Netherlands

The recovery time from school, I've discovered, is directly proportional to the number of classes taken, the type of classes taken, and the amount of time lapse before the final grades are posted. As such, I am not fully recovered yet since I'm still waiting for my final grade from cell bio, which, according to the teacher, should've been posted but I have yet to figure out where it is, lost in the vast landscape of cyberspace as it is.

I did upload the candle-cake picture to my laptop though, so I can post that picture now:

My parents remembered that I like berries, so that, folks, was about a pound of blueberries stashed on top of a rather belabored looking cake. It was great.

In terms of more recent events Anna, Victoria, Kateryna and I went bowling last night at Valco's new bowling alley. The style of the place appears to be targeted more toward teenagers than adults, given the too loud music and really, really um...geometrical decor. (Large brightly colored round dots, that's what they look like.) Kateryna, as the only one of us who actually had some experience at the game, tried to give us pointers such as "aim it at the dots" (which are painted on the ground on each aisle). The rest of us, however, are more concerned with just trying to get the darn thing to go in a straight line which, given the number of gutter balls, IS a sufficiently difficult challenge. I'm quite awful at it, of course, but it was fun and we get different animations on the display screen after we lugged each ball haphazardly toward the pins at the far end.

Anna gravitated toward the arcade games afterwards, where there was giant Spongebobs in the robot-claw-in-a-plastic-box thing. All the games are astonishingly expensive, though, so we left to wander around the mall and goggled at the "power smoothie" that's sold at the stands, which served as a good example of where advertisement has way too much information. How many people wanted to know that there're algae and wheat grass in their smoothies and, what's more, that they're rich in chlorophyll and apparently aid in respiration and sperm DNA repair? Too much information people, WAY too much. And why would anyone name a smoothie "Bee sting"? (Or was that "Bee Stinger?")

Victoria's still fixated on hooded things and we're still going to try the Thanksgiving-Valleyfair trip, despite of the crowd. Some things don't change.