End of Spring Semester

As we all know, the semester is slowly coming to an end. Many of you are probably working on final projects or studying for final exams. As a creative writing major, I always find myself working on a lot of final projects. I usually either have papers, presentations, or writing workshops to turn in by the end of the year. With so many classes, this can start to add up, but I love doing final projects. I think they can be just as stressful as exams, but there is a lot more creative freedom when it comes to them, which is something I really enjoy.

One project I enjoyed working on was my presentation for my video games in society class. For this class, we were given two options for our final projects. We could either do a research project and present our findings, or we could do a creative project that related to the class material. I decided to do a creative project because it sounded a lot more fun. I had to create a piece of fan fiction based off of a video game and present the creative process behind it to the class. As a creative writing major, I found this much more enjoyable than the idea of doing a research project. I find that it's easier to speak to people when you're talking about something you love to do. Our presentation at to be ten minutes long, and I used up every last second. I hope you guys don't get too stressed these last couple of weeks. We're almost done!

Midwest Shooting Range

Over the break, my family and I decided to go visit the Midwest Shooting Range in Cridersville. We aren't a big shooting family, so we thought it would be something that would be interesting and fun. Midwest Shooting Range is an indoor shooting range that allows you and your group to rent shooting lanes as well as guns and ammunition. You aren't required to have a gun to shoot there because everything you need is available to rent or purchase. However, I have a Ruger 10/22, so my family decided to bring that along with us so we only needed to rent one other gun. The building is incredibly cool, and the staff was really friendly. However, we were definitely out of our element.

While I was familiar with my rifle, we didn't know a thing about the handguns that we rented. There weren't really any tips or instructions given to us when we rented them, they just gave us the guns and ammunition. We had to figure these handguns out while we were in our shooting lane, which made me a bit uncomfortable. My brothers happily put in the time to figure out the guns and shoot them, but I tried to stick with what I knew and stayed with my own rifle. After we got over our initial nerves, we relaxed and were able to have more fun. I would definitely suggest this place to anyone looking for a nice place to go shoot, or to even learn to shoot.

Holidays with Kids

This last weekend, my family had our cousins and their kids over for a cookout. My cousins, Keith and Ryan, have two kids named Lucy and Annie. Lucy is 4 years old and Annie is 7 months old. Since Easter was only a week away, we decided that we would hide eggs for Lucy to find around the house. This was so exciting for us because the youngest in our family is currently my step sister, who is 15 years old. That means we've gone a long time without Santa, the Tooth-fairy, or the Easter Bunny. While holidays are still really enjoyable, there is something about having little kids that still believes around that make the holiday that much better. I was so excited to go home Sunday and see Lucy's reaction to the Easter Bunny visiting the house. I got to fill up a bunch of eggs up with candy and hide them around for her. She was so excited to go egg hunting and it made the day that much more enjoyable!

I really enjoy spending the holidays with my family, but we don't have any little kids anymore. When we go to the larger family events, there are plenty of children around, but we tend to only go to those for Thanksgiving and Christmas. We still miss out on Halloween and Easter. What do you guys think? Do any of you have younger siblings who still believe? Are holidays less exciting without little ones?

Infographic

This week, we were tasked to design an infographic for class for one of the panels that presented at ONU's Social Media Workshop. For this assignment, I decided to do the Dublin Irish Festival. I thought that this assignment was really interesting, especially since I have never created an infographic before. One thing that I found myself really focusing on was the design and layout. I spent hours trying to arrange everything and get it to a point where I thought that it looked good. Since this was for an Irish festival, I decided to use the same color scheme as Ireland's flag. I think this really worked well because the colors were easy to match and were manageable.

I tried to make the image as eye-catching as I could while also using the shapes and colors to draw the viewers' attention to where I wanted them to look. For example, I used the triangle in an attempt to trick the eyes into flowing down to look at the other businesses and companies that had sponsored the Dublin Irish Festival. I made sure to incorporate some of the larger brands that people would recognize. I didn't want everything to just blend into the background, so I also tried to use white to help make things pop out of the green a little bit more. While creating this image, I learned that infographics take a lot longer to make than I thought they would! It may have just been me because I fussed over the design, but it took me a few hours to get it to look the I wanted it to.

Portland

Over the weekend, I was lucky enough to be able to go to Portland, Oregon with some of my classmates for a conference. We arrived on Wednesday and didn't return to Ohio until late Sunday evening. I had never been out west before, I have only driven down south to states like Florida. That's why I was so excited to go on this trip. I wanted to experience a new place.

There were a lot of things to do in Portland. While the conference and its panels were interesting, I mostly just wanted to explore the city. My classmates and I tried going to different restaurants every day so that we could try new foods that weren't available to us in Ohio. I got to try real dumplings for the first time at Frank's Noodle House while we were there, and they were delicious! We also went to Powell's City of Books, which was a huge book store that took up a whole city block! I had never seen so many books before in my entire life, but I limited myself to only buying a few. We also explored the Lan Su Chinese Gardens while we were in town since it was only a twenty-minute hike from the conference center. We walked over one of Portland's many bridges, which was a cool experience on its own. While it's usually pretty rainy in Oregon, we were lucky enough to have beautiful weather! In the evenings, we had nice meals outside where we enjoyed the lovely sixty-degree weather. I was a little heartbroken to have to fly back to Ohio, but I'm glad to be back at ONU again. If you're ever looking for a place to go, I would definitely recommend Portland!