March 2005 Archives

The Good

• It's beautiful outside!
• I signed up for my fall classes without any problems.
• I got an A on my statistics test, and my teacher told me and Leigh that we are excellent students.
• I think I did really well on the embryology test I took today. The power went out in the middle of the test, so we just sat in the dark for like 15 minutes while my teacher was deciding what to do. Just as he started to say, "Ok guys, listen up..." the power came back on and everybody let out a huge groan. I didn't mind though because I knew all the answers!
• At work they changed me from an intern to being part time, so now I am an official employee at Ridge Tool, and I got a raise!
• Tomorrow is Friday, my favorite day!

The Bad

• I woke up this morning to the smell of something burning. I ran downstairs thinking maybe Kory fell asleep while cooking something, but he didn't. I walked back upstairs and realized that the smell was only in my room. I unplugged my computer (it was the only thing on besides my alarm clock) and opened up the window so my poor birds wouldn't pass out from the digusting smell. I didn't know where the smell was coming from this morning, but now I'm pretty sure it's something with my computer since it doesn't turn on! Great. My dad's picking it up tonight, hopefully it's not something too bad or expensive. Good thing this happened after I signed up for classes!

I'm going to scream. Kent's site is the worst site EVER. We use this dumb thing called FlashLine to register for classes, check up on financial aid, etc, and it NEVER works when I need it to. "No server available. System unavailable." That is what I get when I try to look at the offered courses so I can make sure there are still seats open in the classes I want to sign up for. If this isn't fixed by tomorrow morning when I have to schedule, I'm going to scream all the way through campus until I find the person who is in charge of maintaining this piece of junk site.

Worst site ever. You have to go through a million different pages just to look at one class! You select the term you want, it brings you to another page where you select the subject you want, and then it brings you to another page where you select the campus you want, and then you go to another page to select the class you want, and finally you come to the page with the class you want. And then you have to repeat the whole process again for another class. Why can't they just have one page where you answer what term, campus, and maybe even subject you want?

Not to mention that in order to get to the page where you select what term, you have to navigate through at least three other pages after logging in!

Oh goodness, and it's so slow. And maybe it's just me, who knows, but if I press "Select" before the page is finished loading, it screws the whole thing up. I end up having to log out of FlashLine, log back in, and navigate through five million screens before I can look at one class. Actually, I don't even get to log out because everything just seems to lock up, and when I click on log out, all the icons disappear and it just sits there doing nothing. I know it's not just my computer, or browser, because it's done this on multiple computers. Oh yeah, you also can't use Firefox! Junky, junk, junk.

It's time to schedule for fall classes already, which is crazy because that's five months away! They break down registration times by grade level, so seniors always get to register first (well, actually second, because the HONOR students get to register first). Within the seniors, they break it down by last names, and each semester it switches. I think this current semester I got to register on the first day. But for fall semester, I'm in the last senior category to register. Kids with names at the beginning of the alphabet (Kory! Loser!) got to start registering at 8:00 this morning, but I have to wait until Wednesday to schedule! It's torture like you can't even imagine!

I know I said it's too early to schedule for fall, but I really had my schedule all planned out well over a month ago. I am obsessed with all things involved with scheduling for classes, and I'm thinking I should probably just be an advisor when I grow up. It's a good thing I wasn't at Kent until I was a junior, I don't think I could wait 3 weeks like the freshman to register for classes. And the horrible part is you can still look at the classes and see how many seats are still available. "Only 4/25 seats available." Torture! I don't know how people can wait until August to schedule, it seems nearly impossible. The classes that I need always fill up extremely fast, that's why it's so crucial that my schedule has to be made months in advance. Months so I can sit and stare at it and make sure there isn't a better way to fit them in.

Starting in the fall, the requirements for a zoology degree are changing. In order to switch over to the new requirements, all I have to do is change my catalog year, which is just filling out some papers. Do you know what this means? This means the best thing ever: I don't have to take my organic chemistry labs! Ever! No organic chem labs for me! If I don't switch to the new catalog year, I would still have TWO organic chem labs to take. Oh, I've heard such terrible stories about these labs from classmates. Most science labs are only one day a week for three hours, but organic chem labs are TWO days a week! 6 hours of my time devoted to dumb organic chemistry! Such a waste. I've also heard you have to write insane lab reports, 14 page long lab reports! NOT ME! Ha! Now I no longer have to take these dreadful labs. I love it. My other requirements have changed too. I now only have one major requirement left, and the rest of my classes get to be electives. Yay.

