Well, I'm a bad person. Not at all, really, but I feel guilty about the fact that I'm not going to SI tonight. But I'm really too tired to get much from it and I'd rather not have to drive anywhere, so...no SI. I'll go tomorrow and Tuesday and Wednesday (because my work schedule is built around it), and then I'll have accumulated 15 of the 20 SI points I need for the summer.
The reason I'm tired is a happy one: Taylor, Brittany, and Jeff came down to College Station this weekend to hang out. They got in late on Friday night, and we just sat around the living room and talked until it was (past) time for bed. Yesterday we watched the Veggie Tales Ultimate Silly Song Countdown and then the four of us watched Outbreak on TNT while Brittany practiced. We went and saw Spiderman 2 in the afternoon - I really enjoyed it, which both surprised and relieved me, since I didn't really like the first one. We all went to Swensen's for dinner and ginormous ice cream concoctions (I got coffee ice cream with fudge and butterscotch toppings, almonds, whipped cream, and a cherry). Emily and I were both suffering from our lack of sleep, which I counteracted with Tylenol and she with sleep. During Em's nap, Jeff, Taylor, and I taught Brittany how to play Halo. She's not the best at video games, having never played them growing up, but she was a real sport for playing with us and she grasped some of the harder Halo concepts (like using the two joysticks) quicker than most. Taylor and I had profiles, so our characters had names ('CLH' and 'Taylor'), but Brittany and Jeff just had randomly assigned names. I must say, I got a kick out of them - Jeff as 'Hollywood' and Brittany as 'Wilshire'. Poor Wilshire got the snot shot out of him, I'm afraid. It was hard to tell it was Brittany standing there from afar...usually only distinguished after the shotgun had been fired or the grenade tossed...rocket launched...sniper rifle triggered...gun butt connected with back of head...Brittany had a really awesome attitude about playing with us though, and having four people definitely made it more fun. After Em woke up, we really got to work, playing about 4 fun-filled hours of Mario Kart. Brittany was sleeping in my room this weekend, and that didn't help me get any more sleep. We hadn't gotten a chance to really talk (other than once on the phone 10 days ago when this whole trip got mapped out) since Christmas. So we stayed up until 1:45 Friday night and 2:45 last night talking. It was good. This morning, we all awoke somewhat late. We headed to The Kettle for brunch, came back for them to gather their stuff, and they all set out in the early afternoon. It was a great visit, one that had been in the works for years. I was glad it finally happened, especially since I'll only be here for another 5 weeks or so!
This afternoon, I was very sleepy and very lazy. I had to move my gaming systems back into my room, which led to playing Zelda (Majora's Mask) for a couple hours. Now my plan is to watch a health lecture before I get any sleepier, shower, watch Trading Spaces: Inside Out that I taped with Em, and go to bed! The whole sleepiness thing could be worse - I could be in Matt's position, who starts the first day of the rest of his life tomorrow (aka work). Yuck! I think he'll enjoy it, though. It's just me who is not quite ready for the real world.
Sunday, July 11, 2004
Friday, July 09, 2004
Sigh of relief
Last night was great - I just goofed off, talked with Em, read my book, talked with Matt, watched Interview with a Vampire, and stayed up late. :) The last three Thursdays I was either driving or packing up for a weekend away. This weekend, Dallas is coming to me, in the form of Brittany, Taylor, and Jeff. They won't get here for quite a while, though, because all three of them are working people. Today I'm enjoying doing some basic maintenance of things I've ignored, like cleaning and paying bills. But I also thought I'd take advantage of my ability to post pictures on my blog and put some random pics up from this spring. Enjoy! (you can click on them for a larger version in a new window)
This is the anatomy lab. The table behind the blue towel receptacle was my lab table (table 2). All those bins along the right wall are full of bones, and I believe that's a horse skeleton, too.
This is a shot essentially taken 180 degrees from the last pic, in the small lab. That's the door to the hallway in front. The bones you see are (from left to right): an elephant back leg, a dog, an elephant front leg, I think a goat, and a horse.
