Costume Ball

This weekend was slightly different than the other weekends of being here at Harlaxton.  Most people were here, about 100 of the students, and we had an actual normal week of classes - five whole days! I spent the week running around getting things ready for the Costume Ball that was organized by the six RAs.  Along with having a dinner and a dance, the Costume Ball is done to raise money for a charity chosen by the RAs. This year we decided to sponsor Make-A-Wish UK. We also decided to change the way we raised the money from all of the years past. We switched from having a date auction to raffling off a dinner with 3 candidates and a dance at the ball with another 3 candidates. Our goal was to raise 350 pounds, which we completely surpassed! We ended up having a final total of 450 pounds by last night! We were all really pleased with the results and extremely relieved that we could stop badgering people at meal times to donate money and buy raffle tickets.

All of the RAs with our dean and assistant dean of students.

We also had awesome results of our dinner winners who got to enjoy our fancy meal at an even fancier table. Our dance winners were hilarious as well because they opened the ball dancing the "waltz" (or something like it) to the song from Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire's Yule Ball. Our youngest manor inhabitants, my environmental science teacher's 2 year old and 8 year old, stole the show by dancing with one of my old roommate's, who was dressed as a bunch of grapes.

We were really proud of our board, even though it wasn't updated to our final tally.

The rest of the night was an extreme success having the ball in the Great Hall with a DJ who brought cool lights that completely changed the look of the manor. It definitely looked like something out of Hogwarts! We danced for hours to music from all kinds of decades and enjoyed everyone's costumes. We had a huge range of outfits which was really fun. By midnight, everyone was exhausted and were asleep. When my fellow RA Caylin and I did our rounds for the evening, the manor was completely silent. It was actually kind of eerie.

Me with Rebekah and Sarah (and Collin as a unicorn).

Other than that, the weekend has been spent finishing up all my homework for the rest of the semester. I'm officially done with everything except my final art project and two final tests. I'll be home in 2 1/2 weeks which is crazy! Tomorrow, my family arrives (they arrived in London today) and so we'll adventure around the manor, Grantham, possibly Nottingham, see Harry Potter (finally!!) and who knows what else. After that I head to Scotland for the last weekend (my last trip!) to meet up with Maren and her friends! It should be really exciting! After that, last week of classes and finals! It's going to fly by!

P.S. My costume was originally an authentic hippie (leftover from Halloween) until I put on Caylin's HP glasses and everyone told me I looked like Prof. Trelawny from Harry Potter. I went with that the rest of the night!