Sara's blog

I decided to take advantage of the sales and go shopping super-early the morning after Thanksgiving. I don't usually shop for sport, and this may have been only like my second time going shopping on Black Friday, so I was unsure what to expect. The adventure began at 5:00 am. Mom said she'd wake me and my sister up when she got up. I didn't realize it would be so ridiculously early, but I guess that's part of the experience. I don't think Katie was expecting to get woken up so early either, and she almost wimped out but had a change of heart and came with us. Destination #1: the Brighton Target. There was more traffic than usual for it being so early in the morning. I soon discovered my mother is very intense when it comes to shopping. She was on a mission, and the person driving in front of us was going a little too slowly for her liking. I could hardly even keep my eyes open, I was so sleepy, and here was this woman in the front seat with road rage at 5:30 am. Sh...

Every Sunday, my church serves Sunday supper. Back when the cafeterias weren't open on Sundays for dinner, it was a really good way to get students to come. But even now, a delicious home-cooked meal is always more appetizing than what the caf has to serve. Now that I have to cook for myself (and y'all know how good I am at that), I especially appreciate the free, good food at Church on Sundays. Different people from the church volunteer to cook each Sunday. Sometimes it's ministry teams like the women's guild, Bible study leaders, or something like that. Or sometimes random church members step up and cook. Last Sunday, a family volunteered. Joe and his sister Lizzy go to my church. Their parents, who live in Frankenmuth , came to help make dinner. Being from Frankenmuth , they had the brilliant idea to buy food from there and serve it. That's the first time I've had food from the Bavarian Inn in a long time. It was soooooo good. The fried chicken wa...

Today, after church this morning, I went out to lunch with some of the other college students. We decided to get Chinese food, and one person in the group, Katie Beth, really wanted to go to Everyday Buffet. So that's where we went. Without really checking it out, everyone at my table ordered the buffet and immediately went to fill our plates. We were surprised to find nothing normal-looking. I was shocked that someone would have recommended this place; but I guess today was a special day where they were serving more authentic food instead of their normal fare: Americanized Chinese food. I wasn't feeling very brave so I passed over the chicken feet and eel sushi. I ate tiny little bites of most things and was able to feel somewhat full. I certainly wish I hadn't spent $10 on the buffet though. I should have just ordered off the menu and at least had leftovers that way. I think most people were like me and weren't really diggin ' the food choices we had. We didn'...

Happy National Novel Writing Month! I wouldn't really know about this, except that I got roped into writing a chapter of a novel that is a team effort among several people in the college of engineering. Craig is the "communications specialist" in our department. He has no engineering background; I believe he studied English in school. He looks at people's lab reports for formatting and grammatical issues. I guess he's also willing to proofread any paper you might have for another class or an application for something or whatever. I don't know what else he does, but he has an office just like any other professor. Anyway, he came up with this idea that fifty people would each write a chapter and we'd piece them all together in the form of a novel. The requirements are that we have to each write at least 1000 words. We've been given information on the setting (on an island off the coast of California in the summer of 2010) and characters. I've ...

So, I mentioned a quiz bowl tournament in my last post; and I bet you're dying to know how we did. I honestly don't know what place we finished--somewhere near the middle. The format had the 24 teams divided into 2 divisions. We played the other 11 teams in our division. All three MSU teams were in the same division. My team won against the team of all freshman from MSU but lost to our A team. Overall, we finished 6-5 for the prelims. Then we had two playoff rounds versus teams with similar records in the other division. We won one, lost one. So we finished 7-6. They keep statistics on individual players in this tournament. Through the first 11 rounds, I had answered 12 questions correctly, or something like that. I looked online for the stats, but they don't seem to be posted yet. Since it was Halloween, several people were dressed up at the tournament. I wasn't in costume; I couldn't think of anything creative. People from our team dressed up as Carmen San Diego,...

This weekend, I went to Chicago for a quiz bowl tournament. MSU was sending three teams to the tournament, or 11 people (2 teams of 4, 1 team of 3). We took three cars. I was in Aren's car with Nalin and Debra. It was a fun group of people. We left East Lansing around 6pm on Friday, about an hour later than the other two cars. On the way down, we stopped at Steak and Shake for dinner. It was good, though going to a sit down restaurant takes a while and slowed down our trip a little bit. The other two vehicles had already arrived at the hotel while we were still in Michigan. We decided on Debra's suggestion to play the radio game where you can only change to the next station after singing along to 15 seconds of one song. I figured I wouldn't be able to participate much since I never listen to music; but we must have been on a Christian station to start or something. I recognized a song from singing it at large group and was able to sing along for 15 seconds. We ...