There's a girl in this computer lab with my name, and a bunch of people are all working on the same thing, and this one guy keeps calling her, and confusing me.
Only a week and a half of classes to go! I totally forgot about this, sounds kind of dumb, but time's been flying. Trying to keep track of a bunch of things at once--starting up my research project, not failing boring classes--no, actually, I have all A's except one AB, which is a make-believe grade they have here. So, not doing worse at boring classes. Wedding stuff, especially that damm directions page, preventing myself from going psycho on the creepy people that live in my apartment, and now, trying to figure out when the heck I'm going to get these driving lessons in. And getting my brain scanned.
The brain scan thing is some study thing in the psych department. I might get 50$ for sitting in a tube for two hours. Not too shabby. The only reason I say "might" is because the woman needs to interview me to see if I'm eligible, but the only thing the email said was grad students, and I think I'm somewhat healthy and normal, and I really hope I'll get it.
I want to blow 50$ on something tasty, and something else pretty for the apartment.
I want a picture of my brain.
I want to make grad students in perfectly clean lab coats (which means they don't use them) say "Dammit, brain 52-475B!".
In other words, I want to be a statistical outlier, a term I only pretend to understand when Jeremy throws it around before I change the topic to poo or comic strips. A statistical outlier basically means "a point on the graph that you wish you could delete." There's some fancy definition of it, but I get to work with BAZILLIONS of doodads at a time, not a few dozen like the psychologists do, so my statistic stuff nicely condenses to REAL information.
Jeremy signed up for one of these brain MRI things one time but didn't like the idea of sitting in a tube for a long time. But the only claustrophobia I've ever felt has been of the mental/emotional variety, so I kind of look forward to being all snug. After all, I've slept in the upper bunk bed in Dad's old camper, a space with the approximate dimensions and comfort of a ferret coffin.
So bring it on, wierd psychologist people. Bring it on.
I apologize for the recent sparseness of entries, I'm making up for it with the excessive richness of those darn driving directions pages. I really hope this thing works. My goal is for no one to have a single question about directions after looking over my info. We'll see.
One good thing was, Dan told me that one of the exits is currently screwy because one of the bridges got taken down and is getting rebuilt. I'm just glad I know in plenty of time so nothing gets messed up.
Classes going well. Weather was a little bit warmer today. Just a little bit. But then colder for the rest of the week, makes me want to cry. I'm not asking for much. Partly cloudy, low 60's (the average this time of year is 65). Something that isn't rain and sleet and low 40's. But I guess I'm just not that lucky, either it's 85 and marble sized hail is aiming at my head or it's 40 and graygraygray. According to Claire the midwest doesn't actually get a spring, which I'm starting to believe. It's cold and yukky, we get 1 week of mild temperatures, then it's hot and yukky. Where was this weather when I was expecting it in November? Poo.
This grumpiness is more coding-induced than anything. A little bit of HTML--changing something about the layout, adding something of a hobbyish nature--I really enjoy, but I'm tired of thinking about highway routes, one way roads, and I'm DEFINITELY tired of mapquest not giving me the information I ask it for. I'm starting to learn how unreliable it is. It's not terrible, but it's not great. It gives me nice pictures to draw on, though.
Worked some more on the directions page. I think now there's a page for people coming in from anywhere they could be coming in from, even if there aren't actually DIRECTIONS on the page. But I'm harassing all the people in charge of telling me how they get to Ithaca. It's coming together, though.
I just hope that I don't say left when I should say right and turn this into the Odyssey or something. (somewhat obscure Greek reference, Go look it up, I'm too lazy to find a link, sorry).
Most of today was spent either cleaning or absorbing Indian Culture. There's this guy in the Materials Science department that's a first year like me and Claire that's from South India, named Suri. He told us how there was this India culture thing today, with food and a concert, at the student union. So we went, and ate all kinds of tasty spicy food they had, and saw this really great concert with ALL different kinds of dancing and music and poety. Suri sat with me for the second half (he hung out with his friends the first half), and tried to explain what was going on in some of the skits. Even not knowing what he was talking about, I would've enjoyed just the music and how wonderful a job all of these students did, especially considering that they had all simply volunteered their time! But knowing some of the little detail things and hearing the translation of some of the jokes gave it more meaning.
Okay, it just took me about 4 1/2 hours to do, but I have a good chunk of the directions page done. Everything that's actually IN Ithaca is taken care of, I think-- even the delightfully hand-Windows Paint-drawn maps. And if you're coming in from Connecticut, directions to Ithaca have been done, including all maps involved. If you're coming in from the east, north, south, or airport, then you'll just have to wait until my sources of directions send the directions to me (J, Dan, grrrr...) ;) But check out what I have there so far, and if you're familiar with the area, fill me in on any errors or omissions I might have made--it's totally possible that there are many.
That's it for now, it's late and all that mapping has me too drained to be entertaining. If you need amusement, and not directions to the wedding, just use your warped twisted little mind to play with this, this,this, or this.
A 22 year old woman should not be jumping around all excited because she got her driving learner's permit.
But I am.
And I did.
It doesn't mean that I plan on liking to drive--I think I'm a pretty good passenger (good at working the radio, can keep up my end of conversation), and my previous driving experiences have involved a lot of screaming, crying, and swearing on everyone's part. No good reason to skip out on this good thing I got going.
