I hope you all have a wonderful and exciting and fun Christmas this year!

I’m sitting in an airport terminal waiting for the plane to arrive

(and I’m really thrilled that they have a wireless connection mainly because my home computer hates the internet

anyway……MERRY CHRISTMAS AND HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!!!!!!

are you guys thinking up new year’s resolutions yet?

Wow guys, sorry it’s been a while. The end of the year is coming! It’s crazy for me to think that my first semester of college is almost over…it went waaaaaay too fast! I’ve had some awesome times so far, and I hope they’ll continue into the next few years. Despite the onset of winter and finals, thankfully we’re all still managing to have our usual random adventures…

We made a return trip to the Stairwell to Nowhere. As the three of us look with curiosity, Matt (far left) scratches his head in confusion.

I love the UIS campus! It’s perfect for solitary walks late at night or wandering around with friends…and you’d be surprised at how many students do walk around in the evenings.

It took some effort, but we managed to straighten Derber’s hair (and not have it end up looking like a mullet)!!!

ahhh….gotta love twosouth pranks. This is where a couple of unidentified (but we all know who it was) students decided to put stink spray in someone’s dorm room. It contaminated the whole hallway for days. ahg!

and finally Christmas tree decorating. I hope you all get your fill of hot chocolate, snowball fights, sledding, eggnog, fireplaces, and everything else that accompanies this time of year. Have a good one.

So…we all know Jacob Friggin’ House god of Thunder, right? Well…tonight apparently my twosouth neighbor Nate decided it was high time to duct tape someone…and that someone happened to be Jacob…it was a rockin’ good time, yeah…

and this is where Nate walks in, grabs Jacob, and starts taping

and then we added a hat

Jacob’s showing some skin! Ow Ow!

after watching him writhe for a few minutes, some of our more compassionate twosouthers decided to lend a hand…

by the way, I hope you all had a wonderful thanksgiving!

Welcome Back!!!

Last Saturday S.T.A.R.S. hosted a fun-filled evening of sumo wrestling, karaoke, DDR, free food, board games, and a lot of other exciting things…Hopefully you’ll all come if S.T.A.R.S. decides to have another one!

Wow…
Lance is completely squished beneath Tom and Matt

Pow!

Pat is Flying!!!

karaoke was amazin’

Turbo’s awesome on the DDR

Kegger!

Yeah, the pictures should speak for themselves–it was a good time…

First, there was the pep rally where a few
Two-southers showed their support by, uh, painting themselves….

Then there was the basket ball game where our team rocked, just look at that score!!!

oh, and I spotted batman in the crowd!

And later I had a good time costume shopping with friends, then hanging out at the Monster Bash!

there was a kissing booth….

and here’s our group of miscellaneous characters

Then, Sunday’s outings included the International Festival which was amazing to watch…now it’s time to catch up on the homework that I could have been doing this weekend instead of having fun….

Hey! So I just wanted to remind everyone about an awesome little club called THE UIS BLUE CREW!!! At every sporting event there’s a section in the stands full of standing, shouting, face-paint and crazy wig-wearing college students just out to support the team. Anyway, it’s fun and everyone should go to the games, even if you’re not into watching sports–where else can you go to get all your aggression out on the other team?…random things you hear with the blue crew at games:

“buhbuhbuhbuh….”(the noise when you brush your index finger up and down on your lips)

“Mike Jones!” “R-O-W-D-I-E that’s the way we spell rowdie, rowdie…”

“trees are green and I don’t eat cats!”

“WE MUST PROTECT THIS HOUSE!!!”

“Who you rootin’ for?” “UIS!!!”

along with too many yells and onomatopoeia outbursts to name (or write down in a way that you could read…)

Yeah, so, I get around to bowling maybe once every two years and tonight happened to be one of those nights! The first thing you need to know is that I’m a terrible bowler, as in, 63 is my highest all-time score, and the second thing is that when I get a ball in the gutter, it’s absolutely amazing! I mean, my gutterball is astonishing–the ball zooms out of my hand and flies directly into the gutter where it proceeds to run at incredibly high speeds into the mysterious darkness at the back of the alleyway. Tonight, for once, my gutterball was not underappreciated. My friend and roommate Liz decided to try a new style of rolling the ball–she strolled down the lane, raised her leg, threw her arm with bowling ball in hand under her leg, released the ball, and it went nowhere! So, as her bowling ball sat in the gutter halfway down the lane and no one had any idea how to get it out, I knew what I had to do. I picked up a bowling ball, threw a fantastic gutter shot, it rolled straight down to her stuck ball with enough velocity to send both her ball and mine careening into the black hole at the end of the alley. My gutterball had done something positive for the team instead of just bringing us down pointwise! And we all had an absolute blast playing for the rest of the night…

Okay, so, I just got back from some late night exploring in the library. Some friends and I discovered a stairwell that goes absolutely nowhere! Well, we didn’t exactly discover it, we actually intentionally ended up there using a map and everything. Running around the Quad. trying to find secret stairwells in the library late at night was definitely one of my first college adventures–I’m having an awesome time learning to embrace the complete random-ness of college life!!!

Life has been kind of insane lately. I’m one of those people who tries to get involved in everything, so balancing classes and extra-curriculars has been really trying (not to mention having a social life). Just to make things a little more interesting, this week my suite decided that we should swap room-mates. Of course, it’s not as simple as relocating the person; the bigger issue at play here is their stuff. So we spent the better part of last Sunday dragging everything out of both rooms and into the hallway. We had so much random furniture and paraphernalia sitting outside of our suite that people actually started stopping to ask if we were getting ready for a garage sale. Then came the painstaking task of getting all of the stuff back into the rooms. This felt a lot like when you unpack a box full of holiday decorations or something; all the pieces just don’t quite fit together like they did when you first opened the box. Thankfully many of the “hey, are you guys having a yard sale” people stuck around to help rebuild beds, cram stuff into closets, and rearrange masses of your average dorm necessities (I’m learning how to survive on bottled water and Ramen noodles).
Now, three days later, we’re all getting settled into new patterns with our new roommate. The initial shock from suddenly being placed in a single room with my first roommate was just beginning to wear off, and now I have the chance to experience that all over again with my new roomie, Liz! If nothing else, when this is all over I’m going to be great at arranging dorm furniture…

this is a test post–does the blog work?