A little laziness to kick things off

Posted on May 22, 2013 by Annie Brown

I’ve been home for almost a week now, and my time since leaving college has been fabulously lazy, for the most part–at least compared to what I do at college.

At McDaniel, I find myself constantly working toward deadlines, going to meetings, and finding time to squeeze in time with friends and other fun activities. At home, I don’t have many deadlines and I’ve only had a few obligations every day.

I’ve been occupying my time by reading, gardening, and spending time with my corgi puppy. Yesterday, since my siblings were off from school for primary elections, my parents took off from work, so I spent a nice afternoon with my mother picking out flowers for our garden after we voted. I love having time off from college to hang out with my mom; she’s one of my best friends and I cherish the time I spend with her.

I haven’t formulated any solid summer plans yet, but I’m enjoying some downtime right now.

Staying Connected With Home

Posted on February 9, 2013 by Kaitlyn Vadenais

Rhode Island and my home don’t seem that far from Maryland and McDaniel, but 7 and a half hours driving or an hour flight are difficult to justify for just a short weekend.

For this reason, I usually don’t go home at all during the semester. For shorter breaks, I will go home with one of my roommates. Instead, I usually just wait until the end of the semester. Four months flies by in college.

Unfortunately, I am not very good at long distance communication either. But I have gotten better since I’ve gone off the school.

Neither of my parents are big texters, so I used to send my mom a few emails a week with my random thoughts, some which required responses, some which didn’t. Now she has an iPad so she can iMessage me and we chat more often that way. I still call the house every Sunday afternoon to talk to her and my dad and swap stories about school and home.

When it comes to my friends, it is easy to send them little texts every few days of things that remind me of them or just to say hey. I am not big on long texting conversations however, so we will try to arrange time for FaceTime or Skype at least once or twice a month to talk about things more in depth. With Twitter and Instagram it also helps us keep tabs on our lives.

Even though I miss my family and friends when I am down at school, it is nice to know that everyone is only a text or phone call away.

Returning from my quilting bee

Posted on January 15, 2013 by Annie Brown

Yesterday afternoon, I was gearing up to go back to McDaniel later in the evening, when my mom and sister came back from the fabric store with a few bolts of beautiful fabric. They had decided to follow up on my suggestion that we make a quilt for one of our family friends who is undergoing chemotherapy.

Not wanting to pass up an evening of quality family and quilting time, I decided to postpone my return to campus to this morning and get sewing instead! I’d say this proved to be a wonderful choice. My mom cut and pinned fabric while my sister and I sewed and ironed. In only a couple of hours, the face of our quilt (the top part with all the different pieces sewn together) was nearly finished! (Some of the pieces weren’t lining up though, so we decided to call it a night.) We also talked about how “back in the day,” it was common for women to make quilts together in quilting bees, and that’s kind of what it felt like.

Spending an extra night at home to have a small quilting bee was wonderful, but it did come at a small price: I ended up being late to class. Since I don’t keep a car on campus, my dad drove me back. And unfortunately, a number of things got us behind schedule, including a 10-minute delay that involved one of the tires of our car sounding funny that resulted in us going back to the house to take our other car instead.

So I ended up getting to class at around 10, thirty minutes after it started. But I didn’t stress, since a lot of the factors that caused me to be late were out of my control. Dr. Mazeroff, my professor, was very understanding when I explained my situation to him during our mid-class break.

Though it’s courteous and in good practice to be on time, most professors at McDaniel won’t get upset if you’re a few minutes late. If for whatever reason you’re really late, apologize to your professor after class or in an email and explain what happened. Professors will often say that it’s better to show up late to class then not at all. Some professors might deduct points from your grade, but you’ll never get a detention–college doesn’t work that way.

I try not to be late, but sometimes time and other things I can’t control have a way of working against me. I’ve learned that it’s best to not let these things stress me out. My lateness this morning really doesn’t matter in the smaller or the grander scheme of things. What’s important is that I spent an extra night at home doing something fun with people I love…and now I know what I need to do to be on time when I return back to campus on a Monday morning : )

Home for the weekend

Posted on January 12, 2013 by Annie Brown

The way I see it, Jan Term is kind of an extension of my winter break. My only class, Coping with Stress, doesn’t involve a lot of work outside of class time, so I have a lot of time to do what I please, like reading, blogging, and surfing the web.

