FLU

I had a great Christmas day but Christmas night I started to feel really really sick. For the past few days I've had the flu. I forgot how bad it STINKS!

Influenza, commonly known as the flu, is an infectious disease of birds and mammals caused by RNA viruses of the family Orthomyxoviridae (the influenza viruses). The name influenza comes from the Italian: influenza, meaning "influence", (Latin: influentia). In humans, common symptoms of the disease are chills and fever, pharyngitis, muscle pains, severe headache, coughing, weakness and general discomfort.[1] In more serious cases, influenza causes pneumonia, which can be fatal, particularly in young children and the elderly. Although it is sometimes confused with the common cold, influenza is a much more severe disease and is caused by a different type of virus.[2] Influenza can produce nausea and vomiting, especially in children,[1] but these symptoms are more characteristic of the unrelated gastroenteritis, which is sometimes called "stomach flu" or "24-hour flu".

I suffered from ahhheehmmmmm, the kind of influenza produced by a different type of virus apparently and had the stomach flu for a miserable 36 hours!

merry christmas

Hope everyone had a merry christmas!

skating on fryback

Today I skated on the lake with my two wonderful brothesr for the first time in FOREVER! The past two days temperatures here have been hovering around zero helping to speed up the freezing process of the lake and making it nice and thick to skate on.


why are skates so hard to get on??


catching the wind


chip trying to teach me all his cool spinning tricks


geeezee we look old!

ice

Northern Indiana got hit by some heavy ice right before I came home for winter break last week making for some really beautiful winter scenery.

happy thanksgiving!

I was able to go home for a little over a week during the Thanksgiving Holiday! What a great break from school and Bloomington!
Here are a couple pictures I snapped of the lake one night while the sun was setting...

last one

Our last tailgate as students with the tailgating crew.
Indiana vs. Wisconsin

COLTS

Colts game with Chelsea! COLTS beat the PATRIOTS!





John McLaughlin was the halftime show!

GIOVANNI

After returning to IU this fall I volunteered to be a "conversation partner" for an international student. I turned in an application at the International Center in August and was told I would be paired up with someone who had similar interests as me, similar ideas, similar....etc. Fast forward to October. I am finally contacted and told I now have a conversation partner named Giovanni and he is very eager to meet me! I too was excited to find out I had a conversation partner. The program is designed to help international students become more immersed in the American culture and in return the foreign partner is suppose to share things about their home country, whether it be things about their culture or language lessons.

I finally am able to meet Giovanni and find out he is a PhD student studying finance and he hails from Naples, Italy. I'm not going to say I wasn't shocked when I first met him. I was kind of expecting someone a little more my age and maybe not someone so intimidating on the academic level. I'm still trying to figure out how we were matched up as partners. The only thing I can really figure out is that I had put on my application that I traveled in Italy earlier in the year. Needless to say I have been meeting with Giovanni at least once a week now for over a month and have learned this whole program is a lot more challenging than I had expected. This is the first time Giovanni has ever been in the states and he is not familiar with many of our ways. It has been a great reminder to me of how we always assume and expect visitors to know how to act in our country and how unforgiving a midwestern community is to outsiders.

FALL in Bloomington

Some pretty pictures from around IU's campus...