It's just that I know it'd be nice to run to the grocery store at 12:07, instead of missing the bus at 12:05 and waiting around for an hour.
And, it'd be nice for me to be able to take over some of the driving for J as we drive back from the honeymoon. Cape Cod to Wisconsin is a long way for one person to take over. This way I can at least contribute a half hour here and there.
I need 30 hours of driving time before they give me the real licence. I'm going to take a few hours with one of the local driving schools before the wedding, but I don't think I'll be totally done in time. But then J and the Baube-mobile will be here, so I'll be able to practice with him. That's one of the advantages of doing this as a (semi) grownup, all of my friends are people over the age of 21 with licences and cars who have offered to help me learn to drive. Rock!
That's it about that. My mom gave me the driving directions to Ithaca from that direction, I still need to hear from a few people, but that information will be on the Wedding page soon enough.
I got an A+ on a test that I took last Friday. I'm quite happy with it. I think it has more to do with everyone else really stinking, though, since I got an 83, which was the high score. If you got a 40, you still had a B-. Still, I felt pretty good considering the class is on a topic that I didn't know anything about to begin with: phase transformations in metals. Basically, it centers around the belief that things like this have lots and lots of meaning. But at least I get it. Whoo-hoo!
I had a very strange dream last night, involving extra bunnies and cubic dogs showing up in me and Jeremy's apartment next year. It seemed that we owned a bunny, who lived in a cage. Suddenly, she was popping out baby bunnies and a big white guy (bunny guy) was chilling on the carpet, along with one tiny normal-looking dog and one tiny dog that was a perfect furry cube, except for his floppy ears that hung over the side of the cube that his face was on. I woke up pretty confused.
Maybe it has to do with the fact that I found out last night that Dan has a new puppy, but I don't know anything about what it's like, and I want to make sure that Jessie gets along with her new sibling all right.
I just took yet another one of those website quiz things, only this one isn't so much "If you were an ice cream, you'd be chocolate chip!", with a nice little poster to put up here. It's a Personality Disorder Test, I don't think it's something a shrink would use, but it's still interesting to play with. Apparently I'm mildly schizophrenic, and moderately histrionic, the combination of which seems to say (according to the website), that I'm an attention seeker, and yet I make no sense to others. Hmm... considering the fact that I write on this thing every day just so the couple of people that look at the page know what's going on with me, and the fact that yesterday I spent the whole entry talking about how I make no sense, I guess that makes sense.
How many people look at this every day? Well, I know there's a counter at the bottom of this page, but if I checked it that way every day I'd be inflating the numbers like crazy. There's a little thing for me to check the number of visitors in the webpage editing area. It's usually somewheres between 5 and 15 people, a few more on weekends, a few less just at random times. At least, I've been hearing fewer complaints about angelfire not letting people load the page, that was a major ass-pain for the first few weeks.
I think I mentioned a while back that I taught a mini-lesson in my engineering teaching class. The teacher took video of everyone's lesson, and we're supposed to review the video and give our impressions of what we did well and what we could have done better. Easy enough.
Easy enough, if I had a VCR, that is.
Luckily there's a whole wallfull of VCR's in one of the libraries, which I only had to visit 3 libraries to track down. And then I had to figure out how to operate it, since this particular setup consisted of a VCR, some kind of multimedia sender/reciever thingie, full computer, and a TV. Once I figured out how to operate it, I managed to put my earphones in the wrong earphone plug (there were no less than 4 places they could have gone), and watched half of my lesson without any sound before I noticed a little set of sound indicator lights on the excessively technologically complicated multimedia thingie. Then I actually got to get the full experience of my teaching.
Dear Lord, am I spastic! (the Lord replies, "Yes you are, my child. Sorry 'bout that.") Granted, I was trying to describe three dimensional polymer structures, so I needed to indicate what things really looked like, but my arms wave wildly about 3/4 of the time that I'm teaching. I noticed that I no longer say "like" excessively, but "you know" and "I mean" have viciously taken its place. It's strange, that I enjoy teaching so much, and people seem to agree that I'm pretty good at it, and yet speaking in a clear logical way really isn't my strong suit. I forget simple words, and if I DON'T say "you know", there are long random pauses where I look off to one side and squint. I forget the point to stories I'm telling until an hour after I've stopped talking to that person. It's funny, too, because my writing style tends to be very relaxed and conversational.
It's just my actual conversational-ness that isn't conversational.
Maybe that's why I DO write pretty well in an informal way: I get to take my time and say things the way I'd say them if I could talk like a normal person. If I just read this entry out loud, I like to think that I'd probably sound like a calm, funny, articulate, intelligent person. If I told you about the exact same things that I just did, but was sitting across from you at a coffee shop and speaking instead of sitting god-know-how far from you in a computer lab and typing, I'd be a total spaz.
Maybe I should just go mute. Walk around with little notecards and a pen.
Oh, wait, my handwriting stinks too. Whoops.
And, by the way, I do realize that my writing has been quite clunky today, just because I'm thinking about it too much now that I'm talking about writing. Kinda like trying to think about tying your shoelaces, or looking at a word for 10 minutes until it doesn't look like it means anything anymore.
