June Update

New Hampshire Road 101

I've had kind of a hectic month, between school and getting ready for my mom to come visit. I'm currently up in Merrimack, New Hampshire for one of my younger cousin's high school graduation. The weather is absolutely gorgeous. Today was "hot" (it got up to 75ish), but it has been in the 60s the rest of the time we've been here.

We had a pretty good trip in, since we drove through NYC in the early AM. We stopped at the Discovery Museum in Trumbull, CT for the GPS Maze exhibit, but ended up exploring the rest of the hands on exhibits. If you're ever in the area with your kids, it's definitely worth getting off of I95 to see it.

I finally got a chance to see my aunt's "new" house that they built over 10 years ago. It's really neat, since they have 3 "secret" rooms. Paul and I ended up sleeping in one of the hidden rooms. Although it was a kind of a pain to get to, it worked out really well, since you can't really hear noise from the rest of the house.

I will try to post more once I get back to Virginia. We're going to see one of the professional sand castle building contests tomorrow, so hopefully I'll get some neat pictures there.

Study Break

After Clayton got home, I decided to run to Wegman's to pick up a few things without Paul underfoot. As I passed the hotel near our house, I thought I saw the Wienermobile out of the corner of my eye, so I stopped to take a picture. I thought Paul and I would walk over after supper, but by the time I managed to get him out the door, it had already moved on.

One Down, One to Go

I'm finally done with the most nerve wracking part of my semester - my speech. I thought it was going to be pretty easy at first - five minutes seems like a really long time to stand up and talk in front of an audience about a topic you don't like. However, we got to pick our topics, and I swear, I had a much harder time trimming my speech down to 5 minutes. I ended up clocking in right around the 5.5 minute mark. I know it probably sounds weird, but I honestly wouldn't have minded doing a 15-20 minute speech on my topic. My topic was on why/how to help your older relatives use blogging as a social outlet. I have to thank my grandma C. and Ann of Roc Rebel Granny for the inspiration for my topic.

I ended up deciding to do an extemporaneous speech, and just talking to the class about my topic, so I didn't spend 5 minutes with my eyes glued to note cards. This ended up being fortunate, since I hit the one minute warning when I had about 2 minutes of stuff I wanted to talk about. I was able to to hit the high points on my last slide and transition into my conclusion before the 30 second warning. I made a high A on my speech, which was a little surprising to me. About two words into my introduction, I felt like I was the patient of the week on House and for some reason, he'd decided to replace my blood with adrenaline. I guess it didn't show as much as I thought it did.

Tomorrow I need to go in and actually take my final for the study skills class and post my speech/end of the semester evaluations and I'm on summer vacation. (Well, for a week or so until the summer semester starts up again.)

Lookin’ in the Mirror

Photo by Hope

So my friend Hope posted her photography final (along with a few other pictures from earlier in the semester). Her theme was on body image and I think it came out very well. A few of the photos are borderline NSFW. This is my favorite from the set.

Still Around

Leia and Paul...

Originally uploaded by cmoneill.

This last week has been kind of rough, since it just seems like there isn't nearly enough time for everything to get done. Between finals and migrating the geocoin site from zencart to ubercart, I've been very busy. I should be completely done on May 9th. My semester break is about 3 weeks long, so I may plan a little weekend getaway to go camping/caching in the DelMarVa area.

Last week, I managed to free up some time to go to the Reston Zoo with Tamara and Leia. In spite of several bus loads of elementary school kids being there, we had fun. They had the cutest day old baby goats in the barn, and the lambs had grown quite a bit since we went back in March. After we finished up at the zoo, we drove around Lake Fairfax Park. Both of the kids were quite tired, but managed to stay awake. They even held hands for a little bit, before Paul learned the hard way that you do not take a pacifier from a sleepy baby.