two peas in a dorm.

http://milkchaihoney.wordpress.com/2011/12/02/mart130/

I found another blogger, 'Milk, Chai & Honey' who is a freelance photographer, and has a beautiful knack of cafe photography. Her particular blog 'Mart 130' has lovely images of food and flowers that I really like the depth of field and colours of. 

Below are a few of my favourite images.

(I think this is one of my favourite images - I can't pinpoint exactly why, but I love the depth of field, and the colours of the image.)

Once upon a time, we bought a cactus. But not just any cactus, a special cactus.

See, it all started like this.

Our good friend Laura, who lives just down the hall, well, she had cactus. Its name was Jenny and Jenny was a grafted cactus. Basically, grafted cacti are amazing – they’re a hybrid cactus, which means that the ball looking thing on the top of the cactus has been put onto the top of another cactus.

There was this one day, when Laura brought Jenny into our room and that was the day that everything changed. That was the day that we became avid cactus enthusiasts.

After considering our options, we dove in the deep end and became cactus parents, along with our good friend Catherine*, who also lives down the hallway. We jumped in the car and went to lurk down at the nursery for a while, while we chose ‘the one’.

It took us longer than we expected (not gonna lie, we thought that we could just go down there and immediately be met with the most beautiful cactus that we had ever seen in our entire lives) because they didn’t have a cactus that was as pretty as Jenny. After some careful consideration and a few words of advice from the nursery lady, we finally made our purchase – a grafted cactus. While being larger and not as brightly coloured as Jenny, we were instantly in love.

Taking him home, he was immediately paraded around the dorms to the other girls, being met with both appreciation of his beauty and horror that we had actually bought ourselves a cactus. It really broke our hearts. (Who wouldn’t love something as beautiful as a cactus, especially a grafted one?!)

Days went past and our little cactus was thriving. Although he still lived in the little plastic container we bought him in, he loved life in our dorm. After some more careful consideration, he finally had a name.

Charlie.

Short and sweet and simple enough to refer to in everyday conversation.  Along with his new name, Charlie adopted a shiny red bucket to live in, inspired by his girlfriend, Jenny. Even though that relationship was short lived**, Charlie was still loving life. It wasn’t until we were near mid-semester break that he started to worry us.

I went home to Melbourne and Paris went home a few blocks away for break, and it wasn’t until we returned to college that we noticed that Charlie was growing a flower! This was great. Until I also noticed that Charlie was getting a bit squishy. This could never be a good sign. It wasn’t until one of my tea parties where Charlie was living it up and being shown off (again) that one of our friends said, ‘You know, sometimes when things die, they start growing new life so that they’re ‘legacy’ will live on.’

*Insert sad face here

Only a few weeks ago, Charlie’s flower fell off. As much as we would have loved to see the flower bloom, he seems to be doing better, and we can only hope that over break he won't frankly die... and that he will still be our dorm room mascot next semester, cheering us on during those struggletown days.

*Catherine was also successful in her cactus shopping that day. Her addition to the dorm life cactus collection was Steve, a spiky, sea-looking creature disguised as a cactus. We’re babysitting him at the moment, as Mumma Catherine has returned home for break.

(Paris loves her snapchat!)

**Ahh, so. The Jenny story. Charlie and Jenny’s short-lived relationship was due to the fact that Jenny wasn’t the most healthy of cacti. Laura brought her into our room one day, stating that ‘I don’t get enough sun in my room!’ only for us to discover that Jenny was caving in on one side. We left her in the sun for a few days, only to discover that she was shrinking – slowly but surely. It only took us a few weeks to realise that Jenny was past the point of no return, and so after being reunited with Laura, we (Charlie included) said our goodbyes to Jenny before she was sent to the great cactus farm in the sky…

cafeteria |kafɪˈtɪərɪə| noun

a restaurant in which customers serve themselves from a counter and pay before eating.

ORIGIN mid 19th cent. (originally US): from Latin American Spanish cafetería ‘coffee shop’.

  Well……….. As much as we’d like to say our caf is close to a ‘coffee shop’ or ‘restaurant’, it’s not.

Although I can appreciate some meals at the caf; cheesecake, selected pasties and the evergoing fresh salad bar and toast machine, sometimes it does get a little monotonous.

It took me a while to get creative with my meals… sometimes the caf would have extra things such as wraps, shredded cheese, celery and avocado. I would see these things new at the food bar, and get excited but not really know what do do with them to enhance my food experience. There would usually already be quite a few plates full of food already on my tray by the time I noticed these extra goodies anyway.

