I kept putting off writing a blog entry this month. Okay, well, that’s not exactly true; I started to write one three times, but each attempt got deleted before I was able to save it, so I gave up. Not that you, dear readers, were missing much—I was going to write a tribute post for the sinking of the RMS Titanic, whose 103rd anniversary was this month, and especially explain why it’s so important to me, but alas, ‘twas not to be. (Not that people would have had much interest in an entry like that, anyway.)
So what’s been going on over the past month, other than the 103rd anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic? Well, on what was actually the anniversary of the ship hitting the iceberg (it hit the iceberg at 11:40pm on April 14 and didn’t sink until 2:20am on April 15), I had my French Capstone presentation. There are six of us French majors, one of whom is in China, who are graduating this semester. The order for our presentations was already pre-determined, but it worked out perfectly, i.e. Kisa wanted to go first and she did, and Chelsea and I didn’t want to go first or last and we didn’t. My project was/is a forty-page translation of six different articles from a French literary journal, though all of the articles are about different subjects in Québec, specifically their sovereignty movement. I didn’t do the whole “master of public speaking” thing by memorizing everything and using notecards, but hey. Don’t judge.
On that same day, April 14, Kat and I received a reward for our immense patience throughout the semester: Halestorm’s third album was released! Around noon, about three hours before my presentation, we went to Hasting’s to each buy the deluxe version of the album, which comes with two extra songs. Both Kat and I have a certain “process” to listening to new albums in that we like to do it when there’s nothing else going on so we can focus only on the music, rather than just putting it on as background music and multi-tasking. The verdict? The album is awesome! It’s different, perhaps not as heavy as their past two albums, but it’s still awesome. You can tell they had a lot of different influences—there’s a big whiff of 80s music, actually—and the musicians all got more “spotlight” as it were, with more drum, bass, and guitar solos. All in all: YAY!
Speaking of Halestorm, we’ve known for quite a while that they’ll be coming to St. Louis (the Pageant specifically) on May 20. We’ve always planned to go, but then a contest popped up to win two free tickets on Tunespeak, in which I had to listen to different songs, look at pictures, and watch videos in an effort to earn a crap ton of a points. I did win a lot of points, but I’ve kind of plateaued at 10th place, though that’s still really good. However, looks like Kat and I will have to buy our tickets ourselves. Darn.
Something else that happened this month was that David, who is a photographer, agreed to come on campus with me and take some pictures to use for graduation announcements. Said graduation announcements have been made and printed, and now they just need to arrive in the mail so they can be sent out! (I could have done the one-hour service at Wal-Mart, but that would have cost me $40 as opposed to $15 to just have them mailed to me.) The resulting pictures were also fun to experiment with in that in one of them, my eyes are closed. However, David managed to get a picture right after or before that, so the only part that moves between the two photos is my eyes. So I used photoshop to take my eyes from the first picture and blend them into the second so it looked like my eyes were actually open. I’ve managed to trick a few people with this. Muwahaha. (Also, it’s fun to switch back and forth between the old photo and the new one and make my stationary self blink.)
However, the main highlight of the month has been what happened this past Tuesday the 21st. A while back, in late March (actually, a month and a day before this actually happened) I won a contest to have a Skype call with Bruno! It took a while to find some time that we both had free, but it all came together on Tuesday, and it was AWESOME! I’m not going to go into detail (because, hey, I need to have some mystery), but suffice to say that it was amazing and that I am the luckiest girl in the world.
