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Since we have been on Spring Break this week, I have had more time to hang out with my friends who graduated last year. On Wednesday, we all got together to eat at Qdoba. I had never heard about it before they introduced it to me. It’s basically like Chipotle, but they have something called “queso”. In English, it just means cheese, but they have different types. I tried the spicy one they have and mixed it with the spicy salsa. It burned my insides, and it was soooooo good!
My friend, who is equally obsessed with Qdoba, got chips and the new type of queso. It was jalenpeño and bacon. It was not as spicy as I expected, but the flavor was still delicious. I was very happy to get to hang out with them and eat some awesome food as well. I cannot wait until we get together again!
 Queso and chips!
Before last Monday, I hadn’t touched a microscope since I had biology in high school five years ago. I’d never even touched a quality microscope; the ones my high school had used mirrors for light and had limited magnification.
The microscopes the College has, however, are amazing.
As part of a class I’m taking with Dr. Mary, Hair: A Scholarly Untangling, we went to a biology lab with samples of everybody’s hair in little baggies in order to stage two fake murder mysteries, which means the class was split in half and we had to pick the murderer out of the other group.
My group, armed with baggies with names on it and one saying “Crime Scene” to compare the samples to, examined the samples. It was fascinating to see the different components of hair up close and see how different hair is from different people. It has different thicknesses, density of pigments, and there’s a component called a medulla that runs through the center of the hair, but only in some people and it’s not always continuous in people that do have one.
Although I loved to see the hair dyed pink under the microscope and marvel at the differences found in something so common as hair, I most liked to see my own hair under a microscope.
In the end, my group was able to successfully choose the hair that matched the crime scene, while the other group had more difficulty because the hair they had to choose from was more similar in their hair samples than in the samples my group was working with.
I still like my choice to become an English major instead of a biology major, but I did enjoy expanding my horizons for a night and I wouldn’t mind doing it again. That’s one reason I decided to go to a liberal arts college, after all.
I was doing so many fun things (and homework things) the first two weeks of March that I didn’t have time to write about them here as they were happening! Here’s a recap of what I was up to prior to spring break:
 SNOW DAYS! We had three snow days the first week of March, so I kept busy doing homework and keeping up with my editorial obligations for Contrast, McDaniel’s literary magazine. But on Friday of that week, on our third snow day, I went to Papa Joe’s Mexican restaurant with a group of friends and then went sledding. It was the first time that I had ever been sledding on McDaniel’s legendary golf course sledding hill, and I was glad to have finally given myself the chance to go. I figured it would be my last opportunity to go sledding before I graduate in May, and I knew I would regret it if I didn’t go. No regrets now!- My Contrast co-editor Jimmy and I led our editorial board through selecting which submissions from our contest in February will be published in this year. We had some great discussions and chose some great pieces of writing and art. We also enjoyed a lot of pizza along the way!
 I had this scrumptious coconut french toast for brunch at Rocket to Venus in Baltimore.
- Some of my Writing Center coworkers and I went to The Book Thing the Saturday before spring break. The Book Thing is a warehouse in Baltimore open on Saturdays and Sundays that gives away free books. That’s right — free books. Every year, my boss at the Writing Center organizes a trip for Writing Center tutors to go here to pick up books for our free book shelf and for ourselves. I picked a lot of cool memoirs and works of creative nonfiction for myself and even found a couple books that I had been hoping to find there. Afterwards, we went to brunch a restaurant called Rocket to Venus.
- I got to see my friend Jennifer perform in McDaniel’s production of The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. It was a fun and funny musical and I was very impressed with how well-cast it was. I’m definitely glad I got to go!
- I attended the annual Bothe Poetry Reading. The Bothe is one of my favorite annual events at McDaniel; it’s always a treat to hear authors read their own poetry and to see all of the McDaniel English faculty in one place. This year, I got to enjoy the added bonus of being invited to President Roger Casey’s house for dinner prior to the lecture. It was a fun opportunity to chat with my classmates, professors, and this year’s guest poet Carol Frost.
Clearly, March has kept me quite busy. McDaniel is on spring break right now, which is giving me a bit of a much-needed break from things, but I know that once I get back to campus, I’ll be going at full throttle again!
Yesterday, it rained almost all day. I woke up to the sound of rain on the windows, and it reminded me of Costa Rica. Most of the houses have tin roofs, and I was there during the rainy season, so I would fall asleep to the tinkling sound. It made me realize how much I have missed the rain. Before I went to Costa Rica, I did not care for it as much, but now, it feels like an old friend.
One of the coolest things was going into the rainforest. We walked down a bunch of steps so that we could see this huge waterfall. It was one of the most beautiful sights I have ever seen in my life. It was so cool to be able to see the waterfall’s beauty up close. After we had seen it, we had to walk back up the steps, and right on time, it started raining.
 The waterfall Normally the rain is awesome, but it also makes you heavier. It’s hard to love the rain when you’re trying to hike back up to the bus. Still, I have grown to appreciate the rain and all of its beauty. I hope to return to the rainforest again someday soon, so that I can gain even more appreciation for the rain!
 This week was midterms week, so I wanted to have a small event for my residents to treat them. One of my residents suggested a while back that we have a root beer float night using A&W root beer. Since we live in Albert Norman Ward Hall, ANW, it was very fitting to use A&W root beer!
I personally don’t like root beer OR vanilla ice cream, and a lot of my residents told me they don’t like root beer, so I decided to spice things up. We had traditional vanilla ice cream and A&W root beer, but we also had Martinelli’s apple cider and mango sorbet! The combination of apple and mango turned out to be really refreshing and delicious.
A good number of my residents came, which made me happy–one of my goals as a resident assistant is to build community and it can be hard to get residents from opposite ends of my hall in the same place. We have a variety of different personalities but everyone’s really relaxed and they get along well, which I think is generally true of the entire McDaniel community. And it’s always great to have an opportunity to relax before the stress of exams hits!
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