I Dream of Dreamweaver
Saturday, February 24

Rarely will you see two posts in the same day, but this is certainly the sort of occassion that calls for such measures. Before your eyes is a brand new website, completely remastered in Dreamweaver (with long lost deleted scenes and subtitles in five different languages). There will be no more of that iWeb sillyness! It's probably going to take a while to get some of these pages up and running (ie photos and music), but the blog will most definitely be updated. You can all thank Matt and his awesome skilz of a webmaster for my shiney-new-glitch-free site. He earns lots of bonus points in my book.

While we're here, I may as well tell you about the events of commandeering Shanna's kitchen for the night. Matt and I came up with a tasty vegetarian meal with a little help from our friends at Kraft. I made my own guacamole, which turned out really well. With that we had black bean and rice soup and stuffed bell peppers.

According to Russell and Shanna, it was pretty good. We've received a request to come back and cook next Saturday, which we are seriously contemplating accepting. Here are the recipes for the soup and peppers at Kraft in case you'd like to try either of them.

That's all for now; hope you enjoy the new site! I know I will.

-Karen (with many, much thanks to Mattface)

5 Things We've Learned about being Vegetarian
Saturday, February 24

1. Never order a veggie burger at Burger King. It both looks and tastes like a smashed together conglomeration of vegetables pretending to be a hamburger and failing miserably.

2. Definitely order a veggie burger at Bucket's. They use Boca burgers, which in my opinion are almost indistinguishable from the real thing. A really good version of the real thing.

3. Be prepared to leave Noonday hungry. This Wednesday the choices were: ham and cheese sandwiches or ham and cheese sandwiches. Matt and I ganked some salad dressing from the refridgerator and ate lettuce and chips.

4. Two servings of couscous = a whole lot more than two servings of brown rice. We had a lot of couscous last night.

5. Both hummus and Quaker Soy Crisps are super-awesome. (although maybe not so much together) Even Matt, who was immediately disgusted by the sight of a mixture made of olive oil, chickpeas, and some spices found out that he like it. The Soy Crisps are similar to very small rice cakes, but much tastier. Especially the cheesy ones.

Tonight we're taking over Shanna's kitchen and trying out some of the new recipes I found on Kraft website, which has become a favorite (thanks kwachel!).

On a different note, a few rantings about the website. The blog page seems to have gone AWOL, and the html for it is nowhere to be found. So, all future blog entries will just remain here. Matt and I are working on recreating my template in Dreamweaver, which is the step that takes the longest. Hopefully sooner rather than later, I can stop using iWeb altogether.

- Karen

Spring in February?
Tuesday, February 20

It’s true - it feels like spring outside around here. A bit surprising, considering that it won’t officially be spring until, oh, exactly a month from now. I suppose you must be wondering if anything else exciting happened in Jackson. Well, that Saturday Matt and I did our usual running around picking up things we needed that can’t be found in Martin. And then we decided to stop back by the Olive Garden...tiramisu had been calling our names the night before, but we didn’t get any. Our trip was well worth the effort, because it just so happens that the Olive Garden has the best tiramisu and cafe mocha that we`ve tasted in a long time. Just look at that.

On Sunday we had to head back to Martin pretty early to rehearse with New Pacers for a performance at Dr. Simmons’s church in Fulton. That night was somewhat of a Reelfoot Rural Ministries get-together in which several churches brought their choirs and performed a few selections. Our archnemesis the Lambuth Singers were there, which made us a little nervous. But, after the performance it was obvious which ensemble had prevailed. May I just say that the Pacers received several joyous comments from our conductor, accompanyist, and many audience members, and tried to conceal the smug looks on our faces.

Nothing else exciting has been going on around here, with the exception of the amazing weather. Tomorrow marks that first day of Lent, and I am going to take this opportunity to do something I’ve always wanted to - be vegetarian. Surprisingly, Matt has decided to do it with me! I haven’t been trying to convince him or anything, but yesterday he decided that he may as well get on board, especially since I do all my cooking at his apartment. I’m pretty excited about giving vegetarianism a try, and am wondering if it will stick. I also plan to follow the Lenten World Hunger calendar that my church in Jackson supports, and I may even post the daily offerings here in case you’d like to participate.

By the way, if some of these pages look really messed up it’s not you - it’s iWeb. I do not recommend this software. Eventually, when Matt helps me rebuild everything in Dreamweaver, we won’t have these problems. But for now, I don’t have time to fix everything. That`s all, I’ll post later about the vegetarian thing is going.

- Karen

A Trip to Jackson
Saturday, February 17

Really this is the second day of the trip to Jackson. A few minutes ago I walked into Supercuts to find that 10 people were already anxiously awaiting the lowering of their ears. So, I supposed this would as good a time as any to update by blog, especially since there's no wireless connection be found around here.

Matt and I got here yesterday for our late celebration of Valentine's Day, which meant the ridiculously crowded Olive Garden. In the waiting area we came across several people from Martin, which is wont to happen every time we come to Jackson. Once we were finally seated after about 45 minutes, we decided to get a calamari and toasted ravioli appetizer because, pretty much, they have the best calamari in the ever. I attribute this awesomeness to the parmesan peppercorn dipping sauce it comes with. After much debate, Matt ended up ordering Tuscan Garlic Chicken, which came with this exciting "curly fettuccine". I opted for Shrimp and Asparagus Risotto, (risotto is a type of pasta that resembles large flattened grains of rice). It proved itself to be very tasty and extremely cheesy.

And now I sit in the waiting room at SuperCuts, surrounded by hair products, nursing home occupants, and the inevitable country music, while it flurries outside. Expect updates later, when something exciting happens. Like the results of the forthcoming game night with my grandparents. I predict that either Granny or I will prevail...

