Kitty

Howdy! It's been a while. This semester has been overwhelming, but it's almost over. I've had a good time--enjoying time spent with friends, family, and boyfriend. Now, I'm procrastinating for finals, anticipating my freedom in T- 5 days!



Stitch, our new kitty. She's my roommate Leslie's. She's adjusted to living in our apartment quite well, especially cohabiting with a dog! In fact, just this afternoon, she walked over to our dog Marco's water dish right before he was going to drink, and Marco just waited patiently for her to drink her fill. Hehe :)

Homework Bound...

Well, folks, I had a great time during spring break bumming around home. It was good to see old friends and soak up some Florida sun.
I brought a friend of mine, Nori, to visit. We used to play the same 2-D spaceship game around seven years ago, and we've been friends ever since. Anywho, it was fun to show him around my hometown, although I was thoroughly shamed by my lack of knowledge of the space program. I now know about 20x more than I used to in that area thanks to a tour of Kennedy Space center and Nori's fascination with space.



We also visited ECHO, saw some of the farm, saw some briquette presses and solar dryers, and poked around in ECHO's library. I got the titles of some cool books on solar drying (how ironic!) that look like they'll be useful in our peanut drying efforts.

But sadly, I am now back in school, working diligently on homework (with a bit of socializing and EWB stuff thrown in for good measure, of course).

Middle Eastern Muffins

Okay, okay, so the muffins are actually from a mix sent in a care package from my mom last week. However, one perk of our new living situation is that there is a nice kitchen in the dorm basement. So far we've grilled hamburgers, made corn, baked pork chops and chicken and rice, and made countless cupcakes, cookies, and muffins. Carissa and myself are quite the chefs!

While making muffins this afternoon (thanks Mom!) I also did some reading for my Middle Eastern politics class. Coming into the class knowing relatively little about the Middle East, I've been a bit overwhelmed, but have learned a ton!

Like, for example, the fact that so many countries in that area are 99.9% muslim. Or that the reason why the US and West is generally disliked in the Middle East is fairly complicated and is not because "they hate democracy and American freedom!". If you're interested, I can muse on that more at a later date. For now, my thoughts are focused on the relationship between mosque and state in primarily Islamic countries. This issue is the topic of my research paper for the class. I'm quite curious to compare the mosque-state relationship in a couple middle eastern countries with the church-state relationship of the US.

And so that brings me to this afternoon as I read about Turkey for my class and make muffins. Middle Eastern muffins!

Tulips

Spring in St. Louis is beautiful. I know Mom is "oooh"ing over the tulips right now. I've been enjoying 50-70 degree weather (well, for the most part--it snowed two weeks ago). Things have been crazy lately, but I guess that's the way it goes.

We had our first build day for the solar peanut dryer yesterday. So far, we have a bunch of cut but unattached pieces of wood, some fun pictures (that I haven't been able to get my hands on yet--sorry!), permission to use the engineering shop, and a place to store our dryer-in-progress.

I got my guitar fixed. It got knocked over a couple times (don't know who would have done that...) and I finally managed to knock off a tuning peg. Still, I got it fixed at the music shop on the Loop for $14! Sweet!

I played second oboe in an oboe-oboe-English horn trio last monday at a recital. That went fairly well. Oboes in harmony are so nice!

Anyway, I don't really feel very philisophical right now. Things are just...busy. I have three more weeks of school and then I'm done. Two more weeks until finals. Two of my classes have no final, just final projects. The project would be really neat if it weren't for the fact that we're given very little time to work on them and each one is worth about a third of my grade! Here's a concept sketch for one of my projects:


Since the school year is coming to an end, I guess it's time to reflect. I really like college. It's a good feeling to be on your own, figuring out life for yourself.

I feel like I can cause things that I care about to happen. I'm very happy I've been leading the Haiti project with Engineers without Borders. Going to Haiti was an eye-opening experience of course, but I was amazed at how much I was pushed and stretched to get it in motion. I had to make many phone calls, and do a ton of coordinating, because it takes a lot of people to make such things happen. I've found a lot wanting in myself, but I think I've grown a lot this year as well.

I've made some friends here at Wash U. My roommate, Carissa, is awesome--we're rooming together next year! I still haven't settled down completely in a church, but I've made a lot of good friends through the church groups on campus.

