Rhyme in Time 2010

I recently completed an extra credit project on CleanPlace, a writer's forum I'm a member of (cleanplace.net)! Rhyme in Time was a poetry project in which the mentors gave prompts every week to use in the poems, and we wrote six poems in six weeks.

My college classes were a bit hectic and made it challenging to finish, but I really enjoyed doing it. (And it often served as a mental break for me from chemistry...) :)

Here are two of my poems that I didn't think were quite as good as some of the others (but since I am thinking of perhaps submitting some of the others for publication, I don't want to publish those publicly on the internet. :P)

The Ballroom

You wear the echoing footfalls
of the flowing years
etched on your glazed wooden floor.
Your festooned walls,
cloaked in ivory tapestries,
emit blurred reflections
of the violin’s vibrato
and frosted scenes mirrored,
as if frozen, on your frescos.

Coffee Date

Steamy, gyrating aromas
and the grinder’s grating
brim over the edges
of the flushed chestnut room.

He
clutches
the green and white paper cup,
raising it to his lips
with a bent pinkie.

She
encircles her slender fingertips
around the china cup—
amber ringlets trembling
about her half-smile.

More "Common Knowledge"?

Several weeks ago, I posted how much the average American knows about current events in a recent poll, and how shocked I was to see how much more I knew than most people.
Well...there was a similar poll very recently by the Pew Research Center again. About how much Americans know about religion, and strangely, atheists scored higher than Catholics and even Evangelicals. Granted, several of the questions were about other religions than Christianity, but that still seems very surprising that so few people would know the answers to these questions.
Here were my results on their online quiz. I scored a 100%...












And here is the online quiz if you would like to take it yourself: http://features.pewforum.org/quiz/us-religious-knowledge/index.php

What Kind of Reader I Am :)

Yes, this is definitely me. :P

Take the What Kind of Reader Are You? quiz

Common Knowledge

A few weeks ago, my next-door neighbor forwarded me a quiz/survey being conducted by the Pew Research Center that was meant to test the general public's knowledge of current events. I was shocked to see my results, not because I did badly, but because I did so well. The questions were fairly simple, at least to me, and I don't even watch the news all that often.

Here were my results:

Could it really be true that so few people are aware of what is going on in America? It frightens me when I remember that these same people are mostly likely voters as well.
Curious about how you would score? Think your knowledge could sway the balance? Take the quiz: http://pewresearch.org/politicalquiz/quiz/index.php

End of an Era

Last winter, I drove our vacuum cleaner that was just about as old as me down to Goodwill to be donated. Here is my little brother standing beside it just before I loaded it into the car.

It might sound silly, but I was felt kind of sentimental about donating it.

Not to sound schmaltzy, but I have many memories of this vacuum cleaner throughout my childhood. This one was used back at my dad's office when we lived in southeast Texas.

I can remember using it for years there, and we also had an identical one at home. When I was six years old and my mother was expecting my younger sister, I tried to vacuum the house for her, but it was taller than I was, and my little arms struggled to push it across the floor. It ended up that the handle slipped out of my grip and fell on my knee that I'd badly scraped a few days before. Blood suddenly started flowing out from underneath my bandage. Hearing my shrieks, my mother quickly came and rushed me into the kitchen to rebandage it. Being young and tending to exaggerate things, my rather active imagination that the blood was gushing out of my leg. It was a while before I attempted to subdue that nasty vacuum cleaner again.

We ended up purchasing a new vacuum for the house about three years later, but we kept the one from the office for several more years. It traveled with us when we moved to western Colorado, to the Dallas Metroplex area, and back to eastern Colorado. We even had its cord replaced at a Dallas repair shop. I thought that things had come "full circle" in a sense when we started using it in my dad's new office.

However, the time finally came when the suction just wasn't enough to really clean the carpets well anymore. It was a faithful machine...it must have been almost two decades old. This may sound a little strange, but it felt like the end of an era for me in some ways.  Another one of my childhood monsters faded into a memory.  The new vacuum works much better, though.

Who or What is Elo De Norjeles?

I suppose I should explain the meaning of "Elo de Norjeles."

It's a nickname my dad gave me in late elementary or early middle school. I think it has a royally silly sort of sound when you say it...and well, that's me. My blogging pseudonym, EclecticElegance, has been my screenname since October 2009 on CleanPlace, a Christian teen and college age writers' forum community, cleanplace.net.

I'm a senior in college, double majoring in English literature and Chemistry. I became an editor at my school newspaper in fall 2012, and I've been a chemistry tutor on campus since fall 2011.

I often doodle cartoons combining nerd culture and science and fiddle about on my blue violin named Azora. My little white car's name is Journey. And my 1 TB external harddrive is Nessie.

I love writing, both for journalism and creatively. I fell in love with poetry first, but my unfinished novels are calling me again. I also enjoy theater and am actively plotting to be in a production soon.

Often my iPod is filled with Irish or Celtic music - more recently Celtic screamo -  and Disney classics and Broadway musicals. I'm also definitely a fan of Disciple, Skillet, Jason Gray, Mumford and Sons, and more recently Imagine Dragons.
 
My favorite authors are C.S. Lewis, Charles Dickens, Max Lucado, Susie Shellenberger, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Baroness Orczy, J.R.R. Tolkien, Lew Wallace, Jane Austen, William Shakespeare, John Donne, Seamus Heaney, Christina Rossetti, Shannon Hale, J.K. Rowling, Gail Carson Levine, Tom Stoppard, George MacDonald, Madeline L'Engle, and Cynthia Voigt.

But as far as fandoms go - I'm kind of obsessed with Dickens and metafiction about him, anything related to The Scarlet Pimpernel or Harry Potter, or the 90s TV show Due South. 

I also splatter paint across canvases, mold lanterns out of Monster cans, and cover tote bags and beach balls with Sharpie drawings of my happy molecules and compounds. Sometimes I carve stamps for letterboxing (which you can check out at letterboxing.org), another one of my hobbies. My letterboxing trailname is NationalTreasureFan.

My blog posts will probably focus on one or more of these interests or something random that I find interesting. I am rather eclectic... :)

Updated 26 October 2013.