oops!

Today I had an "oops" moment. I walked into Intro to Retail and Design, sat down, chatted a little
with the teacher (Dr. Nerad) and Kati, who was there picking up the overhead projector thing, for a few minutes, and looked at the clock. I saw that it was like a minute after the hour, so I said "I can't believe I'm the first one here!" Dr. Nerad looks at me and says, "Class is over! You missed it!" I hadn't paid attention to what hour it was, just the minute. It was so funny--and so embarrassing! She was supernice about it, though. Looks like I'll have to get the notes from someone else...although this is a class where she says a lot of interesting things that aren't necessarily on the PowerPoints. So that's not good. But it happens to everyone--I have friends who slept through 2 classes a day like 4 days already! Till today, I hadn't missed a class in the month I've been here, so I'm still pretty proud of myself!

As I'm sure I've mentioned, I'm the chair for the Winter Formal committee, so yesterday I made up flyers for the first meeting, which will be Tuesday at 2. Then Tabitha and Kati and I decorated them and put em up all around Ropp. (Ropp is traditionally in charge of the Winter Formal.) Then I'll hopefully bring in some other halls to help. I'll have the girls who come to the meeting help me with getting assistance from the other halls. I'm not sure how many guys we can rope in to help, but I want to try!

Things have been so fun around the dorm lately. Last night me and Meghan had Danette and Melissa and two guys over to watch "In Her Shoes," the Cameron Diaz chick flick. We had to watch it for First Year Seminar because of the way it portrays complicated family relationships. So that was kinda nice. Then I was IM-ing with my mom--when you get to college, it's weird, but that sometimes happens--and I hear this disturbance, for lack of a better word, from down the hall. I went and investigated and found my friends Peter and Sarah wrestling over a pillow. I think Peter had stuck her pillow in the freezer! And then Sarah stuck another guy's keys in the freezer...it was very strange! Then Peter went in to Jess and Aimee's room and stole their rug and ran around the dorm with it. Man, weird things happen in dorms, and it's great :-)

Then Sarah and Danette and Meghan and I sat in the hall and just talked for a few minutes in our pajamas. It was really nice :-) We have great chats late at night. I love having friends 15 feet away!

This weekend is Flip This Dorm's big time to shine. We'll clean out the dorm, organize it, go shopping, totally transform it. I got a great idea for milk crates turning into shelves from my friend Rachel. I went to her room to borrow her vacuum cleaner--she has the cutest little one that can turn into a handheld--and saw her crates and thought, "Brilliant!" Ropp (and the other dorms too, I think) have picture rails built into the walls about 1.5 feet below the ceiling. So it's easy to hang shelves and other things from those with S-hooks...looks like a trip to the hardware store is going to happen soon!

Looks like I also need a trip to Wal-mart...I have the 15-meal-a-week plan, so I eat breakfast in my room, and I'm almost out of milk, cereal, and juice. That's an annoying thing about college--you have to do your own shopping. Laundry is a pain too! Bluffton tries to make it easier: it's included in room and board, so you don't have to collect quarters, and there's a way to check from your computer whether your laundry is done (although I haven't actually tried that yet). So that's pretty nice.

Oh, I forgot what else is happening tonight--a root beer keg party! I hope to get out of Flip This Dorm in time for that. It's good clean fun--I love that kind of fun :-)



Other good clean fun they have around here is corn hole. I've mentioned it already, but I found a picture I wanted to share. It's so funny:
Well, I have things to do and people to see! Talk to you next week!

fun weekend!

You won't believe what I did this weekend.

I sung karaoke.

Okay, so there were only about 10 other people there at the time, but I didn't know a lot of them. And yes, I did it with two other girls (Jen and Danette), but I definitely leaned into that microphone and sang. We did Sheryl Crow's "The First Cut is the Deepest." It was hard because it wasn't one of my "good voice" days, and I always have trouble singing when I can't hear myself--like then, with two other girls singing and lots of background noise. But I did it!

I also did 3 rounds of DDR against/with Jen in front of a different group of maybe 10 people. But they were mostly girls and somehow that made it easier, as did knowing most of them.

