L.A. County Fair

One of the best things about going to USC is getting to take advantage of everything Los Angeles has to offer!  It's even better when you get to do cool things for free!  Yesterday, my friend Beth and I went to the L.A. County fair spending only $5 for transportation instead of the regular $17 entry and $15 parking.



We ended up having a GREAT time eating, drinking, shopping, playing games, watching horse races, and admiring the animals.

One of my personal favorites was the "Taste of France" food booth where we got one of the world's best monte cristos.  Seriously, this thing was DELISH!

The best purchase of the day, however, was definitely this hat!  I'm absolutely obsessed with it!  I don't have a hat here in SoCal so I'm looking forward to wearing it all the time during all the sunshine we get here!  I'm especially looking forward to wearing it this weekend out in the desert at Balls!

Of course I had to try to play one of the impossible carnival games when I saw this giraffe!  I didn't win :(  (the hat is looking stylish at least)

They even had a London section!  I got super excited when I saw this.

Some nice images of the queen at coronation and 60 years later at her diamond jubilee (I WAS THERE!).

Awwwww, more memories of London's Covent Garden flower market.

They even had horse races at the fair!  I really got into the Derby spirit with my awesome hat (yes, I'm a little obsessed!).  In between horse races they had little dog races!  One of the ones I saw was with the long, skinny weiner dogs!  It was SO cute!

My friend, Beth, who went to the fair with me.

Go go go!!!

Some doggies about to race!

Hanging out at the races was one of the most fun parts of the day.  It was so much fun watching the races, having a couple drinkings, and relaxing.  It was a great way to get out of the stressful campus bubble!

Of course, it is a county fair so they had a farm section.  We couldn't believe how chilled out this momma pig was while all the baby pigs were going crazy sucking milk.  

Some of the babies were pooped...

They had cajun food too!  I didn't try it so I can't say whether it was good or not, but I always get excited when I see a little piece of home.

I got so excited when I saw this!  They had a section of super heros and TV shows.

Anywho, that's it for my day at the fair!  It was quite fun indeed!

Overcome with Sadness

Last year, when we lost to Stanford in triple overtime after a killer game, honestly, it didn't feel too bad because we had fought it till the last second and really played our best.  This year, we went out there, played the sloppiest game of football I've ever seen, and came home with a loss in week three losing to #21 when we were ranked #2.

This is what disappointment feels like.  This. feeling. sucks.

I'll try to post more when I overcome the depth of my emotional despair.

New Year, New Blog!

Hello All!

I can already tell that this is going to be a terrible year for blogging seeing as I've already been here for four weeks and this is my first post.  So, let me explain what I've been doing with all that time.

I moved in early this year for RA (resident advisor) training.  My first two weeks here were packed with training activities and trying to organize all my stuff.  Of course, during the first week I decided to rearrange all my furniture hence bringing me back to square one, but alas, I tried.

First, I was in charge of door decorations.  I decided to decorate my own door in honor of Doctor Who, the British Sci Fi show I got hooked on while studying abroad in London.

In case you're not a Whovian, this is what the front door to the Doctor's time machine looks like.  When you're walking through the hall, you definitely can't miss my door which is good since I'm the RA!

After getting my door done, I moved on to decorating the inside of my room.  Unfortunately, I still haven't finished organizing everything since I decided to move all my furniture around.

Hopefully I'll get it straightened out soon!

Anywho, ever since move-in day for the freshmen I've been really busy with RA stuff helping my residents get settled in.  I am meeting one-on-one with each of my 45 residents which has been quite a time-consuming venture indeed.  Additionally, I already did my first floor program on Wednesday taking my residents to Hollywood Blvd to check out the Walk of Fame and get some In-N-Out Burgers (it's a California thing).

On top of all my RA stuff, I had my first week of classes last week.  So far so good but I already have problem sets in all four of my engineering classes!  It appears that most weeks I'll have four problem sets so that's definitely a lot of homework.  Thankfully, though, none of my midterms overlap so I won't have three in one week like I did last year.  With another stroke of good luck, none of my finals overlap so I only have one final per day during finals week!

Anywho, most of my time this week has been spent in preparation for the rest of the semester so I'm hoping the rest of the semester will go smoothly.  Of course, I say that now when I'm super motivated to plan ahead and manage my time well.  We'll see what happens later on in the semester when there are more distractions available.

Finally, we had our first football game this weekend!  USC started out really strongly with a touchdown on the very first play!  Seriously, what an amazing way to begin a season!  We went on to win the game 49-10 which was great.  Our defense really held it together which is promising since defense has been a weak point in the past.  We have a lot of younger students on our defense so I'm looking forward to seeing improvement throughout the season.  In spite of the 49-10 win, Coach Kiffin still gave the offense a "C" rating showing that he has extremely high expectations for our team this year.  Overall, it was a good game to watch and there was great energy in the coliseum.  For the first time in my time as a student, the coliseum was actually sold out (all 90,000 seats) almost a week before the game.  The stadium was definitely packed!  I'm really looking forward to our later home games against Oregon and Notre Dame.  I expect these two teams plus Stanford to be the only teams who can even come close to challenging us.  I'm definitely expecting a sold-out coliseum and plenty of energy!!!

Anywho, that's all for now!  Expect sporadic updates until I get my life under control (don't hold your breath).

Stephanie