Winter Hiking

Mon, Mar 8, 2010 – 08:58

You may know that with both her little rocketts lifted off, my mom has finally gotten the chance to start on her big dream of thruhiking the Appalachian Trail. The trail runs about 2,200 miles from Springer Mtn in Georgia to Mt. Katahdin in Maine. She’s been planning and dreaming and training since before I left for college (and I’m almost done now) so it’s very important to her. Because she expects to take until September or later to finish, she wanted to get as early a start as she could manage – the end of January.

Since Georgia usually doesn’t have much of a winter, this wasn’t going to be too much of a problem especially since it would give her time to outrun the mosquitos and black flies in the summer. Second Stage (her trail name, referring to the way a rocket drops the extra stages to make it all the way to outer space) is a pretty cautious hiker though, and all the ice and blown-down trees and snow (and temperatures cold enough to freeze her boots in the sleeping bag) in addition to steep mountain trails have worn down her nerves a lot.

She’s currently made it as far as the Smokey Mountains (her milestone of Fontana Dam at 164 miles), but since only thruhiking purists actually cover the entire trail in order, she’s decided to take some time off to go home to Illinois and take care of some things there. She’s mostly on track with where she expected to be, regardless of the bad weather. Once the stuff there is resolved, she’ll go back out to the Trail, because my mom is not one to give up just because something is in her way. Usually that sort of thing just makes her growl and grit her teeth and try harder until she’s beaten whatever obstacle it is into the ground. She’s smart enough to know that even people like Gandalf can be defeated by winter weather in the mountains though, so she plans to return to the trail north of the Smokeys and come back later.

This is a big goal – more constructive than your usual “midlife crisis” and a huge boost for her self-confidence. We’re all really supportive of her that she can overcome all the fears and discomforts to reach the top. Of course, hiking in winter is dangerous and we’re worried about her, but she’s smart and can do a good job taking care of herself, and all the trail community is amazingly supportive. She’s in good hands with them!

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The Only Day That’s a Command

Thu, Mar 4, 2010 – 23:47

My birthday is March 4, the only day of the year that’s a command. In English, at least, as I learned trying to explain the joke to Germans last year.

"Heute Ha-ha-habe Ich Geburtstag" video by Die Prinzen: even if you don't know German, the visuals convey what they're singing about pretty well.

My little brother wrote me an alternative version of the first verse to “It’s Not My Birthday” by my favorite band, They Might Be Giants. I’m not sure they’re teaching him the right things over there at his college… :P

Well the rum falls down without my help I’m afraid;
And my lawn gets drunk though I’ve withheld my consent;
When this Grey [goose] world crumbles like a cake;
I’ll be hungover from the hope;
That I’ll never see double that recipe again

Janine's Happy Birthday Card

Janine sent me a drawing for my birthday. ^^ I guess our flatmates Micha and Steffi don't like her singing much!

Ellen and Chels taking a turn together

Ellen and Chels taking a turn together after the movie

I woke up to a beautiful sunny day and walked to work for the morning. So many people wished me happy birthday before I was even in the office for five minutes (the internet is a wonderful thing), I felt like such a lucky girl. Lots of people wished me happy birthday, and when I got home my cousin and I had some pizza and chatted until Chelsey and Tara showed up. We drove to the Pittsford Mall (Rochester’s famed shopping center) and all saw “The Young Victoria” with Derik from German club. It was better than I expected – pleasant and interesting, although after you left the theater and thought it over, it seemed to lack a certain depth to the development of Queen Victoria’s story. We had ice cream and visited the motherstore of Wegmans, which is huge but because there’s so much selection, rather than the way Walmart is huge. This is evidently one of the premier tourist attractions in Rochester. Anyone who has not been to a Wegmans cannot appreciate how important this is, because they don’t understand how a grocery store can be cool. Those who have been to a Trader Joe’s may have some understanding, however.