This is my anatomy lab group: Kyle, Rachel, me, and David. Oh, and yes we intentionally put the dog skeleton there!
Dr. Harding's 2002-2003 organic chemistry workshop leaders: me, Jon, Midhat, Jenny, and Amanda. Jon, Midhat, and I had a Wednesday night Double Daves tradition going, and in February we managed to persuade Amanda and Jenny to come too. I'm really glad we've all kept in touch, and it is going to be awesome having Jon and Midhat in Dallas (UT Southwestern) for years to come!
Taken at the ACS chemistry banquet in May, this is my with my advisor Dr. Hogg. I like my shoes.
Laura, Amanda, Jenny, and Cameron. We are definitely the coolest, smartest, and most attractive female chemistry majors in our class (heehee). Laura and Jenny graduated in May, and they're both going to California for grad school: Laura to UC Irvine and Jenny to Berkeley (go Cal!).
I took this picture right after I got my Xbox. I'd just cleaned up the entertainment center to accommodate the new addition and everything was arranged so neatly I wanted to take a picture. Those are all the video game systems I own: PS2, Xbox, GCN, N64, SNES, and GBA. :)
Okay, that's it. I should maybe get dressed now and do some homework before our house is invaded by HP kiddos!
EDIT: One quick addition - it is the beginning of Round 3 - we have an egg in the nest again! I don't know if it is from the same parents or their children, but it is the same family of birds as before ("round 1" and "round 2"). When I checked at noon, there was only one egg in the nest, but I will investigate later to see if more have been added. I'm so glad Lori got that hanging plant and then neglected it, because otherwise we'd never have had so much fun bird watching!
This is the anatomy lab. The table behind the blue towel receptacle was my lab table (table 2). All those bins along the right wall are full of bones, and I believe that's a horse skeleton, too.
This is a shot essentially taken 180 degrees from the last pic, in the small lab. That's the door to the hallway in front. The bones you see are (from left to right): an elephant back leg, a dog, an elephant front leg, I think a goat, and a horse.
This is my anatomy lab group: Kyle, Rachel, me, and David. Oh, and yes we intentionally put the dog skeleton there!
Dr. Harding's 2002-2003 organic chemistry workshop leaders: me, Jon, Midhat, Jenny, and Amanda. Jon, Midhat, and I had a Wednesday night Double Daves tradition going, and in February we managed to persuade Amanda and Jenny to come too. I'm really glad we've all kept in touch, and it is going to be awesome having Jon and Midhat in Dallas (UT Southwestern) for years to come!
Taken at the ACS chemistry banquet in May, this is my with my advisor Dr. Hogg. I like my shoes.
Laura, Amanda, Jenny, and Cameron. We are definitely the coolest, smartest, and most attractive female chemistry majors in our class (heehee). Laura and Jenny graduated in May, and they're both going to California for grad school: Laura to UC Irvine and Jenny to Berkeley (go Cal!).
I took this picture right after I got my Xbox. I'd just cleaned up the entertainment center to accommodate the new addition and everything was arranged so neatly I wanted to take a picture. Those are all the video game systems I own: PS2, Xbox, GCN, N64, SNES, and GBA. :)
Okay, that's it. I should maybe get dressed now and do some homework before our house is invaded by HP kiddos!
EDIT: One quick addition - it is the beginning of Round 3 - we have an egg in the nest again! I don't know if it is from the same parents or their children, but it is the same family of birds as before ("round 1" and "round 2"). When I checked at noon, there was only one egg in the nest, but I will investigate later to see if more have been added. I'm so glad Lori got that hanging plant and then neglected it, because otherwise we'd never have had so much fun bird watching!
Thursday, July 08, 2004
Forgot one thing...
I forgot - I wanted to answer the most frequent question I've gotten since the engagement: Matt and I have not set a date. We've narrowed it down to next summer sometime (between May-August) (that isn't very narrow, I know). We're still looking into where we might want to have the wedding (any suggestions?) and our date decision will be based on availability of the place we choose. Many thanks for Mom for researching these things while I'm stuck in College Station.
