The College Chronicles

Hey guys, don't worry, my crazy life didn't get the best of me in the end. Still very much alive. I've been adjusting to college life at the University of Michigan....of Dearborn. I'm majoring in Industrial engineering and have been focusing on my classes for the past few months. Let me tell you about some of my college adventures.

The day before classes I went to this voluntary event called convocation, it's basically a lame ceremony where the speak at you for a few hours, but you still can meet new classmates. It started at 9 in the morning so most people were still sleepy, but thankfully I'm skilled in the art of giving the illusion that I'm a morning person. We were split into groups for icebreakers, and your group name was among "the things you need to survive college" I was group cellphone.

So when I see my group. I rally the troops with a moving speech that can be summarized as "Okay guys, I have no idea what games we're going to be doing....but whatever it is we're gonna win!" Unfortunately we played little games among our group so we weren't able to beat other groups, but one game we played did stick out to me.

We were in a circle with one person in the center and that person had to point to someone and say one out of about 5 set things (dog, elephant, bunny, jello, and cow) when they said their object then the person who was pointed at had to act with the 2 people beside them that animal or object. They had to do it before the person in the center counted to 10. The worst one was cow where the person in the center stuck out their hands with their thumbs down and the people next to them had to milk their thumbs! It was kind of an unwritten rule that they wouldn't use the dreaded cow on anyone, but soon I was in the center.

I only used the cow, and I would count really slowly so I was able to stay in the center and make everyone do the cow. It was so funny watching people's facial expression as they had to milk a strangers thumbs. Despite torturing group cellphone with my cow obsession, 3 members of it are now really good friends of mine and I see everyday at school.

I met a bunch of people through group cellphone and was quickly making a name of myself. Right after lunch I met a girl named Nia who is a transfer student from school craft. We hit it off pretty well and I'm so glad because we ended up sitting next to each other during the ceremony which consisted of an hour and a half of professor blahblity blah blah. We entertained each other by making faces at each other and simulate various actions like slitting our wrists, shooting out head, and other various ways of suicide to end our suffering.

I honestly thought this was going to be the biggest waste of time going to the convocation, but it helped me meet several of my friends including Marisa, Sara, Alfred, and Nia. In my next post I'll tell you about my engineering friends and some other adventures we have.

Summer highlights

- Kentucky Hiking Trip: Unfortunately most of this trip wasn't funny story filled, it was more group bonding with people. There was a battle between me and the plant life. The trail had a bunch of overgrown branches doming over it, so I decided to break them out of the way...until I came to the part of the trail where the branches were enter twined with thorns! I quickly became a pacifist and loved nature...until the thorns passed, and I was shredding branches once again.

Then plant warfare came up with a new weapon whose sinister name was "stinging nettles"! These plants had thousands of little razors causing a very painful walk through part of the trails. Now you may think the plants had beaten me... oh are you wrong! Next time I had to pee, I paid a little visit to those stinging nettles. Victory is mine!

- Family Camp 2011: I was the 8th grade and younger, heart throb. I executed several assaults via super soaker. I have another post with much more details on this trip on the way.

- Anna, Emily H, and Emily M took me with them to the mall where they spent an hour at forever 21. I thought I was a goner. Now in my defense, I was hanging out with Anna before going to the mall and I went for their company not for forever 21! When we got back to the church (where we met up) a bunch of guys from youth group were playing basketball in the parking lot. They were pretty shocked that I went to forever 21.

- Last week it was crazy hot so I got a few of the guys together and we drove to girls from youth group houses and attacked them via super soakers and waterballoons. It was a complete success. We got Joy, Michaela, Emily h, Sarah, and Anna

Senior Boat Trip!

A couple of my friends from youth group and I, won an afternoon on the Michalak’s (Church friends) Boat during the auction dinner in April. The day finally arrived, and it was fantastic weather, super hot and humid. There was a maximum of 8 people who could come on the boat trip it was me, Donnie, Travis, Chad, Jared, Anna, Emily H, and Emily M. We chose 8 of the core members of our youth group all of them graduating seniors.

Since the heat was intense, the first thing we did was jump into the water. They had this floaty which was just big enough for all 8 of us to squeeze onto. Half of it had this mesh, which was awesome because we could get wet while still being lazy teenagers! After our crazy splashing ended and we started to relax…they brought out squirt guns.

The chaos recommenced. Soon Emily M jumped on this floaty chair and decided to soak us. After several minutes of water warfare, I was planning on swimming to Emily’s chair and capsizing it. Right before I was about to initiate the attack Emily said “Hey! I’m not tied up to the boat anymore!” her floaty was untied and she was drifting farther away. And just like that, I went from attacker to liberator.

I brought Emily back to the boat, but that whole situation gave Travis an idea. He untied the big floaty with Donnie and Emily H still in it. As they tried to return back to the boat, we assaulted them via squirt guns. It probably took them a half hour to get back to the boat.

This is the way the after noon seemed to go. We would be together as a group for a while, and then the girls would be tired of the crazy rough guys and go somewhere else on the boat or in the water. We guys would then do something completely stupid and nearly break our necks like play “King of the floaty”. But after awhile of being idiots, we would miss the girls, so we’d go wherever they were and we were together…until the girls got sick of us.

