I FINALLY Have an Internship!

So, kind of big news, okay, who am I kidding, HUGE news! I finally have an internship! After almost two years of applications going nowhere, and (almost) never hearing back from anyone, I finally have an internship!

And now for the twist. This will not be a traditional internship. In fact, I am basically making it up as I go! I had to get special permission to do my internship this way, but it will count as the final credit I need to officially graduate and get my degree!

I've mentioned my YouTube channel here before, I don't talk about it a lot here, but if you follow me on my public social media pages, then you'll know I almost always make at least one video a week. Some of those videos I do with other people, and one of those people is Rachel Wagner.

I mentioned her in my last post, you may have seen the pictures from January when I made a scarf and hat for her for a late Christmas gift. Rachel lives in Utah, and she and I met through the Rotoscopers. We both write for the site, and she's the main reason I finally bit the bullet and started my own YouTube channel.

We've become pretty good friends over the past few years, and for the past few months I have been occasionally doing some freelance editing for her. Rachel has two blogs, two channels, and two podcasts, (In addition to a full time job, completely unrelated to YouTube) and sometimes, on weeks where she has too much to do, she'll have me edit an episode or two of her podcasts for her.

In mid-January I started thinking, I have been getting some decent experience with this, I wonder if there is a way I could expand on it and make it count as an internship. I didn't say anything right away, like I said, I have been applying for internships ever since I graduated, and I had just applied for some at the beginning of the year, so I was waiting to see if anything came from them. Shocker, nothing ever did. Story of my life for the last 22 months.

Finally in February, I proposed an idea to Rachel, if I came on as an unpaid intern, would she have enough work for me to do on a consistent basis? It was an immediate yes. Like I said, she's very busy.

So, as for the unpaid part, I know I've said since I graduated that I was not going to do an unpaid internship, since it would almost certainly mean quitting my job while working on it, and I have bills to pay. I can't afford to be without income for 3 months, or however long a full-time internship would last. I had a plan for that, but since this internship is very unconventional, having it be unpaid would only work out if everything came together perfectly.

So, Rachel has actually been paying me since I started working for her, but knowing that she requests my services only when she's really needing some extra help, I figured it would be best to propose it be unpaid. That, and at this point I really just want to get this thing over with. I figured this way it'd be a win-win for both of us, as long as everything worked out the way I wanted it to.

Since January I've actually been working full time at the hotel. At first it was because someone went on vacation, but then there have been, (and are still continuing to be) a bunch of schedule disruptions. People quitting, getting promoted, moving to a different parts of the hotel; it seems like every week a new person leaves or is hired. At the beginning of February, one of the night auditors was moved to days temporarily, so I've been working five nights a week until things can go back to normal. Even if I wasn't working full time at the hotel, I am still employed at Hy-Vee, so I have full time work either way.

With that in mind, I am definitely not interested in quitting for an unpaid internship, no matter how much I need to get this thing done. So my idea in proposing the unpaid internship to Rachel was to keep working at the hotel, but work on the internship on the side. Normally internships are ten, 40 hour weeks. Basically it becomes your full time job for around three months. The way I was planning this, it would take much longer to reach the required 400 hours, but at least I could still have a steady income, and do the internship at the same time. Any other internship, unpaid or not, would not have this kind of flexibility.

So obviously I had Rachel on board, now I just had to convince my faculty adviser and the school's internship adviser. My adviser was pretty easy. Once I told him what I wanted to do, he thought it sounded like a great idea, and a great opportunity. I couldn't believe it! I thought I was going to have to work so much harder to convince him! Rachel even wrote up a huge long list of her qualifications, education, and achievements, and he hadn't even seen that when he said he liked the idea!

But then I had to make another appointment with the internship adviser, and I was sent a whole long list of guidelines, and forms to fill out before our meeting. And one of those guidelines was that the internship had to take place at a physical location, and I could NOT work from home. There were no exceptions listed anywhere in these rules, just that students MUST go to an actual workplace environment.

Well, I figured that was the end of that. I still decided to keep the meeting with her, I figured I'd at least TRY to explain everything on the very off chance that she could bend the rules for me, but I was no longer hopeful at all. I wondered if maybe my adviser didn't understand that I had planned to work from home before he given me the green light to move forward. At that point I had basically accepted that this was not going to work out. So the rest of that week I was not in the best mood.

When we finally had the meeting she seemed very hesitant about the idea, but when she heard that I had already been freelancing for Rachel, and that we always keep in close contact when I'm working on something for her, she seemed a lot more open to the idea. Apparently the biggest reason for the no working from home rule is that the students typically have a hard time keeping in touch with the person who is supposed to be their supervisor. The fact that I am always in touch with Rachel, made it pretty clear that that wouldn't be an issue.