So, last night I made a nice pasta dish for dinner--cooked some raviolis and sauteed a mess of thinly sliced green peppers and mushrooms. Put a bunch of romano cheese on top, add a nice salad and a toasted slice of rosemary bread, and mmmm. 'Twas very tasty. One thing was, though, the smell of the peppers reminded me of grampa P_ (the Italian side grampa, for those of you that don't know). Strange how smells can do that to you, huh? Grampa had a big garden in the backyard in the summers, mostly tomatoes and peppers. He'd go out in the back and pick as many peppers as were ripe (a good sized stock pot in mid-summer), and cook them until the volume had been cut in 10 and all that was left was small floppy grayish-green things. So yummy though, although I didn't like peppers when I was little.
The whole house would smell good.
Okay, that's the Random Memory Of the Day. Time for leftovers.
Evil, evil weather. I was wearing shorts and a tank top and I was still hot last Thursday. Yesterday, only 3 days later? Snow and sleet. SNOW AND SLEET. Crazycrazycrazy.
I'm working on getting driving directions from all over the place to Ithaca onto the wedding page. Just emailed people with experience coming in from all directions to ask how they do it. Should be up soon. That, and driving directions for places within town. And more random wedding information. And the pictures I scanned in this weekend. Egad! Busy busy busy. May not be writing a whole lot here the next couple of days, but I'll be working on the site, believe me. Maybe just a note or two about what I've gotten up.
Bleah, wedding wedding wedding. It's definitely too late to elope to Vegas, I think. Which is unfortunate, since I've gotten 10 emails about wedding detailey things just today so far, I think I've sent at least twice that many, and it would be quite easy to write one to everyone in my address book saying "Go ahead and come to Ithaca, eat the food, go on the boatride, and have a good time. We're going to Cancun." Heehee.
It's nothing bad though, like I said, just little sniggly things that trip me up. I'm only good with details when I'm working in the dining hall.
I was supposed to be spending the last two hours looking for a research paper that I'll need to do the next step of my synthesis, but all of this got in the way, so I'm just mildly grumpy. Give me another week, maybe, when things will be a lot more cleared up, and I'll be (comparitively) normal. Bleah. Again.
Later:
Several days of entries and the whole bottom half of the index page seems to have disappeared. Hrm. Doesn't SEEM like something I'd be stupid enough to do....oh well, I fixed it. Sucks, though.
And I just calmed myself by playing around with the photo album. Now there are two pages of family pictures, because the first page was getting a little bit leggy. And some new pictures on both pages. I particularly like the one of Becca making that Tales from the Crypt face (currently on the bottom of the More Family page). I'm sure that's one of those ones that she'll be SO embarrased about once she hits puberty. But now, I'll bet she'd still think it was funny.
AHHH!!! The computer was being stupid, and so I cut and copied the long entry I'd just done, and then closed the program and restarted it again and pasted and it didn't paste! Dirty microsoft bastards. So sorry this is short, it was longer. Now it's just less funny, although the information is still there. How come the computer does this just as I'm about to save stuff? Grr.
So, I went to the mall today and bought the last couple of things I needed to be fully dressed at the wedding--shoes and underthings.
This is what Steve from Blue's Clues is doing now. (got this from Jon-Jon.)
Grr. That sucked.
Heehaahoo.
Speaking of kids, I did a pretty cool diversity awareness thing with 5th grade kids at a local elementary school today. It was through the LGBT resource center here, although we were basically just saying "people are different, be nice to them." I don't know if they were really into and will think about what they say in the future, but maybe one or two of them will take something genuine away with them. Or maybe for those couple of kids that try to treat everyone equally to begin with, they'll have some more ideas about ways to help others.
One of the kind of strange/sad things: We went to three different classes. The first two classes, I got the feeling that so long as we weren't swearing or teaching them explicit racial slurs, we could pretty much say whatever. And with those two classes, one of the things we talked about was the phrase "that's so gay", how gay is talking about a group of people and how saying that can hurt someone that IS gay. One of the kids in one of those classes asked what gay was (because she looked it up and it said "happy", of course), so I said what my mom told me that I've since come to appreciate as being a relaxed and non-scary way of saying it: that some boys have boyfriends and some girls have girlfriends, and many of those people call themselves "gay"--big whoop. Just demystifies and de-scaries it.
In the third class though, one of the kids asked what "heterosexual" was, because the girl that was heading the training said that word, and the science teacher was sitting off to one side of the room, violently shaking her head no at us. Then she said to the class, "You guys will be learning about all that in a couple of weeks. Don't worry about it for now."
Of course, the next five minutes were spent with us talking to 25 eleven year olds that were wondering what the heck could be so interesting and forbidden that the science teacher wouldn't let us talk about it. And when we talked about the phrase "that's so gay", we couldn't say what gay WAS after the teacher's admonition, and talking to the kids about it, they really thought the word meant "bad" or "stupid" and nothing else, so us saying that one of us could be gay and they wouldn't know it didn't really mean anything to them. "One of those speakers is stupid and says so?" That's what they ended up thinking, because a teacher thought that telling fifth graders that some girls have girlfriends was so controversial. I worry about the kids in that school that ARE gay, y'know? There we were talking about how Native Americans and Hispanic people have done good things for this country in the last 100 years, too, and how important it is for everyone to feel like they have a place in the world.
Ten percent of the kids in that school probably don't feel like that.
