Party & water polo

Posted on Saturday, 12 April 2014, 19:46 by Alexandra

Last night’s birthday party was awesome! My daytime birthday was boring, but it ended with blue sky and a nice party. There weren’t so many people there, but we mixed drink, took shots and played Cards Against Humanity for the first time. I had so much fun.

We didn’t go out after, no one was interested, but that was how I wanted it. I’m not really a fan of nightclubs.

The original plan for this morning was to have lunch with mom, but I wasn’t feeling very well, so I went to Max Hamburgers with Chad instead. So delicious and greasy and perfect for a hangover day.

He helped me clean up the mess and then went home to get some sleep. I on the other hand was feeling surprisingly well and went with VIRUS to play water polo. I wasn’t even sure what it was, but I had so much fun. We were three girls and maybe 11 guys. But everyone was very nice at the end and passed the ball to me and I did some nice pass interruptions. And I surprised myself by crawling pretty okay. I’ve never been able to do that before and now, all of a sudden I can. It’s like with my setting in beach volleyball. It just worked!

Before the game at the end, when we had to have those stupid hats, we had some exercises like how to pass and shoot and drown eachother. It was hard and after one hour in the water I was done. So much fun tough.

April 1st

Posted on Wednesday, 2 April 2014, 0:15 by Alexandra

Not much have happened since last I wrote. I went to that party and I had an amazing evening with lots of wine and good food! For the first time since I started studying at Chalmers in 2010, I was served fish at a “sittning”. It was grilled salmon and really good, but beef is more appropriate when you’re drinking. The next VIRUS party is on May 17th. I was glad when they told me they are gonna have another one before the summer. Too bad I am in London that weekend… There is one more right before I move back to USA in late August, not so much of a dinner as a party, but still. One last night with VIRUS before I will be leaving again.
On Sunday I felt like I deserved but I’ve had way worse.
On Monday’s agenda was structural engineering the whole morning and after lunch a meeting with our counselor or whatever I should call him about the thesis.
And working with that is what I did this morning. We did some customization and wrote a little bit in the paper. After lunch I was so exhausted I fell asleep on the couch for a couple of hours. After that I was so groggy and weird that I decided to stay on the couch and watch TV series. I couldn’t even work if I wanted to, my internet was down for some reason.
After dinner it was up and running again but it was too late to start writing, so I played a little bit of Guild Wars. Every April 1st they do something in game. This year they made everyone (even the foes, minipets and NPC’s) bobble heads. It looked very stupid running around with a loose head. I am almost level 80 now, next time I play I will be. And then I will be able to play with my guildies again, it will be fun!

The only one who tried to fool me today was my 9-year old cousin. She told me they got 3 bunnies to look after again. Haha, could have been true!

Pub crawl @ Chalmers

Posted on Thursday, 20 March 2014, 23:29 by Alexandra

This was a very nice day actually, even if the whole afternoon was spent with structural engineering (the class I’m taking again). I actually solved one problem all by myself. It took one hour though and I had the answer key. But it’s a good start!

In the evening I went to one hour of yoga with mom and Sofia. It was in English so I recognized the names of the positions. It was a very good class to. I will try to go to this one regularly. We did headstands and I did surprisingly well. My mom was more than surprised, “where did you learn to do that?!”. I think I did a lot of headstands and handstands when I was younger. Guess some things are hard to forget how to do.

Right after yoga I and Sofia went to Chalmers, it was the pub crawl tonight (we have that four times a year, a night when all the 19 pubs on campus are open at the same time for everyone tovisit). We only went there to eat a burger outside of the Civil Engineer department’s house where our former committee barbecued them. So good! And cheap, since we used to do that ourselves, we get a huge discount. Very nice to talk to the new guys in VIRUS and I look forward to the “fancy” dinner party next weekend with them.

We didn’t feel that we were done with the pub crawl so we went to one of the pubs and had a drink each. We ran into two friends and sat there for maybe an hour. I didn’t drink any alcohol though. Mom said that wasn’t a good idea with an open wound in my mouth, so I ordered a hot cocoa. Worked perfectly fine that too!

Now I just took a warm shower and I have packed for this weekend’s trip up to grandma and grandpa on dad’s side. It will be nice to see them again. They live so far away so I don’t see them very often.

I should probably get to bed, I have a lecture at 8am.

New computer

Posted on Saturday, 22 February 2014, 23:35 by Alexandra

I am too addicted to my computer so it didn’t take me more than a day to get a new one. Yesterday I went with mom to her job and then borrowed her car to drive around and look for a new computer. Well, first to the support and see if they could fix it. They could, but that would have cost me like 4000 SEK (and my new one was 6000). First 1000 to send it in to find out what was wrong with it. The guy who helped me at Inet told me that it was probably something wrong with the motherboard. It might have been the keyboard too, but to find that out I would have to pay 1000. I bought my old computer when I graduated high school which is almost four years ago so neither he nor I thought it was worth spending that much money on that old thing. But I can’t really say that I was super sad about it.

So we talked about what new computer I should get and he showed me a pretty good Asus (Intel core i5-4200U, 8GB RAM (upgradeable to 16), 500GB, 15.6″, GeForce GT 740M, 2kg (my old one was probably like 4)) . I had googled some the night before and found one at Elgiganten, an Acer with tuochscreen. It would have been so awesome to have a touchscreen, but it would have made the computer slower so I didn’t want that one in the end. I drove to MediaMarkt but they didn’t have anything and after I took a quick look on the plastic Acer at Elgiganten I decided to go for the Asus at Inet. I love that store and it feels good to buy electronics there.

