Going to bed soon... tomorrow will be busy as I take the second half (oral) of the German "final" test and then proceed to throw together some sort of packing arrangement and head to my parents to do what laundry I might need and spend the night. Then Saturday morning we fly out to San Francisco. It should be a fun trip. I'll probably bring Quark (my laptop) to my parents' tomorrow and do some last minute email reading, but most likely this is my last blog entry until I get back (Aug. 16, spoketh the Sunbird).
I should have been packing tonight, but I got distracted by the Leadership Advantage festivities. I ended up lending a hand with the meal preparations (nothing says College like cooking 60-ish JTMs on a big honking grill), which was something like a pre-tailgate season practice. Football starts in September and I'm going to have to be there on the tailgating frontlines. The older guys have mostly matriculated and now its my turn to help carry on the legacy. After dinner I hung around a bit and got to watch the scavenger hunt videos.
Finished the written half of my final German test today at Highland Coffee, then nostalgically walked around the newly renovated Bloom Elementary (I went there for two years) before heading home. The new addition looks pretty nice and they attempted a decent replication of the aged highlands school style with a modern (read: cheap) style. The big thing it was missing was column decorations and roof line decorations. All in all they did an astounding job of meshing the styles unlike a certain University I could mention. Each day passes and the Ekstrom Library Expansion looks uglier and clashes more with the over-bearing blocky Library. It's funny, but even from the artist rendering proudly displayed at the edge of the site you can tell how hideous the new structure is sitting next to the old. (Then there's the further clashing of the "crappy modern art lean-to" looking extension to the neighboring classically styled Speed Museum, which doesn't show up in the artist rendering.) I guess I find it particularly annoying because the Extension also removed the last wooded part of campus and the architects apparently decided to swing entirely in the opposite direction from natural beauty to obscenely ugly. (Other parts are "treed", but not wooded.)
Honestly, I really wonder if the architect's the University hires actually step foot on the campus. No two recent buildings look alike or follow a particular architectural style other than the two "wooden trailer park" dorm halls. Oh, and I'm sick of trying to take a nap with the noises of construction of the next wooden trailer park outside my window. (I've been watching the construction because it is right outside my window, and I really don't understand what the heck they think they are doing... particularly, they spent a week or two leveling the two parking lots and filling them up higher with fill dirt... then this last week they've started digging back down and remove the dirt they had just recently put in. I guess it makes sense for some reason, but from just watching it it looks like a ton of wasted effort.)