Cedarville University

Since my last post involved pranks, I feel that I am obligated to share what joyous surprise our entire dorm awoke to this morning. In the middle of the night someone decided to gather and take all of the shower curtains throughout the entire dorm. This of course stirred quite the ruckous among the girls in the dorm. I believe it would be a fairly accurate statement to say that girls tend to be a little more dependent upon their showers than most guys are. Which, when you look at it that way makes it a very successful prank. Thankfully the curtains showed up a few hours later in the laundry room  probably out of fear as the Resident Director went from room to room searching for the culprits and the missing curtains.

Well it’s finally starting to feel like November outside and with the adjustment from cool fall weather to cold winter weather taking place, it is only to be expected that the cold bug is making it’s rounds across campus.  You know it’s starting to get cold outside when you’re sitting in chapel and you can hear someone different coughing about ever 2-3 minutes. My room mate came back last weekend from a visit to Michigan with a pretty bad cough and cold, which basically told me I was doomed. I survived most of the week feeling pretty strong and thought that I may have escaped this round, until finally this morning I woke up with a splitting headache, cough, sore throat and runny nose. It must have caught up with me in the night, which really doesn’t seem like a fair fight but I have yet to find an illness that abides to any form of sportsmanship.

Being sick in college isn’t terribly different from what it’s like when you’re home, other than your mom or dad isn’t there to make you chicken noodle soup or jell-o. Thankfully we have a very nice university medical center (UMS) run by very caring and considerate individuals who will graciously help equip you for the road to recovery. Although I do not feel any need to go to the UMS, I did confine myself to my dorm room spending a significant amount of the day sleeping and watching somewhere around 7 episodes of my favorite show, I did still manage to get my laundry done and talk to a catch up with a couple people that I’d been playing phone tag with for the past month or so. So it wasn’t the most productive day, but sometimes we just need that time to rest. Although it’s not the same as being home and I would kill for some of my mom’s homemade soup right about now, sometimes being sick at school can actually be a blessing depending on how you look at it. I think God uses times like this to remind us that we need time to rest and at college it’s really easy to overlook that particular need as we frequently get bogged down with homework and various activities. All I know is, this time I needed a forced day of rest. Although being sick is never fun, try to see the blessings in it if you so happen to catch something. Oh, and pump yourself full of Vitamin C!

Walking in my dorm today I was instantly inspired for my next post…pranks in the dorm! As I walked in I noticed my friend’s room directly across from our main entrance. The door wasn’t visible as all you could see was cardboard. As I approached I noticed that the only way to enter her room was by way of cardboard tunnel, a very long and narrow tunnel. Apparently she and one of her teammates have been having a pranking battle, going back and forth getting worse as the year goes on. They both love it! So I decided to share some of the pranks I’ve witnessed, received or pulled

Forking- We gathered about 150 plastic forks over the course of about a week and decided to fork a friend of ours. We discovered that you can actually wedge forks into the carpet so they stick up, but more importantly that they’re actually kind of a pain to get out if done correctly. Only about 75 forks made it into the floor. The rest were hidden throughout the room in various locations. Basically, she was still finding forks a month after we did it.

TP w/Silly String- I don’t feel that this one needs a lot of explanation. but I will say that if you want to go a little further than the traditional toilet papering, when you finish shoot silly string all over the paper and it makes it soggy and gross, and a lot less fun to clean up.

Balloons- Fill the victim’s room from floor to ceiling with inflated balloons. It may take awhile, but it’s completely worth it! Also quite fun to hide in the balloons so you can watch their expression when they return to their room.

Jello-Take one of your friends prized possessions, place it in liquid jello and allow it to harden in your dorm fridge. When ready, dump onto a plate and leave outside the owners door.

Sleeping Beauty- Take a picture of your room mate with your cell phone while they’re in a really funny sleeping position. Send it to them and their friends while they’re in class (my advice, probably wise to leave their significant other off that list though. she laughed, but I don’t think she would have if I’d sent it to her boyfriend too).

That’s all I’m listing for now, but I do want to mention that no one was injured or angry for long after the above mentioned took place…to the best of my knowledge.

I know that I’m a senior and typically things that excite a freshmen or sophomore don’t always have the same effect on us. Of course I mean absolutely no offense to them, especially since I may just be the exception to that stereotype. This weekend I had the joy of hosting my older sister for a visit. I’m one of those people who has been able to stay really close to a lot of my family and friends back home, even while I’m at college. It never gets old when someone decides to come down for a visit, if anything I think it gets better because I am more comfortable and aware of my surroundings and am thus a better host (hopefully) because I know more and better ways to entertain them. Now this time, my sister and I actually spent a majority of the time she was here “shopping.” Just a side note: There are a lot of good places to shop in areas surrounding Cedarville, I will most definitely miss that when I graduate! Back to my original topic…it’s nice to say the least, that my sister and I have gotten to the point where we can actually do anything for hours on end and neither of us get really bored because it’s just nice talking and catching up with each other.

Now to go back a few posts, another fear that I had upon entering undergraduate study was that I would lose contact with my family and friends back home. I won’t lie, naturally it’s tougher because you don’t see them on a daily basis, but if you make the effort it’s definitely quite possible to stay connected with people. My sister and I may not talk as much as we would like, but in some ways we’ve become even closer since I enrolled at CU. I think the distance forces us to value our time together all the more, and the conversations that we have with each other may even be deeper and more heartfelt as we tend to focus more on the important things then the more casual things that are expressed between a family member that you see every day of your life (although we still manage to get some casual conversation worked in there for sure). All in all it was great spending time talking with her and getting to step out of the school setting for a little bit. It was refreshing be around my sister and to get updated on happenings at home. I love and value my Cedarville family (they really do feel like family), but it’s always nice to get a visit from the real thing.