Green Key

LAST WEEKEND WAS GREEN KEY!



Green Key is one of the three big weekends at Dartmouth (the others being Homecoming in the fall and Winter Carnival in the winter) and it was a blast! Depending on who you ask, Green Key started anytime between Monday and Thursday of last week, though the consensus is generally Wednesday. What is Green Key? Well, basically it's a chance for Dartmouth students to relax, enjoy each other's company and frolic in the sun.

There were a lot of parties, both during the day and at night. They weren't just typical frat parties though - there were parties with bands and pig roasts and big inflatable toys. The weather was, for the most part, gorgeous. All the pictures above are from my Green Key weekend.

Explanations of photos, clockwise from top right corner:

1. On Thursday, my Introduction to the Dartmouth Outing Club PE class went to practice woodsmen's skills with a member of the Dartmouth Forestry Team. We threw axes (this picture shows my only successful attempt), sawed logs, made fires, tossed logs around and did some other lumberjack-y things. It was great!

2. One of the fraternities had a paint party and it was amazing. Their house is being torn down and rebuilt this summer, so they provided nontoxic, washable paint for everyone to throw all over themselves and the basement. It was a huge, colorful dance party and was, in my opinion, one of my favorite parties of the weekend.

3. This picture is from another fraternity party we went to, but this one didn't involve any paint. We got to dress up and be classy and eat hor d'oeuvres!

4. My other favorite party of the weekend was definitely Block Party, where this picture was taken. Webster Avenue was closed to cars and a band came to play on the front lawn of a fraternity. It was on Friday afternoon, the weather was glorious and everyone was carefree and happy. This is also where the inflatables were. It doesn't get much better than this.

5. This was Saturday night, pre-dance parties. Green Key was great because I got to meet a lot of new people (everyone for some reason seemed friendlier over the weekend) and hang out with friends who have been really busy lately.

6. Just throwing some axes, don't worry about it!

Awesome video!

I just found this video and it's amazing! It reminds me why I love it here so much!

My week

I'm busy once again studying for a chemistry test. Luckily this is the last term of chem I'm taking (if you can't tell by now, chemistry is NOT my subject). Tonight I'm going to a high school stereotypes themed party and I think I'm going as a teacher's pet - jumper, polo, headband, etc. My friend Angie is going as a foreign exchange student, so yesterday we went to West Lebanon (home of Wal-Mart, Kmart, TJ Maxx and some other stores) to find her a Hello Kitty mini-backpack. I was really skeptical that we would be able to find one (it's a little... specific, especially to be hunting for in a small New Hampshire town) but the first store we went to had a Hello Kitty mini-backpack on sale for $6. What a steal!

We also went into a pet store and looked at a bunch of rodents and birds. They had a 14-year-old parrot that cost $10,000. After that we came back to Hanover and saw the movie Babies at the Nugget, the local movie theater where movies are only $4.50 for Dartmouth students. Babies was possibly the cutest movie ever. EVER. It's essentially clips of babies' lives for an hour and a half with no dialogue.

Next post: First Year Parents Weekend! My parents were here last weekend and it was wonderful.

Student Assembly elections

I was assigned to the Student Assembly beat for The D this term, which means I got to cover the student body presidential and vice presidential elections in April (part of the reason I was so busy)!

It was really cool to know what was going on all the time with the elections. I got to talk to the candidates a lot and meet people I would probably never have met otherwise. It also taught me a lot about SA, which is basically Dartmouth's student government organization, and what issues that are important to different groups on campus.

Eric Tanner '11 won the presidency and Brandon Aiono '11 won the vice presidency so any of you '14s reading this will likely hear Eric (and maybe Brandon) speak at some point during orientation.

Here they are! This picture is taken from The D website and went along with an article I wrote about Eric (who's one the left) and Brandon.

Catherine's visit!

A few weeks ago my best friend from home visited me at Dartmouth! She's a freshman at Georgetown and came up during their Easter break. The weather cooperated and it was in the mid-70s the whole time she was here!

She said it felt like we were at Camp Dartmouth because it was so warm and everyone was basking on the Green. It was a great weekend because it was right after the first week of classes for spring term so life hadn't gotten quite so busy yet.

It was great to show her everything here! She saw The D offices and Foco (Food Court) and the places where I spend all my time. We walked down and sat by the Connecticut River one night and we hiked to the Gile Mountain fire tower one evening. The fire tower has gorgeous 360° views of the area. It's near Norwich, VT (about 15 minutes away from campus) but you can see Baker Tower and Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center from the top!

We also dyed eggs for Easter and went to a fraternity dance party (these two things are very unrelated, but I just wanted to give you a comprehensive idea of what we did while she was here).

Overall we had a great weekend together!

Spring break

It's been a long time since my last post - sorry everybody! I thought spring term would be less chaotic than winter, but I'm realizing that every term here is crazy busy (in the best way possible!). I'm going to go ahead and break up things that have happened recently into different posts so that I don't scare you off with an overwhelmingly long essay about my life (though I'm sure everyone is dying to read something like that, right?). So that leads me into...

SPRING BREAK!

It was almost a month ago now, but it was unbelievably fun! I went with the ultimate frisbee team to a tournament in Georgia. We road tripped down in a bunch of minivans that we rented from the College. There were about 85 of us total!

As you may have realized, New Hampshire is not all that close to Georgia, so it was a ton of driving to get down there. The driving was one of my favorite parts though (no joke). I got to meet a bunch of male and female frisbee players I didn't already know or know very well.

We stayed at people's family's houses all down the East Coast and it was wonderful! Everyone's parents were incredibly generous and kind and it was so relaxing to be back in a home, even if it wasn't mine.

And then we played frisbee in Georgia, and the first day it was really hot (yay sunburns!). The second day was rainy but it was still fun. I am from Seattle after all, so the rain is pretty familiar. After Georgia, we went up to beach houses in South Carolina. It was so idyllic! We had two houses right on the beach and we went on beach walks and perused cute little shops and hung out. I found the best shell I've ever found too! This doesn't sound very exciting, but trust me, it's a pretty great shell.

After that we road tripped back up to Hanover. I was nervous about the trip beforehand because I felt like I didn't know most of the people very well, but it was a fantastic (how many positive adjectives can I use in one post? This is just how great it was!) experience and now I want to go every year. I got to go to a bunch of states I'd never been to before - Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia - and meet new people and relax and play frisbee. We also played a lot of Bananagrams, which I highly recommend to everyone if you've never played before!

Summary: Spring break was wonderful/excellent/lovely/awesome/amazing/fantastic! Sorry for the blogging hiatus - I'm back in action now.

End of term

I have not been very good about updating my blog lately, but it's been a very hectic end of term. I miraculously managed to not fail chemistry.

My mom visited at the very beginning and we went to Boston together, which was great. I hadn't seen my mom for three and a half months and I really missed her. We went shopping and walked around (but only a little - the weather was crazy bad!).

She also came up to campus for a day or so before we went to Boston, so I got to show her around. We walked legitimately everywhere we could on campus - Occom Pond, Leverone Field House, my dorms by the Connecticut River, etc. If you look at a map of campus, you'll see that we criss-crossed it a lot. I also showed her the newsroom at The D (where I spend probably 10 hours a week) and how I walk to class and such.

Tomorrow is her birthday so I'm mailing her a package with coffee from Dirt Cowboy Cafe and a book and seeds and a card. And confetti, which will probably make a mess when she opens the package but it's pretty and sparkly so hopefully she won't mind.