School, toasters, drill and craziness

Wow, it has been a while since I have posted anything on here. School has pretty much taken over my life and is sucking up all of my time. I swear I become a major flake when I am in school. So, to those of you that have e-mailed me and I haven't responded... I am really sorry... I will work on doing better. Anyways... here is a little update on everything going on in my life.

School --- Like I said before, it is all I do... and it is crazy! This quarter has been absolutely INSANE! I love being in the design program, but man it is tough. For anyone who thinks being an art major is easy... let me tell you, it definitely is not. Out of all of the classes that I have taken my design classes have been the most intense and the most competitive. When I decided to do design at the UW I was amazed at how competitive the program is. To get into the program students have to complete an intro class take an all day entrance exam and then be chosen to be in the program. Last spring, when I applied, there were also about 150 other students applying. Of those 150 only about 40-45 were accepted into the program. Pretty crazy.

Anyways, this quarter I am taking a typography class and a human centered design class. I really, really like my typography class... my human centered design class---not so much. It is an industrial design class and I am more of a graphic design kind of girl.

For our first project in this class we had to make 30 comics for how to catch a mouse. That was actually a pretty fun project, I just wish we would have had more time to work on it. For that class we also had to create a toaster manual. We had to do the layout, do all of the illustrations and have it flow well. Right now we just finished a big observation report on self-checkout machines and we are working on drawings for new and improved self-checkout machines. Later this week we will start to make 3-D models of the machines, create a new computer interface for them and then present them to the class. Here is the toaster manual that I made:
OK... enough with school!

Sadly... not much else has been going on other than school stuff. One cool thing though is that my niece Cadison is on the Drill team at Sammamish High and she had a competition on Saturday that I was able to got to. It was an all day event and was very fun. Sammamish took 3rd place in both the drill and kick categories. In the end of March they will go to Yakima for state... it will be fun to see how they do there!

At the end of the competition they have what is called a Drill Down... Cadison takes it very seriously and gets nervous during it... she is also very good at it. Here is a video of the drill down yesterday... she is about dead center and is wearing black and a white tutu (sp??). I will try and get a video of the drill and kick routine from my sister Melanie and put it on here sometime this week.