I called mom andI picked her up so both of us could go to Inet. I can’t part pay because I don’t have a fixed income.

I’ve been working with the computer for two days now and I have to say that I actually like Windows 8. I’m still installing programs and stuff, but it will be nice with this computer the next years!

Last night was the first omsits for me in a very long time and I had such a great time. Pregaming, three course dinner, after party and keps. The sittning was really big this time. More alumni than normal.There were even two guys from VIRUS 1995! The next one is on March 29th and it’sa fancy dinner (ugly-fancy as we call it, we are nicely dressed, eat nice food, but drink a lot of wine). I really look forward to it!

Party @ Chalmers

Posted on Friday, 14 February 2014, 16:20 by Alexandra

I’ve attended my first Chalmers party in more than a year and it was so much fun. But before the party could start there was a student held department meeting. Normally those are kinda fun, but this time they didn’t allow alcohol at the meeting so I got really really bored. And when they talked about the year’s budget for about an hour it didn’t make it better. So I went down to “Buren” (translated into The Cage), our room in the basement. In the pause my grand-grandchild came down and gave me some pasta salad. Very nice of him to think of his elder!

At like 9:30 pm (the meeting started at 5) we were dragged up to the meeting again to vote for the new person to join the group. One quit…

The meeting didn’t end until I think 12:30am but as soon as it was over we all went down to welcome the new girl. We drank champagne and after some talking they brought forth the tray, caps, glasses and beer. It was time for keps! I’ve been missing that game so much in the US. I couldn’t play too long though. Sober for almost a year and keps is not a good combination so I stopped after four ciders. I was lagom drunk. And no hangover today, win!

But I slept the whole day. I came home around 5am, slept until 11am, watched some sitcoms and then fell asleep again and got up at 3pm to take a shower.

I should read through some documents for my thesis and for once I actually think I will do it instead of being a lazy-ass.

Happy Valentine’s Day everyone!! ❤

This is my view yesterday morning. SNOW! But it only lasted a few hours…When I walked to school it was actually a bit pretty. My camera isn’t very good with lights, but the sky was a peach color and it almost felt like California/Hawaii. Except that it was very cold…

Whale watching

Posted on Friday, 24 January 2014, 22:59 by Alexandra

This post used to contain pictures, but due to new storage limitations from WordPress, I had to fix the problem and decided to create a new blog that works as an archive for all the posts from my two years in California. This full post can be found here.

The weather today was the best ever! Every day so far, clouds have been hanging right over the mountains here and it has been windy. But today the mountains were completely free of clouds and the world’s second windiest harbor didn’t have any wind at all! It was a blue sky and it was just an awesome day here in Paradise.

The day didn’t start very well though. I woke up early because it was freezing cold in our room. I was half asleep and wasn’t really aware of what I was doing, but I took my hoodie and put my legs through the arms of the hoodie and pulled it up over my thighs. A very smart solution for a sleeping person. Then it got even colder so I removed it and put it on like normal, but then my legs were cold. So for tonight I’m taking both my hoodies out and am gonna put them on. I can’t believe how it can be so cold!

Anyway, after that we took the tour buses to the harbor in Ma’alaea, which is the second windiest harbor in the world. The tour was with Pacific Whale Foundation and was a very good tour. 2 hours out on the water under a blue sky and hot sun. The water under us was the bluest of blue I’ve ever seen. When I didn’t see any whales I just couldn’t stop looking down at the beautiful water. It was mesmerizing!

When it comes to the whales, the Humpback Whales, we saw a lot of them. They were seriously everywhere. Wherever you looked you could either see their backs breaching the water or see water blown out. And that you could see from very far away. They had a rule to not go closer to the whales than 100 yards except if they came up to the boat which they didn’t really do today. One time four of them came pretty close to the boat, but otherwise we watched them from afar. But they are big, like 45-50feet long so we saw them pretty good. The whole experience was just so amazing. We didn’t see any jumps close up but we did see some side fin splashes, a lot of tailfin splashes, and one head splash. They do that to get water in their mouths to look bigger and impress the females. So today we saw mostly males in competitive pods trying to win a females heart. We also saw a calf which probably wasn’t much older than just a few days, maybe weeks. It looked like a dolphin compared to the huge grownups.

It was incredible, but I so wish they had swam under the boat like they did the last Friday. That would have been soo awesome!!

After the whale watching we drove to Paia to hang around in the small and pretty city or just hang out at the beach for a couple of hours. I, Caroline and Sabrina (our new roomie) decided to spend those hours at the beach. The waves were really big today as well, and they were irregular. Fun for the surfers who could catch pretty much any wave.

At 4:30pm we drove back to the hostel where we had dinner, noodles in the microwave. It was good actually. At 7pm they opened a keg of beer and everyone was out in the common area playing drinking games, and just hanging out. I hardly drank anything, I tried Flip Cup and the Hands Game and I had a very nice time. And I’m so glad they have a quiet time after 10pm so I will still get some sleep :).

So, tomorrow’s the big volcano crater hike. It will probably kill me, but I really look forward to it. 12 miles is a lot though…

The baby humpback whale with its mom!