All things considered
I finally have a chance to take a deep breath and compose a proper post on my blog. A great deal has happened since my last real post over a week ago. We will take it from the top...
It was really hard to go to class on Thursday like nothing had happened. But it was definitely fun to show the ring to people. I walked into the room and sat next to Elise, my physiology friend, and said "well, you know how my boyfriend was coming into town last night..." and she said yes, and then I just held out my left hand and sat back for her to ooo and ahhh. Dr. Hunter was sitting right by us, so he got to hear all about it too. He was quite interested, actually - I think he's a romantic at heart. When he began class, he asked if anyone had questions before we started, as usual. When no one had any, he then asked, "so, anyone get engaged last night?" I got to raise my hand. Now that I think about it, I should've raised my left hand so that everyone could have appreciated the ring. Oh well. And later, when lecturing about the sympathetic nervous system (responsible for "fight or flight"), he gave the example that it causes dry mouth - he said you might experience such effects when you are doing something like speaking in public...taking a test...asking someone to marry you... :) What a goofball. After Thursday's class, Matt picked me up and we ate lunch at NY Sub. Then we went to the mall to ask about ring resizing and to get my left ring finger sized. Matt had used my ring size from the Aggie Ring office to decide what ring size to get, but your dominate hand is always bigger, it turns out. My left ring finger is 0.75 sizes smaller than my right. But we're going to wait to get the ring resized, so we just got some plastic spacers that go around the band. This way I don't get paranoid about the ring falling off every second of the day - a good thing. I had to go back to campus for lab, but it was a quick one - only about an hour! Thursday night I got to have the pizza rolls I thought I was getting on Wednesday.
On Friday, we left for the miniranch. We spend the weekend, we playing in the lake a lot, floating and riding the Pous awesome Sea-Dos, hanging out with all the people there, playing ping pong, feeding the cows, watching all the munchkins run around (there were 4 kids there under the age of 3), setting off fireworks and watching fireworks on Saturday and Sunday night. On Saturday night, everyone was at our place for a big pot-luck dinner and Dad got everyone's attention so that Matt could announce our engagement. No one was shocked, but they were all very happy (which made us happy). You can look at a few pictures at Mom and Dad's place on overt. My favorite pic is the black widow - Matt put his hand in its web retrieving the ping pong ball...and we just learned a few days ago in physiology how its toxin works. :) The fireworks were really awesome. Everyone at Cedar Creek was setting them off - you always could look out and see them somewhere - and some of them were of professional quality. Plus, it was fun to set them off, since Matt and I haven't had many opportunities to do so before. One of the best parts of the weekend was getting to spend time with Robin & Karen and Lathram & Carmen Pou. Lathram and Carmen just got married about 2 months ago, and all four of them were great to observe and talk to about the whole marriage (and wedding) thing. It isn't surprising that the sons and daughters-in-law of people as generous and loving as Robert and Cindy are just as great, and I think Matt and I can learn a lot about having a strong relationship/marriage from those two couples.
The only downside from the Fourth of July weekend was that I had to study A LOT. My health midterm was on Monday and my physiology test was yesterday, and both classes had suffered a bit immediately after the proposal. So at night or random times during the days, I was reading health notes, making physiology flash cards, highlighting my book, etc. On Monday, Matt and I headed out from the miniranch in the morning because I had to go to work (and study and take my midterm at 5) and Matt had to drive from College Station to Dallas (he bowled in between his two drives, though, with his new bowling ball and shoes!). So Matt left :( and I went to work because labs started the next day (Tuesday). My schedule is fine - 10 hours a week spread over M-T-W - but it is just rough going from no work, where I was spending my free time studying physiology and watching health lectures, to having afternoons consumed by work. Now I'll essentially be occupied 9:30-6:00 Mondays-Wednesdays (hey, it's summer! that's significant!) with my full Thursday of physiology. *sigh* At least I'll having money going into my bank account again!