Ellen examining her wine

Examining the wine carefully

Kara and I relaxed afterwards and then walked to Lovin Cup, a cafe bar place not too far from my apartment, where we had delicious hamburgers and I got ID’d for the first time. I had a glass of Riesling at the suggestion of the waitress (before I had decided on my meal, so there), and Kara had Blue Moon, which, she pointed out for later reference, is very drinkable since

Kara at dinner

Cousin Kara

I have yet to appreciate beer. Then we spent a while making fun of people who spend too much time appreciating their wine, because evidently different drinks have to be drunk very differently. Tara and her friend stopped by our table and her friend pondered the question with me of “which wine actually would go best with a burger and potato chips?” Because Lovin Cup is devoid of hard liquor, we had to make a stop at the real bar across the courtyard on the way home to have my “birthday shot.” It was a pretty great birthday, spending a bunch of time with cool people, having good food and ice cream, getting off campus for a nice movie, and going to my first real American bar. (I like that old-world-looking pub in Dessau with the oil paintings a lot better!)

Cake at 21st Birthday

Cake the next day at my party

But I still can’t help missing Rose’s balloon hats for any classmate with a birthday…

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Spring Break Week

Tue, Mar 2, 2010 – 20:12

By the end of the week, my blog will have been up for a year! And just like last year at this time, I’m looking at returning to Germany.

While I wait to hear back from CDS and try to stay patient, I’ve started doing research. Looking at prices for plane tickets, apartment furnishings, mobile contracts, rooms in shared apartments (WGs). Adding up the costs and figuring out how much I need to earn each month so I don’t lose money in my first job. And so far it’s not looking good for a German internship – CDS offers to find one paying 400-800€ per month, which according to my calculations means significantly less than the US federal minimum wage. I’ve been pretty passionate about this for a while now, and I want to see how things turn out – it would be a really great experience. But… I guess realism is setting in now that I’m actually looking at the logistics.

Helping this week has been the much-needed extra encouragement I’ve been getting from family and friends (and also all these hiker people from my mom’s blog!) as Winter Quarter at RIT finally ends. Also this great tongue-in-cheek blog I found about the differences between the US and Germany has been helping with much-needed laughs. RIT loses a huge number of freshman during Winter Quarter because of the winter snows and clouds – Rochester gets something like 60 sunny days all year – and seven weeks of rigorous academics after winter break. We need all the laughs we can get by the time spring break rolls around!

Tomorrow afternoon my cousin Kara is coming out to visit for a few days. We have some plans to go see a movie and out to dinner on my birthday Thursday, and then Friday I have a party with friends to watch silly science fiction shows. The rest of the weekend will be scrapbooking with Kara, relaxing and getting some final rest for the sprint to the end.

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Vancouver Closing Ceremony

Mon, Mar 1, 2010 – 11:00

Sunday night was the closing ceremony of the 2010 Winter Olympics, which, with some persuasion, Nate, Ruth and I gathered to watch. By the end, it was EPIC, and totally worth watching.

Evidently, there had been trouble lighting the torch at the opening ceremonies, so they made fun of themselves by having a mime with a giant tool belt come out and fix the broken arm of the display, miming pulling it up out of the floor.

But really, it started out with typically Canadian knitted sweaters depicting reindeer heads on the Canadian olympic team. When combined with the American team’s Ralph Lauren cardigans, it definitely looked like there was an ugly sweater contest happening.

Canadian reindeer sweater

Ralph Lauren sweaters

And I still don’t understand why the German uniforms were yellow and blue – they just looked like another variation of Sweden’s gear.

German Olympic uniform

Anyway, after all the teams came out and whatnot, WILLIAM SHATNER spoke. I guess he is Canadian after all. His description of Canada reminded me strongly of his reading of Sarah Palin’s poetry/resignation speech. And he couldn’t resist dropping the Canada is the “final frontier” line, could he?

Then… then there was the actual dancing and music part at the end. Some guy dressed as one of Canada’s mounted policemen came out and started singing, and then a bunch of women dressed as “sexy mounties” with short skirts came out and ripped off his uniform to reveal a white tuxedo. Sexy mounties: wtf? Giant maple leaf-wrapped women and pairs of people dancing while carrying birch canoes around. Huge inflatable mounties. Every minute, the routine got weirder and weirder. Nate pointed out that Canadians can’t pass up a chance to make fun of themselves. I see what he means… Huge cardboard cutouts of hockey players and a little boy in a hockey puck costume came out and wheeled around. And then… and then the “always enjoyable giant inflatable beavers” came out, as the commentator described them, followed by giant inflatable moose. I was disappointed when NBC cut to some stupid tv show at the height of the epicness.

