11:10 Late Thursday Night   Does This Really Happen Once A Year? Once again Christmas has sneaked up on me. While I have most of my family's presents, there are a few things I still have yet to acquire. Something for my grandma's birthday. Something for my grandparents for christmas. Something for Papa's birthday. Something for my other grandparents for christmas. something spectacular for Caleb. I want to figure out what to for each of my friends. When on earth will I ever find the time? So, grades? I got almost straight A-'s. I got 10 hours of A-, 5 hours of A, and 3 hours of B-. Screw that ridiculously horrendous ecology lecturer. I must have tanked on the final. I'm really surprised I got an A- in chemistry, though. I guess he didn't curve the final exam...though the average was 45/80. I think I got 64/80, and was the 5th highest score in the class. But no one really cares about my academic well being. Not even me anymore. Disappointed about a few things, happy for others, resigned about the rest. hopefully next semester goes better. on my psyche. Ecology was killing me. But as far as coursework goes, it wasn't actually that bad. I guess... for my effort, I did alright. I do keep intending to make more of an effort....and every semester I start off well and doing homework and studying, and then i just give up and say "well i'll just be smart enough." and...well we all know THAT's not true. So now it's Christmas holidays, Caleb and I went to Portland, Oregon. That was really fun. It had its frustrating moments. I love how we didn't figure out the zone system until halfway through our trip. We saw some interesting things, though. Some highlights shall follow: The day we arrived, ours was the first suitcase at baggage claim so we were out of the airport like a shot. That's kind of inconsequential. We took the train to where our motel was meant to be. We got lost looking for it and walked nearly half a mile before realising we had gone way too far. Apparently we had been too busy admiring the cafe in front of it, owned by a church, called "The Sacred Grounds." The motel turned out to be owned by the same church. We dropped our bags off and went wandering around in search of a grocery store. We didn't, of course, ASK anyone where the nearest grocery store was, so we meandered in a direction we thought most likely to happen upon groceries. We walked for an hour, saw a lot of sex shops and convenience stores with shady people and cigarettes...and turned around when we came upon a huge empty stretch of road without a grocery in sight. We bought a large pineapple pizza and carried it the hour's walk back to the motel. The second day we were in portland, we missed the continental breakfast, which was a terrible disappointment. I wanted to go to Powell's, so we hopped on the train to downtown. We walked around in circles on a friday morning in downtown portland, got a sample of soup from a souvlaki street vender, and got yelled at by every charity person imaginable for not giving them our change. I know, we're terrible people. We found powell's, I searched for used Sailor Moon mangas (which ended fruitlessly, i'm afraid) and ended up finding the two first books of an old manga I had the 3rd and 5th book of...for $4 each. I snapped them up. Caleb found a sci fi novel. we left and bought souvlakis from the guy who gave us the soup for lunch (well, i did. caleb had a hot dog). The rest of the day we mostly just wandered around downtown, doing mostly nothing. We found a Fred Meyers and bought groceries on our way back to the hotel. Oh yeah, we made teriyaki flavoured pasta snacks in the coffee pot because our room didn't have a microwave. it was so effective that we overcooked the pasta. it wasn't very delicious. On saturday, we went to Portland's Saturday Market. That was fun. I bought Chelsea a christmas present and Caleb bought me a pair of nice woolen mittens because i was cold. he's sweet like that. Then we found a dress that he wanted me to try on but it turned out that it wasn't the kind of dress that he thought it was by looking at the mannekin. mild disappointment. that's what we did most of the day. Back at the hotel we had ramen noodles from an obscure canadian brand. They were terrible! we ended up throwing half of it away. It was awful. I felt sick all night and wondered if we were going to die from some random poison that was in the noodles. Sunday I felt sick still, but we went to the church that owned the hotel. There was too much singing; it reminded me a little of new life. The sermon was pretty good, though...about when "God goes Dark." Spiritual rough patches. It was quite a useful sermon. I couldn't go to that church permanently, though, because they don't have snacks afterwords. We went back to the hotel and I threw up breakfast. gross. I did feel better after I puked, but I was still burping up the flavour of the noodles and it was absolutely horrendous. That was the most important thing that happened on sunday, i think. We went to Old town and looked at gift shops and visited the Chinese Garden. It was beautiful It was raining and one tree had lost all its leaves and was bearing ripe persimmons. It looked like ornaments on a christmas tree. We then had tea and small snacks at the teahouse on the premises. It was enjoyable. All the burping had stopped by that time. hooray! That night we bought groceries from a safeway and had really nice vegetable soup for dinner. Monday we intended to go to the Japanese gardens but we got lazy and just made a lunch and went picnicking along the riverfront instead, to the Japanese-American Historical Plaza. Once again, a lovely (though drizzly) day. Tuesday we left. we mostly played around in the airport. I went to the airport's Powell's and read their books without buying them , once again because I'm a terrible person. Caleb and I played several rounds of yu-gi-oh. Then we got home. My maternal grandparents have come visiting for christmas. That's really nice, I've been enjoying their company. Tonight we looked at old photos and mom narrated them, told me what was happening. It is so weird to think of my parents being my age, dating, going to parties and having a life. it's like there was life before i was born; what a crazy idea. and now it's quite late and I'm sleepy. I can't believe Caleb's been here a month already. I want him to never leave me. Or maybe I should just go with him when he leaves. I miss Christchurch so much! I don't know what I'm going to do when he leaves. My life will just... well anyway, enough sounding absolutely pathetic. I feel like I haven't done any actual DIARYing lately, just trying to be profound and failing. This was a nice change. Just a little autobiographical account of my last week or so. Awesome. I've missed it. goodnight, Diary. I lurve you.