Anyway, I took my health final at 6 pm on Monday and it was horrible! Of the 77 questions, roughly 20 were recalling statistics (and considering that about half of all lectures were numbers, remembering specifics like that was a little tough). I knew all the trends, but the test didn't ask that...instead it ask questions like "how many people in the US are uninsured: 15, 20, 33, 39, or 44 million?" or "how much money the US government give the survivors of the Tuskegee syphilis study: 5, 8, 10, 12, or 14 million dollars?" or "how many people die from smoking each year: 125,000, 218,000, 324,000, 456,000, 512,000?") I was SO irritated. The test didn't even ask questions from some material, like the lectures on breast cancer or AIDS, and then rather than testing our knowledge of health disparities, it was testing whether we remembered every number we'd been presented with! And this test was half my grade! Grrrr! And then I got to go home and study physiology.
I went to class and worked on Tuesday. I also did my best to study for my next test. I was let off work on Wednesday, so I just went to class, and then came home to study. My phys test was at 5 yesterday. I was pretty convinced that the excitement of the previous week coupled with a busy weekend, a health midterm, and the difficulty of the material would cause me to do pretty horribly. However, when I got the test, I went through methodically and didn't find any question that left me stumped. When I got my grade back today, it turns out I made a 95%, which is awesome, all things considered! It wasn't enough for a lunch invite, but it was the highest grade in the class and one of only three A's! In fact, I'm the only one who has an A in the class right now!!! :) :) It feels really good to have my hard work pay off, and I am happy to be at the top of a class again. That hasn't happened too frequently since I graduated high school. So, yeah, I was thrilled. Yay! And more happiness: Jeff, Taylor, and Brittany are supposed to come down to visit Em and me this weekend. And so, I think I'll wrap up this never-ending blog entry on that happy note.
It was really hard to go to class on Thursday like nothing had happened. But it was definitely fun to show the ring to people. I walked into the room and sat next to Elise, my physiology friend, and said "well, you know how my boyfriend was coming into town last night..." and she said yes, and then I just held out my left hand and sat back for her to ooo and ahhh. Dr. Hunter was sitting right by us, so he got to hear all about it too. He was quite interested, actually - I think he's a romantic at heart. When he began class, he asked if anyone had questions before we started, as usual. When no one had any, he then asked, "so, anyone get engaged last night?" I got to raise my hand. Now that I think about it, I should've raised my left hand so that everyone could have appreciated the ring. Oh well. And later, when lecturing about the sympathetic nervous system (responsible for "fight or flight"), he gave the example that it causes dry mouth - he said you might experience such effects when you are doing something like speaking in public...taking a test...asking someone to marry you... :) What a goofball. After Thursday's class, Matt picked me up and we ate lunch at NY Sub. Then we went to the mall to ask about ring resizing and to get my left ring finger sized. Matt had used my ring size from the Aggie Ring office to decide what ring size to get, but your dominate hand is always bigger, it turns out. My left ring finger is 0.75 sizes smaller than my right. But we're going to wait to get the ring resized, so we just got some plastic spacers that go around the band. This way I don't get paranoid about the ring falling off every second of the day - a good thing. I had to go back to campus for lab, but it was a quick one - only about an hour! Thursday night I got to have the pizza rolls I thought I was getting on Wednesday.
On Friday, we left for the miniranch. We spend the weekend, we playing in the lake a lot, floating and riding the Pous awesome Sea-Dos, hanging out with all the people there, playing ping pong, feeding the cows, watching all the munchkins run around (there were 4 kids there under the age of 3), setting off fireworks and watching fireworks on Saturday and Sunday night. On Saturday night, everyone was at our place for a big pot-luck dinner and Dad got everyone's attention so that Matt could announce our engagement. No one was shocked, but they were all very happy (which made us happy). You can look at a few pictures at Mom and Dad's place on overt. My favorite pic is the black widow - Matt put his hand in its web retrieving the ping pong ball...and we just learned a few days ago in physiology how its toxin works. :) The fireworks were really awesome. Everyone at Cedar Creek was setting them off - you always could look out and see them somewhere - and some of them were of professional quality. Plus, it was fun to set them off, since Matt and I haven't had many opportunities to do so before. One of the best parts of the weekend was getting to spend time with Robin & Karen and Lathram & Carmen Pou. Lathram and Carmen just got married about 2 months ago, and all four of them were great to observe and talk to about the whole marriage (and wedding) thing. It isn't surprising that the sons and daughters-in-law of people as generous and loving as Robert and Cindy are just as great, and I think Matt and I can learn a lot about having a strong relationship/marriage from those two couples.