The other reason they don't allow students to work from home is that the school wants students to get the experience of working in a professional environment. However, when she realized that I already work full time for the Gateway, that pretty much sealed the deal. I may not be getting the "Professional Environment" from the internship, but the fact that I've already had an office job for almost a year now, is great experience in and of itself. So the fact that I'm getting that experience somewhere, paired with the fact that I already have a great working relationship with with the person who would be my internship supervisor, she thought that this could be one of the VERY rare instances where they actually approve a work from home internship.

Of course this wasn't the end of it though, I still had to write up a formal proposal, the school had to get in contact with Rachel, and I had to go through all the official steps to actually register for the internship as a class. And then I had to wait more than two weeks for my registration date to open up, so I could actually submit the paperwork and actually get officially registered. Which finally happened today! Or, yesterday. It happened on the 26th. I work overnights, I can't keep days straight.

Right now it still hardly feels real. Over two years of applying for internships and I finally have one! Not to mention, I'm practically creating it as I go! I'm still full time at the hotel with a very unpredictable schedule, so I haven't fully gotten into everything, but my internship adviser told me, back when she officially gave her approval, that I could go ahead and start counting hours. So I have been working on a few projects here and there since then, but hopefully work will get back to normal soon, so I can get into the internship work on a regular schedule.

So anyway, that's my news for now! I probably won't do too many updates here along the way unless something really interesting or exciting happens, but I'll definitely follow up when I finish. Right now that's looking to be around September, but like I said, since I'm already working full time, I'm just counting hours as I go, so I can't predict an exact timeline. Either way, things are finally moving forward, and I'm just excited that this is actually happening! Before the end of the year, I should finally have my Bachelor's Degree!

I Have a Podcast!

So, I have a podcast! The first episode went up on the first of February, but haven't told that many people in my real life, so I figured it was about time that I advertise it a little wider than to just my online friends.

This is something that's actually been a long time coming. I've been planning the show since last year, and editing episodes since January. With working two jobs since last April, I have had less and less time to edit videos to the level that I like, so I've been thinking about transitioning to (mostly) audio for a while.

If you've watched any of my videos on YouTube, then you'll probably be familiar with the format that I've settled on for my show. I decided to call it the I Heart Podcast, as it's a natural extension of my I Heart Animation series, but it really follows the same model that my Wonderland Wednesday series eventually developed into, with longer, more in-depth discussions.

The show is not just "I Heart Animation: The Podcast" though animation is a regular feature, I wanted the podcast to function similarly, but to be able to highlight really anything that I or my guests love. In each episode we pick a topic, usually a movie, but it really can be anything. If I had a guest who wanted to talk about Marmite or ceiling tiles, I'd be down for that if they thought we could get a decent episode out of it. The point is just a fun discussion with a friend.

At this point, the podcast has mainly focused on bringing shows from my YouTube channel into a new medium. A few episodes I have taken from my YouTube channel, and reedited them for the podcast. Back when we originally recorded them, most of the time we'd have rabbit trails, and the conversation would veer off and suddenly we'd be talking about something totally unrelated to the movie at hand. 

Those detours would be the first thing edited out of a YouTube video trying to stay under 10 minutes, focusing only on a movie review, but in a podcast, it's a lot more acceptable to have asides now and then. I actually enjoy some shows more when the hosts banter and get off topic. Keeping that in mind, I went back to the original files, and reedited a whole new, longer episode from each of them!

Now, I'm not doing this for every episode. The main reason I wanted to start the podcast out with some reedited episodes, was to give new listeners some context for what I've done before, as well as get them up to speed with one of my favorite series, that will now be a regular feature on the podcast.

Last year I started a show on my YouTube channel to review every Disney movie from the beginning. After only two episodes I realized that that was going to be a LOT more work than I had time for, (not to mention YouTube's broken copyright system throwing a wrench into the series) so I decided to pause the series and move it over to the podcast as soon as I launched it.

Of course I didn't want new listeners to miss out on the episodes I'd already done, so reediting seemed to be the best compromise between recycling an old episode, and making a brand new episode. And then I did the same thing with a couple episodes each of Wonderland Wednesday, and I Heart Animation.

And just reediting isn't all I've done to refresh these episodes, I've also brought guests back to do a Q&A session with them. So when I reedited a review I did with my friend Sol, I decided to bring her back, and just let the listeners get to know a bit more about her. I did the same thing with my friend Rachel, and I have another episode coming soon with my friend Mark. I haven't done one with my cousin Sarah yet, she's co-hosted a good chunk of my content, but we don't video chat like I do with my online friends, so once we have a chance to get together and record some episodes in person, we'll probably try to get one done.

So far the show has been a good mix of old and new, but once I put out our Pinocchio episode, there probably won't be that many more old episodes for awhile. I'll still do a reedit occasionally, but my goal is to eventually get to 100% brand new content.