Later:
J said that the entry above makes me sound extremely homosexual. Maybe I'll write something here some other time about what being a straight ally and gender-screwy means to me, for those of you that haven't heard my shpiel at some point. That'll be a long one, though. And I didn't change anything about what I said just 'cause it does sound kinda lezzie, I guess. If talking about empathizing with kids that feel alone is a lezzie emotion. Hell, I got enough crap in high school that, whatever, I DID experience homophobia, y'know? And, at the time, felt like having a boyfriend would "prove" something (even though I never had one anyway), which isn't much different than a lot of gay kids OR straight kids. And I flirt like a succubus or something with all of my gay boys, and no one else, really--so yes, I am a gay man trapped in a woman's body. Except, I can't dance. At least not like that girl in that Mitsubishi commercial.
Busybusy Goodgood.
Talked to my advisor about tons of random stuff, and everything is pretty well stabilized now. Like, I actually know what I'm going to be doing for the next 1 or 3 or 4 or 5 years.
I'll be... I'll be, umm... playing with cells, some crap like that. No, really, it's actually really cool, I'm just too much of a newbie to explain it well. Once I get a little farther into it, I'll tell you all about it, and what I'm doing with it, just in a way so that some random person from some random university couldn't just publish what I say and claim that they did it.
That would suck.
That kind of thing could happen. I've heard horror stories.
Speaking of horror stories, I get to play with known carcinogens this weekend! Whee! Granted, there are probably dangers in ANY work environment, from smelling Xerox toner to lifting heavy boxes, and in labs at least the bad things the stuff in the bottles can do to you is right on the label. Sometimes the labels are even excessive: NaCl, table salt, is sitting in my lab right now, very pure. On the label it says Irritant. So if salt is an irritant, you know that just about everything is. I don't think that the water has any labels on it. "Do Not Inhale Liquid Directly In Large Quantities", perhaps, if they wanted to be extra careful.
Despite all these safety precautions, however, every once in a while I happen to read one of the bottles of something I'm cooking while I'm waiting for the solvent to heat up, and then I think "Whoops, there goes my fertility."
The visit from the family was good. We just walked around campus, got ice cream, and watched 5 male ducks chase after each other, peck at one another violently, wave their wings, and just generally bicker over the one lady swimming nearby.
She didn't seem particularly interested in their shenanigans.
It was nice to show them around, now they have a mental picture of where I am and what I'm doing.
Besides that, went to classes, finished the first step of my synthesis, have some homework to complete tonight, and general busyness. I remembered today that I'm supposed to give a shpiel about being a Straight Ally to middleschoolers on Friday morning. So I gotta write that up too. Nothing that will make me cry, but enough to keep me busy.
I went into the computer lab today and saw a few of the undergrads looking at their completed schedules for next semester online. "That's strange," I thought to myself, "grad students usually get to pick out their classes first." So I looked at the email that I got a few weeks ago about my classes.
"Dear T__:Note the date. Whoops. Doesn't mean I won't get any classes, because most of my classes are upper level classes that I could probably get into in September, but no one had mentioned them, so I hadn't even thought of it. Will have to talk to my advisor about what to take though, since I have no more required classes.
Blah, blah, blah.
here's how to sign up for classes,
blah blah blah,
signup time April 8th, at 11am.
Sincerely,
YF Registrar
The test went all right, I think. I'm not positive about how other people did, but I was very confident about 80% of the material, and halfway confident on the other 20%. I was at least on the right track with everything. It's really nice to decompress by playing around with the website, just adding little doodads here and there. Ahhh, html. So, there's a couple of old (but new to you) pictures of the girls on the Picture page, some random updates on the links page, and I'm very slowly working on a couple of things that will be coming soon to a computer near you!
Oh! so, the night before last, I sit down with all my books, ready to start my homework, and I hear the smoke alarm outside my door in the hallway go off.
I look out.
I neither smell nor see any smoke.
The alarm then stops.
I walk back into my room, figuring maybe some ladybug flew into a circuit and set off a false alarm or something. So I go to start this homework.
The alarm goes off again.
"Hmm," I say, "maybe I should go downstairs just to make sure everything's all right." Good thing I did.
SMOKE! Billowing out of the oven in the kitchen! By the time I got there, J-Ro and another guy that lives in the building were opening the windows and fanning out the oven. J-Ro was the first person to realize what was going on because her room's right above the kitchen, so the smoke practically knocked on her door to say hello.
J-Ro peeped into the oven.
"I think someone put a candle or something in here," she said. "There's some kind of purple drippy stuff."
A few more people in the house joined our party, as we opened every door and window in the common-area hallways that weren't painted shut. By this time, the oven (which had been set to broil) had cooled down enough that we could inspect what the hell was going on in the oven.
The "purple drippy stuff"? Hard plastic, the type of plastic that plates and bowls are sometimes made out of.
More evidence: a single piece of bacon balancing on the top rack.
SOME IDIOT PUT A PLASTIC PLATE INTO AN OVEN AND SET IT TO BROIL.
The whole house smelled like burnt plastic for about 24 hours. During this whole escapade of running around, calling the landlord, swearing, and then all relaxing and telling stories, no one came down into the kitchen to check on their bacon.
Maybe I'll start sleeping with one ear and nostril open. The good news? The smoke alarms in the house work better than my nose does.
Hey, it's a start.
