Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving here was pretty awesome. It was weird because we we're at home, but we had a pretty big dinner. Christopher came out on the Saturday before Turkey Day and then it was a whirlwind of guests after that. Julie, Davie and Mrs. Levie came on Monday and then my parents came on Wednesday. We had a lot of fun hanging out. Julie and I did most of the cooking. Thank you Julie for all of your help! My mommy helped with cutting stuff and my dad carved the turkey like usual. There was so much video game playing going on it was unbelievable. Our tv was barely ever off! Anyways, I think that everyone had fun and there was plenty of food to go around (which is always a good thing).







At the Holiday Bowl hockey tournament.

another away message update and then some

6:15am
Couldn't finish that 6th cup of coffee
8 out of 12 pages written + works cited (which is a pain so I'm glad it's done)
8 hours before I have to stop writing


i think if i stay up any longer the essay will make even less sense than it's making now. why did i think that writing about Grease would make the paper any more fun?




it's a good thing that this is only a first draft. i don't know why my prof wants it tomorrow. the syllabus says that the first draft isn't due until next wednesday. at least i have a good chunk done. i'm sure i can expand on the topics more, but i started questioning the system and when i do that i go around in circles and get frustrated with the way that our society has bred us. we're all robots of the system. we're exactly how they want us. i'm going to bed.

Update on away message

5:05am
Couldn't finish that 6th cup of coffee
6 out of 12 pages written + works cited (which is a pain so I'm glad it's done)
9 hours before I have to stop writing


I think I can, I think I can, I think I can...


I think all that coffee is giving me heartburn.

My away message currently says...

2:52am
6th cup of coffee
3 out of 12 pages written
13 hours before I have to stop writing


I think I can, I think I can, I think I can...

Sestina

I had to write a poem for tomorrow's Imaginative Writing class. I had the option of writing about myself and family or writing a Sestina. I thought that writing a syllabic and stanzaic poem would be easy, but I wrote two lines and stared at the screen. Since Sestina's have a specific form of their own, I combined the two options together. This is what Wikipedia had to say about Sestina's: "A sestina is a highly structured poem consisting of six six-line stanzas followed by a tercet (called its envoy or tornada), for a total of thirty-nine lines. The same set of six words ends the lines of each of the six-line stanzas, but in a different order each time; if we number the first stanza's lines 123456, then the words ending the second stanza's lines appear in the order 615243, then 364125, then 532614, then 451362, and finally 246531. This organization is referred to as retrogradatio cruciata ("retrograde cross"). These six words then appear in the tercet as well, with the tercet's first line usually containing 1 and 2, its second 3 and 4, and its third 5 and 6."

Thank you Wikipedia for saving me time on writing out the explanation myself. Anyways, as you may have guessed, I'm posting my family sestina, cleverly entitled: Seeing Family. Not all of it rings true, but being set to using the same six words is harder than it looks. The words I used were: check, double, confines, morning, reach and home. Of course the poem is repetitive, but that is the nature of the Sestina.


Allison Chin
Novermber 27, 2007
English 559
Sestina


Seeing Family

When I finish with school, I check
to see if the dog has created double
the chores before I crash to the soft confines
of my bed. The sun is barely shining the morning
that my family is scheduled to arrive. I reach
for my apron and try to tidy up my fur drenched home.

My family is excited to finally get to see my New York home,
where my mother greets my boyfriend and bends to check
out the dog with a warm reach
and tight hug around her neck. My father fumbles with the double
zippers of his green suitcase with bat-like eyes, feeling for the pull tabs with numb fingers. He is tired and grumpy after missing the coffee rounds this morning
in the plane’s coffin like confines.

My brother immediately runs to the confines
of the computer room, where he feels at home.
It is ten in the morning
And he already has to log on to Myspace to check
his messages, starved of teenaged communication. I can hear the double
click of the mouse that is just within his clammy-handed reach.

I try to impress my parents as I reach
for the plate of homemade cinnamon rolls hidden in the confines
of the refrigerator’s concealing double
doors. My boyfriend’s mother is also visiting our home
and I have to hide the sweets and constantly check
to make sure that they are still a secret every morning.

I warm the rolls in the oven for their morning
snack and can see the gleam of happiness in their eyes as they reach
for the soft, sticky sweets. After their first bites, I check
to make sure that they like them and return to the confines
of the kitchen where the cinnamon rolls make the room smell like home.
My father asks me to make more, this time with the recipe doubled.

With my family warm and content they are likely to double
the amount of money they want to spend on me this morning
when we leave my sweet smelling home
and head towards the mall. As I reach
for the stand up mixer in the confines
of Williams Sonoma’s back corner, my mother and I check the price.

We shouldn’t have checked, but we didn’t think that it would be double the price of what we wanted to spend.
Disappointed, I slumped out of the confines of cream and brown colored store like a child who received coal on Christmas morning,
and reached for my keys as we head for home.

Thanksgiving post will be postponed

I'm very busy this week so I'll post pictures and talk about my holiday at the end of the week when my stuff is done.

He's on the plane!

Christopher just called and he's on the plane to Chicago and then Albany! ETA 10:15 PM EST.

I better go mop and start making cinnamon roll dough! We're so excited!

Happy Birthday Mommy!

6 days until Christopher comes;8 for Julie, Davie and Mrs. Levie; 10 for Mommy and Daddy. Yay!!! I'm so excited!

Homemade Cinnamon Rolls

Today I made cinnamon rolls from scratch and they turned out GREAT! They were just like Cinnabon, but much cheaper. Hehe. Making them wasn't really that hard, but since it's so cold here the rolls didn't rise. I ended up putting the pan of rolls in the spare bedroom where the sun was coming in the window. Once the rolls started to warm up, they rose nicely. I think I'm going to make these for our families when they come out here. I think that Mrs. Levie and my daddyhttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif will like them very much. Everyone else too, but they both have the biggest sweet tooth's in the group I think.

My mom and I used to go to the Cinnabon in the Sunvalley mall and share one of the big ones. It was a challenge to finish one of those gigantic things between the two of us, but I think we'll be able to finish these off. I just ate two of the ones I made they were so good. I got the recipe from allrecipes.com. http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Cinnamon-Rolls-I-2/Detail.aspx
When I was making the dough, I added a teaspoon of cinnamon to make it a little more cinnamon-y. As I said, they were pretty easy, but took forever to rise in this weather. Ed suggested that I put them in the oven on the "warm" setting. I think I'm going to try that next time.



And of course, here are some pictures of Emmy. (These are mostly for my mommy and Julie.)