Happy Thanksgiving folks!

Thursday was Thanksgiving which means day off school, work and time to eat til you drop! I was invited by Sam to join her family a 2 hours drive away. Her dad's side of the family was quite small so there was 11 of us at her Grandparents house. Her grandma did all the cooking and I had been told to expect hillbilly kind of food! It was lovely though, not too sure what some of the dishes were but tried a bit of everything and it all tasted good! It was just like a Christmas day though minus the presents. We got back to Columbus about 8pm and it was pretty much straight to bed to prepare ourselves for getting up at 3.30am to hit Black Friday!

So at 4am me, sam, her sister and mum all trooped out in the dark and cold to first off head to Target that opened at 4. It was maaad! Couldn't move very well for all the people in the aisles. People were just being ridiculous as well trying to manouver their trollies where it was clear there was no room!! They did have some good deals but nothing I was looking for...they were mostly in electronics like your TVs and consoles so not much use to me. I bought a plug adaptor though :) wouldn't have bothered queuing to buy just that but the others were waiting in line anyways. After that we headed to Old Navy and then Best Buy which is basically your Comet/Currys place. That was an even more insane line! and by that time it was about 6.30am so we took it in turns to wait in the line in pairs whilst the other 2 went to get breakfast next door at Panera Bread. That worked out well because we were out there by about 7am which was when the Polaris Mall opened so we headed onto there! Here it was less hectic but still busier than your usual weekend shopping. I bought most of my stuff here although it was mostly for xmas gifts which suited me fine as it meant I didn't have the hassle of trying things! Hollister had 30% off until noon so got few gifts there, bath & body works, victoria's secret. We left the mall about 12.30pm - 8 hours of shopping! Was happy to get to bed that night...

Saturday was round 2 of Thanksgiving meals with sam's mums side of the family at their house. The OSU v Michigan game was on at 12 so everyone watched that then food was served at 4pm to about 30 mouths!
All in all I enjoyed my first and probably last Thanksgiving experience although wouldn't mind taking it home with me and celebrating it next year. Any excuse for nice food!

Mirror Laaaake!

Temperatures on tuesday night were almost at freezing and hit -1C at midnight when we jumped in! So we knew we had to get a lot of alcohol down us to drone out some of the cold! We played beer pong at ours then made our way to campus. Parked the car, stripped off to what we were jumping in with and then made a mad dash to Mirror Lake. We passed people running back from jumping in. There was just half naked bodies running all around campus shouting F*ck Michigan!! And high-fiving everyone! As soon as we got there we all found our way to the edge and jumped in. The water only comes up to your waist...wouldn't have liked that dirty water going anywhere near my face or hair! Must have lasted about 10-20 seconds in the water, came out and ran back to the car with Mandi and Marissa whilst the rest went to jump in again! Where my wet shorts were rubbing against my thighs was so sore, felt like icicles were forming on them! and I couldnt move my fingers brrrr so it was a task trying to undo my shoe laces and change into dry clothes back at the car. I was thankful we were only out in the cold for 15 mins or so. Hot water bottle was on the menu when I got in and headed straight to bed! People were able to stay in longer and splash about craaazy! 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c1q_rYtmk_w

Bomb threat

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/40215045/ns/us_news-security

http://articles.cnn.com/2010-11-16/justice/ohio.university.threat_1_buildings-bomb-threat-campus?_s=PM:CRIME
So I probably should have mentioned in yesterdays blog about there being a bomb threat on campus yesterday. 4 buildings were named in an anonymous tip off sent to the FBI in Washington. So those buildings were evacuated and police and everything there. I didn't get to campus til a few hours after the initial warnings but my class was still on as it was a little away from that area.
Had a good discussion about it in my homeland security class today since it's something relevant that happened close to home. Our teacher reckons that the fact that, even though no packages, etc were found and the buildings were re-opened later in the evening, if it were a student messing around as a prank then they would have named the person sending the tipoff. The fact that they haven't made our teacher think that it did come from someone meaning to do harm but this was just a test to see how the university and officials reacted in this scenario. Scary thought but no one really has been informed if there really was a serious intent behind it or if it was just a false claim and totally harmless...

Next Tuesday's antics...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q1pBo00lJMw

This will be me next tuesday jumping in Mirror Lake the week before Ohio State play Michigan, hence why some are shouting F**k you Michigan!...To say I'm a little apprehensive is an understatement. It's gonna be bloody freezing!!!!

Sniffing pots...

