Emily and the Flood

This morning we awoke to rain on an almost Biblical scale. It is absolutely chucking it down, bouncing off the pavements and generally causing chaos. There was a thunderstorm (tropical storm, more like) earlier as well, which was the real reason I woke up at all. I think this is only the second time I've seen any rain at all in Atlanta, so maybe it feels like it's got to make up all the lost opportunities. It did rain overnight the day before yesterday, and all the grass started to turn green again, like those quick-blooming plants that put out flowers for two days after it rains in the desert. Coach had been telling me that the winter weather here is very unpredictable, and I hadn't really believed him (it's been consistently very hot), but this is almost like being back in Edinburgh. 

Today is also SCAD Day, which is like an open day. They are trying to show off, so instead of our usual brunch food, the menu this morning included 'Spinach salad with cucumber, oranges, dried cranberries, corn and a champagne vinaigrette'. Champagne?? They have flashy prospectuses and t-shirts and all sorts going on, and some poor person dressed up as a bee wandering around. I never knew we had a mascot. That would have been a great thing to have at our home XC race!

On Thursday we had a pep rally. This was not something I had ever heard of before, but Wikipedia informs me that these are events, typically held for students before a sporting event to encourage school spirit and enthusiasm for the sporting season. Cheerleaders and bands are usually involved. We don't have cheerleaders or bands, so all the sports teams lined up outside the canteen, and walked through chucking t-shirts at the assembled non-sporty people while Glenn read off some of our achievements from the previous season. It was a slightly mystifying experience, not least because of how crazy some of the audience were going. We wished we'd got to keep the t-shirts instead. 

Yesterday we had a local fashion designer, Megan Huntz, come in and speak to us. She was really interesting; she spoke about what is known as 'Slow Fashion', which really means a focus on working locally, to help boost the local talent and creativity of a place, and to minimalise environmental impacts. Her collection was really nice, and she is obviously very talented, but I can't help but feel that trying to do something pretty high-fashion in Atlanta, which is not really known for that sort of thing, and working in a way that means your costs and prices are going to be high, means that your business and brand are going to grow very, very slowly. And environmentalism and working locally are very fashionable in many ways currently, but who knows how long that will continue to be a selling point? She spoke about how she was committed to very high standards of craftsmanship, and wanted to create pieces that women could hand down as heirlooms to their daughters, but while her creations are very beautiful, they're also very modern, and probably are not the sort of things people will be wanting to wear in 20 or 40 years' time.

Back on the track

I've been back here about a week, and there isn't that much to report. Today is Martin Luther King day, something of an American bank holiday. The weather cannot decided what it's about. The very first day I was back it was genuinely chilly, but since then it's gone back to being the 25-degrees and sticky sort of Atlanta weather I remembered from the Autumn. It feels like it needs to thunderstorm, but of course it doesn't even rain. All the grass has died off since I left as well, so now everywhere looks parched. One of the guys said that we were in an official drought last term (which makes sense given the massive fires that happened in the north of the State just before we left), so maybe they've had a hosepipe ban or something.

Running in the heat is a massive slog; I'd just about got used to the British cold and now I'm going to have to re-acclimatize to this. At least we're racing indoors at first. All the Atlanta locals think we're mad. I was chatting to Greta yesterday, and she's come back from massive snow in Colorado and thinks wearing shorts and flip-flops is totally normal, but all the Atlanta people are in jeans and jackets! I don't know how they don't melt! They even have an ice rink in Atlantic Station!

I must confess I haven't really been taking pictures. Coming back late into term, I've been quite busy catching up with school. One of my courses is basically painting, and I'm a really slow painter, so that's taken a while. My new drawing project is slow going as well- I've done a bit more than the one in the picture, but it's all got to be done with 'linear mark making', rather than shading (although we're using black ink pens, so shading isn't possible anyway) and it takes FOREVER. At least it looks nice. So the only photos I have from the last week are selfies the boyfriend sent me, and they don't really match my college goings-on.

I have a new person to share a room with, which is all right, although I think we would have both been happier if we'd have known about it beforehand. She keeps some very strange hours; coming in at 3am, or even 7am and then sleeping all day. It wakes me up, which I freely admit I resent. I don't know why we have to share rooms, or who on earth decided that was a normal way for people to live.

They're having an open call for models for the end of term fashion show currently as well. The minimum height for a girl? 5 foot 7. The maximum height for an Emily? 5 foot 5. I am really not happy about that. Curse my short genes. Compared to a lot of the girls around here I think I'm taller than average anyway (they're very short), so God knows where they'll get enough tall people from. The most annoying bit of the whole thing is that the blokes only have to be 5 foot 10, which isn't even that tall!