Today was the Harvard-Yale football game. It was a major deal, because Yale is apparently our rival (I still don’t know why though). But, it was pretty obvious which team was going to win. Just go to http://safetyschool.org.

I really only found the football game interesting/exciting for a few minutes time in the fourth quarter, because not much happened. 10 points were made in the entire game.

Other than that, it was freezing during the game. My toes were killing me (and many others were complaining about their toes as well). I was happy they warmed up when I walked back up the river to my dorm, but my lips and hands were swollen after I warmed up.

One of my roommates, however, had to wait thirty minutes for her feet to warm up again. My other roommates had left the game early because it was too cold. See, only north eastern people can tough out the cold.

I was just ordering a bagged lunch for tomorrow, since I have math and life science back-to-back and I would be missing the lunch hours during that time. As I got onto the website, I got an alert on the order page that read:

Please note: the bag meal selections have been revised to maintain the original intent of the program: a simple meal replacement. Some individuals were using the system to “stock up,” rather than to replace a single meal. As such, you can now still enjoy a more personalized bag meal with additional healthy side selections, but within the traditional parameters of a single meal.

That cracked me up. The dining services seemed to have been revised a few weeks before so that you could choose exactly what you want (what snacks you wanted in the meals). Except, the parameters on the snacks that could be chosen were very loose. For example, I could order two sandwiches (the main meal) and then five orange juices. Or five bagels. I had a list to choose from and I could choose five of whatever (I could mix the selections up). I guess they realized giving one person five orange juices was allowing people to be able to stock up. Now the selections are way smaller though, unfortunately.

TF: I didn’t want to take off a lot of points. This question was worth eight points, so if you got the question totally wrong, I took off three.

Class: Hahaa

TF: Yeah, there’s some grade inflation in this class.

Ah, I love easy graders. Don’t let academics get in the way of your education. If all graders were like this, academics would not be in the way of education at all.

I got all my midterm scores back. I’ll be taking my Chinese midterm next week, but I only have one Chinese midterm and that’s why it’s so late. The Chinese midterm oral is this Thursday though, so that’s why I have been so busy in writing up that speech. Translating a political speech from English to Chinese is so hard! I hardly know any words to mean what I want to say.

Anyway, I’m pretty happy with my scores. They aren’t the best, and I definitely take this as a learning experience (especially since I came out from Life Sci feeling like I wanted to cry, and then feeling like I want to cry even more that night because I thought I failed economics, too–boy, the life science test day was a bad night). When I got back my life science midterm, I was seriously pretty excited. I thought that at the most, I would get somewhere below a 70.

I was above average on all my of midterms, which I’m happy about. But, I am still unsatisfied about the scores I got on my midterms. They were pretty low. None of them were in the 90s.

I want scores in the 90s next time. That’s my goal for my next midterms.

So my birthday was yesterday. I can go buy cigarettes now, vote, or open a bank account. I need to go open a bank account, and I dropped off my absentee ballot in the mail yesterday.

Well, at midnight yesterday, my sister came to visit me and then dropped off a minimalist painting she drew as my present. My first reaction was, “What?!” Because it was just a lotus flower on a background of pure brown. The minimalist style. But, I like it. It’s a nice and simplistic picture.

After my sister left, I went to sleep.

After I woke up, the day was pretty much ordinary. I went to my classes, there were people who wished me happy birthday, but overall, nothing big happened. I had my Chinese one-on-one discussion today, so I had to go back to Vanserg (I despise walking to Vanserg, since it’s so far away). But when I got there, Zhang Lao Shi was there. She’s very nice, and she was the one who was supposed to talk with me. I had a good time talking with her.

When I got back to my dorm, I did hardly anything. But soon it was six and I went to eat dinner with my sister. We went to Yen Ching’s. I have found an appreciation for that restaurant. The restaurant owner, waiters, and waitresses were all so nice! It might have been because my sister and I spoke to them in Chinese the entire time. But we were given free soup, and then two extra free fried wontons, and when we asked them to put the meal in a take out after we finished, they gave us a free box of rice! I’ll be going back to Yen Ching’s in the future. Plus, their food is also pretty good! They actually have some authentic Chinese food.

When I came back to my dorm after dinner, my roommates had put a banner that read “happy birthday Yingna!” And I got a balloon. Later, my roommates had some of our hallmates come to our dorm and they sang me happy birthday, and we ate ice cream cake. We also had (diet) coke and cookies and they gave me a card that had the theme song from Shrek in it. It was really cute.

At 10, I went to meet my big sib/lil sib family from CSA at Berryline, where they said happy birthday to me and got me some tea. I wanted tea, cause I ate ice cream only a little before.

Overall, I liked my birthday.

I’m so old now.