So here are the classes I plan on taking in the fall: Japanese, Environmental Physiology, Stream Biology, and Organic Evolution. Yay! The only thing I'm not happy about is still having to take my foreign languages. I dropped out of my Spanish class a long time ago because I disliked it a lot. I actually couldn't stand it. I took three years of it in high school, so I suppose I should have been in Intermediate instead of Elementary, but oh well. Japanese is probably going to be a million times harder, but I'm going to have to stick with it no matter what, otherwise I won't be able to graduate in the spring.

• Monday My mom came down from Michigan and I think we just sat around like bums, except for when we went to buy a pillow and a potato masher! Mmm, vegan mashed potatoes. Oh! We also went to see Robots.
• Tuesday We went down to visit Heidi and the girls and then came home and went to sleep at around 8:00 (I did at least).
• Wednesday We took Jasper to the vet to have a tumor on his tail checked out, got my headlight fixed, got my hair cut, and my mom left later that night.
• Thursday I worked for a few hours and then Kory and I got our weekly shopping done a day early.
• Friday We dropped Jasper off at the vet's at 8:30 to get two tumors removed (the vet is an hour and fifteen minutes away), drove back home, sat around like bums, picked Jasper up from the vet's at 7:00 (-$300), went to Aquatic Technology to buy some snails and shrimp for my fish tank, and then drove all the way back home again.

Pretty uneventful, but I'm glad I got to see my mom and got some well overdue things taken care of. You might notice that I never mentioned the word "school" anywhere, even though I have two huge tests coming up this week! What kind of teacher has tests the week after spring break?

Here are some digital photos from today. My mom is staying with me for a few days during spring break, and today we went down to visit Heidi. As you can tell from the pictures, Kory worked last night, so every time he had a chance to sit down he ended up falling asleep.

I found out the other day that I have eczema. (Thank goodness mine doesn't look as bad as the pictures on that page.) The first time I went in for it, the nurse practitioner wasn't sure what it was, but guessed that it was a fungal infection. So I smeared this gross cream on it for a month, and it only got worse. I went back this past Monday, and she along with another doctor told me she didn't know what it was, and referred me to a dermatologist. So I went to the dermatologist (who looks like Captain Kangaroo) on Wednesday, and he looked somewhat confused when he saw it too. He asked me a million questions over and over, the same questions I've been answering for the past month. "Do you have any history of hayfever or asthma?" "Any family history of skin cancer?" "What kind of soap and detergent do you use?" After all the questioning he determined that it was eczema and gave me a perscription for Kenalog. I don't like medicine, especially when it's a corticosteroid. It seems to be working though, the itching and redness have definitely gone away.

Why in the world did this just decide to come up now? I honestly have not changed anything that would cause a reaction like this. I do use a lot of different soaps, but I get a different one every time, and the eczema appeared back in November! So unless I'm having a reaction to every bar of soap I've used, I don't think it's the soap.

I have to go back to the dermatologist in a month, and I have to go see the nurse practitioner in six weeks because she said she wants to see what the outcome is. Can't I just call her rather than pay $100 to tell her I have eczema and it's gone for now?

That is a picture of my foot, which has nothing to do with the fact that I have eczema. I just wanted to let you know that now BOTH of my feet are swollen right on that little bump by my pinky toe, and it hurts!

My statistics teacher is foreign, and he's always making comments about his poor English spelling and grammar. The other day he was writing a problem up on the board, and he was trying to write "horse" but instead he wrote "houres". People started laughing and he knew he did something wrong. "Oh, is there not supposed to be a "u"? So he erased the "u" and the word now said "hores". Obviously since we are extremely mature people attending college, we all started to laugh. "No? How do I spell it then?" Someone yelled out, "Put a 'w' in front of it!" Fortunately he didn't listen or otherwise I would have been rolling around on the ground. Somehow he eventually got it spelled right, but I don't remember how because I was too busy laughing. And somehow the fact that it was written on the board twice made it even funnier.