So I did my individual presentation today that had to be on our Career Strategy of where we see ourselves in 5 years and do a SWOT analysis of ourselves, etc, etc so was pretty personal stuff which made me even more nervous to speak to a class of about 40 students since I don't really like talking about myself...
But it went fine in the end, felt like my voice was all croaky though haha! Will find out how I did on thurs :)
I had a meeting with my group for doing a presentation on Dell for that same class. Well the plan was to meet with all our rough slides but still have everything we had researched and wanted to include. So here was me working fast all afternoon to get my ratio graphs done to have something to show at our meeting. However in the end, some team members hadn't even started and were just treating this as another meeting to go over who is doing what which has been clarified plenty of times!! We have to present next tuesday and meeting 2 more times over the weekend so we'll be fine in the end cos I know I have my part done. I'm just more annoyed cos I couldn't go out for dinner at the Japanese Steakhouse which sounded amazing! Cos I had said to Sam that I would be at least 40 mins with my group so just go ahead and eat...but turned out we only sat down for about 10.
Lesson of the day: Never rely on others and stop giving people the benefit of the doubt...gets you nowhere in life and spoils your own enjoyments in life!

Mini-rant over - and so onto more good things...
After cooking my nice oven meal of chicken goujons and chips...(not as good as a steak from the Japanese Steakhouse grrr!) we sniffed a whole load of scented pots. Haha! Nah but Hayley's mum works for a catalogue called 'Scentsys' which works in the same way as Avon. It's a wickless candle so it burns the scented blocks from a bulb thats plugged in. There were about 80 scentes to choose from so we had all the samples in small tubs so passed them round and noted which ones we liked. I had it narrowed down to about 30. Settled on 2 different scents as they were $5 each and they seem to last quite a while. Great idea for a xmas present! Then watched Glee before bed, the episode with Gywneth Paltrow, where they mention the Buckeyes yeaaaahhh :)

A night at the Ballet

Friday afternoon I went to the area of Columbus called Short North. It's the area before you hit Downtown. I hadn't been there before but it's a nice area, a bit more upmarket. Had a wander around the kinda one-off boutique stores there with Sam. One in particular was good, is was a massive vintage thrift store that sold everything - clothes, furniture, house decor, accessories, telephones, and my favourite - old vintage xmas decorations! I could have had hours of fun trying on all the old dresses and ball gowns!
There were a few shops selling cute stuff for the home but quite expensive. One shop sold Turkish gifts which was quite unusual as not sure how big the turkish population is here! And one shop was just for dogs - those bags to carry your dogs around in, dog outfits, food you name it.
Managed to not spend a penny though apart from ice cream at http://jenisicecreams.com/. They had such unusual flavours and a big list of them too so had to ask to try a few before I decided which to get! In the end I went for Riesling poached pear which was theee best, sweet cream & elderberries and a safe choice of Vanilla honey bean. But tried 'sweet potato with marshmallows' which was actually quite tasty.
In the evening I went to the ballet performance of Dangerous Liasons with some of the exchange students. It was only $5 for student discount so thought was a perfect opportunity to see whether or not I enjoy ballet! And guess what - I did! Even though it was a bit tricky to follow the story since there was no dialect just dancing it was really good. Was quite a raunchy performance haha with a lot of dancing references to sex. Afterwards we headed to get some food in Downtown and ended up staying there chatting til 12.30am. Some were going on to smoke shisha at a bar but I took the chance to get a lift back with others going back to campus :)

6th November

Hit up the mall today at Polaris after fuelling up with food at their food court - burger and fries of course. I'm still getting used to calling them fries and not chips because obviously chips here are crisps. The girls think crisps is a cool name though and more suiting. Also was the second time a cashier hasn't understood me when I say 'burger without tomato please'. I say tomato you say tomatoe if ya know what I mean....But I'm not changing the way I say tomato here so they'll just have to get used to it!
Was getting some ideas for xmas presents but not going to do my shopping til the day after thanksgiving called Black Friday. Which is the day for the best sales of the year kinda like our boxing day. So have planned with Sam and her mum to get there early and shop til we drop! Macy's opens up at 4am.... Invested in a new winter coat but I need to test it out first that it's really warm enough here or if I need to get something warmer! It would certainly do for Edinburgh but not here when the cold temperatues peak. Not looking forward to that AT ALL! And couldn't resist buying an item in Forever 21 I just love it too much. Navy lace body con dress for $13.50. Need I say more.

After going out for pizza with Sam and her family in Westerville, we went to her old high school's football game. Kick-off was 7pm so was dark and freeeezing. Felt wrapped up enough but when you are just sitting down you still shiver! Luckily we all had blankets to wrap round our legs so that helped a little. Was different seeing a high school american football game rather than college. They still all have their cheerleaders and marching band though so not totally different!

Once we got back home we went out to one of Mandi's work partys at someones house. They had punch going and a couple of kegs - one for doing keg stands in the kitchen! Played a game of beer pong with a guy there and we won against some girls. Love a bit of beer pong now haha still a hit or miss whether I'm good but I still like to try it out and see if im having a good day or not. It was just an average party but music was good (when the CD wasn't jumping!) and we stayed til 3am. But with the clocks turning back it was really 2am so hit Taco Bell on the way home. Enjoyed a nice long lie in sunday morning before catching up with the X-factor :)