This stuff was sponsored by MCB (Marbeck Center Board) on Friday night. Every Friday from 10 to 2, MCB holds Marbeck After Dark, which is a program that holds different activities for the students here.

Then on Saturday, Jen and Emily and I walked into town. We went to the used bookstore and Ten Thousand Villages, and ate lunch at the coffee shop, Common Grounds. Then we hung out and did some silly stuff after that in my room. That night, 10 of us--6 girls, 4 guys--drove to Lima, got a little lost, but made our way to the Thai restaurant. I really don't like Thai food but I knew it would be a good time. (Jessica from down the hall invited me when she saw that I was homesick. What a sweetie!) Then we stopped in Macy's but ended up at Kohl's, where most of the girls bought some things. I heart Kohl's. Anyway, after THAT, we went to Kroeger (that's what it's called, right? They don't have them in Rochester). We had some fun there, although I was kinda tired and didn't really feel like playing along with the others with their little games. Goofballs!

Here's a picture of me at the restaurant:



On Sunday, I went to church with Danette and her friend Jen. We went to St. John's Mennonite Church. I wasn't crazy about it, to be honest--there was only one or two songs, and they were praise songs, which I didn't grow up with. I'm more used to hymns, and lots of 'em. But it was cool seeing my first year seminar professor, Randy Keeler, up there giving the sermon!

Today was my longest day of the week--I start classes at 10 AM and end at 9:15 PM. Luckily there's a break between each class, even if some are just an hour.

Looks like my roomie's ready for bed, I gotta go!

--Holly

homesick...

I'm feeling homesick. It's not even that I miss my family, which is what I thought I'd miss--it's my friends and the big city. Okay, Rochester is no NYC or anything like that, but there's a lot more places to go and a lot more people. I'm feeling kinda down about it all. But I know I wouldn't be happy just going to the local community college with 20,000 other kids or however many go there. So I have to remember that this is what's best for me, even if it doesn't always feel that way.

And I do have some fun, that's for sure...let me show y'all a picture of me and my friend Amy:


I think that might have been the night we went bowling? BU rented out the local bowling alley and we had a good time bowling. LOL the weird thing was, we'd hear music playing, and we'd notice it start...but then a few minutes later we'd sort of realize, wait, the music stopped...when did that happen? It was kinda strange!

My room is a mess. I've gotten a shipment of apples from my parents--NY makes really excellent apples--and I've got papers everywhere from the 5 binders for the committees I'm on. I think I mentioned it--I'm chair of the winter formal committee and of the Little Sibling Weekend committee. So I have papers everywhere from the past years--the girls who did this last year and the years before were pretty considerate and left a lot of records and helpful instructions. I'm having a little trouble getting up a committee (nobody showed up to the meeting!) but that's understandable, there's a lot of other stuff going on. Like, the night of the meeting, BASIC was having a meeting too (Brothers and Sisters in Christ). So a lot of my friends went to that. Luckily, Amy (the girl in the picture) was on her prom committee in high school and wants to help, and the other girls in my hall said they'd help too. I'm kinda psyched...I think this can be really awesome, especially if we decide to keep the dance at the school instead of renting out a hall, and then we'd have a lot more money to spend on decorations and who knows what else. So it could be really sweet! We'll have to think hard about it.

I'm also secretary of the Bluffton Student Design Board. I'm pretty excited about that too. We could go on trips to bigger cities, bring speakers in, do lots of activities and fundraisers for charity...there's so many possibilities! We're selling carnations for homecoming and teaming up with FCSA (Family and Consumer Sciences Association) to sell cookies at the same booth. That's coming up soon. The carnations might be purple--how pretty! (Purple and white are Bluffton's colors.)

Well, I can't think of anything more to say...I'm write another blog before next Tuesday if I have any big news! Bye!

getting crazier...

Hey all! 5th blog post already? Wow.

