Singin' our song, all day long...

At HOOOOOOGWARTS!

(If you've never seen "The Mysterious Ticking Noise", your life is incomplete and you must watch this before continuing to read:)

As I'm sure you all know, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 will hit theaters first thing Friday morning, i.e. I have some very important plans tomorrow night.  I'm going to be busy tomorrow, so I figured I should post this now.  Unlike my friend Katy who is far better at costumes than me and found a giant lion head thing in her attic that (I hope) she is working on converting into Luna Lovegood's infamous hat, I will be donning my Professor McGonagall costume once again.  Before I started at Stanford, I was a little concerned that no one else would be dorky enough to join me in this endeavor, which was extremely silly of me.  We've got a decent-sized group going to a midnight-ish showing, and at least one other girl will be dressing up.  I'm pretty jazzed about it.  The only thing that bums me out is that all my Midwestern friends will be done watching the movie right about the time that I start...so you should all just keep your thoughts in the Central Time Zone until the sun rises on Friday.  K Thanks!

As I mentioned in my last post, I started a new class on Monday.  It's called Literacies, and my work in this class primarily involves facilitating discussions on a reading with a small group of middle school students (we are currently observing and assisting in summer school courses at a middle school).  I have to write up what I've observed/learned so far about the students in my group, and we talked today about how it's important to write as many quotations and direct observations about their behavior as possible.  No unsubstantiated hypotheses allowed -- if you're making guesses about them by reading too far into their behavior and don't have anything to support your thoughts, you shouldn't write it down.  All I could think about was how well Alpha Gamma Delta prepared me to complete this task, and that's all I'm going to say about it.

Finally, here are some other thoughts I had about California that slipped my mind in my last post:

- Californians frequently refer to highways with the word "the."  As in, "You need to take the 101 to get to Sunnyvale."  I don't understand it.
- Stanford has a lot of eucalyptus trees and they smell reeeeally good.  Sometimes, the eucalyptus trees are my sole motivation for driving around with my windows down.
- Stanford also has lots Red-Tailed Hawks, Spotted Towhees (that's right, I brought my bird field guide out here), and Western Scrub-Jays.
- Squirrels come in every color out here.  Black squirrels kind of freak me out and I'm not sure why.  I think I remember learning something about the genetics of squirrel fur color once upon a time, but I don't remember what was interesting about it.  Is it an incomplete dominance thing?  Do any of my biology nerd friends know?  I don't feel like Googling it right now and I'll probably forget to do it later.

And here are the trees that surround my apartment complex.  I'm fairly certain that these are the same trees that grew all over the place in Valencia.  If anyone can tell me what they're called, you get major brownie points with me.  It's something else I've been meaning to Google, but I probably won't get around to it either.  Note the complete lack of clouds in the sky.  It looks like that almost every single day.