More good news, in a backhanded kind of way:
There's a guy that lives on my floor that knows way more about all the comings and goings of the house than me. Apparently, the crazy people next door will get kicked out of the apartment if the police get called on them again. I hadn't even known the police had gotten called ONCE, but they have, several times, apparently. Maybe they'll be gone soon, to some other place where they can melt plasticware in ovens (purely circumstancial evidence, but J-Ro says she smells bacon every morning and when she goes down to leave for class, it's always them).
Oy friggin' vey.
I finally set up the phone that J and I got for a shower present. For some reason there wasn't a real user booklet, just the warranty information, so I just pushed random buttons until I figured out how to leave an outgoing message. Only after I left the outgoing message, I had some trouble figuring out how to END the outgoing message. When I hit the right button and it played back, I heard this:
Me: (sounding particularly New Yawk-y for some reason)Hi, this's T at 123-4567, leave yer name an' number at da beep....(pause, blips from wrong keys) Aw, HELL no..(another pause, then a genuine) BEEP!"When I went to school in Ithaca, I came home one break to a message I'd left on my mom's answering machine where I sounded like a perfect young lady from Rochester (very round vowels). For some reason, now that I'm in the Midwest, where the accent's even more obvious (yes, I've met people that sound like they're in Fargo) has turned me ghetto *singing* faa-bu-lous!
And really gay, apparently. But I'm nobody's hag here, so maybe that's an additional problem. So, great. I'm turning into Frank.
Although I don't think there's anyone that visits here regularly that knows who Frank is. Oh well. Gay Jersey scum. ;)
Have a potentially painful test on Friday so I may not write tomorrow (or I may write tons tomorrow if I'm avoiding studying or magically understand it all).
Today is frikin' rad. I actually walked to class in a tank top! Whoo! Sun!
Mostly, though, today is dominated by the fact that I'm really looking forward to seeing Dad and Jan and the girls next week. It's Kate and Beck's spring break, so they're going on a road trip, visiting Jan's sister in Minnesota for most of the week and spending a night here on the way back.
But first....studying. And tax-ing. And some other mysterious activities.
Ahhh... 'twas beauteeful outside today. Sunny and low 50's. So bright I couldn't see for awhile. I feel like Spring Explosion will be happening soon. A little more rain, a few more sunny warmish days, and suddenly everything'll be green and we won't be able to remember how crappy the world looks in the winter.
Today: went to class, had lunch, did homework, went to class some more. Laying out in the sun has not yet happened, but sitting on my front porch to eat dinner very well may happen. Got the wedding ceremony music stuff figured out, more or less, via emails. And my email Inbox is finally empty! I always leave stuff in the Inbox until I've done what was requested or responded to the email (unless it's a forward or some other stupidity, or I talked to you on the phone to answer your question). It's been quite a while since the box was completely empty. The first couple days after I got back from spring break there were 15-20 things in there. Feels so good, it's like having a long to do list and seeing everything crossed off.
Oh, and there was ONE thing that happened yesterday that I neglected to mention in the boringness. It was more of a boring mood day than an actual boring day--something about a rainy Monday that just kills any enthusiasm for anything. The only thing to rile me up was, I was walking to class, and a bus goes by, and I swear, it was like a Marx Brothers movie or something, I got hit with gross muddyass water. Head to toe. Mouth too.
Thanks, M. Busdriver.
Time to wash the coat. It'll be getting put into retirement for the springtime pretty soon anyhow, so I bet it needs it.
Not much happening today, here's a few links and random entertaining things.
Here's a quote I meant to write about awhile ago, from Dan, upon finding out that one of the places that mom, gramma and I had planned on looking at dresses was a store that includes consignment dresses:
"You can't get someone ELSE'S wedding dress. All of its happiness has already been sucked out."The Museum of Menstruation has kept me occupied and entertained the last couple of days.
I found THAT website through The Disgruntled Housewife, which is also highly entertaining.
This makes me laugh hysterically for some reason.
My Sunday typically goes like this: I wake up around 10, have a nice relaxing breakfast with an extra muffin, donut, or bagel, and at 11, I do my dishes for the week (I rinse them off, but yes, I only do dishes once a week) while listening to This American Life, my favorite show on NPR. It makes the dishwashing a little bit easier to be laughing and crying simultaneously with a sponge in your hand.
This week they spent the whole hour talking to a guy that was a pimp in the 70's and talking about his experiences with other pimps and hos at that time. It was totally surreal--pimping actually existed? Not only that, but existed the way that people joke about with the big purple hats and all that stuff? Jeebuz. Now all just have random pimping phrases running through my head, like "damn, bitch, gimme my money before I beat you down," that sort of thing. Only the idea that people actually talked like this, ever, makes those phrases way less funny.
Change yer clocks!
Got an ungodly early start this morning with J-Ro and her sister-in-law, we went to a rummage sale at a local church that was supporting their day care center. Unfortunately, most of the stuff looked like the kind of material that had been picked over at previous rummage and garage sales. Except for some stuff that must have been the daycare's older furniture and toys--impossibly tiny chairs, desks that in another context I would've misinterpreted as coffee tables, and a big pile of toys that made me nostalgic. I almost bought that pushy-suction cupped plastic-encased merry go round thing 'cause it was just so darn cute, but a 3 year old child was using it and there was no way I was going to take it away from him just so it could take up space in my room. Side note: I just unsucessfully looked for a picture of it, but Fisher Price doesn't appear to make it any more and I was too vague for EBay.