Back to Normal

I've pretty much gotten back into the swing of things back at school. Mom and Dad are relieved to hear that I've gotten caught up on the work that I let slide prior to the trip to Haiti. My roommate's glad that I'm here to bake her pumpkin cake. I'm taking hot showers for granted once again.

Remember the fondue party I helped organize a few months ago to raise awareness about human trafficking and promote fair trade bananas? Well, starting last week, our dining service offers only fair trade bananas! This is an amazing accomplishment for Students for Fair Trade on campus. Fair trade bananas are virtually impossible to buy in St. Louis, but due to the dedication of about a half dozen students, and positive responses on campus to events like the fondue party, our dining service switched to fair trade bananas. Victory has never tasted so sweet!

In addition, last month Cadbury announced that it's best-known product is going to be fair trade certified by late summer this year. This is the first step made by a major chocolate maker toward fair trade. I hope this trend continues.

Our first Haiti Project meeting is tonight. We'll start working on tweaking the design for the solar dryer so that we can build and test one here in St. Louis. Here's the current design made in CAD software.

Busy Busy

Things are going pretty well around here. I've never been so busy for such a long period of time, but I'm actually pretty happy. Several weeks ago, I got behind some in my classes, working on the Haiti Project, and since then I've been spending oodles of time catching up on work, and getting the Haiti Project in order. It's a good thing I can juggle, eh?

The weekend before last, Kristina and Eric (my cousin and her husband) visited my aunt and uncle in Illinois. They picked me up on Friday and we spent the weekend hanging out. We played games, ate lots of good, home-cooked food (including barbeque and beef and noodles!), and visited late into the night.
It's good to get a break from campus life--get in a few home-cooked meals and brush your teeth in your own bathroom. It's also great to visit with people that you love and have known for more than 6 months.

The Haiti project is progressing well. We're leaving for Cap Haitien, Haiti this Monday. We'll spend a week there assessing the factory's machines, teaching the factory workers to properly maintain the machines, and instituting a regular maintenance schedule. It also looks like we'll be trying out making charcoal out of unusable peanuts and peanut shells, to make use of the factory's waste products.

I'm taking my camera, so when I get back, I'll post some pictures from the trip. This should be exciting--one week from now I'll be walking around a peanut butter factory in Haiti!

Life is like a laundry basket full of oboe reeds...

Last semester, I started taking oboe lessons, concentrating mostly on making oboe reeds, an essential skill for a self-sufficient oboist. You can't buy high quality reeds from a store; you have to get someone to make them for you, and then tweak them for you as they change.

Well, as I was working on some reeds this morning, I started thinking that life is kind of like making oboe reeds. Making quality reeds is an extremely tricky process, and takes a long time to learn. It's fairly easy to learn to make a reed that looks right, but extremely difficult to make one that plays right.

Here's how reed-making goes:


First you have to attach a piece of (1)bamboo cane (just called cane) to a (2)metal base called a "staple." You take the piece of cane, fold it in half over about half of the staple, then wrap string very tightly around the cane and staple. (3)

Then, you have to shave bits of cane off of the reed in certain places to make it vibrate right(4). This is the hardest part, and where all of the skill comes in.

There are many subtle techniques to shaving the cane, most of which I have not learned. Pretty much I just work as best on the reed and then my instructor takes it and tries to salvage a playable reed from it.

The thing that impresses me most about the whole process is how difficult it is, and how you go into it knowing that you will not make decent reeds for quite a while. My teacher told me that people say you can't make a good reed until you've made a laundry basket full of them. That's a lot of reeds! Regardless, it will probably be a year or two before I make acceptable reeds, depending on how much I work at it.

I guess that's what life seems like a lot of the time--there are so many little things that you have to learn before you can really excel on your own. Until then, hopefully, there are people to help you salvage your actions to mold them into something useful. But you've gotta make a whole lot of not-so-wonderful moves before you really get the hang of things.

New Classes!

New year, new semester, new clothes. Why new clothes, you ask? Because for some reason I moved from Florida to St. Louis for college. We'll never know what came over me when I chose, I guess ;)

It's been very lightly snowing all afternoon, and is getting heavier as I type. Maybe We'll get some real snow on the ground! I wouldn't mind a snowball fight or two... I've pretty much learned how to bundle up--so much clothing to keep track of! Thanks to everyone that contributed hats, coats, scarves, etc, to my wardrobe. I've used everything, I think.