I sat with my fourth-year, veteran-sister at the caf one day (such a rareity, I hardly even see her at college let alone in the caf). While I sat there opposite her, with my soggy, watery, packet vegetables, second mock-fish fillet for the week, dry chips and a repetitive array of salad feeling a little dissatisfied, I looked across at my sister to see her working all these extra bits of food I hadn’t even thought of getting before at the caf. For example: She had rice crackers as a healthy alternative, with penut butter and honey on them. “You’ve got to know how to get creative with the caf,” I recall her saying to me, “It gets so boring and gross after your fourth year.”

So the next day I tried to get my creative on. And over the last 10-12 weeks, and some serious discussion with Rhianna, we’ve come up with some essential hot tips to surviving the caf:

1. Always check out the menu before arriving at the caf. You can check it online. One meal we recommend steering clear of is ‘fasian’ night.

                            2. Check the bread station upon entering the caf. If there are wraps in sight – start cheering! Go nuts and pile everything on one of them. Or two. Or three. Wraps with salad, wraps with cheese and tomato melted inside, wraps with nutmeat or nutolene and salad and cheese, wraps with cheesecake; whatever floats your boat. 

3. Don’t be a rookie and forget your cookie. (Rookie – the word of the year) But seriously guys, the caf has a couple of deserts a week. Make the most of them while they’re they’re there. Dig in. Take seconds. Take some for tomorrow.

4. Open days are winners. When the college has to dine for visitors, whether they be future potential students at open day, ex-students at homecoming or college lecturers at a staff meeting, the caf is sure to put on a good spread.

5. Rice crackers – as mentioned before – are a great alternative to bread (or even wraps – when you spend long enough at the caf).

6. Make the most of a Sunday brunch! It is probably one of the best meals all week at the caf, serving lots of hot breakfast choices such as hash browns, baked beans, mushies, tomato and other gear for a big breakfast… Plus the usual good cereal and yoghurt selection, along with banana bread and some other goodies. Some people survive all week off this meal. Unfortunately for me, I work every Sunday and have missed this portion of the college meal because work starts at 10. And brunch starts at 10. Heavy days.

7. Lastly but not least – if there are wedges on the menu, bust your gut to be at college. They’re rare, they’re wonderful, and they’re not worth missing. Tip 7ii. Don’t be late on a wedges night. They will revert to regular chips when they’ve run out. *Cries*

  So there you have it - some hot tips we came up with as something to remember when the caf’s getting you down… Make the most of these special occasions.

Happy caffing

- P x

Everyone plays basketball on Tuesday and Wednesday nights… Or when it comes to a Sunday night and half of Watson, Ella and Andre are down playing scrimmage in the audo… Or when they’re playing on the spare court next to netball of a Monday night. It’s no secret we’re quite the basketball-loving College. Although, when I say we, what I really mean is everyone else… I’m just the one on the side of the court trying to understand what the heck is going on with all the hand signals from the ref. (Seriously, how do they remember them all?!)

Just this past weekend… actually the one before Mothers day, we had the ‘All Stars’ basketball competition, one that was quite competitive and brought out the serious, game-on side of our college.

To give you a bit of a background, our college’s weekly competitions on Tuesday and Wednesday nights consist of everyone coming together to play/watch-and-pretend-we-can-play the basketball in the auditorium. Indoor and outdoor students (along with some additional teams from around the way from various age groups) come to play. There are teams that play because they are genuinely good at it, and then there are the ones who do it purely for the laughs and memories… I can, and do play… just not in A-grade or as well as some others. (*CoughParis*Cough) But for the All Stars weekend, it’s the best of the best.

Pretty much, the best players from each of the grades are chosen to play in a team, for various named games. Indoors VS Outdoors students (living status); Andre VS Ella Boyd (the two girls dorms); South-West VS North-East (the boys hometown states); or Rookies VS Returns (first year boys versus the rest of the seasoned Watson boys).

Athletic Paris over here was representing the indoor students who played on Sunday night. With some well-chosen commentators providing some light-hearted commentary mixed with their ‘expert basketball opinions’ on the stats of the game, it made for an entertaining evening. The Indoors VS Outdoors game was probably the best of the weekend (aka the game with Paris in it). It was a pretty tough game… (Ok, well, it looked like a tough game…from the sidelines.) After some pretty impressive 3-pointers and a few choice four-letter words from Paris as she burst her way onto the court (not going unnoticed by the commentators), the indoors came out victorious. Paris came out of the game with a pretty impressive trophy to adorn her shelf, (I can just look on and dream of what it’s like to win at basketball). In all seriousness, it was a brilliant weekend. All of College came together to celebrate the great game that is basketball (never thought I’d hear myself saying those words). I now look forward to next-years’ All-Stars weekend with fondness!