Cleaned the house today, the weather was quite warm (sunny, upper 40's), so I was able to air out the place and sweep all the dusty clumps out the door onto the porch. I tried to do this a few months ago and my room was cold for the next few hours. I'm looking forward to days warm enough so I don't need my coat--heck, I'd be excited to not need my HAT during a 24 hour period.
After a semi-productive day, J-Ro and I went to a poetry slam at a local bookstore. I had high hopes--this store is always so beautifully set up that I start drooling--but the event wasn't as organized as it could have been. It largely consisted of high school aged kids saying "C'mon, guys, doesn't anyone have anything that they want to read? What, you ALL came here just to listen?" Well, most of us had, and the three or four people that had stuff prepared were very young and just full of angsty love. When they realized that no one else was there to read and pulled out a sheet of paper ("Let's make a poem together, everyone!") me and J-Ro skipped out of there. My overwhelming feeling was that of, gosh, I remember being in that place. These kids, their poems were cliches of the WORST kind--seriously, lines like "minutes without you seem like forever". But, they were so earnest about their work, because they didn't KNOW that these things were cliches, because it's all new to them. It's so strange, I thought that I looked back at that part of my life and remembered what it was like fairly accurately. But there was someting about seeing the world that was my "group" in high school again: the colorfully-haired, the pierced, the queer, the queer-and-not-out-yet, the funkily dressed, the shaggy-haired angry boys, and the rest of the freaks. It made me remember that teenaged feeling a little bit better.
And boy, am I glad to have enough distance from it to need a bunch of gawky 15 year olds to remember it.
This feeling of grateful nostalgia is probably just as bad a cliche as getting all crazy about hand-holding, but what the hey--it's new to me.
I've been spending too darn much time playing on the computers the last couple of days. Don't know why, I'm just wandering around Computerland while I'm trying to think of things to say, and I look up and 3 hours went by. Whoops. I've been getting my homework and random errands done, though, so it's not THAT bad, and I haven't been playing any computer games, which suck time even worse. And I have an excuse right now, I'm waiting for hotmail to wake up again. I've been getting error messages all afternoon, saying that the computer that holds all my information is screwy. Poo.
In fact, today was a troubleshooting type of day--why isn't my hotmail working? Oh well, it mysteriously came back as quickly as it left, so I guess I don't have to worry about that.
Why didn't my alarm go off today? Maybe I just turned it off without waking up: it's happened before.
Where's the stuff in my new (to me) lab that I need? I'll find out Monday when one of the 2 grad students in there isn't running around like a crazy child (which she always is, she's worse than I was at IC).
How come my frick-napbing NMR homework isn't working right, after starting from scratch twice? Time to track down the TA's and the prof (over four hours on a "less than 90 minute" homework).
How come it's wicked late and I'm still typing? I don't know. And I'm supposed to go to a flea market at 8am sharp tomorrow morning with J-Ro and her sister in law. Bleah. Bleah about the time of morning, not the activity or company. Maybe I'll sleep in anyhow--the flea market's supposed to go until the afternoon, anyhow, they just wanted to get there while all of the junk is still fresh looking. I'll let you know how it goes.
Oh, one last thing. I'm in the computer lab at the moment, and there's a pen that someone left behind. Having a parent that works for doctors and therefore has notepads and pens throughout the house advertising various and sundry new prescription medicines, it's not the fact that it's for some drug called Norvasc that's surprising, it's the fact that it's one of those chotchki novelty pens you usually see advertising a cruise ride around the Statue of Liberty, with the Liberty Ship being able to float back and forth between the picture of Lady Liberty and the city. Only instead of a boat or a car (or according to floaty.com, a dress, pair of boxers, or Guardian Angel) it has a floating pill of Norvasc. I guess this is supposed to reinforce the fact that it's supposed to clear your veins. I guessed this from the floaty pen and the word "vasc" before I even looked it up. Those drug companies, they're not too dumb.
Yes, yes, I know that "chotchky" is not a real word. [UPDATE: I get more people looking for chotchkies on Google and finding me than anything else, so maybe I should make myself useful here. I've since found that it's spelled tchotchke, and you can find a more formal definition by going to the Merriam-Webster online dictionary. You're welcome.] Neither, for that matter, it "frick" or "napbing". I looked up "chotchky" up on my super-reliable online dictionary, but the closest it got was "Chukchi", an Arctic Sea in Russia. And, actually, it does have an entry for "Frick", being the richass industrialist who left his entire city-block-containing house as an art museum in NYC (as if NYC didn't have enough art museums to begin with). In fact, I'm almost positive that Jeremy pointed this place out to me when I visited him in the city the semester he was there, as we walked to Central Park and the Museum of Natural History--the only thing I can really remember about the place was a door set roughly five feet above the ground, with no stairs or porch or anything leading to the sidewalk below. I think we'd decided that this door was the "industrialist's charity" door--the Frick family could throw their leftover dinner or spare change out into the teeming masses without the teeming masses being able to get too close.
An interesting tangent, there, but I still don't know how to spell "chotchki".
I suspect it's one of those Yiddish and/or Italian phrases that my mom picked up somewhere along the way and made it her own by mispronunciation, and I don't know any better, having occasionally heard the word my whole life.