-Karen

Valentine's Day Adventures
Wednesday, February 14

Well, it all started this morning when I started to get on my bike and realized that...it was frozen. That is just not supposed to happen. Especially not when you need to be in Dr. Roberts's theory class in less than 10 minutes. So, I spent about half of those minutes fiddling with my bike and trying to get it un-frozen, to no avail. I spent the other half walking as fast as humanly possible from the corner of campus where I live to the extreme opposite corner, where Fine Arts is. And being late to theory.

Now, English was pretty exciting. I"m not quite sure what amount of education value it held, but for what it was worth we watched The Little Mermaid. We were extremely dissapointed, however, that we had to fast-forward through a good deal of it to get finished on time. (yes, we actually fast-forwarded...Dr. Bradshaw lost the remote)

At lunch the former director of Noonday spoke and was EXTREMELY BOUNCY. One of the first things she pointed out as she was introducing herself in an EXTREMELY BOUNCY manner was that Karen was her "liiiiittle sisterrrrrr". So, of course, half of the room immediately turned to stare at me and the other half turned to stare at Karen. Then she proceeded to speak about having been a Journeyman in Japan for the past two years, where it was very lonely. Perhaps this EXTREME BOUNCINESS had been bottled up for an entire two years and suddenly released itself on the unsuspecting Noonday crowd? There`s no telling. But I don't think I could ever sustain such a level of EXTREME BOUNCINESS for so long.

Today we also had the joy of having Dr. Roberts at our opera rehearsal. (Up until now we've listened to Dr. Yeung attempt to peck out melodies on her piano.) Dr. Roberts, on the other hand, plays very fast and considers himself to be very all-knowing. Our rehearsal was...exciting, to say the least.

After church choir tonight we were suddenly pulled aside by Brother David and not allowed to leave. Apparantly he had heard that Rachel, Blair, Matt and I sang In Remembrance in Sunday school this week and had also heard from his wife (who had heard Matt and me warming up) that it was amazing. So, we were required to stay and sing for him and have now been recruited to sing in church one Sunday.

And afterwards Matt and I decided we should at least do something for Valentine's Day (we're postponing the rest until we get to Jackson Friday - Olive Garden!) so we went to Dairy Queen and got some wonderfulness known as "The Brownie Earthquake". It was nothing short of amazing. Happy Valentine's Day!

-Karen

Lots of Updates and Bug Fixes
Saturday, February 10

Hello there! This website should be looking much better since the last time you were here, if you saw the original redesigned version. I`ve done quite a bit of fanaggling to get everything to look the way it`s supposed to, and I`ve also added a few new things.

So, about all those weird characters that were coming up. That was the fault of my server, which UTM provides for its students (very few students realize that the university does indeed provide them with their very own blank web page and server space with which to do whatever they like - thanks, Matt!). This sneaky server likes to force your browser to view everything in Latin 1 text encoding.

iWeb, which I used to build my website, uses Unicode in order to support more languages than just English. So, when you try to read Unicode with your browser set to Latin 1, it ends up looking pretty strange. There`s not much I can do about this other than reformat all my text so that it looks ok in Latin 1. It`s quite annoying and time-consuming, but that`s what I did.

Another thing I changed is my music page. I wanted you to have access to all of my UTM choral music, but...there`s a lot of it. So, all the music is split up into different pages so that you don`t have to wait a ridiculously long time for it load.

That`s what I`ve been up to lately. And now it`s time to clean my room while I wait for this entire site to upload to the server...again. If my room gets done soon, I might even come back and post a picture of its sparkliness.

- Karen

New Year's Resolution
Thursday, February 6

Happy belated New Year! Happy belated new website too. So, what do you think? A new year, a new look. And a new resolution: to actually update this thing. I know, it started out great, but then fall semester came along. But with the dawn of new web software and a much better method for uploading, I hope to be able to keep this site up and running this semester.

Now for the real blogging. Let’s just start from this weekend: it snowed. It actually got below freezing in Martin and frozen precipitation fell from the sky! But...not enough frozen precipitation to warrant cancelling classes. Matt and I decided we would go on a photo shoot in the quad Sunday morning (church was cancelled), and we came up with some pretty good stuff. A piece of my pretty good stuff even made it onto the front page of this week’s Pacer.

Today I sang “Bist du bei mir”, my first German song, in voice studio. That reminds me, you might be wondering what classes I’m taking this semester!

On Monday, Wednesday, and Friday I have Theory I with Dr. Roberts. We’ve just started a unit on composition. After that I have Diction for Singers II with Dr. Gatwood (not on Friday, though). Last semester we learned the international phoenetic alphabet and studied Italian, and this semester we’re doing German and French. Upon hearing me read some German in class today, Dr. Gatwood wondered if I spoke any Dutch.

I also have English 112 honors with Dr. Bradshaw; since I couldn’t get into the class last year I’m the only sophomore in a room full of a lot of freshman Scholars. At 1:00 I have Spanish 122 with Luis Ferrer, for which I am the SI. I speak broken Spanish and he speaks broken English.

On Monday through Thursday I have University Singers, and on Tuesday and Thursday I have New Pacers. I have voice lessons on Monday, recital on Wednesday, and rehearsal with Delana on Friday. And Lyric Opera Theatre is Monday and Wednesday.

Also, let’s not forget my SI sessions (although most of my students certainly seem to). I have those for 50 minutes on Monday, Thursday and Friday.

So, looks like the blog is off promising start! We’ll just see how long it takes before I get this new version of the site up on the internet.

-Karen