My most recent episode was a new one with Rachel, and we talked about our top 10 movie releases of the past year. A few episodes before that, my friend Sol and I ranked all the animated releases of 2018. These are quite different than things I've previously done for my YouTube channel, but those discussions were a lot of fun, and I think they made for a great podcast.

If you think this sounds interesting, and you'd like to listen, my show is now available for download on just about every major podcast platform, I publish through Anchor, but you can find it on iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcasts, and more! I'll link you to my homepage on Anchor, and you can get the whole list of platforms there.

https://anchor.fm/iheartpodcast

So that's my big news for now, I actually have a couple more posts planned for this month, which, if you've seen my blog recently, is kind of a big deal for me! I've actually been working full time at the hotel since January, so I haven't had much extra time, and the blog has kind of fallen by the wayside. I have a few pictures to share, which I haven't done in ages, so check back in a few days for those! I'll see you soon!

U Spel bad 16: teh emd

Well, I think this is the end. I have decided to end my "U Spel bad" and "If I were a Troll" series'. I haven't added anything to either of my drafts in over two months, and I've kind of gotten bored with them. Sometime in the future I might bring them back, if I find something so hideously mangled that it demands to be publicly ridiculed, but for now, this post will be the last of the "U Spel bad" series. The final "If I were a Troll" post will be up tomorrow.

Aledgelly

Your teacher was ALLEGEDLY fired for being an awful teacher.


Earitating

I'd find your ignorance IRRITATING, but really I just find it sad.


twietie

Given that TWEETY is my favorite Loony Tunes character, it is incredibly difficult to keep myself from doing you an injury.


Organs

This is the most disturbing misspelling of ORIGINS that I've ever seen.


Tootaly

I'm not even gonna touch this one.


Cud

Is this a new abbreviation? Because it's completely stupid. (COULD)


Biginning

I think your dementia is BEGINNING to set in


Magicle

The only thing MAGICAL about you is that you can function well enough to even use a computer.


Egzist

Wow. I'm actually speechless. (EXIST)


Dido

Just say, "Likewise," "You too," or, "I agree." Right now you're just casually name-dropping an internationally famous British singer-songwriter. (DITTO)

New Pages!

If you're paying attention, you might have noticed that the look of the blog has been updated slightly. If you'll look at the top of the page, you'll now see links to a whole bunch of new pages. I wanted to have an archive of all my fiction in case anyone wanted to find a post quickly. In addition, I put up a guide to all my Facebook Friends character bios, so they could all be found in one place. Look around! Maybe you'll find something you haven't read before!

I'm A Reporter!

Tuesday afternoon I have an intro to journalism class. This past week, one of the heads of the Iowa State Daily, our school newspaper, came to speak to the class, basically to recruit new writers. He explained that while the classes we're taking are important, they won't mean hardly anything compared to real work experience, and for those of us who want to be journalists in the future, it is in our own best interests to start getting some of that experience now.

I had known that there was a school newspaper, but I didn't know anything about it, and I didn't know anything about how to join. I had thought about looking into it later, after I'd been in journalism longer than just one week, but when he came into class looking for people to join, I decided not to wait. I applied the next day, and I had an interview this afternoon. There wasn't really even any question on will I or won't I get the job. He basically said that if we want the experience, they will find a place for us. Training starts on Monday and I am so excited! This is almost like a dream come true, but it's sort of like a dream I never knew I wanted.

As I've said before I have never really thought about being anything other than an artist. Until last semester I had never even thought about being a journalist myself, which is odd, because some of my favorite fictional characters have been journalists ever since I was a kid. My two favorite Superheros are journalists in their day-to-day lives, Superman, is a newspaper reporter as Clark Kent, and Spider-Man is a newspaper photographer as Peter Parker. When I was into the Left Behind series, my favorite character was Buck Williams, another newspaper reporter. When I was obsessed with Smallville, my favorite character was Chloe Sullivan, school newspaper, then later Daily Planet reporter. I always thought that being a reporter would be a fun job, but I also thought of it as something that other people did, not something I could ever do. Sort of like how I knew that cities like Chicago and New York were real, but not places I could ever visit. I was weird like that.

So anyway, I am now a reporter at the Iowa State Daily, and eventually this will lead to being a photographer as well. He told me that he'll have me talk to the photography department, and that being both a journalist and a photographer would be great, because I can shoot for all my own stories. I will keep you updated on how everything goes. This could be the first step toward something huge!

A New Direction

Today I have a pretty big announcement. It's probably bigger than "Pretty Big" actually. It's kind of huge.

I am changing my major. Actually, I have changed my major. It's pretty much a done deal now.

It all started a few weeks ago in Drawing class. I have been having a terrible time there. It's not that I didn't understand anything. I understood everything. I know absolutely everything they were teaching. It was all extremely basic stuff. I've been doing this for years. The problem is having enough time to get what you know to come out in your drawings. The goal of the class is to produce realistic drawings, and I have never been good at that without spending a LOT of extra time on them. Time I do not have, and that was where the problem started.

