Editor's Camp

     At Thurston we have this wonderful department that we lovingly call the Publications Department. I could go on for hours about this place... Room 140 is where life begins for some, where careers begin, dreams start and every so often come true...and the sickness takes over.

     I started in Yearbook my 6th grade year and I spent my three middle school years rubber cementing pictures to big layout pages, doing the one hour photo developments and spending hours upon hours getting high off the rubber cement while chatting away with friends after school.

     My sophomore year of high school I was recommended to take a Newswriting course by my literature teacher. I went in for an interview with the greatest man I've ever met - Saylor Smith.

     Toward the end of my sophomore year, Saylor urged all of us to apply for the Newspaper or the Yearbook staff. Thankfully I made it onto the Yearbook staff (seeing as how I'm NOT a writer) and I was recommended to be the Section Editor for the Clubs and Academics pages. I had no idea what I was doing...

     Around December the Juniors started putting in applications for the following year's Editor-In-Chief position. I wasn't too sure if I should apply or not but I gave it a chance anyway. I doubted that I would get it because I was new on staff and I didn't know very much. Well, I amazingly enough qualified for the position and my friend, Kim, and I are now the 2002-2003 Editors-In-Chief of the yearbook.

     Being Editor comes with obligations and responsibilities and going to Editor's Camp was one of them. While Kim and I spent nights in the ugliest dorm room you could ever imagine and practically fell asleep during our classes, we created our senior high yearbook.

     Before camp, Kim and I didn't communicate that much mainly because we both had different things going on at different times and it was hard to get together. Three days later, we walked away with our yearbook pretty much planned out.

     While we were there, we had two different projects to accomplish. The first of the two was to design our own personal layouts. We could choose any template, division page, people section, opening/closing page we wanted. Well Kim designed a club template and submitted it to get judged and I turned in about the ugliest sport template you will ever see in your lifetime (I'm not even joking...).

     Our second project was to design a miniature yearbook. All we had to do was create a cover which an artist would do (every school rep. had a meeting with an artist to design the cover) and make one layout for each person. That was simple enough - Kim and I could use the layout we already did and we would have our book done. But we got bored...

     People started flipping out about this project and didn't feel like they had enough time but Kim and I spent three and a half hours (which isn't actually that long to design a yearbook) going way beyond what was asked of us. We designed a title page, an opening and a closing, a student life division page and template, a club division page and template, an academics division page and template and a sports division page and template. We ended up with a 21-page miniature yearbook that is basically going to be turned into our yearbook.

     The last day we were there, we had an award ceremony. Kim and I didn't think we'd get anything but we wanted to stick around just in case. I'm glad we did. I guess the fact that the staff was up until 1am judging the layouts had something to do with the final outcome...

     We walked away from camp with our yearbook designed and $10 in our hands and I have to say that I am so excited to be creating my senior yearbook.

     I don't know if Saylor will every know how much he's helped me by giving me this opportunity but he's the one who made me believe that even the most impossible dreams really do come true.

Here's Jeff and...someone I don't know. I think her name is Amanda but she's from a different school and she was also a Newspaper Editor. I guess they were doing some homework or something cuz the poor Newspaper Editors had nothing but classes all day long (one day their schedule was 7:00am-8:00am Breakfast, 8:00am-12:00pm Class, 12:00pm-1:00pm Lunch, 1:00pm-5:00pm Class, 5:00pm-6:00pm Dinner - would that not suck??)

These are the two "Newspaper Geeks" Laura and Jeff. They are fun to hang out with - we had some good times. :)

There's the two "Newspaper Geeks" again but the one on the far right is my partner in crime, Kim. She's so much fun - we shared a crappy dorm room (I have a picture below...) and we became a pretty good team during camp. But anyway she's the other "Yearbook Nerd".

While we were at camp, Jeff found a love note from a secret admirer on his dorm room door. If you know Jeff, you'd find that pretty funny too... (He knows I'm joking...)

Here's a close-up of the note that Jeff found. If you can't read it, here's what it says:

Hey,               Room 207
I saw you in one of our classes and I thought you were cute.
I asked around to find your room number!
Well if you want to meet me & get to know me better come to room 426.
      l8er
    love: the hot babe upstairs

It's pretty funny - they were just down the hall from our dorm room so Laura went and saw what it was all about. Poor Jeff - it was just a joke. :(

Kim is strange sometimes... We were supposed to be down at the Memorial Union building to play pool and cosmic bowling and all that fun stuff but we decided to just ditch and go hang out in front of Cauthorn Hall (where our dorms were) and play around. Anyway, there were some Sheldon boys there and every time she said something about one of them, our little saying was "We have rings!" because both of our boyfriends gave us rings. :) You had to be there to find it funny...

The poor Newspaperians had homework to do almost every night we were there so I thought I'd take a picture to prove that these two didn't actually "skip"... She and Jeff decided that their camp was extremely boring so they ended up going to the movies and to a coffee shop and hanging out for a while instead of going to their last class of the day and an ice cream social afterwards - the staff didn't care where you were so they never got caught.

Laura told me that she hated taking pictures because they never turned out that great but I proved her wrong - I think this picture of her is cute. :) Kim and I were just distracting them from getting their "homework" done...

The very first night we were there, I layed down on my bed and I swear I couldn't move without waking up the entire floor...my bed was SO squeaky!! I was so afraid to move that I was hardly breathing and I was curled up against the wall. About 2 minutes later I rolled off my bed, stood up and pulled my mattress off the bed. Kim laughed at me but I'd rather be able to sleep comfortably and not make noise than not be able to breath all night long. Anyway this is about the wonderfulness of our room.

I'm not going to OSU mainly because I'm a Duck fan and the Beavers suck but these dorm rooms were the worst things in the world. You walk in and two beds are up against the wall (Kim's was in front of mine) and you have a little desk off to the right with a huge closet next to it, another little desk and a closet after that. What made it worse was that we were next to the creepy bathroom - every time you turned the lights on, the fan would make creepy noises. Other than the dorm rooms and the boring classes, camp was fun. :)

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