Medieval Fun

Last weekend was Medieval Day at CUA. We all had a great time. I brought my new-to-me camera and practiced taking pictures. One of them even got published in the school newspaper! Here are a few of my favorite shots of the day.

The whole flickr set is here, deliberately obnoxiously watermarked since many of the pictures involve the faces of children.

Most Posts of 2013

Amongst Lovely Things is having a link up! There are five categories:

• Post with the most clicks
• Post with the most comments
• Post with the best picture
• Post that was hardest to write
• Post that was your personal favorite (not your readers' favorite- your favorite)

Here are my answers:

• Post with the most clicks

My post of seagull pictures got over 500 views. I am not really sure why or how that happened, but there you go. It all happened in the last week, so either someone is sharing that post like crazy, or it's one of those spammer hacks that jack up your page views in the hopes that you will click on your link.

• Post with the most comments

That would definitely be μετὰ λόγου. Nine whole comments, you guys!

• Post with the best picture

Um, by whose standard? This is probably the best picture on the blog. It's also the tree I got engaged under, although I did not know at the time that it was going to be that special. But the eighth photo in this post, of the seagull eating the dead bird, is my favorite picture.

Hey, I should take a poll. Which photo should be my header? The tree or the bird?

• Post that was hardest to write
• Post that was your personal favorite (not your readers' favorite- your favorite)

These are the same post: my farewell post to Maggie. I struggle to put my thoughts into words if what I am trying to write about can't be put into a syllogism. That post took me a long time to write, but I think it turned out well.

Head over to Amongst Lovely Things to join the link-up!

7 QT, Volume 17

I'm just popping in to say 7 quick things...about moving!

1. We made an offer on a new house, and it got accepted. The closing is scheduled for right before Christmas, so we'll probably move after Christmas.

2. The pros of this house are as follows: it's in a better parish, it's closer to Papa's work, there's an intellectual Catholic community there, and it's prettier than our current house.

3. The cons are as follows: it's smaller, the yard is smaller, and it requires leaving the house we've owned for fourteen years.

4. The older people think that, on balance, this will be good for our family. The younger people, who can only see what they would lose and not what they would gain, are rather distraught.

5. Prayers for them would be appreciated!

6. Since the house is smaller, we'll have to do some purging. That's definitely not a bad thing. We could use it.

7. Lastly, lest I leave you on a depressing note, here's a little beauty for you.

7QT, Volume 16

Wow, it has been a few months since I participated in this link up! For my seven quick takes, I'll do seven photos.

 Halloween! I am a deviled egg. Kevin is a soul in purgatory.

 Fall is my favorite season. Yesterday I went walking around campus taking pictures.

 Tricolor trees! After taking biology freshman year, I now know how this works.

 I think they have to plant these beautiful bushes across from the school of architecture because it is so ugly.

 These are near the Nursing-Biology building.

 (At CUA, we have a biology building and a nursing building. The building in between them is called Nursing-Bio. Someone was super creative there.)

Here's the one that got away. I only had my phone, and it couldn't focus without any natural light. This could have been such a cool shot, with the Shrine in the background and the green and orange leaves with the CUA banner. I may go back tonight and try to retake this shot.

Seagulls

I have been having a good few weeks. Life has slowed down enough that I am no longer going insane. Although I am not budgeting scrupulously, I am managing to save while having enough spending money to enable me to buy coffee and the occasional milkshake.

However, there's not much that's very interesting to blog about! So instead, you will get some pictures I took at the beach a few months ago. There were other pictures, mostly of people, but I hesitate to post pictures of people on the open internet.

 I love photographing birds. The beach is a really good place to do it, because there are a lot of birds, and not too many places for them to hide. The lighting can be a little tricky since the sun is so bright, though. Given that I tend towards the underexposed rather than the overexposed, I did not run into a lot of trouble!

 You can see straight through this guy's beak.

 Yes, sadly, that is our food. Or was.

 Did you know seagulls scratched themselves like dogs?

 A seagull feeding another seagull. I didn't realize they did this, and I wouldn't have expected to see it in September either.

Perhaps I'll do something more interesting one of these days.Perhaps I won't. We shall have to wait and see. Right now I'm pretty happy with the status quo of school, more school, work, and sleeping.

Rome, Day 2

To catch up, I'm going to have to post a little more frequently. Don't expect this to continue!