In the class we are required to draw from still lifes (Lives?) that the teacher has set up. These constructions are made of a bunch of random junk. A dented rusty tin can next to a box with a wine bottle and a vase on it, beside a large wooden stool, topped with a large metal tub, with tiny clay pots hanging off, surrounded by all manor of rusty teapots, old liquor bottles, a baby's sippy cup, a tipped over wine glass, and who knows what else. The drawings are interesting, I suppose, but they are not fun. I was not enjoying trying to draw this mess.

What made the class so unbearable, was the teacher's insistence on EXACT accuracy. Without the use of rulers. We had to draw by sight only. Maybe if I had had lessons of this kind as a kid it might be easier now, but I'm 27, and I've been doing it "The wrong way" all my life. It's going to take a very long time to "Unlearn" everything I already knew. Not that that's impossible. It's not impossible at all. What IS impossible, is the insistence that we only draw that one still life for class. Nothing else would be acceptable for grading, and we only have around 6 hours of class time each week.

The teacher told us that we would need to spend, at the very least, six hours outside of class drawing. That would have been fine if I could have drawn in my spare time. The problem was, I could not draw whenever I had time, I had to draw, at school, in that room, and only when there weren't other classes there. In order to finish our projects, it was an absolute necessity to come back at night and on the weekends to draw when there were no classes taking place. I don't know what fantasy land the teacher lives in, but some of us have jobs. Not everyone is getting their way paid through school by their parents. There was absolutely no way that I would be able to complete the projects by the deadlines and have them look good.

I thought my teacher would be understanding if I simply explained my situation, but she was not. She actually told me that I should just drop the class. (A class which is a foundational requirement for any of the design programs.) As tempting as it is, I'm not trying to paint her as a witch. I'm just saying that she just could have been a little more understanding about things. Part of the problem lies in why she was teaching. She's actually probably around the same age as I am. She's a graduate student there herself, and in order to graduate, she is required to teach some classes. I suspect that she is just "Doing her time," and doesn't really want to be a teacher at all.

Initially I was determined to stick it out. I don't like quitting anything, and I needed that class in order to move on in school. But as the semester wore on, it was getting harder, and I felt like I was falling behind. The deadlines kept getting shorter, and the still lifes became more complicated. Finally after a particularly tough day, I started considering dropping the class. But then, if I did drop it, what would I do? I could pick it up again in another semester and hope for a better teacher, but there's still the issue of how much time I'd need to spend drawing. Unless I found a Fairy Godmother who would give me all the money I'd need to pay bills etc, I couldn't make that big of a time commitment. Because even if I only spent six extra hours drawing, that hasn't even begun to factor in the time I would spend waiting for the other class to get out so I could use the room, not to mention the time spent waiting for, and riding on, the bus. That alone is at least one extra hour total each day. There really is no way to pass this class unless you don't have a job, or are already extremely talented.

So I started thinking about other options and suddenly it hit me. Writing. I love to write. I love writing just as much as I love art, but until that day I had never even considered it as a career possibility. When I went to ITT Tech I had no goal, other than the fact that I knew I liked art, and I thought that graphic design was a surefire way to get a job. *Derivative Laugh* It led nowhere.

After three years of dead-end jobs, I decided I wanted a career I could love. I hated hating my job. I wanted to learn art. I loved art, and I wanted art-related opportunities that I wouldn't get in the middle of nowhere Iowa. So I decided to go back to school. I've never given anything else a thought, because I've always loved art, and I wanted to be an artist.

The more I thought about it, the more it made sense. I love both art and writing, but I really feel like I am a better writer than I am an artist. Most days when I would have other school work to do, all I would think about was how much I would rather be working on my blog. I really love writing, and unlike art, it comes pretty easily to me. I love art, but I really have to work at it, and sometimes that takes a lot of the fun out of it. Especially when you're not allowed to draw what you want. With writing, even when I'm writing about something that I don't necessarily enjoy, I can still get through it relatively easily.

With that in mind, I started thinking about how I could translate writing into a career. My only writing experience, other than school, is this blog. And on this blog, I do all sorts of different kinds of writing. When I first started, it was mainly about me. What I liked, what I was doing, your basic boring blog. In the last year or so though, I've really branched out into a lot more creative writing. With my "Real Stories" fairy tale series, and my Facebook Friends posts, among others. Given these facts I thought that maybe I should look into getting a degree in creative writing. But then again, I needed to be thinking about money. As much as I absolutely hate money, it is an unavoidable fact that I need it, and unless I somehow managed to get published, or gain fame in some other way, creative writing is probably not going to yield that many job opportunities.

I started to think of the other ways that people earn a living by writing, beyond just writing books. My first thought was journalism, and as soon as I had the thought, I knew that was it. Done. The decision was made instantly. It was perfect. I wanted to be a journalist. I love to travel, and I love to write about what I've seen. If I could get paid to do that, I'd be set.

