, has increased, so we decided to experiment with a pastry bag. We only tried it on one color, so it turned out that Red was the only color used with any great detail. It obviously worked, so next year we will hopefully have another color or two to add to our tool box.

My favorite cookie? The Oregon State "O" which was carefully shaped by hand!

Fiddling with my Computers

This weekend while in Vancouver for the Army Reserves, I was working on my personal computer. I had already spent several hours on my own formulating a spreadsheet in Excel and getting our unit up-to-date for the first time in over a decade, when tragedy struck. Don't worry, nothing happend to my file... but when I popped in a CD to make a backup at the request of our Unit Administrator, it start making this horrible clicking sound. Immediately I figured it was my computer's fault--after all, the panel on the end of my CD-ROM is broken and only connected in one of the two spots it should be--but I also thought it might be the disc's format.

I was wrong.

It was confirmed today when I tried to put my Fiddler on the Roof Soundtrack into iTunes. My computer still reads CDs just fine; it just is no longer capable of transferring data on to the harddrive. Some quick thinking got the CD ripped onto my PC's Window's Media Center, and from there, onto a thumbdrive, though not before a temporary longing for a Mac because the whole process would have been user-friendly and not like pulling teeth, like any media is for Windows. Don't worry, I recognized the error in my ways and stopped longing for the Mac within seconds, though I was still annoyed with Windows, as improved as Windows 7 might be. Anyways, a long story short, I used the thumbdrive to get it to the laptop and on to iTunes in a very long way around what is supposed to be a simple task. At least my iPod is updated now--I had lost the cord and misplaced my iPod, so needless to say, it had been a while. It is nice, though. Now I can listen to songs from somewhat of a tragic musical which can remind me of a sad plot involving a ruined wedding party, choosing between home and love, choosing between family and a lover, and losing a home altogether. Fitting title, considering my dad used to always play the world's smallest violin in a sweet song of sorrow when I didn't get my way. Pretty upbeat, huh? I think so.