Greetings, festive friends!
As many of you are aware, before one gets to the joy of Christmas, one must endure the overwhelming experience that is Finals Week™️. I am almost done, and at the time of writing this only have one final remaining: rhetoric. Our final this term consists of writing a commonplace (speech praising or censuring something and moving our audience to act upon their previously held convictions), memorizing it (via our newly-acquired memory palace skills), and delivering it without a paper in front of us (difficult, but possible). For once, I am actually feeling fairly confident about the speech, so let’s hope that I manage to deliver it without forgetting everything.
As far as other finals: so far, in my opinion, I’ve done pretty mediocre overall, which is a little disappointing–however, I haven’t failed anything and although I made two C’s, my grade in the class is still a high B, which is encouraging.
Moscow is Christmasified to the max, and all the red-brick buildings are glimmering in the early mornings and mid-afternoon (because it doesn’t wait until “night” to get dark here) because of all the lights strung up. The lights stay up year-round, but they look the best in Christmastime.
{Brief interjection: I am sitting in Tyndale library, and have just realized that to everyone else in here, it probably looks like I am frantically writing right now the rhetoric speech which I must deliver in approximately one hour and nine minutes. But, in fact, I am not; my speech has been written for three days and I am simply waiting for the printer to be free so that I can print it. I also type fast, so no matter what I am typing it always sounds like I’m typing frantically.}
NSA put on its yearly Christmas choir concert last week, and it was glorious. There were a handful of songs that were my particular favorite! I’ll link the concert below and I highly recommend watching all of it, as it was truly beautiful; but, here are my top picks.
-Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence (my choir sang this one!)
-Warum toben die Heiden
-Narration & The March of the Three Kings
-Coventry Carol (my choir also sang this one!)
My choir was overall very excited and pleased with how we performed, because we are the lowest choir (right above vocal tech–which is also known as, “The Bad Place” or just “VT”) and we had done a lot of work preparing and working hard to sing well. Mr. Esmond was very pleased with our performance and told us that it was some of the best we’d ever sung!
It has snowed in Moscow once (of note) so far, and the ensuing snowball battle at the park in the dark was quite fun. Being in college is great because if, on a Tuesday night after soup night at our college’s president’s house, we feel like going over to the park at 8PM and snowball fighting until 10, we can just…do it. ‘Twas great fun–a group of us played capture the flag in the snow and it was quite the night. It is snowing now as I write this, but from what I’m observing, said snow seems to be treading the fine line between snow and sleet. Hopefully it stays on the right side of the line (the snow side, obviously). I’ll probably come back from break to find the ground carpeted in several inches of white–or slush, depending on what part of the cycle it’s all at.
NSA has been adorned with all manner of festive decorations–including the lopped-off branches of Christmas trees. Said branches have been stuck all over the premises in odd places, but my personal favorite is the one that was shoved through the hole in a table in the North Campus commons area. The branch has shed all its upper needles, but the lower ones still cling for dear life and someone saw fit to adorn the branch with a Charlie Brown-esque ornament, and I find it quite funny. Someone just needs to find a blue blanket now.
Other interesting things that have happened since the last time I wrote anything here:
-I got stuck in the DFW airport flying home from Thanksgiving break, had to spend the night, was awake for 30ish hours, etc. Not fun!
-I have continued to gain an appreciation for old music and choral music in general. It’s just so cool!
-Mr. Griffith, my Latin teacher, has given me permission to move up to honors Latin over Christmas break! So I will be doing 12 chapters of the book in order to catch up with the honors students. It will be lots to do, but I’m very excited, especially since moving up to honors doesn’t happen every day and as far as I know there is only one other student who is also moving up.
-There was a large windstorm yesterday, and the night before, which knocked power out across a lot of Moscow. But we got a band together and went Christmas caroling nevertheless, which turned out to be very fun although our voices rather died from singing in the cold!
-I made a TON of Christmas cookies and brought them to school for people to partake of, as well as for my teachers. All in all it was a smashing success (although I spectacularly tripped on the way up the stairs and crashed to my knees quite grandly–I didn’t drop anything though). My snickerdoodles are now famous apparently, and Dr. T described my macaroons as “bomb-diggety” which is some insanely high praise.
And now, for a plethora of pictures.
Top to bottom, left to right:
-the park in the snow
-NSA by day
-NSA by night
-macaroons
-a glorious sunset
-lights in the trees on Main
-the same glorious sunset, but in the other direction
-Chorale the night of the concert after delivering a smashingly performance!
~
Well, as Bugs Bunny says, that’s all, folks. Merry Christmas!
Subscribe to get a notification when I post!
Always so much fun to read! Snowballing sounds like so much fun! You’re so lucky! lol. We’ll get all our snow in June likely. Perfect timing fir when we DON’T want it.
That is the best Christmas decoration ever! lololol.
I also type very loud. I learned with an old computer, so now I sort of pound the laptop. My dad and brothers always tell me “quit abusing the poor keyboard. lol”