One of these moments while we were together, Jared and Donnie were wrestling each other on the big floaty when the mesh broke! We were then trying to stay out of too much trouble, when the cops came! At first we thought it was because of us because the girls were laying out on the bow of the boat, and Wayne (the owner of the boat) said that it might be illegal but that we could do it anyways. The cop came because of registration stuff so it wasn’t us.

Considering the fact that we had many opportunities, we didn’t really flip the girls into the water often. But near the end of our trip, we did have fun doing that. We had just been soaking each other with squirt guns and were resting on the floaty when I realized that I had Emily M to my left, Anna to my right, and Emily H partly on me due to the lack of space. It didn’t take much encouragement to throw Emily H in the hole where the mesh was supposed to be.

Poor Emily M, she totally saw that I was going on a flipping rampage and that she was my next victim. There wasn’t anything she could do and with a flip of her feet she was in. Turning to my 3rd and final prey, I was about to get Anna when she said “No Connor! I’ll just go in by mysel…. *SPLOOSH!*” I didn’t let her finish that sentence. Oops.

I had a BLAST during that trip. I’m glad we had that day since we’re all going to college in the fall and everyone is going away except for Anna and I. I’m really going to miss these guys.

(I hope to put up some actual pictures of us, I just have to wait for Emily M to put them up on FB)
EDIT: got them up!

Grad parties

With my senior year ending soon graduation parties are just around the corner. Infact I have one for 3 days in a row starting today. I haven't gone to too many grad parties in my lifetime, probably about 5 or 6 but that should change this year since my youthgroup alone has 13 or 14 graduates this year. Today I have Michael Kulaga's grad party, he's an old buddy of mine from the golden days of DFMC. He, Michael Bratt, and I made the "Michael club". Ironically I was the leader of the Michael club, but that was changed fast by accepting the club name of "Michael C".

We also invited Ryan Dennison to join so together we had Michael B,C,D and K. We caused havok among the elementary aged girls in the church who were Joy, Hannah, and Brooke. We would harrass them with whatever idea our 5th grade selves could think of! At somerset beach camp we would have massive sexist battles where we "Michaels" always triomphed!

Michael Kulaga moved away the summer inbetween 5th and 6th grade, and Ryan's family decided to change churches, but Michael Bratt and I never stopped attacking the girls! Anyway with the grad parties starting soon it means that summer and pool parties are right around the corner!

Ninja strike!

Yesterday I had freshman orientation at UofM Dearborn. For the most part it was very boring and I just wanted to get home. I did get to meet a whole lot of new people though like 3 Michaels, 2 Alexes, Sierrah, Shannon, Aaron, Pat, Joe, Brian, Rachel, Allie, and Anitra. Meeting fellow classmates was actually pretty fun. Playing ninja with them was better!

I hadn't even thought of playing ninja until some of our leaders decided to play ninja as an icebreaker. I had a blast slaying enemy ninjas left and right! Unfortunately we weren't able to play it too long because we had to continue on our tour of campus.

Right after lunch I started up another game of ninja and was able to recruit about 7 other people to play. I used my sickly (I was really sick) squid style of attack and just slaughtered the other players! I was getting double kills in most of the games and only lost once in 10 games.

Wake up call!

Mother nature once again threw a powerful blow to my dwindling pride. Yesterday I had just waken up when I looked outside. I saw a parking cop about to give us a ticket for parking in the street on trash day. Without thinking I bolted outside to the cop to try to keep from getting a ticket! It must've been a funny sight for the cop to see a sleepy teenager with bed head and just wearing basketball shorts, running in the freezing pouring rain, to keep from getting a ticket!

Yeah it was raining buckets outside and about 50 degrees! I didn't get the ticket, but I really was sick of all this rain we'd been getting. I have noticed though that all of these events have happened when I was shirtless...

Mother Nature Kicking My Butt!

Yesterday I was mowing one of my client's lawns, and since he doesn't have much money I give him a great deal. I add more pressure to myself by letting his lawn grow for 2 weeks so he only has to pay half as often as everyone else. His grass is extremely long, especially this certain patch which tempts me to use a machete instead of a lawn mower.

Right before I went to work my mom told me that we were going to get a storm in about 45 minutes so I have to hurry up. Normally mowing a lawn in 45 minutes is a piece of cake, but not this one since it was so long. I had just finished the jungle patch in his backyard when it started to sprinkle. I thought, "Ok you have 5 more minutes just try to get as much done as possible." Then suddenly this fierce wind starts up and it was so strong that it even scared me a little bit. I remained calm and thought "It's ok, it's not raining hard, you have another minute or two"

Then as if God wanted to show me that I was a stupid teenager, he then smited me with a great heavenly thunderbolt!... Ok I wasn't struck by lightning, but right what happened was that I was instantly consumed by this massive storm! I grabbed my mower and started booking it for home.

Fortunately my house was just on the other side of the block. If you were driving by me at that moment you would see a shirtless dude tearing across the sidewalk, yelling at the top of his lungs, pushing a lawn mower, and keeping up his shorts with his other hand!

By the time I got home I was completely drenched. My family and neighbors had a good laugh though.