Week 1 = Over!

Hi!

I survived my first week of college! I did a bit of schedule shuffling this week, too, which was a bit confusing. I may have already mentioned that I used my AP Calculus credit to get out of Calc 1 and 2 and just do Linear Algebra and Vector Geometry at the same time. Neither are reported to be really hard, so I'm not worried. And since I was really bored in German 2105, I switched into German 3105, where they're analyzing films and stuff. I'm still a little nervous about it, since it's a class full of non-freshmen and you actually have to talk about stuff in German pretty much the entire time... even new words are usually defined in German, not English. But I'm excited; this looks like exactly what I needed. And the people in the class are genuinely interested in learning German. Which rocks. The only bad part: I had a week's worth of German 3105 work to make up (still not 100% done) since I missed the first two classes. Oh well.

Anyway, I have to admit I'm a bit freaked out about my meal plan. I have *finds receipt* exactly $390.69 with which to feed myself until December 18th. I guess it will help me not gain the Freshman 8 (The seniors in my church were told that "Freshman 15" is an exaggeration, and that usually freshmen gain only 8 pounds. But still.)(Man, I really should ban the parenthesis keys on my keyboard. I commentate parenthetically waaaay too much. Ending comment... now.) if I have to watch how much I'm eating, but still. I didn't realize how much food cost. And students even get half-price on nearly everything in the dining halls, unless the cashier forgets to press the "student with meal plan" button. Which has thankfully only happened to me once. Well, I guess I now know why college students can be won over by free food!

Ooh, I should mention my favorite food place. First of all, I like coffee and baked goods. It turns out that there is a coffee shop, similar to Starbucks (but it serves ice cream as well) that uses Dining Dollars. And the prices are *gasp* reasonable! It's also a great atmosphere; I did much of my Deutsch homework there this afternoon, and while I was there, there were people playing chess, having what looked like a first meeting for a small club that was just starting up, having coffee with a professor, and some people I'm pretty sure I saw at nlcf this morning discussing the Bible. It's great. <3

And I'm not just doing academics either. I'm already in InterVarsity and Cru small groups (I'll try both organizations this semester, and if I feel like God wants me to drop one, I will) that have their first meetings this week, and I can actually remember the names of the leaders! They have had a lot of mixers, and I've tried to go to pretty much everything. ("Tried" meaning that when I got lost going to the large IV group meeting on Friday because I accidentally ended up on the exact opposite side of campus, I actually tried to find the building for about an hour before giving up. And yes, it was an accident. I keep accidentally mixing up the academic and residential sides of campus on the map...) And I'm probably going to try to get involved in the Society of Women Engineers and maybe even the Society of Women in Computing. And hopefully a design team of some sort. Ooh, and there's a group that meets at a certain restaurant on Thursday nights and has dinner conversations in German. =) There's so much here.

Not everything is amazing, sadly. It doesn't look good for me getting private violin lessons right now, since people who are either music majors or in the symphony get top priority (and I am neither) and there are a lot of those people. But that's okay. I can always just work at my own pace. I still think the director was a bit miffed that I didn't bring my "good" instrument (I really don't think dorm rooms are secure enough to keep one's expensive instrument from being stolen. And bothering insurance companies isn't my idea of fun.) Oh well. Oh, and I heard that the internet security software everyone is supposed to install messes up the brand of computer I got, and mine has seemed a bit slower and more temperamental than it was before I installed the software. Maybe I'll take it to SWAT soon to see what suggestions they have. But it's usable. And it is pretty fun having a tablet. Even a Windows one. (Yeah, I still use my Powerbook for stuff too. Sometimes I'll have both computers up and running for some reason, and I think of this:



EDIT: Oops! At least on my monitor, the last panel is cut off. If you click the comic, you can see all of it on the Dilbert website.

EDIT: My spontaneous change of layout fixed the problem. w00t.)

=)

But I did get a ticket to the first home football game! I'm excited about that. The one we watched on TV yesterday (and by "we" I mean I watched it with Intervarsity) looked like a lot of fun, even though we (narrowly) lost.

Now, to finish the rest of the homework.

New violin!

This happened last Saturday. Since I'm kind of short on time (I've been working nearly full time and still have summer homework to finish), I'll just post what I emailed to my private violin teacher and my orchestra director.

We went to Potters, a violin shop in the area. My parents had told the guy that we wanted to move up one price bracket, so that put us in the "Old French/Old German" category. I tried the instruments they set out, and a couple sounded a little nicer than my Doetsch, but I don't think they were buy-worthy. After I was narrowing my choices down to the three I sort-of liked just to see if I would suddenly fall in love with one, a Potters guy came in and, after my parents and I talked with him, that
the French violinmakers (most of the violins on my table were French, and the one German one was one of the first to go) liked making brassy-sounding instruments. When I told him I wanted "sweet and not fuzzy," he told us that Italian violins would be better. Like the one in the display cabinet in my room. When he left and I wasdouble-checking that none of the instruments were perfect, my parents pulled a more expensive instrument off the wall and had me try it. It cost $6500. I liked that instrument's tone better, and the next time the Potters guy came in, we told him about what I had just tried. He
pulled the Italian instrument out of the display case. It was priced at $7000. I liked that one even more, especially when he got me one of the really nice bows to try with it. (That bow was almost a little too ornate for my taste. It had a lot of "bling": a silvery-leaf fleur-de-lis instead of a normal eye on the frog, a non-ebony frog (must have been some kind of bone, but I don't know), etc.) While I tried that out, the Potters guys brought out the next price bracket. The good ones.

I finally narrowed down the more expensive instruments to the Italian one from the display cabinet and a French (! it sounded good!) instrument costing $6200. After listening to S, another Potters guy, play the instruments, I decided that the French violin had less of a brassy tone than the Italian one. Weird. Since I now had about fifteen bows (two price brackets) sitting on the table to choose between, we asked Simon which ones he would suggest I try. He picked out three (of the higher priced ones, of course) and played them each for me, explaining their strengths and tone qualities. I tried them all myself and fell in love with the bow he said was best for spiccatto. I, of course, am a girl—not as strong as a man. I like light bows, even though he said he liked a different bow for overall playing. The spiccatto bow has a beautiful tone. I love it. And it's all personal preference anyway.

Before we left the room to check out, we asked Simon if we would get any credit for turning in my Doetsch instrument and bow. We got $1500 for the Doetsch, but he said that they don't give credit for "nickel bows" and
that the bow I had used with my Doetsch was now my "outdoor bow." He said it with all seriousness, and the new one sounds several gillion times better, especially on my new instrument. But my parents and I still laugh about it. (We didn't laugh to his face, though. And it makes sense; it's just so different than what we all thought before.)

I'm still getting used to the instrument. I kept the same case but get a pleasant surprise each time I open it. I love it. The tone is so much cleaner than my old instrument. I love it, I love it, I love it. That's about all I can think about my violin right now.