Today is Tuesday, which means it's meeting day! Whoo-hoo. <--sarcasm

I don't have classes on Tuesdays andd Thursdays, so those are my days to get things done. I have a meeting with the hall director, Katie, about my position as Little Sibs Weekend chair/Winter Formal chair at 2, then at 4:30 I have a Stylefile meeting, and at 9 there's a Hall Association meeting. Anyone from Ropp Annex or Ropp Addition can be on Hall Association; you help shape the activities and the atmosphere in the dorm. I hope a lot of people come tonight--I'll definitely be able to use the help once planning starts getting underway! I'm excited--there's going to be lots of fun things to do this year, I hope. One thing I'd like to do is a scrapbooking activity. A lot of girls here like scrapbooking, and I know how to teach some of it (mind you, I'm not a great teacher, but I've done it before).

There's roommate drama going on--again, not with me and my roommate, but other girls. It's a little stressful being around it. But most people I know like their roommates, which is good!

Last night, my evening class (Media and Culture) was canceled (the professor wasn't feeling well) so I had to go turn my homework into his mailbox. Danette and Meghan came with me (Danette lives down the hall, and Meghan, as I've said before, is my roommate). We stopped by the all-boys dorm Lincoln (it's gorgeous...from the outside!) to visit my friend Peter, and we ended up watching Vacancy with Peter, his roommate, and a couple other guys. We got maybe halfway through when a bunch of them had to leave for a future teachers meeting, but I stayed. It was really pretty scary and I don't know why people like to watch movies like that, with the disturbing parts being so bad. But I had a good time anyway. Lincoln's the crazy dorm--the football players live there, and a lot of them are a little wild. We kept hearing really strange things from the hall while we were watching the movie!

So I'm off to a Stylefile meeting, where we're going to talk more about Flip This Dorm. We have a winner, so now we have to get a group together to talk to the girl who won, see what she likes, go shopping, look at the room, stuff like that. I'm excited!

Talk to y'all in a few days!

big sister!

I'm going to be a Big Sister! For the Honors program, we have to do some volunteer work. So today I had my interview and it seems like it could be a really great experience. I want to be a stable force in some kid's life who needs it. I have a friend--not a close one--who has a Big Brother, and that's probably really influenced his life for the better. There are a ton of other options though, if you get into the Honors program. You can do things with computers, or work with the Girl Scouts, or work with old people...personally, I'm a little-kid kind of a person, so I hope I can click with someone a little older. The kids in the BBBS program are from kindergarten to eighth grade, and while I have experience babysitting kids that age, I really love tiny kids. Like, age 5 and under. Maybe next year I'll volunteer at a daycare or something.

Tonight was my second Bluffton premiere of my movie. About 20 people came to the Ropp Pitt (common area) and watched it with me. They seemed to like it--I was really happy. We started with just girls from our floor, and then over the past 2 days I invited about 10 more people through facebook, and today and tonight we just ran into people and said, "hey, you should come!" Then a few people were passing by just as the movie was starting and they came and joined us. They were guys--I'm not sure what they were doing in Ropp (it's all girls). That's the beauty of college life--there's almost always someone there to hang out with, and people your age are just everywhere.

Tonight we also had a hall association meeting. I am in charge of Little Sibling Weekend in the spring and the winter formal. Whoa--lots of responsibility right there. This year, I'm going to pick a better deejay--the one last year was awful. (I came and visited campus during the Winter Wonderland dance during my senior year.) Tomorrow, our residence hall adviser person will post my name and the other officers' names somewhere, and we'll get decorations on our doors that say our positions. Fun!

I'm really excited about one particular thing that Ropp Hall Association is going to do--a dorm-wide recycling program! I don't know details, but Katie, the adviser, mentioned
it at our meeting tonight, and I'm all for it. It fits right in with our campus-wide theme this year too: environmental awareness. Before we came this fall, we were given a book to read called Wisdom for a Livable Planet, by Dr. Carl McDaniel. It's all about people who are activists for helping the environment, and in turn, helping people. We are maybe going to talk about it in First Year Seminar--the one class that is required first semester of your freshman year. That might be mildly interesting.

Well, it's late, and I've gotta be up for a 10:00 class tomorrow. (Yes, 10 seems early for you when you're in college!) Goodnight!

busy busy busy

Hi everyone! So the past few days have been kinda crazy. When I'm not in class, I'm doing an errand or catching up on sleep. (I'm the kind of person who generally needs a LOT of sleep. It's a drag.)