- R x

  If you’re interested in some of the stars of the weekend, check out the link to the video made by one of our fourth years below. :)

The art of decorating a room is one that can liven or darken, lift or drop a room’s mood and tempo. The aim when decorating – especially a dorm room – is to create a space that reflects you, and your energy in order to make you feel happy when in the surroundings. After all, college dorm rooms are your homes for a while, right?

To make things a little difficult, or I guess exciting in my experience; I put down on my form for Andre Hall Dorms to be down with someone random. Because I lived only a five-minute drive from college, and being here was to have the ‘college experience’ I wanted to make the most of it by meeting as many new people as I could. The chances I ended up rooming with Rhi, was slim to nothing, yet here we are living to tell about it. The problem was I had no idea what styles she had, what she was into, whether her favourite colour was violet purple or galactic blue. I guess that was the adventure of it all, but somehow we ended up being ridiculously similar in our tastes which may be something to do with the fact we’re a one in a few of the twin dorm room friends to stay with each other this far.

Something I have learnt while decorating our dorm room is to work with what you’ve got. In our case, we didn’t have any set in stone ideas of what we wanted to achieve and even if we did it was highly unlikely to match with the ivory/off white and dusty, horse-riding-jodhpur green paint our room and trimmings were decked out with already. Really, the colour scheme was already cut out for us, and we had to work with it; not against it.

So here’s how we did it, and here are a few tips to take note of if and when you decide to decorate your room:

1. To my delight, Rhi and I both have white doona covers, which keep the room looking fresh and uncluttered. Rhi had a green pillow, a green kettle and a red/orange throw. We worked with these colours as a basis for the colours we would decorate our room with without much thought.

2. We turned one bed on the side to create more space; turned out to be a great couch for watching movies on too!

3. Be cautious of lighting, which plays a significant part in the mood and atmosphere of the room. R and I both brought warm lamps in with white shades to put above our beds and at night we only have them on because our dorm light is very harsh, hospital-like and blue.

4. Simple fairy lights (college cliché) balanced our lighting as we chose to place ours above our desk, opposite our lamps rather than over the window. Probably one of my favourite parts of our room now.

5. Early on in the semester we had a hallway decorating competition. Naturally everyone decided to wrapping paper their doors as a fun way to brighten our halls. We decided to get one that was fun and reflected the tones in our room. Turns out the majority of the time we have our door open anyway, and it adds a significant touch to the vibe of the room.

6. Add some class to your room through memorabilia; Rhi and I added white picture frames for simplicity; one which we plan to get a photo of us together put in.

7. Don’t be afraid to include objects or photos of of you and your hobbies: like this new-old red Konica camera I got the other day that I’m super excited to check out.

8. Pinboards are great! For all our lists and clutter.

9. For a fresh feel, keep the walls simply decorated with not too many decals/posters. Have one or two that reflect your personality or the style you’re going for.

10. Luckily for me, R enjoys her music as much as I do… so although it messys up the desk with chords; our speakers are an important part of the scene!

11. Having a fruit bowl with regularly-put-in fresh fruit can make a place feel homely and welcoming.

12. Pieces of inspiration! Find some funny e-cards, quotes, a photo of the fam, or draw something yourself! It’s guaranteed to make the place a more personal living space that can help to inspire.

13. Last but not least: Greenery! Charlie our cactus sits on our windowsill cheering us on: He is actually, legitimately budding a flower this current moment which Rhianna and I are super excited about. Try sneakily chopping a rose or a flower from a bush outside (or you could actually just go and buy one) and stick it in a vase! Rhi and I had a yellow gerbra, which livened the room significantly… Now we have a red/pink rose which picks up some of the colours in our poster and Rhi’s throw.

  Most of all, make a place that reflects YOU! These are some of the ways R and I made our room ours… together, and it is a place that we have learned to love and feel comfortable in. Happy dorm room decorating!

Not gonna lie, things have been a little stressful here lately. See, it’s coming to that time of the semester when we all lose it a little; kind of like when you’re going through Year 12 and the amount of work is just a tad cray and you start acting like you’re five instead of 18. Not really, but everything is just more fun. Well, it’s been like that.