Classes are going well. I'm taking Intro to Mechanical Engineering, Calculus 3, Computer Science 2, Logic and Discrete Mathematics, and Lingustics. I'm pretty pleased with my schedule this semester. I only have one hour of classes on Wednesday, and two on Monday and Friday. So those days I should be able to do homework and relax! Anyway, that's the plan.

I'm looking forward to Linguistics the most. The teacher is really cool. I can't really think of another word to describe him. He gives the class a hard time, but in a good-natured way. It's enjoyable.

Pondering Programs...

I'm really looking forward to going home, soon. I'll be glad to see Mom, Dad and Thomas. And it will be nice to go outside without 20 layers of clothing on. Okay, maybe not 20 layers, but a lot!!

I signed up for classes a few weeks ago. Here's the line-up: Calc 3, Computer Science II (I took CS I this semester) , Logic and Discrete Math (another Comp Sci class), Intro to Mechanical Engineering, and Linguistics. I really wanted to take Communication Design, which is kind of like a graphic design class, from the art school, but it would mean going from 9:00 to 5:30 solid Tuesday and Thursday. I would be a basketcase if I did that, I think. (Well, more so a basketcase than I am now.) I'll start taking mechanical engineering (my major?) classes in earnest in my junior year, so I'm taking comp sci classes to go towards a minor.

I've been thinking about what I want to major in. I'm waiting to see how much I like this intro to mechanical engineering class. If after taking it, I think mech e is what I want to go into, then I'll stick with it. Otherwise, I have lots of other options. I could see myself majoring in systems engineering or computer science, or something non-engineering. Apparently the systems engineering major is pretty flexible so you can take lots of non-engineering classes, like communication design, anthropology, or other classes. We'll see.

Well, I'm going to go surfing the internet to see if I can program my cellphone. The guest speaker in my computer science class today talked about how he programmed his phone. Wouldn't that be cool! I can program it to...do something nifty! I can't actually think of anything really useful that I could do by programming my phone, but how cool would it be to be like "I programmed my cellphone." Everyone will be so jealous.

East meets ... East?

We've been looking at a lot of different music-cultures in my Musics of the World class. We just wrapped up a unit on Japanese music and are beginning a new section on Central/Southeastern European music. Finishing up my reading for class tonight, I was inspired to share a tidbit with you.
Several weeks ago we studied bits of Indonesian music, especially Javanese Gamelan music. One of the neat things I've learned in the course is that most cultures do not use the same tuning system that we use. To some of us, Jazz and blues might seem out there, but those musical styles are still based on "half-step" intervals in tuning. In most of the communities we've studied, they use completely different tuning systems, usually only similar to "Western" tuning in that they recognize the octave (nifty, eh?). A long-existing musical style in Java is music made by a Gamelan, a "band" of 10-15 members who play large metal xylophone-ish things (actually called metallophones), a violin-ish instrument, drums, and all shapes and sizes of gongs. Well, when I was listening to this music, I thought to myself: "this sounds oddly familiar." It took me a times listening to this music to identify the place I had heard this type of music before. Here's a nice example of a Javanese Gamelan performing:



Now, I'd like to introduce you to a Super Nintendo game called "Secret of Mana." Thomas and I played it on my computer for a while, and we both agree it's an excellent game (except when your sister accidentally erases your game--sorry!). Take 30 seconds to watch/listen to this clip of a battle in Secret of Mana.

Secret of Mana: Dark Lich


Can you hear it yet? Try listening again if you need to. Beneath the frenzied accompaniment and battle noises, you'll hear Gamelan metallophones! The metallophones are tuned completely different from Western tuning and give quite a different sound than we're used to. Video games usually use "western"-sounding music, even though so many are produced in the "east." Look how cultured you are.

I've got rhythm...

Last Monday, we watched a video in Musics of the World about northern Indian classical music. Since I found out we would be studying music, I've been keen to see if I recognize some of the music I heard this summer. As some of you know, my paternal grandparents grew up as missionary kids in the part of India that is now Pakistan. Earlier this year they came into contact with a UCF PhD student from Pakistan, Monas. They were amazed to find that he is a Christian, coming from a country that is over 90% Muslim.

Monas came to the New Wilmington Mission Conference along with me. While at Conference, the grandparents showed him a drum, called a tabla (I don't know where it came from, actually--Grandma? Grandpa?). So Monas played for us! He played the drum (although it was not in good condition, and another drum is played at the same time) and sang. It was really neat.