And yes, I really do think that the dictionary site is super. There's this silly online game that I play and every once in awhile it'll come up with this crazy random word that I've never heard of, and I look it up. So I can pretend like I'm learning something, while I chat with the other players about having to pee.
Some alterations on the Wedding page, namely, a whole lot of information about all of the exciting things that Ithaca has to offer, if all the dancing, cruising, and ceremony-ing doesn't tire you out. Because it really does look like a whole lot of scenic nothing when you first get there. But there's so many college students that there's a lot stuff to do when you go searching (Ithaca wasn't named for the Odyssey but is actually Iriquois for "Land of Disposable Income"). Of course, there are lots of inexpensive-to-free things available as well.
I've just found the scariest damn page I've ever seen. I would laugh at the scientific inconsistencies if it weren't for the fact that they're being used to spread racism. As a chemist, I could disprove just about every statement about chemicals that he makes by doing a week's worth of research. Maybe 2 week's worth, if I actually did all the experiments, since he says so damn much. That is, if I wanted to go through the trouble to disprove facts to an idiot.
Nothing exciting today. Had a visit from the exterminator yesterday, I hope I won't get any more visits from my mousie friend. He gave me these really strange mousetraps--basically a piece of cardboard with some sticky tape on it. I guess they just run by and get stuck. Only then I'll have to throw away a sticky angry mouse. Blech. And I have to check the trap too, to make sure I don't end up with a sticky angry stinky rotting DEAD mouse. Even worse. Better that than a mouse munching on my boxes of Mac & Cheese, however. I'm glad all my food is high up and they can't reach.
So, I really shouldn't be writing because I'm behind on the homework, but I only have one class tomorrow and one on Friday, so I'll catch up pretty quick too. The post-spring break swing-getting is always rough. It's especially rough since Jeremy was here the week before spring break, when I didn't get much done, either. Two weeks of mostly lazy, if you don't count the babysitting, extensive traveling, stomach yukkies, cooking, and receiving presents. And I don't.
Went grocery shopping last night, I desperately needed to, since all the food I had left, I turned into soup the night before. Still had a half a box of macaroni, but no bread, milk, cheese, salad, or fruit. Or cookies. I should really go grocery shopping on Tuesday evenings more often! Granted, the people seemed to be a lot stupider getting their carts in everyone's way and then walking away from them, but it was a lot more empty. I usually go on Saturday mornings when it's nuts. Bought everything I could think of wanting. And for the first time I can ever think of, I actually looked for something I saw advertised on tv. And I ate it last night, so I can make a full report to you so you know what you'd be getting into if you also thought that whipped yogurt sounded tasty. I was picturing something like Cool Whip--kind of fluffy, no real texture except a nice creamy one.
Nope. I opened up the container and thought it was spoiled--it looked all lumpy like tapioca, which I like, but wasn't what I really wanted to eat. So I gave it the sniff test: nope, it's safe, just lumpy looking.
It's lumpy tasting, too.
The actual flavor wasn't half bad--the peach was just peachy enough--but the texture was very strange. It looked just like it tasted--like soft tapioca. Bleah. Not so bad I didn't finish it, but bad enough that I won't buy it again. I'll stick with Dannon for my occasional servings of Acidophilus .
So, now that I'm looking at random yogurt things, I found this , which I need to send to Erin, my sister-in-law-to-be. The story behind this: apparently apple-cinnamon Dannon yogurt (also one of my favorites), is difficult to find in Buffalo, so when Joe and Elaine would come to Ithaca to visit J, they'd leave with a cooler full of it.
Time to stop procrastinating. G'Night!
A good day. I had no food in the house last night so I made some minestrone-ish soup, a la Elaine. Her recipe consists of throwing whatever she has open into a container, adding water, and hoping.
My only problem with making soup is it always ends up wayyy too thick. So I sliced myself a nice piece of soup, which was tasty anyhow.
Today I taught a lesson in my Teaching Engineering class. It went really well, I think. I did well on the part that I really wanted to do well on. Was a little rough on the intro, but I was impressed that all these totally non-chemical people were actually understanding this pretty fundamental chemical stuff.
And all because they played with string. Maybe I should work at a Montesorri school, I'm good at all that hands-on stuff. Only then I'd have to work with rich kids.
Never mind...
CRAP.
Crap, crap crap.
I just wrote a LOT about the spring break, and the computer pooped on me. It's all Ken's fault, I was trying to look at his webpage and he must have something evil on it. I'd even copied what I'd had so far because I was writing a lot and the computer ALWAYS poops on me when I'm writing a lot. But when I hit paste it didn't give me anything.
poo. poopoopoo.
Well, I'll start from the beginning again, 'cause I have no choice. What follows is what I did for my spring break, since the last time I wrote, which was last Monday.
Tuesday:
Me and J talked to the florist lady, who was very nice and seemed to understand the whole "cheerful, relaxed, cheap" concept that this wedding is founded on. Then he dropped me off at the bus station. I went across the street to the Greenstar Market, and I got some little rice cakes (actually quite tasty), and some water, hoping that these things would keep my stomach sort of full and sort of calm for the ride back to CT. They did.
After an uneventful but long bus ride, I ate 2 or 3 (or 4 or 5) of Gramma's Famous Rolls, played with mom's cat, reminded everyone of how happy I was to be home, and crashed early.
