Merry Christmas!

It's the most wonderful time of the year! I've had a lovely Christmas at home with the family. My brothers and I have a tradition where we all sleep in the same room on Christmas Eve, and in my family we keep our stockings by our beds rather than by our nonexistent fireplace. Amazingly, Josh let me sleep until after seven this morning, although he kept waking me up between midnight and three to tell me our stockings weren't full yet. Thanks a lot, kid.


Anyway, this year my parents gave me my very own digital camera (I've never had one before), quite a few new DVDs, and a beautiful gold cross. They did not give me The Sims 2: Nightlife for Mac, but it was under $25 on Amazon, so I went ahead and bought it for myself. Merry Christmas to me!


Now I'm recovering from my massive food coma. For breakfast, I had eggs, a cinnamon roll, and a piece of nut ring (a pastry my grandmother bakes and sends us every year) with cream cheese. For dinner, I had arroz con gandules, green beans, and yes, a little bit of pernil (pork roast to the non-Puerto Ricans). My stomach was not happy with me for ingesting meat, for the record. This is what I get for not eating meat since Thanksgiving, and specifically for not eating red meat since early in the semester (it's been so long I honestly can't remember when). I have had chicken a couple of times since I've been home, however. Puerto Ricans eat a lot of meat, and as a compromise with my mom I told her I would eat poultry while I was staying with the family.



Other fun things I've done this week:

• I went to see Tangled with Jackie, Steph, and the Birdsong clan. We ended up going to the 3-D showing because that was the time that worked for all of us. Now, I loathe 3-D and wish the whole silly fad would go away in a hurry, but it did not take away from Tangled's adorableness one bit. So cute! It did make me miss my once-Rapunzelian hair, though. 
• Later that day, we kidnapped Jackie and took her to the Forever 21 in Calexico because it was her birthday. Sadie and her sisters blindfolded her with a Strawberry Shortcake bandanna. It was hilarious.
• The Southwest High School Science Fiction and Fantasy Readers' Club had a reunion on the 23rd. We went to see Deathly Hallows: Part 1 again. I still really like it!
• Jackie spent the night and we watched Coraline together.
• 50% off sale at New York and Company! So many new earrings, and a totally cute jacket and pink top.
• Wrote a chapter of a story. Not saying anything other than that.
• The fam and I watched Inception between meal preparation today. It was my fourth time, Richie's third, and everyone else's first. Dad seemed suitably impressed, but Mom dozed through half of it and was upstairs checking her email for much of the rest. Oh well. She'll get to truly appreciate it sometime soon.

Well, that's been my week. Hope all of yours have been just as nice and relaxing.

Feliz Navidad, Joyeux Noël, and Mele Kalikimaka!

I Went Outside in Short Sleeves Today...

... and it was glorious! I'm back in California for Christmas!



The reading project has begun! I was intending to start with The Great Gatsby, but I discovered to my considerable disappointment that the book I checked out of Clemons on Friday was in fact not the novel itself but a collection of essays about The Great Gatsby. Luckily, I had also packed a copy of A Wizard of Earthsea, so I still got to read something new on the plane. I'm only three chapters in at this point, though, and quite honestly I was bored stiff the entire time. However, Harry Potter has taught me that I should never, ever give up on a book before chapter 4, so I shall persevere.


I drove today for the first time in about four months! There's no need for me to have a car in Charlottesville, besides which I don't own one and probably won't for some time. Still, I happen to love a) driving and b) my parents' new(ish) Toyota Camry, to the point where I'm jumping at every opportunity I get to pick up one of my brothers from a friend's house or to go to the store. At least the Camry gets good gas mileage, so I don't have to feel too guilty about wanting to use the car so much.


Jackie and I went to Starbucks today and I nearly forgot that I can't use my Plus Dollars here. Heh. On the other hand, it was over 70 degrees. I can't remember the last time I regretted ordering a hot drink because it was too warm outside. Oh, El Centro.