One of the things I've been doing is Flip This Dorm (or, Flip This). It's a contest put on by StyleFile, which is the main part of Bluffton Student Design Board, the interior design/fashion design/other design club on campus. It's called BSDB for short. It's only been around for a year, but they've done really cool things so far. Like, last year, they did a fashion show with clothes from Wet Seal, I think it was. They designed the stage, which looked awesome, and the clothes were put together really well. (We saw pictures in my Intro to Retail and Design class.)

Anyway, Flip This Dorm is a contest that just ended, where Stylefile put up a bulletin board in Marbeck (the student center) with pictures of 7 different disastrous dorm rooms. Each room had something wrong with it: too cluttered, too messy, too boring. There were ballots so you could vote on which one you thought needed the most improvement. Then the winner (who will be revealed soon) will get $50 in goods in a dorm room makeover! So I'm one of the main people in charge of Flip This Dorm, and I had to make the bulletin board and try to round people up and things like that. We had a meeting tonight which was tons of fun. I brought my friend Danette, who lives down the hall from me, to the meeting, where there were 3 upperclassmen and a fifth-year senior and another freshman. The older girls have so much wisdom to share about different teachers and they're just so funny. Allison and I (she's the other freshman) are just dying to see the different things that apparently the teachers do. We've got some characters here! For example, one middle-aged professor who danced around to Usher music once. It sounds like quite a sight....

Last night we had a floor activity, although only a few people were able to come (everyone's so busy with music, sports, homework, meetings...). It was a little bitty premiere of the movie I acted in/assistant-directed/edited this spring and summer called "Hamartia." We had about 5 girls plus me, and we went down to the Ropp Pitt, which is the common area on the first floor of our dorm. We had popcorn and soda and watched the movie. I think they liked it :-)

Here's a screenshot from the movie:


Tomorrow night we're having another premiere--a bigger one. About 20 people are supposed to come to the Pitt and we're going to dress up! It's going to be awesome (I hope).

Meghan (my roommate) and I went to the hardware store today and bought some metal chain. We put up a shelf from the picture rail in our room and I'm really happy with how it works. Now I have a good place for my food!

Another errand I did was open a bank account. They had this sweet deal at one of the local banks where you open a checking account and get $25--$15 in your account, and $10 to the BU bookstore. I was happy :-) So they have a lot of incentives around here for college students. It's cool.

Tonight me and about 6 girls from my floor sat in our dorm hallway and chatted for like half an hour or more. It was great!! We laugh and laugh. Dorm life is so unique--no other time will you be in such close proximity with so many people your age. I love it...although I do kind of miss grown-ups a little bit!

Well, I'm exhausted. Time for bed so I can get up tomorrow and go to the weekly chapel service!

things are settling down...and starting up

Hey everyone. I've been at Bluffton for just about 2 weeks now--hard to believe! I already call my dorm room "home." In fact, I have a sign on top of the door that says "home" in order to trick myself into feeling at home here!

Of course, there's things about dorms that will never feel like home. For one, the water here just isn't as good as at home. Some people get used to it, but I've gotta filter mine. Even then, it's not like the tap water in Rochester. Another thing is the communal showers. Here in Ropp Annex (I don't know about the other dorms), it's hard to keep anything dry--your glasses, your change of clothes, whatever. So that's annoying.

But dorm life is also a blast. There's almost always somebody to hang out with--I've had to walk to lunch alone only once. I can wander the halls and stop in someone's room to just say hi, chat, or play a game of Dutch Blitz. Do y'all know what that is? It's a card game that I think is traditionally Mennonite, and it's a lot of fun. We're big on that here :-) There's going to be a tournament tomorrow night--I'm excited! MCB (Marbeck Center Board, the event planning group on campus) puts on a lot of cool stuff for the people who are around on weekends. It's at 10 PM: they cater to the typical college student's schedule. Although me and Meghan, my roommate (see picture below!) go to bed between 11 and 12 most nights. We're not the most exciting people, I guess! :-)

Everyone in my dorm--and on campus, for that matter--has been really great. My laptop was backordered, so I've been borrowing other people's computers for the last 2 weeks in order to check my e-mail and do my homework and feed my facebook addiction. They're really generous about it. Luckily, I got an e-mail last night saying my pink laptop has shipped! Whoo-hoo!

