Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon. Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen, Carter, Reagan, Bush and Clinton.

It's finals week. Which means, you guessed it, Midnight Breakfast in the dining halls tonight and tomorrow night!

My final-ish project for Geology — we have an actual exam this week, so maybe it was just a project, not a final one — was a national park poster. A long time ago in a classroom not very far away, everyone in the class picked a US National Park, and last week we all hung ours up in the Great Hall (Yes, we have a great hall. And yes, it's actually called that.) and gave little presentations. I picked King's Canyon, and several people commented that my national park was among the most beautiful. Who would have guessed that a state like California — which is, after all, one gigantic beach where everyone is tan and smokes pot — would still have glaciers! For some reason, the background photo didn't go to 70%ish transparency, so you can't read any of the captions, but that belongs in the long list of things I find difficult to care about.

Just look at that exfoliation dome. Nice.

Not sure what happened to our posters, actually. I want mine back. It's 6' x 3' and awesome. We used Adobe Illustrator, which is a very cool thing. The map on the left is displayed prominently on the poster, and I planted those little numbers as locators for several of my figures, like you see below. I'm kinda bragging about my poster now. That's okay. I'm happy I used maps effectively.

See the glacial arêtes and cols and horns and the U-shaped valley? Yeah. Yeah you do.

My final for creative writing is the final draft of anything I've written over the semester, and I'm doing my short story, Ceiling Lights. It needs a lot of work. Which I'll get to once I'm done with my final assignment/exam for GIS.

While procrastinating on Friday, I re-re-re-rediscovered I Write Like, which I think we've actually talked about on this blog before. I still consider it an almost completely useless site — how could it possibly be anything close to accurate? — but it's somehow fun nevertheless. I spent an hour putting in probably 50 papers I had written in college and high school, and I got H. P. Lovecraft for at least 65% (including this blog post) of those. I haven't read any Lovecraft, and was starting to think maybe I should, until I put in a bunch of Wikipedia pages, including Lovecraft's, and they all ended up being Lovecraft too. Which furthers my opinion that I Write Like is useless. Which does nothing at all to dispel my immense satisfaction upon seeing J. R. R. Tolkien's name pop up after I submitted my Ceiling Lights story.

The last trivia night of the semester was on Thursday. It's possible I haven't mentioned trivia here before. Our team, named "Costa Concordia Navigation Team," ended up getting second by two point in the overall standings for the semester, thereby barely losing out on giftcards or something. A few weeks ago we all one movie passes though, so that's good.

There was an art category this time around, and I recognized every single painting, but couldn't remember any of the painters' names. Very frustrating. I did do some damage in the "Which river runs through this city?" category, though.

Future Derek: Remember the Admiral Hat? Whoever drove during the road trip to Nattys wore the hat, and now Chuck, who doesn't even have a license, wears it all the time when he's working. Infuriating.

On Friday, we celebrated "It's a Bob Dylan Christmas Party Party" and played this song a lot.

Saturday was XC Banquet night. There were, of course, post-banquet shenanigans. I spent plenty of time with one of my best friends, Melake, who is graduating after this semester. This is sad.