After coming to that conclusion I started to get things moving with all the different departments at school, and as of a few days ago, I am now a journalism major. I don't know exactly where this will lead me, after all, newspapers are slowly dying off. Such a shame, as I do love the thought of having the same career as Clark Kent. :) I'm thinking I will probably look to something more along the lines of a magazine. Or, more likely, an online magazine. Part of the journalism degree includes photojournalism, and I think that if I could combine photography with writing, it would just be the icing on the cake.

What does all this mean for my long-wished-for career as an artist? Well, I am not going to completely give that up yet. No one ever said you could only be ONE thing when you grow up. I am still going to get a minor in Design, and I am actually almost there right now. With all the classes I took at Iowa Western, I only need two more to get the Minor, so I decided to just go for it. Thankfully the drawing classes I took at Iowa Western are enough and I don't need to take any more here. I won't have to worry about taking that terrible class! The main thing I'll need to do is take an upper level art history class. One other upper level class after that, and I'll have the minor. Not sure what I'll do with it, but I think it's useful to be able to say that you know how to do a variety of things.

So, that's where I am right now. I know writing probably seems like it should have been an obvious choice, since I write so much more than I draw, but for whatever reason, until a couple weeks ago, it had literally never once crossed my mind to pursue it as a career. Now that I am, I can't wait to see where it takes me!

Iowa State University

Earlier this year I decided that I was going to continue my education past just getting my Associates degree. I applied at Iowa State University and have been waiting to find out if I was accepted. This morning I checked my e-mail and found a link to this video.

CLICK HERE

So I can now officially announce that this Fall I will be attending Iowa State University. I will be going for my Bachelors of Art degree. As I am still early in the process I don't know many details yet, but I will share more information as I find out myself.

Portfolio Class / School Update

So, I realized that I never did fill any of you in on my Portfolio class. The first class was held on the day we left for Worlds and Oceans of Fun, and I have not finished the post about that yet, so it completely slipped my mind to do a separate post about school.

On the first day we ended up meeting in our teacher’s office, since Joel and I are the only two students in the class. The class is basically going to help us prepare to move on to the next chapter of our lives whether that be with a job, or more education. We’ll put together a portfolio, and discuss schools. We will also have two teachers. Rob and Jesse. Since Joel and I are the only two students, we are changing the time of the class to Wednesday after our other class gets out. That way we have one less day that we have to drive to Council Bluffs. Now I have Fridays free to work on my online classes. Yay...

As of right now I am deciding on where I want to go to school next. That is so far the only for sure decision. I WILL be going on to a university somewhere. Most likely Art will not be the major focus, though I plan to keep pursuing that, just to a lesser degree. Right now I am thinking about photo-journalism. My teachers have said that I have a journalistic style to my photography, and I have really decided that I love traveling. If I could find a job that merges the two, that would be a dream job for me.

Speaking of traveling, keep a look out in the next few days, because I will be uploading a very long blog post about our trip to Kansas City. I have some editing to do, but I am nearly finished with it. School takes up so much time these days, that sometimes my writing gets put on the back burner. Most of the posts I have released recently are ones that I've been working on for a very long time. Very few blog posts come together quickly any more. Oh well, school has to come first.

I will continue to update you as I make important life decisions. That sounded too grown up. I hate that. :p

Another Close Call

Last night I had another close call with neglected school work. I had not been paying very close attention to my online classes and I almost missed the deadline for an assignment in Geography class. Our teacher gave us a list of various cities from all all over the world and we were to look them all up in an atlas or on a globe. This was almost a very big problem, as I have no idea where our atlas is. As you probably know, our house was flooded last year, and pretty much everything in the basement was ruined or moved before it could get ruined. The atlas was on a shelf, so I’m sure it is fine, I just have no idea where it is. Joel didn’t either, but he borrowed one from our grandma, so we could do the assignment. If she hadn’t had one we’d have been in trouble.

The atlas was one from 1962, which worked out fine except for question 11 which asked for the location of Ho Chi Minh City. Ho Chi Minh City was not in the Atlas. When this particular atlas was published Ho Chi Minh City was called Cochin China, Thank goodness for Wikipedia. :) After I found this out, I easily found Cochin China. In case you’re wondering, it’s at 10°N 106°E. :) I submitted the assignment with minutes to spare before it would have been considered late. This is another example of why I needed to cut down on time-wasting things. If I’d have been paying more attention to due dates, I would have gotten the assignment done a long time ago. Procrastination never pays.

True to my word, I unsubscribed from a whole bunch of YouTube channels, and I deleted Northern Imagination. I did however, save a bunch of posts from the archive and I integrated them into this blog. They are mainly writing posts. I’ll link to a few of them here if you want to read any of them. Most of them are pretty funny.