Wednesday:
Mom and Gramma had set up an appointment at David's Bridal for me on Thursday, and before we went there we wanted to go to this other place to see how cheap we could get away with all this wedding clothing crap. Turns out, pretty cheaply (although still more expensive than I was hoping). The place I got my stuff at had a bunch of stuff--consignment, samples from other stores (samples being the ones that girls usually try on before they order their specially made dress), and last year's fashions that the New York City girls reject like they're on fire. Whatever, last year's dress. I tried on, oh, maybe 3 dresses that were varying levels of ugly before I tried one on that was just IT. If I had gone up to the Magical Wedding Dress Fairy and described what I had in mind, along with a price range, he would have come back with this dress. And it fit almost perfect! Just a couple inches too long on the bottom. Mom has forbidden me to reveal any details, I'm just supposed to say "Two words: Tie Dyed".
So: Two words. Tie Dyed.
We didn't even go to David's Bridal in the end. Mom was pretty pooped after that, anyhow. If there's anyone out there who happens to be in the New England area that's looking for a decent place to get a dress (prom or wedding or whatever) that won't make you cry when you look at the pricetag, it's Brides to Be in Glastonbury, CT. They deserve the plug, they were awesome.
Then mom got her hair cut, and we chilled at home. And mom's friend Lisa came over, we made black beans and rice, and she gave me and Jeremy some more wedding stuff. I swear, after the shower last weekend, there isn't anything else we could possibly want or need, except a place to PUT all this damn stuff. I have things tucked under my kitchen table, under my bed, under my couch, and I'm using some of it, and half the stuff is in CT! I know, poor us, we're starting married life with a glut of useful stuff from people who love us. But yeah, there's a ton and a half.
Thursday:
Called David's Bridal to cancel. They were heartbroken, I'm sure.
Relaxed at home most of the day. Went for a walk around the block with mom and gramma. Got the dress shortened--now there are three words: tie dyed miniskirt. Got Chinese food, which satisfied my need for cold sesame noodles, which I can't find here. Which is strange, you'd think "How can Chinese food in the Midwest be different from Chinese food in the Northeast, so long as it's still people of Asian descent cooking the food?" All I know is, I've walked into every Chinese food place within walking distance of my house (and one that isn't), asked if they have Cold Sesame Noodles, and they look at me like I'm ordering escargots or something. A look that says "Maybe you didn't see the sign, we serve Chinese food, not any of that hippy crap, so go do some yoga, or something."
That might not be the EXACT look, but it's something similar.
Friday:
Did zero. Zilch. Nada. Didn't even take a shower. Watched the cat--even she was too lazy to be playful. Mom needed a very boring day, and we had one.
Loved every second of it.
Saturday:
Had Bridal Shower #2. This one was a more "legitimate" shower, I guess you could call it, because no icky stinky boys were present. Just icky stinky girls. Plenty of tasty food was present, including a cake from Mazzicato's, which is ANOTHER one of those things that I have trouble finding elsewhere--a decent Italian bakery. Go to the South End of Hartford, there are at least 3 or 4 places with squishy almond extract flavored cookies and real Italian ice (not that solid block of pain they have in grocery stores. Don't even get me started).
No where else, friends. Not even in "Little Italy" in New York. J and I went there when he had his semester in NYC, I was thinking "mmm... almond ice", because I'd even buy a grocery store atrocity if it was almond flavored. You can keep your chocolate. Squishy almond flavored things are MY friend and nemesis.
You know what? Chinatown ate Little Italy! There we were, standing smack dab in the middle of where it said "little italy" on his map, and every sign as far as the eye could see had Chinese (or some other pictographic language) characters on it.
What was I talking about? Oh yeah, the party. Got lots of good stuff, pretty stuff, practical stuff, etc. Went home with my stepmom and sisters. Watched AI and played Yahtzee with the girls while my dad and stepmom went out.
Again, loved every second of it.
Went to sleep in Becca's lower bunk--the girls sleep in the same bed a lot. Even though they have separate rooms now, they're so close to each other, it's a really beautiful thing to see, when so many siblings are rude and obnoxious.
Sunday:
A small voice woke me up at 7:30 am. I don't even wake up that early for SCHOOL, but I do wake up that early for Kate and Beck. Of course, as soon as I went downstairs and got cozy with them, I fell asleep again, but they're pretty patient about that, because Daddy does that constantly (has to do with working 3rd shift and sleeping at wierd times). Flew home slowly. Stopover in Chicago. I don't like the Chicago airport, I've decided. Pittsburg is the best place for a layover. There's a mall in the middle, moving sidewalks everywhere, every passageway is clearly marked and well lit and you can read all of the signs about which flight is departing from where (even if the information ON the sign is wrong).
Chicago has none of these things. And the people were grumpy. But that might have just been because they had to work on Easter sunday. I can understand how that would suck.
And then I got home, after some more shenanigans involving the taxi driver and a luggage mixup. At least it got cleared up in under 10 minutes.
Today:
Nothing, compared to the rest of the week (except maybe Friday). Talked to my mama, who's feeling better after some stomach upsettiness yesterday, and is going up to the Cape with Gramma tomorrow. I'm jealous.
All right, now I'm tired. Time to go home and call up my honey.