Trying to be healthy, Paris and I started going to an Abs class at the gym a few weeks back, thinking that maybe we could get a head-start on our beach bodies for summer (ha!) We made it to one class together before work and assignments and a timetable change got in the way. So for the last couple of weeks, I’ve had to go to Abs sans Paris, but with some other girls in Andre. The only thing is, it seems that the instructor got the memo that Paris was ditching class and I’ve never been lucky enough to have the same instructor since (which isn’t entirely a bad thing because after the first class, we both kind of felt like we’d been hit by a car).

In an effort to make up for missing Abs class, we spontaneously decided one night, to have a study break, only not the regular kind of study break – the Zumba kind. All through year 12, I was an avid Zumba-rer, and when I told Paris, we brought out Zumba music and (with a little help from YouTube) I attempted to teach her. For a rookie, she didn’t do too badly (love you roomie!) and it was actually the most fun I’ve had in a while. And if Zumba fails, we also resort to a plain old dance party to get some exercise, whether it be late at night or the middle of the day. With our dance moves, we soon have the inspiration to finish our assignments or just brighten our day with some laughs.

If you’ve never tried Zumba before and you’re in the mood for a bit of a laugh with your friends, give it a go! Sure, at first you’ll look like a fish when you take it out of water and put it on the ground and it kind of just flops around, but you’ll get there! And if you’re just having a bad day, here’s a video of Paris and I doing what we do best – acting like the strangest of roomies but the bestest of friends! And that friends, is why we’re just two peas in a dorm.

 - R x

Speed-dating night, pool party, barn night and undie runs… All which make up the first week of college madness that maybe recognised as the equivalent of ‘O’ week for other universities… without the booze.

It’s coming close to mid-semester break, and we thought we should give y’all a recap of our first, exciting, social and somewhat misleading first week of college!

In such endeavours to limit the college’s ‘bad’ appearance, our first Tuesday night social was speed-‘friending’ rather than speed-‘dating’. I honestly don’t even know why they try to change it; people legitimately come to this particular Christian college to do what’s known as the ‘Matrimonial’ course anyway. On the enrolment form they even have a tick box list of the reasons why you’re at college from 1 to 10: ‘Good education, being involved in groups, sporting events… or “dating”. (I only put that down as no. 2)  ‘If you go un-partnered by the end of your degree, we guarantee full-reimbursement!’ They may as well start selling themselves as a dating college.

But I’ve gotten off track. This speed-friending night was a really great time; the sort where you can’t remember any of the names of the people you were introduced to the day before at registration, and you have to awkwardly re-ask their names, or subtly listen to the person next to you in the line (Rhi) as they told them their name before it’s your turn to be introduced.

We actually had to dress up too; our theme was: ‘What I wanted to be when I grew up’. I mean – I had no idea of what I was supposed to wear. I ended up going as a mad scientist, borrowing a white lab coat off my auntie who works at Sanitarium. Bit of a rookie mistake though – everyone kept asking me, “So… you wanted to be a Sanitarium worker when you grew up?”

So that wasn’t carried out so well. But my hair and nerd glasses made for a good laugh. I spent about half an hour before hand teasing up my long hair so it sat out like a young Michael Jackson’s hair-do. It was such a pain in the butt to get out, I’m surprised the next day I wasn’t looking like Bruce Willis.

To top the night off, we all jumped on the bandwagon with the rest of the world and made a ‘harlem shake’ video. We really couldn’t pass up the opportunity with so many people in one hall, all dressed as ninja turtles, mad scientists, old people, scrubs nurses, morph suits, Mexicans and professional golfers.

  Here’s a link to it if you’re interested:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sz2ej_VIC6w

Wednesday night’s adventures consisted of a hectic pool party with zorb-balls (which we weren’t actually allowed inside) 3 or 4 giant blow up trampolines, a volleyball net and blasting music. It was so much fun to get in there and jump from one floating device to another with about 15 people crammed in it, getting all tangled. All or nothing. Only a couple of times did I almost drown. The zorb-balls that we weren’t actually allowed inside turned out to be quite fun to play volleyball with but when approaching distracted people in the pool became a bit lethal and almost knocked a few people out!

Saturday was fun dressing up in the barn gear for the famous barn night; one group of creative second years actually came as a barn with cardboard boxes and all the different animals. We participated in the cliché Peter Dixon Band’s usual round of songs: The Hokey Pokey, Heel and Toe and many other classics, finishing it all off with ‘Yellow’ by Coldplay. Classic for any child brought up in the local area having attended many of these barn nights.