This was my most recent post on my other blog. CLICK HERE. We had eggplant twice last week and it got me to thinking, why is it called an eggplant? It got me into one of my random humor moods, and I wrote a brief rant about how silly the name was, then I researched it and wrote what I found.

This was another example of my very random sense of humor. CLICK HERE. My random sense of humor is very easily fueled by randomness from outside sources. :)

This post started out as a comment on my cousin Shaina’s blog. CLICK HERE. She posted about coffee shops and how they were one of her favorite haunts. Of course this brought to my mind a very different kind of haunting, and I posted a comment in character as a ghost. I turned that comment into a whole blog post in itself. :)

This was a post about a terrifying sight at the Wellness Center one morning. CLICK HERE. Yes, this is hyperbole. :p

One post I did earlier this year was about a weird quiz on a cereal box. CLICK HERE. A while after I wrote it, I posted this follow up. CLICK HERE.

This post I wrote on my birthday. CLICK HERE.

All my old posts kept their original publishing dates and even their comments, so they blend into this blog quite well. This wasn’t all of them, so If you’re feeling adventurous you can find more of them. They’ll be in the post archives, between today and May.

As you can see I changed the background and color scheme of this blog. Since Fall is almost here, I thought it would be a good idea to have my blog match the season. I also redesigned my photo-blog again, and I have posted a 9/11 tribute picture there, as today is the 10 year anniversary of the terrorist attacks. You can find it by clicking HERE.

That picture did not always look as it does now. Joel and I have finally begun learning the basics of Photoshop in our digital photography class, and thanks to Thursday’s lesson I was able to turn this:



Into this:



I LOVE Photoshop!

Bad Habits = Bad Grades

This week I got a terrible grade on my biology test. The grade I got was an 85. Some people would say that’s nothing to be ashamed of. An 85 is a B and is considered above average work! Yes, a B is a good grade, but it is not the grade I could have had if I had applied myself better, and actually, the grade could have been a lot worse. After I finished the test, I knew I had a very low grade. I was expecting a C at best. When I saw the 85 I was shocked. There had been two bonus questions worth 4 points, but I did not expect them to pull my grade up that much. As I suspected, the teacher had curved the grade. I wasn’t the only one who did terrible on the test, so she added 7 points to everyone’s score, bring up the student who had the highest grade to a 100. (This did not help some students, I think she said there were at least 6 people who failed, even with the grade curve and the bonus points.) I would have had a low C were it not for these circumstances.

So, in light of all that, we come to the reason that I am writing this blog post. I am giving up a lot of things that are wasting my time. I think that the B was a warning that I needed to cut down on the amount of time I waste with “Entertainment”.

The first thing I have decided to do is cut WAY back on YouTube. I’ll still watch things from a very select group of artists, MysteryGuitarMan, The Piano Guys, but I am going to go through and unsubscribe from almost all of what I watch. Anything that is mindless entertainment.

The second thing I’m going to do, is give up watching most of the TV shows that I download. Don’t worry Shaina, I’m not talking about any of the shows I watch with you. :)The ones I am getting rid of are any that are mainly just more mindless entertainment. Most of them sounded good, but really aren’t that great. I started them though, and I am mildly curious to see how things turn out so I keep watching.

Lastly, I have decided to get rid of my Northern Imagination blog. Lately it has become nothing more than a place where I share YouTube videos. Since I no longer will be watching much YouTube there is no reason for me to keep that blog running. If I ever do come across a great video, Facebook will have to suffice for my sharing impulses. Anything else I wrote on Northern Imagination, such as humorous pieces, silly rants, etc. will be perfectly fine here on My Random World. That’s where I started writing stuff like that to begin with, and given the infrequency in which I write them, they really do not warrant a second blog.

With giving up these time wasting activities I am going back to putting school first. I do not want a repeat of the last biology test. If I get a B in something, I want to get it knowing that I did my best. I don’t want a B knowing that I could have had an A.

I also hope to have more time now to work on my photography blog as I have been neglecting it lately. If I have time after homework and before I leave for work this afternoon, I am going to do some work there. I think I am going to go redesign it slightly. I don’t like having all my links down below the posts, so I am going to move everything to a sidebar. Unfortunately this means going back to a slightly smaller picture, but I’m keeping it wide enough that it will still be very large.

Anyway, thanks for reading. I felt like I needed to write this, because if I didn’t “Put it out there” so to speak, I would probably just revert back to wasting time again. This way I have a little more accountability, and am a lot less likely to go back to my bad habits. Now if you’ll excuse me, my history book is calling me.

Complete Overhaul!

I have finished working on my blogs and I have completely overhauled all three! I think they look so much better now than they did before! I also added a little of my “Random” Humor in some not so obvious places, so look around, explore, and let me know what you think! I’ve added new posts to both Northern Imagination and J. North Photography, so go check out those posts, and look at the new designs at the same time!

A Completely New Look!