Note to Self

Aida, the next time you volunteer for a charity venture organized by your roommate selling cookies outside Clemons in the rain, don't saunter out in ballet flats instead of winter boots. Bring your umbrella. Wear a scarf, gloves, and you know, socks. Try to remember that you're not in California anymore. Virginia has 20 degree weather and precipitation. You might as well act like you know that.
Love,
Aida


P.S. Guys, I can't feel my toes. Send help!

Surfacing from Finals Momentarily

Here is the one update you will get while I'm inundated with exams. I'm only stopping to write this because I'm about to go to bed and I happen to have a few extra minutes. Finals are in full swing at UVa, which means I've been keeping strange hours and stranger habits. Today, for example, I didn't leave my room until past 5 o'clock, because I was studying for French and subsisting on Special K bars and half a hummus and feta lavosh. Yesterday I was in Study Camp at Wesley, conjugating verbs on post-it notes. The day before that I delivered care packages, researched Cesare Beccaria's On Crimes and Punishments for my anti-torture paper, and took a four-hour study break to indulge in some girlish squealing over my fictional boyfriend, Gilbert Blythe, with the Sara(h)s. And Tuesday night I assigned various mostly food-inspired colors (maraschino, cayenne, honeydew, tangerine, etc.) to Supreme Court cases while studying for Constitutional Interpretation with Matt. I cannot tell you how excited I am to be going back to California in a week, where it's 70 degrees every day and there's no homework. Speaking of which, it's supposed to snow on Monday. I don't know how I feel about that.


Constitutional Interpretation final tomorrow. At least I'm not getting up before 11.

1,000 Pageviews!

Thank you to everyone who has been following my blog! It always makes me pleasantly surprised to hear from friends that they've read it. I hope you've enjoyed your daily (er, sort of) dose of Aida.


The first book for the winter break project has been chosen: The Great Gatsby. Exam time is nearly upon us here at Mr. Jefferson's University, so no doubt I shall be busy, but I shall hopefully obtain a copy by the time I hop on the plane back to California. Get excited!


In the meantime, I was thrilled to find Avatar: The Last Airbender on sale for about $23 a season on Amazon, which is about 60% off! My love for ATLA is so great that I went ahead and bought Book Two, even though I'm a broke college student who should be spending money on textbooks instead. But then, what would I procrastinate with next semester? Not that I really need an excuse to procrastinate, as daydreaming works just as well as a DVD. Heh.


Okay, better put the nose to the grindstone. Those civil rights terms aren't going to define themselves.

Possible Winter Break Project (Your Input Required)

I need your help in my quest to retain my literary spark. My goal is to read five new books over winter break, in addition to revisiting some old favorites. Here is where you come in. Please tell me which of the following books are worth reading (and feel free to recommend others). 


Watership Down by Richard Adams
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
Middlemarch by George Eliot
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons
Moby Dick by Herman Melville
The Time Traveller's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
Vanity Fair by William Thackeray
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy


More on this to come later. Stay tuned!

Entertainment 2010: November 1 - November 30

So this is what I spent my time not writing for NaNoWriMo doing! Interesting.

November Update

Movies (1st viewing)

Black Swan (special advanced screening FTW)

Freedom Riders (the documentary)

The first two episodes of the 1983 Mansfield Park miniseries

The Secret of Kells

Jesus Christ Superstar

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (in Swedish)

Indochine

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1

The Mission

Dead Poets Society

Movies (repeat viewing)

Beauty and the Beast

Mansfield Park (2007)

Star Wars, Episode IV: A New Hope

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

Inception

Back to the Future

Books (new reads)

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson

The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins

Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins

Books (rereads)

None

Plays (new section!)

Hair

Carousel

If I have time in the next few days, I may post a review of Mockingjay or The Hunger Games trilogy as a whole. I tore through it in less than a week, after valiantly reading the first five chapters at Mark Oshiro's pace, and I certainly have some things to say about it. On a related note, it does feel good to go through books my usual way again. I'm a fast and prolific reader, but I was worried that college had somehow taken that out of me. Not so, as The Hunger Games proved. Yes!