By the end, my head was about to explode. Sexy mounties dancing and singing on a giant stetson hat, while surrounded by huge inflatable beavers, enormous hockey players, flying maple leaves, all to honor (among others) a team dressed in what were apparently the kind of home-made reindeer sweaters that you are only allowed to wear to Christmas family parties because all your aunts are wearing them too.

Crazy.

2010 Closing Ceremonies Final Outcome

The final result.

Oh and I forgot to mention: Uni High School now has a silver medalist to add to its list of three Nobel Prize winners and Pulitzer Prize winner!

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Dreaming Miles Away

Tue, Feb 23, 2010 – 19:24

I’m in my final three months at RIT. I’m prepping for German Theater and Advanced German III next quarter in addition to the second halves of Experimental New Media and Senior Team Project. In a week I will be trying to test out of Writing Seminar – I would hope I can pass the test, since my music teacher says he is nominating my research essay about Haydn’s Sturm und Drang period for the RIT Liberal Arts writing contest. We’ll see though. A couple of days after that, I’ll be turning 21! It’s taken long enough – I’m by far the youngest in the whole new media graduating class.

Adam, my senior project advisor, is very enthusiastic about our project. We all signed our document in pink sharpie… hopefully we can produce something to fulfill that promise. We’re all looking forward to seeing it completed, too, although enthusiasm waxes and wanes from week to week. At least another group has replaced us as “the problem group” :P The rest of finals week is proving just as stressful as usual, more because I’m constantly waking up during the night to worry if things will work out once the net has been removed at graduation, than because I have projects to finish up at the last minute.

Despite the discouraging form email response from Pluspol (turns out they mostly just do programming and don’t have a budget for design interns), I’ve decided that I should throw cautious pessimism to the winds and start thinking about a packing list for Germany. If I can’t get a job when I’m paying to find one, I figure I’m unlikely to do any better with my own job-hunting skills and am bound to be disappointed anyway. I took a look at plane tickets – they’re expensive already, and I still have to wait something like two months before I’ll know if I should be booking anything. I’ll be going right as tourist season starts up…

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End-of-the-Quarter Design

Thu, Feb 18, 2010 – 09:52

Here’s my quarter projects in summary:

Art History final project: Produce a fake Gothic artifact and write a paper explaining what you have produced. I used RIT’s extensive Cary Collection to photograph real Gothic manuscripts and then photoshop them together. I consider it to be using the medieval philosophy of copying the masters.

Vellum Folio

Photoshopped 13th Century English Bible

During my presentation, one of the guys in class asked, “did you stretch the vellum yourself?” when I explained how the hole was made from a little nick that expanded during the stretching. I told him I did indeed stretch it myself, and his response was “are you serious?!” I guess it’s convincing. :P

Career Skills: new design for the blog, as you can see. I’ll be finishing up the CSS in the next week or so. Lots of bubbly stuff, and looks like an actual custom template now. Also a functional HTML portfolio (and just in time, now that all the German praktikum stuff is out!).

Experimental New Media: Although my timeline doesn’t have me starting actual design work on my type-motion piece until next quarter, my teacher requested some initial comps. This is a looping animation to display some of my poetry in a dynamic style that attempts to bring out some of the emotions they contain. And my teacher likes trippy projects.
Inkstains Comp 1Inkstains Comp 2

Team Project: Comp for the design of our game. All four designers produced their own, and we’re combining the most successful elements from each into the final version.

Map Comp Design

Individual design for senior project game

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Deaf Academic Research

Mon, Feb 15, 2010 – 12:10

For the past half year I’ve been working with Ron Kelly at RIT/NTID on a research project about deaf/hard-of-hearing students’ low academics. It takes something like five years (on average) for one of our deaf students to graduate from the NTID two-year associate degree programs, and we lose about half our students by the time four years have gone by.