Now fast-forward to my Musics of the World class. I was so excited when I saw the men in the video playing the tabla! It made me feel quite cultured. Here's a picture of a tabla--which includes the pair. The grandparents only had the drum on the left. You tune the drum by moving the wood blocks on the sides up and down. Now if I were only coordinated enough to play something like that!

Musics of the World

School is going pretty well, and, if my assumptions are correct, the semester is almost half-way over. I will be taking mid term exams over the next couple of weeks, but I've already had a round of exams, so I'm not too nervous about the next ones.

One of the cooler classes I'm taking this semester is Musics of the World. Obviously, we can't learn about all of the musics of the world, so we've been surveying different kinds of music from several regions/continents. We started out with Native American music, focusing on Navajo musical styles. Then, we learned about some music from five different people groups in sub-saharan Africa. We learned about Griots, who sing praises and oral histories of their peoples. You can find Griots in multiple cultural groups--we studied two in particular, Luni from Ghana that use (along with singing) drums that actually imitate the tonal language of the Dagbama people. They use an hour glass-shaped drum whose pitch can be changed by squeezing the cords that hold the drum head in place. We also studied Jalolu from Mali and Gambia that uses a large harp-ish instrument called a kora to accompany vocalists. In an interesting twist, the kora's highest-sounding strings are closest to the ground and thus the high-pitched sounds are called "low" sounds, while what we would call low pitches are the highest. It makes me think of the rat in the Narnia Tales that is so intrigued by a round world -- "are things upside-down on the other side of the world?" Apparently so!

After our section on African music (which obviously covered a lot more material than what I shared with you above), we studied African American music, with blues being our main focus. It was fascinating to see different types of blues as it changed into soul and rock and roll. I was particularly inspired to work on blues on the guitar. A girl in my class and I are planning to get together and have a "jam session."

The next section we'll be studying in Musics of the World is Indian music! I'm pretty excited. I'll have to talk to my grandparents and see how the material I learn in class compares to their own experiences growing up in India. This summer at the New Wilmington Mission Conference, I got to hear Monas, a PhD student in Florida but from Pakistan, play a drum (whose name I forgot) and sing for us. It was pretty neat. Maybe I'll learn about it in my class...

Classes!

I've now had six days of classes, and so far, they look promising. I get really excited when I hear about what we'll be learning, because I immediately begin to figure out where I can incorporate those pieces of knowledge into Wikipedia. I haven't actually edited it since I left for Illinois early August, but I still think about it often...
Maybe a break from Wikipedia is a good thing. I do think it is neat. I think I'll learn a lot of things I can incorporate into Wikipedia--some this year, but much more so in the following years when I start taking higher level classes. If I do graduate classes, I will learn even more obscure information that I can add to wikipedia!
So far, I've been the most excited about my computer aided design class. Essentially it's a drafting class, 50% learning how to design things with pencil and paper, and 50% designing things on a 3D modeling program. The modeling program, called Solid Edge, is fascinating! You can create all sorts of things--make a rectangular prism, then cut out various holes, or handles or what not. This kind of program is like the kind where you will design your house in (in 3D), then use the energy analysis add-on software to analyze the building exactly as it was drawn. This is all called Building Information Modeling, except for the 21st century! (you can find information of Building Information Modeling on--you guessed it--wikipedia. I've done some editing of that page, but I don't really know what I'm talking about--hopefully I'll know more once I'm done with the class.)
I'm also taking computer science I, where we will be learning the basics of computer programming and practical uses of computers. For those who are interested, we'll be programming in Java. Already we've done a bit--involving changing the colors of pictures, combining, pictures, and other fun stuff!
Okay, enough computers. I've spent several hours now playing the piano in various practice rooms on campus. There's one in a dorm a short walk away from me, and very nice practice rooms in the music building, a five minute walk away. I've been teaching Leslie and a guy down the hall from me, Daniel to play chords on the piano, and we've been enjoying ourselves immensely. Leslie and I spent an hour and half yesterday going through my book of guitar music playing songs on guitar and piano. We're turning ourselves into jazz pianists! Well, maybe.
Also, I've been helping some people to learn guitar. Mainly, I've just been showing them chords or giving them music and letting them go to town on my guitar. When they become famous I can say I taught them everything they know: