What do you "assign" to the Shire?

[Orominuialwen]

I second JennyHallu's assignment of glasses. I just got mine on Tuesday and the increased ability to see and decreased headaches are wonderful.

I also second tgwbs' assignment of Latin. It's such a beautiful language and it's just wonderful to sing in. Plus, it can make even mundane things like Madison, Wisconsin seem special by turning them into Madisonenis, Wisconsinenis. (At least I think that's what it was.)

Spelunking. It seems like something Hobbits would enjoy and it's immense fun when the grey sweatshirt and blue pants you wore into the cave come out mud brown and soaking wet.

Robotics competitions. Even when your robot is less than great (it placed 29th out of 34 teams) it's enormous fun. There are silly things, like when all the teams' mascots, including two martians (one with two heads!), a penguin, a knight, a yeti, an apple , and a badger (from my team!) did the Electric Slide. There are exciting things, like winning matches (admittedly, very few of ours). And then there's the amazing feeling of elation that comes from winning the second highest award possible in the regional competition (the Engineering Inspiration Award) which qualifies your team for Nationals (for the second time in the three years the team has been around) and running on to the field to get high fives from all the judges and medals from the referees while waving your team's giant flag. being optimistic enough to think that everything will work out just fine to go to Nationals, even though it means you have about a month to raise somewhere between six and ten thousand dollars (robotics is really expensive), you have to have all of your stuff moved out of your building at the earliest possible date because there's another (paying) ternant for it, so there's no place for your team to work, and your robot is absolutely awful and only really worked when you disabled its one major function (it was actually much better then). I'm completely on cloud nine at the moment because I'm so excited about everything.