This research project is examining the phenomenon through personal factors on academics – grades, early alerts, attrition rates, and we also did a bunch of testing on incoming students to look at their analytical abilities/intelligence, motivation, reading level, etc. Over the years this study has been going on, the factors involved have been refined – not everything that you might think is actually important to whether the deaf succeed or not. Ron is presenting the ongoing research at a conference, and since I gave his presentation a makeover he is allowing me to post some pages from the 28-pg presentation.

Slide Preview

Click to view PDF sample of the presentation

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SewBaby logos

Sun, Feb 7, 2010 – 12:50

My new client SewBaby is reviewing the logos I designed for them over on Ann Brodsky’s blog! Ms. Brodsky asked me to reskin her website and develop a new logo for her company, with the goal of opening up a new sector of younger women while keeping her current 45+ customer base happy. The logo requirements were to work with the heart and name to keep brand recognition, while also bringing it up to date.

Although I sketched up a number of other ideas, these are the ones that made it as far as being sent to SewBaby for review:

Pink Stitched Heart Logo

Design incorporating the sewing aspect, and their friendly home-oriented business style.

Blue Heart Logo

Design focuses on professionalism and trustworthiness. Blue also plays down the "girlyness" of sewing.

Pink Painted Heart Logo

Bolder palette and modern type for a simply updated look to the old logo.

Once we get a logo settled on (and when I have time, since the quarter is wrapping up and I’m swamped with homework I really ought to be doing) then I’ll be working on a makeover for her main site. At the moment I’ve gotten as far as contacting her programmer and doing some style and color palette research. I’ve got a palette I’m pretty satisfied with (thanks to my new tool Color Scheme Designer), but it may get tweaked when I start working on the site design. Ms. Brodsky has been great about sending me links to sewing sites she likes the look of, which has made my job a lot easier!

In the meantime, I’m working on a design (if you want to see the sketches and give feedback please let me know!) for this blog so hopefully (I’ve been saying this for a year now…) it will look like a designer’s blog for real.

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Acceptance

Thu, Feb 4, 2010 – 17:39

Just what I need for the end of this day! ^^ I’m sooo glad I have no classes tomorrow, and getting this helps ease my stress a bit!

Dear Ellen,

We have reviewed your application to the CDS Internship Program in Germany, and are pleased to accept you into the program.  Congratulations!  Your official program start will be July 1, 2010. <snip> Upon receipt of these documents and the payment, we will begin the placement process on your behalf and the program fee is no longer refundable.

Upon receipt of an internship offer from a German firm/organization, we will contact you with further information about your internship.  We recommend that you attend an orientation seminar at our German partner organization, the InWEnt gGmbH in Bonn, at the start of your program.  Further information will be forwarded to you as soon as it becomes available.

A hardcopy of this email is on its way. Please feel free to contact us with any questions that you may have.

Sincerely yours,
Katerina Holubova & Marie Kratzmann

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Players

Sun, Jan 31, 2010 – 10:43

I went to see Much Ado About Nothing from the RIT Players last night, they did a reasonable job but got kind of silly in the middle. Don Pedro kept hamming for the photographer in the front row, and Ursula had so much baby powder in her hair to make it white, that whenever she came onstage the whole theater smelled like it, which was distracting. After the German hobo version of Dogberry I saw over the summer, I expected to be very disappointed in the Players’ interpretation of the character. But impressively he was one of the best characters in the show! The guy doing him did a pretty good French accent, and paraded around like Napoleon – a completely different interpretation than I’ve seen before.

My interview on Monday seemed successful. Tomorrow I’m turning in my cover letter and corrections to some of my documentation, and hopefully we’ll start making progress soon! I know Mike has already done some interviewing. Soon I’ll be sending the German “Bewerbung” to Micha to pass on to his contact in Leipzig, since I got some help with translating.

Speaking of Micha, I had a nice chance to skype with him and Janine on Friday. Janine is taking the international English test soon, so she has to study! I’m not sure why all Germans apologize for their bad English when they can speak/write it better than many of the Americans on the internet. You can speak perfectly fine! Stop embarrassing us with your apologies! It makes us feel bad that we can’t speak your language that well. :P

I have one month left in the quarter. One month before spring break! I can do this… I’m already looking forward to break a lot.

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