Today I sort of started work as the honors program secretary. The honors program here is really nice because it's fairly small, so you can get to know people. There's maybe 20 freshmen in it, so we're all in the same advanced English class and we get to interact a lot. I feel a little bit over my head sometimes during class discussions--everyone's so deep!--but mostly it's really thought-provoking. Lately we've been exploring the question, "Is an experience diminished when other people have experienced it too?" and things along those lines. Speaking of that question, I need to write a paper about it tonight!

So not only is the freshman honors class small, but the whole honors program is, so we all went over last week to Dr. Steiner's house. He's the director of the honors program. So we had a picnic, and it was really fun. A few professors came and most of the honors students, and the food was a nice change from cafeteria food! Then we played a game called Corn Hole. I'd never heard of it before I came to Ohio--maybe it's a midwest thing? We don't have that much corn in New York, so maybe that's why we don't play it :-) I didn't do so well, but then again, it was only my first time. I plan on practicing so I can beat Team Ben, the reigning champions, next time!

I should probably explain what I mean by "things are settling down...and starting up". On the one hand, we're all settling into a routine--we've had almost 2 weeks of classes now, so we're figuring out when we have to get up and when we have to leave our dorms to get to class on time, stuff like that. But on the other hand, all the clubs have started their meetings. I'm basically the main person in charge of making over a dorm room for the Bluffton Student Design Board (BDSB) and its little subgroup, Stylefile. I've never done anything like this before! I decorated my own dorm room, and I've always been very interested in interior design, but I didn't expect to be put in charge of the complete makeover AND the bulletin board in Marbeck (the dining hall/mailroom/hangout spot/etc)! So today I rushed around trying to get the bulletin board up to advertise the makeover and so people can vote on which dorm room needs the makeover the most. It was crazy!

Well, I'll definitely post before and after pictures of the dorm room we choose. Stay tuned!

first post!

Hey guys! I figured I'd introduce myself and tell you a little bit about my first week and a half at Bluffton!

So my name is Holly Nickeson, and I'm from Rochester, New York. "What?! Why are you in the middle of Ohio?" is a question I get a lot. I chose Bluffton because I'm Mennonite, and Bluffton is a historically Mennonite school, in case you didn't know, although only about 20% of its students right now are Mennonite. I also liked that one of my best friends, Kristen, is a sophomore this year and would be here for me if I got overwhelmed or homesick, and my parents have some friends here that would be here for me too. Most of all, though, I just really liked the campus and the people and its small size (about 1,000 people)--I felt like I could really fit in.

Actually, one of the ways I could tell that I liked the people here was because I went to two dances during my Bluffton visits in senior year. It gave me a chance to see that a lot of Bluffton students share my views about dancing--there was practically no dirty dancing at both of the dances! I was thrilled! Back home, 90% of the music at dances is rap, and 90% of the dancing consists of grinding. Here, everyone just had a great time with music of all different genres and decades (particularly at the Decades dance, where we dressed up in outfits from different eras) and danced without it being disgusting.

So even though that seems like a little thing, it really said something about the campus and its students, and it was part of the reason I decided to be a Bluffton Beaver :-)

When I got here, I could tell that I made a good choice. Everyone was so friendly, and my roommate's dad helped my dad set up my loft bed. It was really generous of him because it was sweltering out--the job wasn't easy! All the girls from my floor are great. They're tons of fun, always stopping by my room to hang out. It's definitely not one of those floors where everyone stays in their room all the time. We go out to lunch and dinner in groups, which shows how much we genuinely like each other :-) It's been over a week now, but we're still close and hang out 24/7. Sure, there's a few roommate problems (not mine, thank goodness!) but for the most part, everyone gets along really well.

Well, I'm off to a Bluffton Design Board meeting--their first one this year--so I'll blog more on Thursday! I'll tell you all about it then!

--Holly