I was not completely satisfied with the new background I picked out so I went back to the template designer on blogger and I started playing around with it. I found a whole bunch of new things I had never tried before, and I decided to completely update my theme. I’ve decided that I really like the natural feel of this template, and I am going to be able to easily change the look to suit my mood. There are tons of different natural backgrounds and the color schemes all change automatically to match the chosen background. But I can even change that if I want something else. I really like the way this works, and I am now going to go make some changes to my other blogs as well.

Happy Monday!

Yes, This was a random video. I haven’t posted anything random in quite awhile, despite that being the “Theme” of my blog, but I felt it necessary because this post is my

200th post!

This blog has come a long way since I first started it over a year ago. Back then I didn’t know what I wanted to do with it, I just knew I wanted to have a blog so I started it, hoping that inspiration would strike. Not long after, I started back to school studying art and photography, and I haven’t been without post ideas since! The Fall semester starts in exactly one week, so I’ll have plenty more things to share in the coming months!

I’m also trying to find a new look for my blog. I like the Tie Dye, but I think I’ve had it long enough, and my 200th postiversary seems like a good enough occasion to find a new look, so I’m trying this out. Let me know what you think!

Here’s to the next two hundred posts!

It’s Been a LONG week

This week was finals week for my summer classes. I had a ton of algebra to finish if I wanted to get it all out of the way before the Fall semester.

If that wasn’t bad enough, I also had a quiz, a test, a paper, and a final exam all due throughout this week in Nutrition class.

If THAT wasn’t enough, I was scheduled for FOUR days at Hy-Vee. I usually get just a couple days, so why they chose this week of all weeks to give me a ton of hours is beyond me.

But wait, I’m not done. If those four days weren’t enough, one of my coworkers asked me to fill in a few hours for him because wasn’t going to be able to make it to work at 4 the next day, so I told him I would.

Is that all? No! At the beginning of the week we heard from Jared! He was headed for home! After a year in Afghanistan his tour of duty was finally over! So in addition to all this stuff I’ve had to deal with, I now had to find someone to cover my hours on Saturday, so that I could go with my family to meet him.

Needless to say this week has been just slightly stressful.

I suppose you are wondering how my finals went. The algebra class was a Pass/No Pass class. If I didn’t learn enough to pass I would have to pay for another semester and keep working on it this fall. Joel had already taken the course and he told me that everyone in his class had taken two full semesters to complete it. I did not want to do that. I do not like math. I “Get” math and I generally don’t have a problem with it if I know what I’m doing, but I do not like it, and I really did not want to have the expense of another whole semester. So I worked my tail off and this afternoon I took the final assessment to find out if I had learned enough to pass. And I did! I did in one half semester what it usually takes other students two FULL semesters to do. And I NEVER want to go through that again!

As soon as I was done with that test, I logged onto the school website to get into my final exam in Nutrition. As I explained before, our teacher is not in Harlan, so we had classes in the basement of the library, with video cameras and microphones. Our tests and assignments were all done at home over the internet. I was a bit nervous about getting that test done because I knew I’d be working on math at the same time the test was open. There was only a three hour window in which we could take it. I finished the math test about an hour before the nutrition test closed. Thankfully I knew the stuff on the test and I completely aced it. Zero questions wrong!

I got home at about 5 that evening and I was starving. I had been so busy with school stuff, and nervous about the tests, that I hadn’t eaten anything all day. That was rather new for me. I’ve always heard of people being “Too nervous to eat,” but I’d never had it happen to me before today. Mom called me soon after I got home and asked me to make tuna salad for supper. She had been at work all day and was headed for home. We were going to leave right after supper, and as you might have guessed, I hadn’t even thought about packing yet.

Right now I am in bed in my grandparent’s basement. I have no internet connection, so when I’ll get a chance to publish this is anyone’s guess. I hope I’ll be able to find a Wi-Fi hot spot somewhere tomorrow before we meet Jared, but if not, you’ll read this when we get home tomorrow night.

I’d better sign off for now and get some sleep, we are going to try to get to Cedar Rapids by noon tomorrow, so we’ll probably leave at ten in the morning.

 

EDIT: As you can see I didn’t get this published before we met Jared. I took lots of pictures, so look for them sometime soon!

One Year Ago Today

I started this blog! Wow! I can’t believe I’ve been blogging for a year! And now, in addition to this blog, I have a photography blog, which you can find HERE, and a blog for sharing my thoughts and writings on various topics as well as videos or other things I find interesting enough to write about. You can find that blog HERE.
A LOT has happened over the last year. Our basement flooded, forcing me to move upstairs and live on the couch, I went back to school, and my brother was sent overseas to fight in Afghanistan.
I started focusing more seriously on photography as a possible future career, which prompted me to buy my first real camera, and I started taking classes in photography. In both semesters in school so far, I have been named on the president’s honor role, so pray that I can continue getting good grades and stay there!
Who knows what the next year holds. Our basement is slowly being repaired, and I recently moved back into my newly refurnished room. Jared is due to return home soon, probably sometime within the next two or three weeks. We don’t know the date, but we pray that it’s soon. I start my second year in school next month and hopefully I will continue to do as well grade-wise, as I have in the previous year.
Thanks to all who read this blog, and my other two. I am having a lot of fun writing for them, and I plan to keep going!