The only downside from the Fourth of July weekend was that I had to study A LOT. My health midterm was on Monday and my physiology test was yesterday, and both classes had suffered a bit immediately after the proposal. So at night or random times during the days, I was reading health notes, making physiology flash cards, highlighting my book, etc. On Monday, Matt and I headed out from the miniranch in the morning because I had to go to work (and study and take my midterm at 5) and Matt had to drive from College Station to Dallas (he bowled in between his two drives, though, with his new bowling ball and shoes!). So Matt left :( and I went to work because labs started the next day (Tuesday). My schedule is fine - 10 hours a week spread over M-T-W - but it is just rough going from no work, where I was spending my free time studying physiology and watching health lectures, to having afternoons consumed by work. Now I'll essentially be occupied 9:30-6:00 Mondays-Wednesdays (hey, it's summer! that's significant!) with my full Thursday of physiology. *sigh* At least I'll having money going into my bank account again!
Anyway, I took my health final at 6 pm on Monday and it was horrible! Of the 77 questions, roughly 20 were recalling statistics (and considering that about half of all lectures were numbers, remembering specifics like that was a little tough). I knew all the trends, but the test didn't ask that...instead it ask questions like "how many people in the US are uninsured: 15, 20, 33, 39, or 44 million?" or "how much money the US government give the survivors of the Tuskegee syphilis study: 5, 8, 10, 12, or 14 million dollars?" or "how many people die from smoking each year: 125,000, 218,000, 324,000, 456,000, 512,000?") I was SO irritated. The test didn't even ask questions from some material, like the lectures on breast cancer or AIDS, and then rather than testing our knowledge of health disparities, it was testing whether we remembered every number we'd been presented with! And this test was half my grade! Grrrr! And then I got to go home and study physiology.
I went to class and worked on Tuesday. I also did my best to study for my next test. I was let off work on Wednesday, so I just went to class, and then came home to study. My phys test was at 5 yesterday. I was pretty convinced that the excitement of the previous week coupled with a busy weekend, a health midterm, and the difficulty of the material would cause me to do pretty horribly. However, when I got the test, I went through methodically and didn't find any question that left me stumped. When I got my grade back today, it turns out I made a 95%, which is awesome, all things considered! It wasn't enough for a lunch invite, but it was the highest grade in the class and one of only three A's! In fact, I'm the only one who has an A in the class right now!!! :) :) It feels really good to have my hard work pay off, and I am happy to be at the top of a class again. That hasn't happened too frequently since I graduated high school. So, yeah, I was thrilled. Yay! And more happiness: Jeff, Taylor, and Brittany are supposed to come down to visit Em and me this weekend. And so, I think I'll wrap up this never-ending blog entry on that happy note.
Wednesday, July 07, 2004
~One week ago...~
One week ago I was getting back from a wonderful dinner with my new fiance. This week that wonderful fiance is almost 200 miles away in Dallas and suffering from a head cold (which we are hoping I do not develop myself). I did have a test tonight, though, just like last Wednesday...but no mysterious blindfolded adventure awaited me when I got home tonight...just Fernando watching a Mexican soccer match on our TV. Anyway, I have plenty to say about last weekend (mucho fun) and this week (not so fun) and all that good stuff, but everyone is just going to have to wait a bit longer to read about it. I did do something for my avid fans, though - now each engagement picture is clickable and brings up a(much) larger version of the picture in a new window upon said click. Enjoy (moms)!
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