She's alive! She's blogging!

It's been over a month since I last posted a real update. Sorry.

I am still alive, though. And I'll grab my calender here and see if I can't remember a little of what I've been up to...

Yup. Nothing.

We went on household retreat this last weekend. We went to Toronto, OH and stayed at the TOR Sisters' retreat house. It was a nice relaxing weekend and a lot of fun, and we even learned a little something.

We've got two new intents now! One intented on Thursday at breakfast, and the other on Saturday, at brunch. It's exciting because now we'll actually have a household next semester. There were only three of us, and the other two are going to Austria in the Spring, but now I won't be alone. Yay!

As everyone on the semester system knows, it's midterms season. I had two pretty busy weeks, but now it's slowed down for a while. It'll take some real concentration to force myself to work on the papers due in a few weeks so I'll be relatively free come November.

I'm going to Mexico on mission over Spring break! I was accepted to the team two weeks ago, and we've had two meetings since then. It's a big group, so it's taking a while to learn everyone's names. I think it's going to be a good team. I'll probably be posting in a few weeks to let you know how you can help.

Fall break is in two weeks, and I'll be going to visit my friend at Notre Dame. AM, if you're reading this and haven't checked your facebook in a while, there are details there. I should probably email you...

I'll be getting a ride from the Sisters of St. Francis of Perpetual Adoration in Mishawaka, IN. There are two sisters studying here in Steubenville, and they've got extra room in their van.

I'm also planning to go back to Mishawaka for a retreat mid-November. I'm really looking forward to that too.

And guess what? I get to go to Phoenix for Thanksgiving! It will be my first Thanksgiving with my family in three years. (That means I wasn't there the last two years.) Plus, I'll get to see my uncle and aunt again, whom I haven't since summer 2007.

So, you have all heard about NaNoWriMo now. :)

I'm starting some outlining, but I don't want it to get too detailed before I actually start writing. Part of the fun of NaNo is finding out what happens next as you go. I've got a brief synopsis and cover art on my profile page, though. Check it out! Let me know what you think.

And... My keyboard broke. I dropped a book and the R and T came off. The hinge for the T key broke, so now I've got a funky keyboard until the replacement I ordered comes in. At least it still works, though.

All right. That's it for now. Talk to you soon,

-Ganchi

NaNoWriMo 2009, An Appeal

Friends, Romans, countrymen, Mesopotamians, foreigners, faithful blog readers, dear facebook friends, and everyone else who reads my blog or my facebook notes,

I write to you today, breaking the silence of an unnecessary blogging hiatus, to ask you to consider something.

What will you make of your November?

Will it be, as many a November in the past, just another month? Will you, having reached yet another Christmas season, look back and have nothing to show for those thirty days but some extra Thanksgiving weight?

I want to propose an alternative. I want to beg you to consider making your November extraordinary. This November can be one you can look back on with pride, nostalgia, variations of disgust and anger, and lots of exhaustion, and say to yourself, even outloud, "I am awesome."

In short, it can be a truly epic month.

I know you're all asking yourselves now, "That sounds amazing. How can I become such a kick-butt ninja?" Well, the answer is simple, though it's name is not: NaNoWriMo. It stands for National Novel Writing Month, and it's the greatest thing since freewriting.

As I said, the principle is very simple. You write a 50,000-word novel in a month.

Yeah, I know. It sounds impossible. But it's really not. That's 1,667 words per day, This blog post is almost 500 words and I wrote it in under an hour.

It's not impossible, but it is hard. And it's most likely going to take over your entire life for thirty days. But those thirty days are some of the most amazing, challenging, creative, and just plain downright fun you'll ever have. 'Cause it's not just you and a word processor and a half-thought-out whim of an idea for hundreds of pages. There's a website with forums and tips and dares and motivational emails. There's even a twitter hashtag with its own 140-character bits of encouragement. And there's a huge world-wide community behind it all cheering each other on to the finish line.