Here's a picture of him. He's a really nice teacher and because of that students seem to take advantage of him. They're constantly complaining about how hard the tests are, how they don't understand anything, etc. On our last test he decided that he was going to choose problems from the odd numbered review questions at the end of each chapter. So pretty much we had 40 problems to study, and 5 to 10 of them would be on the test. Our book even comes with a solutions manual, so all the answers are right there for you to study. If all the complainers don't get an "A" on this test he should fail them. I don't think a test can get much easier than that. Of course I probably did horrible, so who am I to talk?

I was driving Kory to work, and a cop pulled me over because of my headlight! (Dad, don't even say, "I told you so!") He said it was DUI Task Force night and that anyone with a headlight out was an easy target. So he took my license, came back and said, "Here's a warning, it just says to get the headlight fixed. It also says to get it fixed within 72 hours, but I scratched that out. Just get it fixed whenever you can. Have a good night, drive safely!"

HAHA! I'm so excited about this, I don't know why. It's secretly my goal to NEVER get a ticket, and I'm so excited that I didn't get one. Kory said, "A warning, I've never even seen one of these. They would have just given me a ticket! And he even scratched part of it out!" HA! That's because he saw that I have a flawless driving record!

Yeah, I know. Now that I've talked about this and am actually excited about it I'll end up getting a speeding ticket or something.

I have to go hang my warning on the refrigerator now!

Today I discovered the best thing ever. To get a new tab in Firefox, all you have to do is double click in the bar where the tabs are. Maybe everyone else knows this, but I didn't, and boy were Kory and I excited when I discovered this today. No more mousing up to file or control T!

Yay, I like Fridays. This is the first semester in a while that I haven't had to work Fridays, and I love it. I don't have to wake up until about 8, and then I get ready and take Kory up to his class. I stay around the school and study for about an hour, go to my class, and then study for another hour until Kory is out of class. Then we both go grocery shopping at Krieger's, which is my favorite part of the whole week. Krieger's has lots of animal friendly organic food/products. Some of my favorites:

• Mrs. Meyer's Geranium Dish Soap
• Barbara's Shredded Spoonfuls
• Alba Hawaiian Kukui Nut Body Cream
• Alba Hawaiian Passion Fruit Body Wash
• Lightlife Chick’n Strips
• Nana's Fudgy Wudgy Cookie Bars

Yum yum yummy.

After all our shopping is done, we usually get a pizza, maybe watch a movie. Today we did laundry, it feels really good to have that out of the way. After laundry I got a bunch of cleaning done. I even swept off the stairs and cleaned out the downstairs closet! And, Kory and I took ALL the recyclables out. I fill my fish tank up with bottles of distilled water, and the empty bottles usually end up sitting underneath the stairs, and they seem to collect very fast! We had a whole bagful to take out today.

It just feels really good to have all the cleaning and running around done today. So tomorrow all I have to do is take care of the animals, and hopefully study and get some rest.

And it's only ten o'clock right now!

It's been a while since I've posted. Last week my grandpa passed away, so I was up in Michigan for a couple days for that. And this semester has been incredibly busy. I don't think I've ever studied so much for anything. It seems like for every class I have to go back through the book and take notes from that. In previous semesters I rarely ever had to use my book because the teachers actually knew how to teach! Taking notes out of the book is extremely time consuming, especially when every other word is something I've never heard of before, like truncus arteriosus and foramen ovale. I really think every other word in my embryology book is in bold.

More complaining:

• The medicine the doctor gave me isn't working, so now I have to go back in. And the lady who scheduled my appointment was MEAN.
• My tooth is still very sensitive to pressure, hot things, and cold things (even cold air!) so I don't even chew on that side anymore. And I have to use warm water to brush my teeth. GROSS!
• I left my work shoes up in Michigan, so I had to go buy a new temporary pair and they tore away the skin on my heel and it hurts! Luckily my mom sent my shoes priority mail, and now I shall never wear the heel-destroying shoes ever again.
• I'm trying to grow my bangs out and it is driving me INSANE. I can't stand it. Also, the rest of my hair needs a trim desperately.
• It's still cold out!

Here are a few digital photos I took around the painting room while I was visiting Kory. After I took the radioactive picture, my camera broke. The lens wouldn't zoom back in when I turned the camera off, so it just continually gave me a lens error. Weird, huh? Today it started working again, so let's hope it stays that way.