At the end of the heel-tapping evening, we tried to all go to the pool which we weren’t really allowed to but it was tradition for after the barn nights in previous years, (apparently). When we actually got to the gates though, it started raining, and people chickened out. They just didn’t get how if we were going to do something it has to be in ‘pack mentality’. There’s strength in numbers! As an alternative, people ran down to the back oval to run around in the mud – with the left over 20 girls we all stripped down to our undercrackers and ran around the oval. It was a lot of spontaneous fun.

The rest of the week was quiet, until 7:28 on Friday night, the spiritual program for college students. Being a local I’ve subsequently been to this program for the last couple of years, but it was nice to finally be there as an actual college student, sitting beside my new bestie Miss Rhi.

So you might be wondering, why was this week all a bit misleading? 

As much as this first week was a whole lot of fun, I somehow had this perception that college would always be full of this hectic social stuff! But now, 7 weeks in I’ve realised that it’s about creating your own adventures when the SAC team doesn’t provide socials that interest you, or at all; in and amongst the growing assignments that are becoming due way too quick! But this first week was one to remember, and I look back onto it with fondness.

Anyway, I’m late for dinner at the one and only cafeteria that College so dearly loves.

Peace,

- P x

Dorm life, as we all know, can be pretty exciting, especially when it comes to open dorms. While they only happen once a week, for many, it’s the highlight. This is the time when the girls can venture through Watson and discover potential love interests, and when the guys can come to do the same in girls dorms. While we’re not scouting out any potentials, we do like to do a bit of ‘lurking’ on the occasion. It’s just a bit of fun, and we come back with heaps of stories to make the other girls jealous. (Side note: What they didn’t tell us when we first went to open dorms expecting to ‘lurk’ about was that you had to drop your ID cards at the desk, and have a guy come and collect you from the foyer. Needless to say we started listing off any name we knew and the guy started calling them over the loudspeaker! Goooood times.) But take for example our most recent adventure in Watson:

 Open dorms arrived on Sunday night, and although we both had heaps of study to do, we decided to go ‘lurking’ as we call it. (Why lurking? Imagine that person who sits on Facebook looking at everyone’s posts and photos, but doesn’t actually like any of them. Lesbihonest – we were just sussing out how Watson worked yeah?) We did set a time limit for ourselves, but after two hours of learning how to use InDesign, beating guys at pool, running up and down the fire escape for kicks, learning how to Dougie and holding snakes, well, let’s just say that we didn’t end up getting much done that night. Wasn’t so much lurking as it was living it up meeting heaps of new people!

(Ps. Can I just say how much Watson smells? Girls – why do we do it to ourselves?)

But it was when we went to visit one of our friends that we had our brilliant idea to have alter egos. After leading us on a tour of rooms that weren’t actually his, our friend introduced us to his ‘roommate’ as ‘Spain and…Moscow.’ I’ll admit, it did take me a while to figure out why Paris was introduced as Spain, but eventually the link between the countries hit me (blame the lack of sleep, I swear!) But see, Moscow was only the name that Paris gave me in the spur of the moment, so it got me thinking about what my actual alter ego name would be. I’m not gonna lie, I get ‘Oh, you’re name’s Rhianna, like the singer!’ all the time (and yeah, it is, but it’s spelt differently,) so without taking on board just ‘Rhianna’ I thought it was only right to have a name of another singer!

 So, it’s my pleasure to officially introduce to you all our alter egos

 Spain and Adele (:

We are Rhianna and Paris; two peas in a dorm who happen to share a love for a lot of things in common, as well as the same living space. We are just a couple of your average first years living in dorms who are up for adventures and trying to make the most of our experience here; juggling our social lives (the no. one priority) along with classes, assignments, work outside of college, sports and all things spiritual.

Originally from Melbourne, Rhi has taken a big step away from home to be here, while Paris-the-local on the other hand... Well she didn’t really have to walk far at all. Together, our new home is our cosy little dorm room, complete with fairy lights and our pet cactus, Charlie, (more on him later).

This blog – part of our bucket list that we created early on in our college experience – has been something we’ve wanted to do and we’ve finally decided to start it. We both take a class this semester in Communications: ‘Writing for Media’ which may or may not have inspired us to start crossing off our bucket list items – starting with this. (You may even notice an improvement in our blogging skills as the year goes on.)

This space is somewhere where we can share all of our, and the other girls, hil-hairy-ass moments with you. Stay tuned and be entertained at what the first year girls of Andre can get up to…at all hours around the clock.

 R & P  x