Hello and welcome back to ΣΝΖΟ’s (Sigma Nu Zeta Omicron) thanksgiving special edition, (part 2). I hope you all had an amazing break. Here it is how mine was:

My thanksgiving break was awesome. Things that I wasn’t expecting happened and all my expectations of things I was planning to do were met, if not surpassed. But let’s organize things. It’s better to go on chronological order, beginning with the weekend. On Saturday night I went to subway to have dinner.

Sorry, I will have to make a confession here-on average, I went at least once a day to subway during this break. Before you judge me, I will let you know that I could not use my university meal plan because all UI food places were closed and subway is the cheapest option of meal I found around campus- That was it, let’s get back. On subway I found one of my friends working there, what was amazing, because she left the university when we were near the middle of the semester, and felt happy I had the chance to see how she is doing.Moving on to Sunday morning, after I go to church I face time my family on the mall. It turns out that while I was talking with my family there was a Brazilian girl on a table close to mine and she noticed I was speaking Portuguese. So after I was done she came to me and introduced herself, and that’s great! She’s the first Brazilian I met since I first came here and now I have someone to speak Portuguese in person.

Now we can move to the week. Monday was just ok, I went to Hy-Vee, but mostly I just chilled. Tuesday I went to some exhibitions here at the university, they were about clay, politics and how the university contributed to space programs in the past. All of them were very good and I could really entertain/inform myself there. Wednesday I went to the career center intending to participate on a job fair, just to find out that the fair is going to be this Wednesday. But hey, since I was at the Pomerantz building, I went to the admissions center because they have free bubblegum there, and they are very good. I got at least five.  On Thursday I went to my friend’s grandparents’ house for dinner. I confess that I had never eaten that much before in my life, there was tons of foods, everybody ate other tons and incredibly, there was tons of left overs. So I took some back with me to my room, (after they insisted a lot, because I felt like I don’t have the right to take leftovers with me). Her family is very nice and we all had a great time there. Now, on Friday, the black Friday, the ISSS department organized a trip to an outlet on a city next to here, it was very nice of them. And I went on it with a friend. The Brazilian girl was there too. I wasn’t planning to buy anything, my intention was only to see how a real black Friday looks like. But, I was weak and so I made purchases on two stores. The first was necessary. We are going to have a baby in the family, so I brought things for baby to give as a present to the parents. The other was a book, because it is from a author I already read in the past and it was only four dollars. Don’t mind the other three books that I already have and haven’t started reading.

This reminded me of something and I will have to run away from the topic. My mother’s rules. You see, for some things in life my mother gave me and my sister rules for us to decide something. For example, now that I spoke of the book, I remembered that when I was a child my mother had a rule about books: “You won’t buy any books if you still have books to read” so I always knew when was the right time to buy books. As time went by and I grew and was able to make my own decisions I abandoned some of this rules. Now, I only have two of them, which are: “always have salads with your meals” and “sodas only on weekends”. Coincidently, both are related to food/nutrition, and I think I kept them because I never had any problems on these fields. The only problem related to nutrition that I had is that I wasn’t used to drinking much water.

Now I wonder if I will have this kind of self-controlling rules for my children or even if I will create more for myself. If I was to make one new rule for me before I came to the university that would be “always do everything you can”. I will have to explain this one. I’m the kind of person that always does what I’m required to do, but I do not always do everything I can, that is, everything I’m offered. For example, for my chemistry class, our homework have grades, so the grade you get is based on the amount of questions you get right. But you are only required to do some exercises and you complete the assignment. They do have extra-credit questions for you to get the maximum grade available. Can you guess what I was doing? Exactly, I only did the required ones, so I never got the maximum score. Now I noticed that those points could really be helping me, they are the difference from why I currently have a B+ when I could easily have an A-. So yes, everything matters. Another thing that happened was on my arts class. We have this sketchbook where we can make 50 drawings and turn them in for extra-credit by our final time. But since it was extra-credit I didn’t cared about it. But I realized that I’m the only one on my class that is not doing it and that can affect very badly my class performance grade. So I was expecting to get on date with my drawings this thanksgiving but I was lazy and only did Three. OH S#!% I forgot we were talking about thanksgiving. Sorry about this interruption.

Well… I think I’m done with thanksgiving anyway. That was it then. Thanks for joining me on my conclusion of my break. I hope you all had and keep having a good week. See you next week!