Since I have so much free time, I thought this would be a good weekend to go home. I’m doing everything that I would have done had I stayed on campus but in the company of my family and the added bonus of home-cooked meals. Most of my friends who are on campus for Jan Term went home this weekend too, so I would have been pretty lonely had I stayed.

There haven’t been as many activities on campus as I would have imagined. Last weekend, the Office of Student Engagement screened Superbad a couple of times, and this weekend, they sponsored a bus trip to the Columbia Mall so students could get some retail therapy. Luckily, it looks like the number of activities will increase in the second half of Jan Term. Off the top of my head, there will be a recreation night, a movie theater night, an inauguration watching event, and the day of service on Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

Amazingly, there’s only a week and a half left of Jan Term, so while I may get bored at times, I’m going to cherish all this down time while I have it!

The End of the Semester

Posted on December 13, 2012 by Kaitlyn Vadenais

Whoa. Another semester down. Except for me this is my last fall semester EVER.

But I’m not going to get all sentimental yet. Even though I am finished with my finals, I feel like I have so much left to do before I can actually leave McDaniel for a month and a half.

Instead of flying home, since I will be on a plane for much of January, my father is coming to get me tomorrow afternoon and we will drive home the next morning.

Before then, I still have one last final, an appointment with the Center for Experience and Opportunity so that my resume is ready for job applications, a tour, packing for home and for Italy, cleaning the apartment, and hanging out and saying goodbye to my friends.

This is the fun part of finals week though, when you are done with your academic obligations and you have no real schedule to your day and you’re just hanging out with friends and enjoying the end of the semester, reminiscing on how it was August like, yesterday.

Break seems long before it starts, but it always flies by, and with my break separated by two weeks in Italy, I know mine is going to go even faster. I can’t wait to get home and see my family, see my cat, and see my best friends. I am excited for driving, fridge water, television with DVR, and my own bed and shower.

Fall Break

Posted on October 18, 2012 by Jess Hague

For me, Fall Break is supposed to be a great time to relax a little and spend some quality time with my family and friends. At least, that’s what I imagined as I was driving up I-95 on Friday afternoon. While it is true that I got to spend a lot of time with my parents and some of my friends, my break was not as restful as I would have hoped. I ended up working two eight-hour shifts at my job, at Bed Bath and Beyond. Now, for most people, that doesn’t seem like that’s a hard thing to do, but trust me, eight hours of running around the store and being really nice to everyone makes you tired. That meant that those days involved nothing more than sitting on the couch and watching TV after work.

There are many positives to Fall Break. I think by far, the biggest positive was my puppy. He’s an 18 month old Rottweiler puppy, and he’s adorable. He’s my biggest fan in my house and always wants to play with me. He was so excited when I got home that he didn’t stop jumping for twenty minutes. We spent a lot of time this weekend playing fetch, cuddling, and practicing his tricks (I taught him a new one over the summer, so it’s fun to practice now). I don’t care what anyone says, there is nothing better than puppy love to lift your spirits. Of course, seeing my parents was also a positive, since I love spending time with them. We had a lot of fun spending time together, including family bonding time in Atlantic City! I live 45 minutes away from AC, so it’s fun to go down there for a few hours. My mom and I also did a lot of shopping on Saturday, since we were on a mission to buy baby gifts for my cousin. She’s having a baby girl and we wanted to send her a fantastic gift. We ended up making her a clothesline full of onesies, socks, bibs, and other clothes. Plus, we topped it all of with a Winnie the Pooh blanket that I made for the baby!

The food of the weekend was also definitely a plus. On Friday night, on our way down the shore, we went to a place called Ott’s Grille. I had the “Jersey Burger”-a burger with American cheese, bacon, and pork roll. Yes, it was a heart attack on a plate, but it was absolutely delicious. Saturday morning, I went to my favorite bagel place to get a bagel. I know this seems a little extreme, but Jersey bagels are just so much better than the bagels you can find in Maryland. Anyone who has tasted a bagel from the Bagel Bin will understand…it’s heavenly. On Sunday, my mom made a fantastic dinner of pasta with shrimp, spinach, mushrooms, and broccoli with an Alfredo sauce. And of course, you cannot forget the garlic bread. If there’s one thing I didn’t do on this break, it’s lose weight.

Even though I love McDaniel, it always feels nice to go home from time to time and get the comforts of home. It makes me appreciate what I have at home, but it also makes me appreciate the things that I do on my own here, like when I make my own delicious meals in my kitchen.

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