A relaxed mind meanders

Spring break is (finally!) pretty much totally planned out. I have one more flight to make, and Elise is making plans for the Switzerland part of our trip. My itinerary:

Feb. 12-20 Rome with my Dad; planning to see the major sites, Pantheon, Vatican, Campidoglio, Tempietto, and some of my favorite churches, Sant Andrea delle Valle, Santa Maria Sopra Minerva, Sant Ivo, and Santa Maria della Vittoria. I think I'll also take him to Ultimate Frisbee, so he can poke around the park and meet some of the Italians I know, and daytrip to Assisi, and maybe Bagnoreggio and Siena, some of my favorite places. They also fulfill the activity requirement! And of course, we'll hit up the gelateria shops!

Feb. 20-22: Traveling to, staying at, and leaving Lourdes, France. It's supposed to be really pretty, and I'm meeting up with my roommate Yacintha and her mom there so I'll have someone to walk around with.

Feb. 23-24: In Angers with Elise. I'm thinking about taking some day trips to Paris and maybe Alencon, where St. Therese was born while she still has classes.

Feb. 25-27: Switzerland with Elise for the weekend... she's planning that one, so details later...

Feb. 28- Mar. 5th: IRELAND! I'm hopefully meeting up with and staying with a girl from Walsh who's studying in Dublin this semester, then traveling to Killarney with Grant and Cailin (both arkies) and seeing the ring of Kerry, Cliffs of Moher, Galway, and Connemara before flying out of Dublin back to Rome.
..................................

Phew... ok, so I took a quizzie from Claire and it said:

Who Should Paint You: Andy Warhol

You've got an interested edge that would be reflected in any portrait You don't need any fancy paint techniques to stand out from the crowd!

What Artist Should Paint Your Portrait?

While I admire him, I don't think that's who I would choose at all. I would have preferred a more traditional painter, but I think they were underrepresented in this quiz. I love the impressionists, and Caravaggio was a genius. We have a book in our library here that shows some of the drapery that Leonardo did, and it's absolutely fabulous. He's fantastic too. So many great artists, but I think overall I'm definitely less of a modern, pop art type person, so that quiz really surprised me.

Also speaking of Claire, I got a joke today that I know she (and several other people I know) will appreciate:

"The importance of punctuation"

Dear John,

I want a man who knows what love is all about. You are generous,
kind, thoughtful. People who are not like you admit to being useless and inferior.

You have ruined me for other men. I yearn for you. I have no
feelings whatsoever when we're apart. I can be forever happy--will
you let me be yours?

Gloria

Or

Dear John,

I want a man who knows what love is. All about you are generous,
kind, thoughtful people, who are not like you. Admit to being
useless and inferior.

You have ruined me. For other men, I yearn. For you, I have no
feelings whatsoever. When we're apart, I can be forever happy. Will
you let me be?

Yours,

Gloria


ahahaha.

OK, now off to work (and pack, and think of break)

hmm...

As seen on Claire's blog:

Bold the books you have read. Italicise the books you might read. Leave the rest. Pass it on:

1. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
2. The Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger
3. The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy - Douglas Adams
4. The Great Gatsby - F.Scott Fitzgerald
5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6. The Time Traveler's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger <--I LOVED this book.
7. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
8. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (Harry Potter 6) - J.K. Rowling
9. Life of Pi - Yann Martel
10. Animal Farm: A Fairy Story - George Orwell
11. Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
12. The Hobbit - J. R. R. Tolkien
13. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
14. Lord of the Flies - William Golding
15. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
16. 1984 - George Orwell
17. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Book 3) - J.K. Rowling
18. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
19. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
20. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
21. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
22. Slaughterhouse 5 - Kurt Vonnegut
23. Angels and Demons - Dan Brown
24. Fight Club - Chuck Palahniuk
25. Neuromancer - William Gibson
26. Cryptonomicon - Neal Stephenson
27. The Secret History - Donna Tartt
28. A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess
29. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
30. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley <--highly recommend
31. American Gods - Neil Gaiman
32. Ender's Game (The Ender Saga) - Orson Scott Card
33. Snow Crash - Neal Stephenson
34. A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
35. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe - C.S. Lewis
36. Middlesex - Jeffrey Eugenides
37. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
38. The Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien
39. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
40. Good Omens - Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaiman
41. Atonement - Ian McEwan
42. The Shadow Of The Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
43. The Old Man and the Sea - Ernest Hemingway
44. The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
45. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
46. Dune - Frank Herbert
47. Farenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury
48. The Things They Carried - Tim O'Brien
49. The Joy Luck Club - Amy Tan
50. The Mists of Avalon - Marion Zimmer Bradley

Always good to have some suggestions for reading, even if it is harder to find those books over here.

I went to Torino this past weekend and I had a lot of fun... we got to see a lot of the venues for the olympics like the piazza where the medal ceremonies will be held, and the rink where the skating will be (only the outside though) and the olympic village and snowboarding facility at Bardonecchio. I also tried skiing there, but the italian definition of an "easy" slope is definitely different from MD! I was on my butt a good portion of the time going down that easy slope and I was being passed by whole groups of approximately 4 year old italian children who were pretty much wider than they were tall with the snowsuits they had on. It gave me a new degree of admiration for the skiiers and snowboarders you see on TV, which somehow just never quite manages to convey the steepness of the hills that those guys are going down and the sharpness of the turns and the speed that they have. It's incredible, really. I'll have to post some of the pictures when I get them onto the computer.

At the Lateran

There was a conference today at St. John Lateran, so I headed over to check it out. It was about catholic education and there were a bunch of cardinals and Fr. Jenkins there, but I thought it was surprisingly boring. I mean, these guys are smart, they all had doctorates from Oxford and stuff, but I could have told you all the stuff they said. I think it was essentially a pep rally for people involved with Catholic education. It wasn't a debate, or addressing a specific problem; it was just three (granted, very smart and articulate) men giving speeches. The most specific comment of the night was "Catholic universities have a responsibility to address the most pressing moral and ethical concerns of the society in which they exist." Well, I could have told you that! So that was disappointing, but then they awarded some cardinal I didn't know and the US ambassador to the Holy See honorary doctorates, which was pretty interesting, and there was free food and champagne downstairs afterwards!

In other exciting news, the board of trustees is coming tomorrow and they pinned up the best of the semester's work in one of the rooms... the project that I was in the masterplanning group for is now pinned up, as is one of the watercolors I did for graphics!! Yay!!