You get to know an amazing cast of characters really well, to the point where you're not even sure this creation could have originated in your own brain. Plus, and this is really my point, there are actual people out there who do this thing.

I want you all, and I really mean you now, to consider trying out NaNoWriMo. It's really a ton of fun, and I want to have friends to share it with this year. You've got a month to start brainstorming and outlining. Check out these pages for more detailed info, and friend me here when you sign up!

What will your November be? I know my answer. And I'll see you all December 1 waving a couple hundred pages of terrible prose over my head with pride and calling myself a novelist. Won't you join me?

If you're younger or have a young writer in your life, check out NaNo's Young Writer's Program for more information and inspiration.

Only at Franciscan...

...can "Be unique, go Greek" be the sorority's recruitment slogan.

Random stuff that happens.

It's the second week of school, and things are starting to get on a roll. It seems like every night, a new commitment starts, which means I'll have to work extra hard to stay on the ball. I'm really excited about everything I'm going to be involved in this semster though.

I finally got my graduation paperwork signed and turned in. My French advisor is still sorting through my Parisien transcripts. With any luck, though, it will work out, and I'll have enough credits for that major.

My Latin American Lit professor is from Madrid, which makes me happy, and I enjoy the challenge of his accent, but the reading for homework is really challenging. Maybe it will get easier as we move out of the conquista and into the modern era.

I need to take my last 30 credits in Steubenville, which means that after my major requirements, my last core class, a thesis and a seminar, I only had one credit left to take. So after I didn't make the University Chorale, I've signed up for Introduction to sign language. Missed the first week, and it's only one hour per week, so we've only learned a little about the history of the deaf community and the alphabet. It should be interesting though.

I'm going to try the nursing home ministry I was involved with two years ago.

Im going to apply for the Mexico mission trip over spring break.

And I'm so excited about Household this semester!

Alright, that's it for now. God bless you guys.

-Rebekah

The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy is a very unevenly edited book and contains many passages that simply seemed to its editors like a good idea at the time.

One of these supposedly relates the experiences of one Veet Voojagig, a quiet young student at the University of Maximegalon, who pursued a brilliant academic career studying ancient philology, transformational ethics and the wave harmonic theory of historical perception, and then, after a night of drinking Pan Galactic Gargle Blasters with Zaphod Beeblebrox, became increasingly obsessed with the problem of what had happened to all the biros he'd bought over the past few years.

There followed a long period of painstaking research during which he visited all the major centres of biro loss throughout the galaxy and eventually came up with a quaint little theory which quite caught the public imagination at the time. Somewhere in the cosmos, he said, along with all the planets inhabited by humanoids, reptiloids, fishoids, walking treeoids and superintelligent shades of the colour blue, there was also a planet entirely given over to biro life forms. And it was to this planet that unattended biros would make their way, slipping away quietly through wormholes in space to a world where they knew they could enjoy a uniquely biroid lifestyle, responding to highly biro-oriented stimuli, and generally leading the biro equivalent of the good life.

And as theories go this was all very fine and pleasant until Veet Voojagig suddenly claimed to have found this planet, and to have worked there for a while driving a limousine for a family of cheap green retractables, whereupon he was taken away, locked up, wrote a book, and was finally sent into tax exile, which is the usual fate reserved for those who are determined to make a fool of themselves in public.

When one day an expedition was sent to the spatial coordinates that Voojagig had claimed for this planet they discovered only a small asteroid inhabited by a solitary old man who claimed repeatedly that nothing was true, though he was later discovered to be lying.

There did, however, remain the question of both the mysterious 60,000 Altairan dollars paid yearly into his Brantisvogan bank account, and of course Zaphod Beeblebrox's highly profitable second-hand biro business.

-Douglas Adams

Sorry, it's just that I seem to be having a remarkable amount of difficulty keeping a normal-coloured pen  about when I need one. Thought I'd share a peek into my resulting mental process.

-Rebekah