Well, That Didn’t Last Long

My wordpress blogs are dead. I am not posting any more on them. Wordpress was just too frustrating. Instead I am now doing what I should have done in the first place, starting the new blogs on blogger. I won’t get the blogs to look quite as “Professional” as they looked on wordpress, but I have so much more control, and the dashboard is far easier to navigate.

This blog will remain my personal blog, what I’m doing, pictures of family and friends, etc.

The blog for my writing, and maybe in the future, my artwork, can be found here.

http://northernimagination.blogspot.com/

I still haven’t decided what all I want that blog to be. I just know that I want to have someplace to write, where more people can read it, and keep it separate from any personal life details.

My new photography blog can be found here, and I already have a bunch of pictures up if you want to go look at them.

http://jnorthphoto.blogspot.com/

If you already follow me on this blog, feel free to follow my new ones as well. And if you feel so inclined, share them with others. If anyone has any ideas for things you’d like to see me post, let me know!

New Look, New Name

As you can see, I have totally revamped the look of this blog. I was getting really tired of the same old thing and I wanted to really shake things up. I have also changed the title of my blog. You can still find the blog at the same address, but I felt that this name worked better.
I have a ton of new artwork coming for future posts, so stay tuned!

New Month, New Blogs

I have started two new blogs! To find out why, you’ll have to go and read them for yourself. Don’t worry though, this blog isn’t going anywhere, It will now just be a blog for personal things, what’s happening in my life, picture of my family and friends, etc. Everything else is moving to a more public blog.

http://thecompasspointsnorth.wordpress.com/

I am also starting a photography blog here.

http://jnorthphotography.wordpress.com/

So come on and check them out!

Jonathan North: Animal Photographer

In my photography class we are supposed to be narrowing down our focus to one area that we really want to photograph, so we can put together a final themed portfolio. I love animals and wanted to do animal photography for my final project, but there is not much for animals around Harlan. A friend of mine from work posted on facebook that she was going to be buying a membership to the zoo, and that got me to thinking about getting my own membership. With a membership I would be able to get into the zoo whenever I want. It would be so much easier to get enough pictures for a final project if I could go to the zoo whenever I wanted.

I e-mailed my cousin Shaina and told her about it, and how I wanted to go to the zoo to take pictures for school. After I e-mailed her I went to facebook again where I have “Like”d the Henry Doorly Zoo, and I get their updates on my wall. They had just posted that they were starting a photography club on the 2nd of April. Talk about a coincidence! (I don’t believe in coincidence, though. This was God’s doing.) The club is not open to the general public. To join, you first have to be a member of the Henry Doorly Zoo itself. That clinched it. I bought a membership. I had to join this club.

The first meeting was just kind of a get together to see what people wanted the club to be. There had apparently been a photography club in the past, but whoever had been in charge hadn’t done much with it. They basically had treated it as something they had to do for an hour each month. They want this club to be different, something that will be fun for the members, but also something that can be put to good use for the zoo. If any of our photos are good enough they may be used in promotional materials for the zoo. Also we may be called upon to photograph special events for the zoo, and we also may be used to chronicle the zoo’s upcoming massive reconstruction project.

I am so excited about this! I can not wait till next month when I can go back and take more pictures! I have always loved animals. When I was little I always said I wanted to be an artist, but I would also tell people I wanted to be a zookeeper. This club seems to be the perfect opportunity to explore the possibility of being both. Maybe not a full on zookeeper per se, but something involving animal photography.

I will close with one picture that I consider one of, if not THE best picture I took on Saturday. When I took the pictures off my camera I had 1,045. Of course most of them are worthless. Most times I took many rapid-fire pictures all in a row, hoping for one good shot. This picture however, was a one shot deal. It happened so fast, and I was so far away that I am surprised it turned out at all. There were some children feeding the peacocks a great distance from me. I switched my lens to a zoom lens as fast as I could. Their mom was calling them back, but I managed to get one shot of the little boy before he ran off. I was so happy when I got home and looked at my results. It’s a great picture, if I may say so myself. I plan to submit it for consideration to be used for the zoo.

New Background

I’ve been wanting a change to my blog, and I’ve decided to clean it up a little by narrowing down the background to just one image.

For now it’s going to be my giraffe sketch, but I may try something else later.

EDIT: It's later. :p I added a mirror image to the other side of the page. Hopefully this looks good in all browsers. I'm having some minor issues with the template designer.