Cornell and Beyond

a weird weekend

So this weekend was quite interesting, to say the least.

Fall Break, gone in a flash, as always

Today might be the longest day ever for me.

Ghosts, Ghouls, & Goblins, Oh my!

Well, it’s October, right? That means Halloweeeeeen is coming! That means, dressing up!

Last Halloween was super fun, me and my friend were Gold and Silver, like the elements. We had T-shirts that said Au and Ag on them. I only found out recently that this was probably not the coolest costume ever worn. Probably the opposite. I think someone went as far as to say. “Be whatever you want this year, just not silver and gold. That was pretty bad.”

I liked it! I thought it was quite clever. We were trying to figure out how to make molecular orbitals for ourselves with hula hoops, but we never got that far. Um, now that I think about it, maybe being elements wasn’t that cool. But it was fun! And it was really fun having people recognize us by our atomic number. (Those were also on our shirts.) Haha, OK, nobody recognized our atomic numbers but people did get the Au and the Ag part, so that was great.

Anyways, I digress…what I’m supposed to be talking about is this year. My roomie is absolutely obsessed with Halloween (She bought 5 boxes of Halloween Funfetti Cake…a month ago) so she is making us brainstorm ideas…

Here are the possibilities so far:

(As long as you promise not to take our ideas! I would hate for there to be two groups of fruit flies running around Cornell)
1.Fruit flies

(I was booed viciously on this one. I thought it would be cool, but Silver thought it would be too much like last year in terms of, “let’s be things we learn about in class.” Whatev.)

2.Holidays (Xmas, 4th of July, etc)

3.Cities (Ex: A cowboy would represent houston. The problem with this one is it would be hard to understand unless you knew what we were.)

4.Aliens (My idea! Yeah aliens! I was thinking of headbands with googly eyes, and lots of green.)

5.Cruella and a couple of dalmations

6.Disney Heroines

7.Troll Dolls (Do you remember those? The ugly things with the pointy neon hair. I think it would be really hard to get everyone’s hair to stand up like that. We would need sooo much gel. Possibly some glue.)

That’s all I can remember for now. But I promise that you will get a full update when the 31st rolls around. Probably before that in fact. We are going to be making our costumes so there will be some hard core arts and crafts in the coming weeks!
All this talk of Halloween has given me a real craving for some Snickers. Unfortunately it’s close to 1 AM right now, so I’m going to resist the urge to run downstairs and hit the vending machine and instead I’m going to crawl into bed with my Biochem textbook. On second thought, maybe I will hit that vending machine

(lightening, thunder, evil cackle, lights out!)

BOO!

I’m in a long distance relationship…with Cornell

Fall Break is rapidly approaching! And with Fall Break comes the adventures many out of state Cornellians go through several times a year…finding a way home.

Now for those of us from far far away (ahem Florida), it is no simple thing to get home for breaks. We can’t simply hop in our cars and drive for a couple of hours. Instead, we have to, for the most part, fly.

Now you might think this isn’t a big deal, and for the most part it isn’t. But as an out-of- state Cornellian, I can tell you I’ve learned more about the airline industry in the past two years than I had known in my entire previous lifetime.

I book my tickets myself; which means I’ve also gotten to know online ticket websites intimately. At this point I know which cities it’s cheapest to travel out of (NYC and FLL, not ITH and MIA), when tickets will be most expensive (Thanksgiving, without a doubt), and how to take everything into consideration. (Flying out of NYC is generally cheaper, but if you have to take the bus, then you need to add on $60-90 for a round-trip bus ticket to Port Authority, plus $20 for the airport shuttle.) My crowning achievement: less than $175 for a round trip ticket to go home for winter break.

While the costs can add up, it’s actually pretty reasonable if you book ahead of time. I actually would guess with gas prices the way they are now that it’s not that much cheaper for someone to drive 5-10 hours to get home each time vacation comes along. OK, maybe a little, but it’s still worth it.

Besides, flying can be fun. After all, it gives you an excuse to stay up late the night before. I remember once staying up till 5 AM (that’s when my taxi was coming) watching a movie with my friends who were still around. My excuse: I’ll just sleep on the plane. And this might sound childish, but I still think it’s pretty cool to look down from above the clouds at the world below. I imagine painters and philosophers from centuries past would have done anything to be able to experience that. So if you look at it like that, we out-of-towners are pretty darn lucky! And I mean for besides the fact that we get to go home to 70