 I think the Rome metro looks like a tapeworm. I'm sorry. It does.

 Pope Leo, founder of CUA, hanging out in St. John Lateran. Is there a reason he always looks like he's playing with an invisible yo-yo? I would like to know.

 So much gold! Why exactly we went to Mass at St. John on the feast of St. Peter and St. Paul is not clear to me, but apparently it's a Holy Day of Obligation in Rome, so it's a good thing we went, even if we picked a strange church to do it in.

 On our way to another church, we saw this trail through the straw that a bunch of ants had made.

 This is Santa Cruce, I believe. It's hard for me to tell because I have no pictures from inside it.

 Kevin, reading the map. A common occurrence.

 I forget which church this is, but it is covered in mosaics so I automatically love it.

 St. Sophie, virgin and martyr! My self-adopted patron saint. Her relics are in a little church in Rome near St. Mary major.

 See that underground basement part? That's where the relics were kept. We couldn't find them, so we had to ask a Benedictine (in Italian!) who unlocked it for us and let us go down. Don't be worried by the lit candles. We didn't interrupt Mass; they were setting up for a baptism.

 Cardinal Wuerl's church was unfortunately shut.

St. Paul outside the Walls is my favorite church ever. I will let the pictures speak for themselves.

 The pictures fail to do it justice, really. It's so large, and so gold, and so overwhelming.

 The Forum.

The Colosseum! Photo credit goes to a kind fellow tourist.

Wow, I got all of day two into one post! Let me tell you, it was an exhausting day. We saw tons of churches I didn't take pictures of and walked miles and miles.

Next up: Sunday!

So far behind! Rome, Day 1

On blogging, that is. In terms of schoolwork, the library books I ordered come in tomorrow and I am going to print out my online articles today, so I'm in good shape there. I hope. Due to IES program requirements, I have to turn in my paper five weeks early, so I can only hope that in two weeks I can get a paper up to the standards for a paper everyone else has seven weeks to write. But what can't be cured must be endured, and I am resigned to the (very real) possibility that I may well not get an A in this class.

I still haven't posted the Rome pictures, and I went to Berlin and those pictures aren't even sorted. So here, without further ado, is a substantial dump of Rome pictures. I think it will take several posts to get through them, so here is day 1.

We arrived on Friday at about 2, and went to go check into our hostel. I had been worried about it, because the internet reviews were not stellar, but let me tell you, it was great. For 20E/night, I have zero complaints.

 This is Kevin's favorite bridge in Rome. Perhaps he will be so kind as to remind me in the comments of what it is called.

 First view of the Vatican! We followed the advice of a CUA philosophy professor--if you come at St. Peter's from one stop farther than the tourists go, you get this amazing view as your first view.

 Roman pigeons love to do this. I don't know why.

 The day was so good from a weather perspective it was hard to get photos! The sky kept getting blown out.

 Us at the Vatican. For a tourist selfie, this turned out pretty well!

 It was St. Peter and Paul on the Saturday, so St. Peter got a lovely robe, and if you donated some money to Peter's Pence, they gave you a holy card! So I did, at basically every church we went into.

 Isn't it every Catholic girl's dream for her boyfriend to take her to Rome and then find a photo op with a Swiss guard?

 Because our minds cannot always be set on the eternal, I offer you this photo of a seagull eating a dead something. This is probably on of my top five favorite photos from this weekend. Analyze away, armchair psychiatrists! (I spelled that correctly on the first try. Exhibit A of why everyone should study ancient Greek.)

 There is a specific spot in the square, and if you stand there, all the columns line up. For those of you who are thinking, "Wait, did they not before?", I offer you the next shot:

 This is what I saw when I turned around to look at the other side. Apparently they don't usually appear to line up. I would make a terrible detective--I'm so unobservant!

 The bridge, again, from the other side. Or maybe it was a different bridge. Kevin?

 The Pantheon.

Apparently every other tourist in the world wound up at the Trevi fountain at night. I don't like crowds, so I took a picture from the side, and I think it turned out pretty well.

Next installement will be either the pictures from Saturday or half of the pictures from Saturday. We did a lot of stuff. (Note: I have asked Kevin to comment and fill in my blanks, but obviously other readers are free to do the same, or to straight up correct me if I got something wrong.)