Tramway Updates (Midterms, Occasional Express, & Avatar: TLA Reaction)

Hello everyone, welcome back to the Tramway.

As you've probably seen, I haven't been very active on Tug & Tram Blogging for a while. I'm sorry folks, life has gotten a bit hectic recently. I have said in the past that real life will have to take priority, but I still want to try and write regularly. I guess that's the perfectionist in me showing.

All right, I'd like this post to not be 100% negative, so let me talk about what's going on in my life.

Midterms & Spring Break

.... I'm off to a GREAT start aren't I? Well, as I'm sure you can predict, midterm week has kept me busy, which is why I haven't been able to write a lot.

Funnily enough, despite it being midterm week, I haven't had any midterms yet. Which is a blessing and a curse, because both of my midterms (that I know of) are on the Monday... that we come back from break.......

Yay.

In all seriousness, I feel all right about the upcoming break. I'm going to a hockey game tonight with my Mom, and tomorrow I'm hoping to go to the Essenhaus Model Train show tomorrow and hang out with my best friend and his brother. It's an unofficial tradition that we go together. So stay tuned, I might take some photos for the blog (that's a blogging thing to do, right?)

So speaking of the weekend (and as I mentioned earlier) it's almost Spring Break!! You read that right. My college has a really early spring break, which, again, is a blessing and a curse.

My current plans for the break are to

A) Work on homework
2) Try and get some time in to write (in particular for Lady Luck, which will hopefully include some research)
Banana) Not lose my mind and
Penguin) try and do some networking.

Nothing says serious net-worker like that listing, right? 😛

I'm not sure how much writing or networking I will get done this break (as always, homework has to be the priority) but I'm sure I can manage to get some time in.

All right, onto the next topic.

Occasional Express Blog

So for those who've been following my blog for a while, you know that I created a second blog to act as a train related news source, just for fun. (And hopefully I can use it as a reference for a future job, if I decide to go into journalism).

If you're curious, you can find my secondary blog here.

So far posts have been pretty popular, though I do need to be careful not to get stuck into the numbers game. I will say that I have learned a fair bit about how time consuming writing articles is, and gained some experience interviewing people and asking questions via email.

When I was super stressed a few weeks back (part of the reason why I wasn't writing in a while) I considered dropping the Occasional Express. However, I have decided I will persevere and not abandon it, though I will make sure not to pressure myself too much to work on it. I recently wrote an article about the retiring of an excursion locomotive, which you can read here if you're interested.

Avatar: The Last Airbender Reaction

My last topic is on a show I've finally gotten the chance to watch. Me and my friend Jacob have been watching it on the occasional evening we both are free. So far we've made it into Book 2 and are almost done.

I have heard a lot about this show, and Avatar has certainly lived up to the hype. I love all the characters, the animation style, it's just, magnificent. I in particular love the comedic moments with Momo, the flying lemur and seeing Aang's character development over the two seasons.

Can I really add anything else to what has been said by the army of fans? Not at the moment. I will say that I started watching Avatar at the right time.

As I was planning to write in an earlier post (before life got a little too chaotic) I've been struggling with my own world building (in a term I dubbed "over worldbuilding") where I basically overthink my worlds and forget to focus on characters. I was also feeling very burnt out and didn't have any motivation to create.

Avatar has helped me relax and shut my brain off from my real life concerns and given me an excuse to hang out with a friend, which is a double bonus. On top of that, I have felt re-inspired to get back into writing. I'm not sure what that means yet, but I do know that I'm not out of the game yet. I might try and write some short stories, and visit one I worked on Freshman year of college but haven't finished. I will also continue and try to get "Ticket to a Wrong Time" published somewhere. But that's a post for another day.

Final thought: It's hard to hear Uncle Iroh and not hear Aku from Samurai Jack, since they were both voiced by the legendary Mako (Rest in Peace Mako).

All right, that's all from me for now. I'll try and get back into the habit of writing weekly once again, and I want to say thank you for those who've stuck around. I really appreciate it. Thanks once again, and I'll see you on the tramway.